Sugarcane as History in Paule Marshall's "To Da-Duh, in Memoriam".

There might not be a region of the world that reflects the history of colonialism in its various phases in a more direct way than does the Caribbean. Its very population is a direct result of the African slave trade, European migration, and later immigration from various parts of mostly the British empire, while little is left of the indigenous Arawaks or Caribs. The Caribbean ecology has been forever changed by the plants, animals, and agricultural methods imposed by Europe; in addition, the soil depletion characteristic of a number of West Indian islands directly results from the monocultural economy of the plantation system. The multi-lingualism of the West Indies mirrors the various participants in and stages of European colonialism--Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, French, British--while the fractured nature of West Indian politics grows out of European and North American rivalries over the fate of the Caribbean. In her 1967 short story "To Da-Duh, in Memoriam," Paule Marshall shows the inescapability of this history by inscribing it into the very landscape. In Marshall's story, in her later work, and in works by a number of Caribbean authors, even "nature" does not offer a retreat from the political realities of the West Indies.

By focusing on the role of "nature" in Marshall's story, I wish not so much to offer an analysis concerned with representations or ideologies of "nature" in and of itself but rather an interpretation from the point of view of environmental history; that is, to quote Peter Coats, "looking at the impact of economic and political systems, ideologies and technologies on the non-human world" (1). Much attention has been paid to the importance of landscape in Caribbean literature. One might think here of Wilfred Cartey's study Whispers from the Caribbean, of Eduard Glissant's Caribbean Discourse, or of Moira Ferguson's work on Jamaica Kincaid, as well as of the importance of geography--both as metaphor and "site"--in postcolonial literary criticism. Michael Dash, in his preface to Caribbean Discourse, has commented that

the relationship with the land ... becomes so fundamental in [Caribbean discourse] that landscape ... stops being merely decorative or supportive and emerges as a full character. Describing the lanscape is not enough. The individual, the community, the land are inextricable in the process of creating history. Landscape is a character in this process. (xxxvii)

I wish to "literalize" that attention and focus on the actual flora as flora in Marshall's story--and, later in the essay, in the work of other Caribbean authors--in order to unlock the history found in Caribbean plant life, approaching its symbolic import in the wake of migrating plants.

Wilfred Cartey's wonderful term landscaped history (4) may best describe what I am after here: the intertwining of the forces of nature with the forces of human-shaped time. How does this process play itself out in Marshall's short story, the story of a little girl's first visit to Barbados and her encounter with her grandmother and with island culture? As is characteristic of her fiction in general, Paule Marshall works here with a set of oppositions which interplay with one another in complex ways. "In this case, the asphalt jungle of New York City is fixed against the dense vegetation of a Caribbean isle" (Denniston 91). The story juxtaposes a Barbados representing nature with a West representing technology in a sort of competition. After introducing the child protagonist to some of the Barbadian plant life, her grandmother Da-Duh triumphs," 'I know you don't have anything this nice where you come from,' "repeating the statement after not receiving an answer, to which the protagonist replies, " 'No,'" and observes, "and my world did seem suddenly lacking" (278). Barbados wins this contest through its rich, fertile, natural world. New York, as representative of the West, appears sterile and barren. When Da-Duh claims to have heard that New York is " 'a place where you can walk till you near drop and never see a tree,' "all the protagonist has to offer in reply is" 'a chestnut tree in front of our house.' " But even here Da-Duh--and Barbados--remains victorious: "'Does it bear?' She waited. 'I ask you, does it bear?' 'Not anymore,' I muttered. 'It used to, but not anymore"' (279). The only natural thing the protagonist is finally able to connect with New York-snow--only heightens the impression of sterility and death clinging to the Western metropolis. The child describes with delight the effects snow would have on Barbadian plant life, unwittingly providing a metaphor of the relations between the Third World and the West that the story further develops later on:" '... you see all these trees you got here,' I s aid. 'Well, they'd be bare. No leaves, no fruit, nothing. They'd be covered in snow. You see your canes. They'd be buried under tons of snow'" (279). But since the West becomes associated with barrenness and death here, and the island appears lush and green, full of cane fields, trees, and tropical fruits, it may at first seem that "at the time of the narrator's visit.., the full effects of Western 'progress' and its accompanying materialistic values have not spoiled Da-Duh's Eden," as Dorothy Hamer Denniston claims (91). Upon closer examination of the plant life depicted in the story, however, and especially of the descriptions of sugarcane, it appears that the West has already left an indelible physical mark on Barbados, even before the arrival of concrete and steel. A closer examination of sugarcane in a Barbadian text is a legitimate undertaking since" 'Crop,' as sugar cane harvesting is still known, defined Barbadian life," and its "idea, its permeation of all aspects of island culture was as important a s its economic fact. Every plane of Barbadian life was touched by sugar" (Stoddart 11).

