Sugar andLiterature

How has been represented in literature?

How has the connection between sugar and slavery has been portrayed in poetry?

How has sugar been used as a metaphor for sexuality.

Sugar and Slavery

4 different conceptions of sugar and slavery.

Imperialist image of sugar.

Idealist image of sugar.

Abolitionist image of sugar.

Nationalist image of sugar.

Imperialist Image

Concentrates on sugar purely as a commodity.

Details the environmental conditions under which sugar flourishes and offers practical advice to planter.

Glosses over human suffering.

James Grainger, The Sugar Cane (1764) Must thou from Africk reinforce thy gang? Let health and youth their every sinew firm;       Clear roll their ample eye; their tongue be red;       Broad swell their chest; their shoulders wide expand;       Not prominent their belly; clean and strong. Their thighs and legs, in just proportion rise.       Such soon will brave the fervours of the clime;       And free from ails, that kill thy negroe-train,       A useful servitude will long support.      

Yet, if thine own, thy childrens life, be dear; Buy not a Cormantee, tho' healthy, young.       Of breed too generous for the servile field;       They, born to freedom in their native land,       Chuse death before dishonourable bonds: Or, fir'd with vengeance, at the midnight hour,       Sudden they seize thine unsuspecting watch,       And thine own poinard bury in thy breast.      

Idealist Image

Romantic portrayal of sugar plantations.

Idealised plantation life by omitting its less pleasant aspects.

Present the Caribbean sugar plantation as an island paradise.

Nathaniel Weekes, Barbados (1754)

The virtues of the cane must now be sung;The noblest Plant of all the western Isles!What greater subject can employ my Muse?Not India’s aromatic nor allThe treasures of her Hundred Mines can boastA more important Trade or yield to ManA nobler use. Here, Muse! Your Pow’rs exert,The subject now your utmost power demands,To trace the cane through all its various toils,Till full Perfection crowns its use compleat,Be now your task to celebrate at large.

Abolitionist Literature

Campaigned against evils of slavery.

Advocated sugar boycott.

Sentimentalised sufferings of slaves.

Made graphic connections between sugar and slavery.

Birmingham Female Society for the Relief of British Negro Slaves, ‘What does your Sugar Cost? A Cottage Conversation on the Subject of British Negro Slavery’, Birmingham, 1828

‘Every 25 people who eat West India sugar keep at least one slave to make what they consume.African slave: ‘When you drink our sugar, you drink our blood’. ‘If every English woman would only do what I recommend [and buy East India sugar], there would soon be an end of slavery’.

Nationalist Image

Propagated by 20th century Caribbean poets. Condemned the abuses of the slave regime and blamed sugar for many of the region’s social and economic problems. Use of the oxymoron ‘bitter sugar’. Keith Ellis suggests that ‘the [negative] sentiment [expressed towards sugar] was likely the result of an unbearable accumulation of hostile historical experiences that seemed all the more intolerable because even the recent achievement of political independence offered no hope of expiating the curse of sugar, the original sin of popular Caribbean experience’.

Faustin Charles, Sugar Cane

Cane is sweet, sweat, slain;cane is labour, unrecognised, lostand un-recovered;sugar is the sweet swollen pain of the years;sugar is slavery’s immovable strain.Cane is a slaver;cane is bitter,very bitter,in the sweet blood of life.

Cuban Poets

Agustín Acosta.

Nicolás Guillén.

Opposition to slavery.

Anti-imperialistic stance (US citizens owned many sugar plantations).

Positive attitudes towards racial fusion in Guillén’s work.

Agustín Acosta La Zafra (1926)

Gigantic battleshipThat is extending its empireAnd builds a cemeteryFrom the ruins of the pastForeign trap filledWith perfidious and certain profits;Rope of the expert executionerAround the native neck

Agustín Acosta, El Poema de los Cañaverales

Machines – sugar mills from the North Forgetfulness buries the traditional names (of the ingenios)

Blond engineers of athletic demeanourAnd rare words rattling men’s ears.The fierce machete that shone in the war (of

independence)Ruins its steel in political farces,And meanwhile, lying in wait for the

inexperienced earthMonroe steel sharpens its claws.

