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.