What did Caribbean plant life consist of before Europeans arrived? One answer is that it is difficult to know. Even in the earliest decades after the arrival of the Spanish, the Caribbean flora underwent irreversible processes. Already "Bartolome de las Casas told of large herds of cattle and other European animals in the West Indies eating native plants down to the roots in the first half of the sixteenth century, followed by the spread of ferns, thistles, plantain, nettles, nightshade, sedge, and so forth, which he identified as Castilian" (Crosby 151). With the conquistadores came conquering plants. The most fateful of these imported plants was sugarcane. After sugar plantations had been economically successful in various Mediterranean islands, and, in the fifteenth century, phenomenally so in the Atlantic islands off the African coast, such as the Canary Islands and Madeira, "Columbus, who lived for over a decade in Madeira, had the foresight to take sugar plants from the Canary Islands on his voyages to the 'Indies"' (Davis 62).

Seen in this context, the child protagonist's perception of Barbados' cane fields proves to be more than apt:

They the sugarcanes] were too much for me. I thought of them as giant weeds that had overrun the island, leaving scarcely any room for the small tottering houses of sun-bleached pine we passed or the people, dark streaks as our lorry hurtled by. I suddenly feared that we were journeying, unaware that we were, toward some dangerous place where the canes, grown as high and thick as a forest, would close in on us and run us through with their stiletto blades. (278)

The oppressive presence of the canes, the mortal danger they metaphorically pose here, points, of course, to the way in which sugarcane was cultivated in Barbados, and in the Americas in general, during much of its agricultural history--with the brutal exploitation of African slave labor, an exploitation so relentless that it necessitated a constant influx of new slaves merely to outmatch death rates. [1] As descendant of the surviving Africans, the protagonist appears to intuit the historical meaning of sugar production and seems incapable of perceiving canes merely as green fields swaying in the wind, the picture the tourist industry conveys of cane fields. A second description of canes is even more explicit: In her first walk through her grandmother's plot of land, the protagonist refers to "the canes [as] clashing like swords above my cowering head" (279), thus making sugarcane directly reminiscent of the swords of conquistadores and the whips of overseers--aptly so, since "sugar and slavery traveled toge ther for nearly four centuries in the New World" (Mintz 122).

That the story envisions sugarcane as the symbolic source of oppression is emphasized even more by a passage following the quotation above, as it implies that liberation from the practices of oppression associated with sugarcane only becomes imaginable outside the cane fields. After the child protagonist and Da-Duh leave the cane fields, they go to a small forest:

Following her apprehensively down the incline amid a stand of banana plants whose leaves flapped like elephant's ears in the wind, I found myself in the middle of a small tropical wood. ... It was a violent place, the tangled foliage fighting each other for a chance at the sunlight, the branches of the trees locked in what seemed an immemorial struggle, one both necessary and inevitable. But depsite the violence, it was pleasant, almost peaceful in the gully, and beneath the thick undergrowth the earth smelled like spring. (279)

On leaving the cane, the protagonist encounters this place of violence, which is not a violence of whips and swords but of resistance, revolt, and struggle--all preconditions for peace, as Marshall implies. The spring-like smell of the earth suggests a new beginning, one apparently resulting from struggle. And this struggle takes place in an area not cultivated by plantation owners--and thus outside their immediate purview--but dominated by what might be indigenous woods and by plants pointing to either India or Africa. Elephants exist on both of these landmasses; the origin of bananas is uncertain--some species may have been indigenous to the East Indies, others to Madagascar (Schomburgk 588). However, the English name for the plant seems to have originated from Wolof or Malinke (according to Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary), both West African languages, or from the Congo (according to the Oxford English Dictionary), from which it came to English through Portuguese or Spanish. Given the traject ory of the story as a whole, one may safely assume Africa as the intended symbolic echo in this passage invoking liberation, not least because of an early (1649) uprising in Barbados--to be followed by others--by Africans intending "to make themselves master of the island" (Schomburgk 267); India and the East Indies, though, remain important points of reference in the (ecological) story.

