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:
1 microfiche, Winston Farrell is a performing poet and theatre practioner from the island of Barbados. This work has been created out of a series of interactions with senior citizens focusing on their life experiences and their environment. Some of them are very performance-oriented and stand out as an exercise in storytelling.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
228 p, Poesía negra en Colombia; Based on the author’s thesis (doctoral--Indiana University) entitled La poesía negra en Colombia a través de la obra de Candelario Obeso.
223 p., Argues that certain iconic poems have shaped the canon of American poetry. Not merely "canonical" in the usual sense, iconic poems enjoy a special cultural sanction and influence; they have become discourses themselves, generating our notions about American poetry. By "iconic" the author means extraordinarily famous works like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Paul Revere's Ride," Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself," and Claude McKay's "If We Must Die," that do not merely reside in the national memory but that have determined each poet's reception and thus have shaped the history of American poetry.
