BERKLEY WENDELL SEMPLE

Our parents’ ambition to keep us sexually stupid only ended when fourteen or fifteen-year-olds got pregnant or impregnated someone or so it seemed to me growing up in 1970s Guyana. They wanted to keep us innocent and this innocence deprived us of what we needed to know about our sexual feelings and of the freedom to talk about sex. Our parents’ attitude silenced us. They raised us to believe that there was no sexing in the world, yet there we were the product of it. Perhaps they meant to teach us later when we were past our adolescence. But we never had that talk with them. Not a single word.

They raised us to be innocent, which is to say, to be ignorant and stupid. This stupidity lasted longer for those who were securely ensconced in churches that preached sex as nastiness, and the body as a sacred temple spoiled by fornication. Shame and guilt attended our normal sexual desire of wanting to touch and kiss. It was assumed that we would learn more about how we felt from books. Not so. We learned nothing about sex from the Young Adult (YA) Caribbean novels we read. Sex was a glaring omission when compared to American YA fiction of the time. We learned about the sweet relief of self-pleasure from popular American YA fiction such as Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War (1973) and books by Judy Blume, but not from Green Days by the River (1967) or Cricket in the Road (1973) and other well-known novels in the Caribbean canon.

A strange and unnecessary bashfulness prevailed in our literature. This was glaring when compared to the treatment of other themes, like politics, religion or colonialism. The absence of sex and sexuality in Caribbean literature reflected our actual lives in troubling ways – ways that did not take into consideration the wide-ranging experiences of young adults. This was evident in other canonical YA Caribbean novels such as The Year in San Fernando (1965) by Michael Anthony and Crick Crack Monkey (1970) by Merle Hodge.

YA fiction, which is often referred to as coming of age fiction, makes up a great part of the corpus of Caribbean novels written since 1950. It is by most accounts, a work of the imagination that features a young protagonist between the ages of 12-21. Francis in Michael Anthony’s The Year in San Fernando, and Hector Bradshaw in Jan Carew’s Wild Coast (1958) fit the bill; so do Tee in Merle Hodge’s Crick Crack Monkey and Lula in Oonya Kempadoo’s Buxton Spice (1999).

Several adult novels feature prominent young adult protagonists. These include Corentyne Thunder (1941) and Shadows Move Among Them (1951) by Edgar Mittelholzer, The Schoolmaster by Earl Lovelace (1968), and The Games Were Coming (1968) by Michael Anthony. George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin (1953), Selvon’s A Brighter Sun (1953) and its sequel Turn Again Tiger (1959) and Jan Carew’s Black Midas (1958).In these adult books also there is a reticence to engage with the subject of adolescent sexuality. Black Midas, Shadows Move Among Them and Corentyne Thunder are rare exceptions. In these three novels, sex is discussed naturally and in ways not always proper and acceptable. There is whoring and incest, but the sex is never explicit. It is mostly off the page, but the discussion of it is frank. In high school in Guyana, we read an abridged version of Black Midas with the naughty bits expunged. Often even when youth sexuality is dealt with in the original novel it was removed by the schools.

These coming-of-age novels are distinct from other kinds of books written for youngsters. The natural disaster novels by Andrew Salkey: Drought, Hurricane, Earthquake, for example, are children’s books; as is C Everard Palmer’s broad oeuvre which includes A Cow Called Boy and My Father Sun-Sun Johnson. The children’s books do not transcend the consciousness of primary school children.

Most YA Caribbean novels are written in the first person, through a particularly narrow and inquisitive gaze. What that character sees the reader sees. It is quite ironic then that the lead characters in The Year in San Fernando and Crick Crack Monkey are ultra-sensitive to everything around them except for their bodies. Their gaze is outward mostly, replete with an adult perspective that often erases genuine childlike concerns. They are examples of the wonderful ventriloquism of adult authors aping youngsters, but not thinking and feeling like one.

In Crick Crack Monkey, Tee’s is a fine gaze, detailed and exacting, attentive to the speech pattern and the milieu, but almost unaware of her body, similar to Francis in The Year in San Fernando. As a twelve-year-old, I found Francis strangely aloof, not like anyone I knew, almost like a shadow, animated by others, deprived of private intimacy and honest self-examination. This is so for Christopher as well, whose agency is not self-examination but self-reflection; he looks, he sees, he observes. His story is not about him so much as it is about those seen through his eyes: his parents, Gip his nanny, and some of the villagers. The result is that as readers we are not interested in Christopher so much as we are interested in what he notices.

The children in these novels are observant about their environment, the people around them, but have no awareness of their physicality, their budding breasts for instance, or nocturnal emissions. This creates a dissonance in the texts due to authors using characters as vehicles for their ideas, without allowing them to be sufficiently real.