When Da-Duh shows her grandchild the various trees growing on her plot of land, she names them with proprietary pride: "'This here is bread fruit,' she said. 'That yonder is papaw. Here's a guava. This is a mango. I know you don't have anything like these in New York. Here's a sugar apple. ... This one bears limies. ...' She went on for some time, intoning the names of the trees as though they were those of her gods" (278). Some of the gods she reveres are foreign gods, however, if one takes their origin into account. Papayas come from India, both breadfruit and mango from the East Indies, which leaves only sugar apple and guava as indigenous plants (Schomburgk 585ff), with limes and citrus fruits most likely coming to the Caribbean from the Mediterranean. Da-Duh's dietary choices are indelibly marked by British colonialism and its links to Southeast Asia. India and the East Indies are connected to the Caribbean not only through their common fate as British colonies and sugar plantations but also through a B ritish colonial policy encouraging the importation of East Indian laborers to the Caribbean from the middle of the nineteenth century onward (Williams 347ff). Southeast Asia and India are also the home of sugarcane; in India, "its cultivation was commonplace by the fourth century B.C." (Davis 58), and it was from there that it started its slow but fateful journey westward, a journey that speeded up once it reached the Caribbean.

Thus, the protagonist's description of the cane as "giant weeds that had overrun the island" is historically appropriate in two respects: For one, plants introduced by Europeans tended to thrive on Caribbean soil and spread with incredible speed, even when disregarded by their importers (Crosby 150); secondly, the British, though only settling Barbados in 1627, expanded sugar production so rapidly that, by the early 1650s, the island ran short of timber and of land available for food crops, so that food supplies had to be imported from either England or North America (Segal 38). These last two, significantly, also figure in the short story as external threats. The U.S. symbolically looms over the island through its towering buildings that, in Da-Duh's eyes, threaten to obliterate the natural splendor of Barbados. Great Britain figures as a direct physical menace through the jets it sends flying over the island at the end of the story in response to a 1937 strike that was an expression of solidarity with an o il strike in Trinidad. Both of these external powers are directly linked to Barbados through sugarcane production, and the representation of sugarcane in the story is resonant with these historical linkages. The threatening and foreboding quality cane fields assume in the text is not merely an echo of the past but also of the present of the short story, the 1930s.

In 1697, "Barbados was," as Eric Williams has noted in his masterly history of the Caribbean From Columbus to Castro, "the most important single colony in the British Empire, worth almost as much, in its total trade, as the two tobacco colonies of Virginia and Maryland combined, and nearly three times as valuable as Jamaica. The tiny sugar island was more valuable to Britain than Carolina, New England, New York, and Pennsylvania together" (142). Though Barbados' importance to Great Britain greatly declined in the eighteenth century, the sugar industry remained dominant in Barbados, as in the French and British Caribbean in general. In 1848, Sir Robert Schomburgk, when publishing his History of Barbados, remained well aware of the importance of sugarcane for the British empire, as evidenced by what he gives as one of his main justifications for writing that history: "It was here [in Barbados] that the first sugar-cane was planted upon the soil of British dominions" (i). In 1928, 20 percent of the population w as still employed in the sugar industry, and a British commission estimated that 67 percent of the population of Barbados would be adversely affected should sugar production be abandoned (Williams 440). In the 1930s, most land continued to be given over to sugar production, making the importation of food a continuing necessity. Hence the protagonist's view of the canes as "leaving scarcely any room for the small tottering houses of sun-bleached pine we passed or the people." Locally grown food, due to a shrinking indigenous food production, was often simply too expensive for average workers, who thus often subsisted in part on imported goods--imported, to an overwhelming extent, from the United States. [2]

