Buxton Spice

Kempadoo's semi-autobiographical first novel follows bright, sensitive Lula, a girl growing up in Guyana, through her first frightening and thrilling pubescent milestones. In the early 1970s, when Guyana is beset by racial friction between the East Indian and Afro-Caribbean populations, Lula and her racially mixed family find themselves at the center of conflict in their town of Tamarind Grove. A bastion of the PNC (People's National Congress), Tamarind Grove is run by Our Comrade Linden Forbes Burnham, the leader of the Black Socialist Party, and Lula's progress unfolds as a series of vignettes set against this volatile environment. Omnipresent witness to these adventures is the Buxton Spice mango tree--a mute embodiment of wisdom and identity--whose branches hang over the family home. Madmen, prostitutes, clan scandals, murders, rum shacks and irrepressible sexual energy hasten Lula's passage from childhood to womanhood, but Kempadoo describes her sexual awakening with eloquence, empathy, astonishing frankness and ebullience: ""I pushed my hips up to the base of the tap, legs splayed up against the wall, hands gripping the tap-head.... Hammering on the top of the Tip while the bomb in me was growing, making my heart faster, muscles tighter... The Tip going to blow off. Oh Me Lawd!"" Kempadoo captures the natural beauty of Guyana and the never-ending feast of sensual pleasures: the heat, the foliage, the heavy air and the townspeople, their postures, habits and personalities jumping off the page. But most dazzling is her deft transliteration of language; her words contract and run together, inventively embedding the text with the rocking lilt of Guyanese Creole. Already praised in the U.K., the narrative describes the confusion and changes of puberty with a breathtaking accuracy that both documents a specifically Guyanese experience and also draws a forthright parallel to the many universal discoveries of adolescence. (May)