Nicolás Guillén

Born in the provincial city of Camaguey in 1902.Journalist, writer and poet. Exiled in Mexico for several years during the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. Poetry includes the anthologies Motivos de Son (1930), Sóngoro Cosongo, Tengo (1964) and El Gran Zoo (1967).Addresses the issues of cultural and racial identity.

Nicolás Guillén West Indies Ltd. (1934)West Indies! Coconuts, tobacco, brandy…Black-skinned folks with a smile always handy!Conservative and liberal too;Raise some cattle and cane for you.Here some days there’s cash to be had,But most of the time you live pretty bad.Here the sun fries everything:Your brain, the roses, birds that sing.Policed by flashy suits of drill,We walk about in loincloths still.Simple and tender, we come from slaves and from a multifaceted gang

of knavesThat sailed in the name of the King with Columbus and,Thinking they were in the East,These gentlemen call this place the Indies,And started treating people like beasts.

Continued…

We’ve got Chinese, white, black and mixed;But remember that our colours are cheap,For after years of contracts and tricksNobody’s purity runs very deep.So there’s no ‘stable tone’ as you can see.(Step forward and speak if you don’t agree.)Now, we’ve got all this and politicos too,And speakers who cry, ‘I stand before you…’You’ll find down here both bankers and banks,Legislators and stock market men,Doctors, reporters, generals and cranks;The porters carry, the lawyers defend.Having all this and more we progress undaunted;We’d send out for it if there was anything we wanted.West Indies! Coconuts, tobacco, brandy…Black-skinned folks with a smile always handy!

Nicolás Guillén Sugarcane (1931)

The BlackNext to the cane.

The YankeeOver the canefield.

The earthUnder the canefield.

The bloodWe are loosing!

Sugar and Sex

Mintz notes how terms like ‘sweet’ connote affection in some languages and convey positive qualities, whereas, by contrast, the term ‘bitter’ usually has negative meanings.

Suggests that societies that make linguistic use of sugar and related words outside of a dietary context are often the ones that consume the most sugar.

Sugar often associated with women.

Mintz: ‘sweet things are, in both literal and figurative senses, more the domain of women than of men’.

Kim Hall, argues that European women played an important role in the development of the early modern Atlantic economy by using increasingly large quantities of sugar in their cooking.

Sugar used to denote love and sexuality.Has a racial connotation in the Caribbean and Brazil.Compared to, and used to describe, the supposedly voluptuous figure of the mixed race mulatta, who was often associated with seduction and immorality.

Agostino Brunias, 1770s, Dominica

Sweetness, sensuality and mixed-race ancestry often went together in artistic depictions of the mulatta.

Her image has been used to symbolise the Caribbean and its products – as in this brand of ‘mulata rum’ – which is made from molasses

Different grades of refined sugar have been used to categorise women of different racial classes.Series of pictures entitled ‘Muestras de azúcar de mi ingenio’ or ‘samples of sugar from my mill’ – features captions such as ‘quebrado de primera’ (first rate-from the centrifuge) and ‘blanco de segunda (trén común)’ (second-rate white—common train) – both of which refer to lighter-skinned women, as well as ‘quebrado de segunda’ (second rate), which refers to a darker-skinned woman.

19th-century Cuban guaracha

I am the queen of all the womenin this promised land;I am made of sugar and of fire,I am the key to the heart’s desire.There is no mulata more beautiful,more cunning and more graceful,nor one who has more sugarin her hips than my Rosa.Loving a mulatais sweeter even than sugar,among all the women,she is definitely the cream of the crop.

Luís Palés Matos, Black Majesty (1937)

Swaying her hips the Queen advances

and from her immense buttocks flow

salacious movements that the drums curdle

into rivers of sugar and molasses.

Dark sugarmill of a sensuous harvest,

her thighs, mass against mass,

squeeze out rhythms, sweat till they bleed,

and the grinding culminates in dance.

Fernando Ortiz Cuban Counterpoint (1940)

Tobacco is dark, ranging from black to mulatto; sugar is light, ranging from mulatto to white. Tobacco does not change its colour; it is born dark and dies the colour of its race. Sugar changes its colouring; it is born brown and whitens itself; at first it is a syrupy mulatto and in this state pleases the common taste, then it is bleached and refined until it can pass for white, travel all over the world, reach all mouths, and bring a better price, climbing to the top of the social ladder.

Melao de Caña

Melao De Caña - Lyrics - Oscar De Leon | C-SALSA.COM