OUR parents’ ambition to keep us sexually ignorant only seemed to end when fourteen- or fifteen-year-olds got pregnant or impregnated someone, or so it seemed to me growing up in 1980s Guyana. They wanted to keep us innocent, but 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. Perhaps they meant to teach us later when we were past 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 naïve. This ignorance lasted longer for those who were securely ensconced in churches that preached sex as something nasty and the body as a sacred temple spoiled by fornication. Shame and guilt attend our normal sexual desires — the desire 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, and later, for another generation, from the explicit candour of Adam Rapp’s 33 Snowfish (2003), Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak (2011), and Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2009). Even as far back as 1951, J.D. Salinger, in his now-classic novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951), dealt more honestly with youthful sexuality than anything published by a Caribbean author at the time.

A strange and unnecessary bashfulness prevailed in our literature. This was especially 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, often referred to as coming-of-age fiction, makes up a large 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 and 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 (1968) by Earl Lovelace, and The Games Were Coming (1963) 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) also come to mind. In these adult books, too, 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 in ways not always proper or acceptable. There is whoring and incest, but the sex is never explicit — it happens 1off-page primarily — but the discussion of it is sufficiently frank.

In high school in Guyana, we read an abridged version of Black Midas with the “naughty bits” expunged. Often, even when youth sexuality was dealt with in the original novels, the schools removed it.

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. These children’s books do not transcend the consciousness of primary school children and thus are not part of the representative corpus of what constitutes Young Adult fiction.

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 their bodies. Their gaze is outward, replete with an adult perspective that often erases genuine adolescent concerns. They are examples of the wonderful ventriloquism of adult authors imitating youngsters but not truly thinking or feeling like one. Young adult novels are mostly written by adults.

In Crick Crack Monkey, Tee’s gaze is fine, detailed, and exacting — attentive to speech patterns and 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 true for Christopher in Geoffrey Drayton’s eponymous novel Christopher (1959) as well, whose agency lies not in self-examination but in self-reflection: he looks, he sees, he observes. His story is not so much about him as 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 in what he notices.

The children in these novels are observant of their environment and the people around them, but are unaware of their own physicality — their budding breasts, for instance, their changing odours, 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 feeling 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 epidermal. 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 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 for 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 naïve 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 and using metaphor as fig leaves for the fly. This runs counter to the fidelity they had previously lavished on describing cane fields, rivers, and the bright patois of the various settings, creating a kind of incongruity 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 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 colonial experience or politics or whatever, but he is not wholly there for himself; he is estranged from our reality as an actual teen. This creates dissonance in the text between the lived realities of the protagonist and the ideas he represents. The authorial impetus prioritises representation over the actual life of the youth. The attention to ideas subsumes character reality and agency. There is not enough balance, not enough attention paid to something as salient as sex, which is difficult to justify, given that it is often what adolescents think about most.

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, differing only in expression. The adolescent novels of the Caribbean dispense with this aspect of nature. Often, 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, the adolescent protagonist Hector observes and reflects upon his experiences. He feels and is drawn to the erotic, and he acts upon his desire. He goes to the village woman who will indulge him and rends himself of his virginity. This cold calculation is a mere practicality; it is not a metaphor for something greater:

“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 fully realised young adult characters in the entire Caribbean canon. Like the other characters mentioned above, Lula is a keen observer of the world around her. Unlike the others, she also sees herself, feels her sexuality, comments upon it, and defines 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 and organic. 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 closer to 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 sensations and scents of sex and is consistent with Lula’s vivid descriptions of other things in the book.

One can see Lula, with her freedom and curiosity, graduating to the erotic heights of Yocandra in the Cuban novelist Zoé Valdés’s funny and erotic Yocandra in the Paradise of Nada. Unfortunately, one cannot imagine a post-teenage sexuality for Tee or Francis, whose sexual depictions do not leap off the page into an imagined future. They remain vague adolescents — chaste and unaware of their bodies, as no real adolescent is.

There is no time in our lives when we are more aware of our bodies than when we hit puberty and see the changes — ourselves as new. This may be the first time we fall in love with ourselves, the first inkling of a budding narcissism, when the mirror does not merely reflect our twin in the glass but shows us the greatest love or lover we will ever know. What makes Lula indelible is Kempadoo’s fidelity to, if not the actual lived experience of a Caribbean adolescence, then the closest fictive approximation of it. Kempadoo treats Lula’s budding sensuality with the same fidelity she brings to the novel’s other salient concerns — the politics of the time, filial relationships, and friendship — thus avoiding the strident incongruity between adolescent sexuality and all else worth knowing in the novel.

This trend is sustained somewhat by Ruel Johnson in his wonderful collection Ariadne and Other Stories. In this slim book, there is a sharp continuity between the fictional and the factual, and sex — its pleasure and its consequences — is vividly sketched. The youthful characters in the collection circumvent the conventions of canonical Caribbean teen novels. Sex is nothing to whisper about; it is discussed and enacted in a matter-of-fact way that does not call attention to itself. What we have here is the normalisation of discourse about sex and sexual intercourse. The reality of so salient a thing among animals and humans is not disguised by metaphor, abridged, or excised from the text.

This is a correction of sorts to a seemingly immutable and outdated standard. There is a deliberate effort to “dash way” the parochial depiction of sex in YA novels — or those adult novels that feature YA protagonists.

Dwight Thompson’s My Own Dear People and Berkley Wendell Semple’s Kipling Plass are examples from Jamaica and Guyana, respectively. In these novels, sex is the mode of genuine love and affection, but also the adjunct of toxic, performative masculinity. They are not masking what it is. The allegorical, after all, is a comparative suggestion, not a fact. No real adolescent is allegorical — only the thing to which they are compared.

Authorial parochiality accounts for the gulf between honest and frank depictions of adolescent sexuality in many Caribbean YA novels — an unfortunate indulgence that mars many texts. Caribbean YA novels need to move away from the prudish bashfulness of the past to depict young adults with the kind of sex lives we know they have.