Francis is possibly the most observant child in Caribbean literature. His observation of the adult world is granular. Adult behaviour is rendered with real feelings and authenticity, but not his sexual feelings. On this, he is vague and strange. A blurb from the cover of the Caribbean Writer Series’ (CWS) edition of The Year in San Fernando reads “as the sugar ripens and the seasons change, Francis’s loneliness gives way to awakening sexual interest and growing self-confidence”. There is no solid evidence of sexual awakening in the book beyond the epithelial. Francis says this about girls: “…girls were there to be liked. Some of them were very beautiful. Some of them with the long plaits. And with the nice shy smiles. I liked girls” (p. 60). On another occasion he says: “as the weeks passed, I saw Julia quite often, though at first, I could hardly look her in the face. She was so charming and pretty that I could not help but like her” (p. 48). Sexual interest cannot be apprehended in these platitudes, and Francis has nothing else to say about girls.

These feelings for a girl, though authentic, hardly constitute sexual awakening. In Guyana, we read The Year in San Fernando at the same age as Francis is in the book, around twelve, and we thought him to be a ‘chupidy bai’, partly because he seemed so much more unaware than us, especially in relation to sex and our changing physicality which we discussed in great detail with each other. When we were thirteen and read one of Michael Anthony’s other books, Green Days by the River, we saw ourselves in Shell and Rosalie. These were characters with sexual and romantic longing. They felt more and wanted to do more like us. But they never did. The bodies of these characters are foreign to them, except their eyes. They see all. Their sense of observation is keen and particular, but it hardly ever turns inward upon their sexuality.

This is less so in Ian McDonald’s The Hummingbird Tree, but not by much. At twelve or thirteen, it is unlikely that these characters had not contemplated their bodies in a sexual way. They would have noticed themselves, seen and felt the obvious changes. They are too naive to be real. Too often in most of these adolescent novels the authors turn away from the moment when the reality of sex is possible, becoming inexplicit, using metaphor as fig leaves for the fly. This runs counter to the fidelity they had previously lavished on cane fields and rivers, and the bright patois of the various settings, creating a sort of dissonance in the texts.

This is not always so. There are some wonderfully realised young adult characters who transcend the sexlessness of those mentioned so far. Young adults in adult novels are handled differently. The young lovers Pedro and Christiana in Earl Lovelace’s The Schoolmaster come to mind. As do Tiger in A Brighter Sun and Katree in Corentyne Thunder. Here though what prevails is the allegorical adolescent, whose presence in the text is a stand-in for some greater purpose, mainly to represent and personify an idea. The protagonist of In the Castle of My Skin is one such example. We can discern the political and societal change through his eyes, but we do not see him as a teen in any real sense. He is there to suggest the colonial experience or politics or whatever, but he is not wholly there for himself; he is estranged from our reality as actual teens.

The novels mentioned here are products of their time and possibly reflect the prudishness that prevailed, but the nature of human sexuality has always been the same, only differing in expression. For the most part, the adolescent novels of the Caribbean dispense with this aspect of nature. Often the acknowledgement of it in the lives of adolescent characters is only grudgingly sketched.

Two rare examples of young adults in Caribbean YA fiction who are forthright about their sexuality can be found in Jan Carew’s The Wild Coast and Oonya Kempadoo’s Buxton Spice. In The Wild Coast Hector observes and reflects upon his observations. He feels and is drawn to the erotic and acts upon his desire. He goes to the village woman who will indulge him and rends himself of his virginity. This cold calculation is mere practicality. It is not a metaphor for some greater thing. “When she had drained the sap out of him and he was feeling limp, he rolled away from her” (p.   158). That is the end of that.

Oonya Kempadoo’s wonderful novel Buxton Spice has one of the most realised young adult characters in the whole Caribbean canon. Like the other characters mentioned above, she is a keen observer of things around her. Unlike the others, she also sees herself and feels her sexuality, comments upon it and define her pleasures. Lula is very real, not a by-product of some greater theme the author addresses. She is central to the work and her first experience of sexual pleasure is accidental. She comes by sex naturally and her sexuality is rendered with a frankness that is wonderfully precise.

Buxton Spice is not only about sex, but it is a novel with a young adult character like no other in Caribbean literature. It rings true for those of us who grew up in the Caribbean at the time. Frank Birbalsingh, in his review of the novel, calls it pornographic, a reading that misses the truth, namely that the sex depicted was closest to the reality than in any previous Caribbean novel with a young adult protagonist. It is this honesty that makes Buxton Spice relatable. It does not look away from the sensation and scents of sex and is consistent with Lula’s description of other things in the book.

Caribbean YA novels need to move away from the prudish bashfulness of the past, to actually depict young adults with the kind of sex lives we know they have.

Berkley Wendell Semple was born in Guyana. He has published three collections of poetry –  Lamplight Teller, which was awarded the 2004 Guyana Prize for Poetry, The Solo Flyer and The Central Station –  and has edited a book of student poems. His poetry and fiction have appeared in Callaloo, The Hampden-Sydney Review, and in many other publications. His work for The Caribbean Writer was awarded a Daily News Prize for poetry. Since 2010 he has written audiobook reviews for Sound Commentary Journal. Berkley is a school administrator and Young Adult librarian. He lives in New York City.