Oonya Kempadoo has been praised for her debut novel, Buxton Spice, a coming-of-age story set in the Caribbean. The book is a breathtaking glimpse into the inner life of Lula, a lively, highly imaginative girlchild growing up in a racially mixed family in Guyana in the 1970s. Kempadoo's unique and vibrant prose is the camera lens on the lushly exotic world that Lula inhabits. Through her eyes readers are introduced to the colorful denizens of Tamarind Grove. We see the village prostitutes (Sugar Baby, Bullet and Rumshop), the eccentric families, the gentle town spinsters, and Aunt Ruthy, the obeah voodoo lady.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
342 p, First published in 1764, The Sugar Cane is a major work in the history of Anglophone Caribbean literature. It is the only poem written in the Caribbean before the twentieth century to achieve a place in the Western 'canon'. Grainger wrote a "West India Georgic", challenging assumptions about poetic diction and the proper subject matter of poetry, and boldly asserting the importance of the Caribbean to the eighteenth-century British empire. This is the first reliable text and critical study of the poem, setting it within the context of Grainger's life and work; Grainger interprets his own experience of the Caribbean through his wide reading of literature. This is a critical study of his poem "The Sugar-Cane." (Amazon)
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
495 p., Investigates the diverse poetic manifestations of a sensibility that may be designated as French Caribbean through a close reading of a representative sample of poems. Many are presented here in translation for the first time. Contents: Marie-Magdeleine Carbet -- Léon-Gontran Damas -- Aimé Césaire -- Edouard Glissant -- Guy Tirolien -- Yves Padoly -- Joseph Polius -- Gilette Bazile, Marcelle Archelon-Pépin, Michèle Bilavarn.