This, among other things, explains a U.S. interest in the region that continues to this day, as does the necessity for Barbados to import food in significant quantities. As a military historian approvingly noted in American History in February 1995, U.S. troops have been deployed in the Caribbean thirty times to protect what the U.S. views as its strategic interests. "Eons ago," the historian writes, preparing to introduce an unsettling simile, "the accidental formation of land and sea masses shaped the North American continent into a colossus that--like a giant meat axe poised overhead--dominates its Central American and Caribbean neighbors" (Musicant 30). The threatening presence of Western powers, whether imagined as "canes clashing like swords" or as a "giant meat axe," hovers over the island and is, in both metaphors, directly linked to food production. Indeed, the use of food metaphors in conjunction with imperial interests goes back to an earlier period of U.S. interest in the Caribbean. Listen to the n-foreign minister John Quincy Adams, commenting on Cuba's future in 1823: "There are laws of political as well as physical gravitation[,] and if an apple severed by the tempest from its native tree, cannot choose but fall to the ground, Cuba, forcibly disjoined from its unnatural connection with Spain and incapable of self-support, can gravitate only toward the North American Union, which, by the same law of nature, cannot cast her off from its bosom" (qtd. in Williams 410). Such sentiments were expanded in the same year into the Monroe Doctrine, which declared the entire Western Hemisphere as the sphere of U.S. interest and influence.

In the short story, Da-Duh explains the connection between food production and imperialism in a symbolically resonant way when teaching her grandchild about sugarcane, indirectly commenting on the inordinate consumption of sugar--first by English settlers in the New World and then by American [3]--that, after all, is the basis for Barbados' economic position: "'I bet you don't even know that these canes here and the sugar you eat is one and the same thing. That they does throw these canes into some damn machine at the factory and squeeze out all the little life in them to make sugar for you all so in New York to eat'" (279). The canes in Marshall's story, historically linked to exploitation, death, and economic dependency, are plant representatives of historical forces, are "landscaped history."

Thus, the role they play toward the end of the story must be read in that context. Marshall's protagonist returns to New York and therefore only learns of the death of her grandmother shortly after her visit:

On the day of her death England sent planes flying low over the island in a show of force--so low, according to my aunt's letter, that the downdraft from them shook the ripened mangoes from the trees in Da-Duh's orchard. Frightened, everyone in the village fled into the canes. Except Da-Duh. She remained in the house at the window, so my aunt said, watching as the planes came swooping and screaming like monstrous birds down over the village, over her house, rattling the trees and flattening the young canes in the field. (282-83)

What the story has suggested before becomes clear here as well in a metaphorically urgent manner: The impact of imperialism and its accompanying technology on the Third World, on nature, on human beings, is that it kills. For the purposes of this analysis, it is important to note how the inhabitants of the island attempt to escape this impact: They flee from the planes into the canes, fleeing from technology into nature. But that nature is a nature already compromised by history, not a pre-colonial haven or shelter, and as such, it proves unreliable. Having served imperialist interests for hundreds of years, the sugarcanes do not harbor Barbadians in this moment of conflict but, almost as if in collusion with the metropolis, leave them exposed to the British fighter planes overhead by being flattened.

In what position does this leave the protagonist, the descendant of Da-Duh living in New York? A very ambiguous one, as she herself realizes in the last lines of the story:

She [Da-Duh] died and I lived, but always, to this day even, within the shadow of her death. For a brief period after I was grown I went to live alone, like one doing penance, in a loft above a noisy factory in downtown New York and there painted seas of sugarcane and huge swirling Van Gogh suns and palm trees striding like brightly plumed Tutsi warriors across a tropical landscape, while the thunderous tread of the machines downstairs jarred the floor beneath my easel, mocking my efforts. (283)

She imagines the island, tries to "recollect it in tranquility," to use a Wordsworthian phrase, but even that memory is jarred by the impact of technology, the very thing the act of recollection attempts to escape. The machines "mock" the narrator's efforts so that even her attempt at artistic recreation is compromised. Indeed, one can see that: While one imaginary trajectory in her painting leads back to Africa, to "Tutsi warriors," another one leads to Europe again, making her see a tropical sun through a European painter's eyes. The Caribbean present connects to an African past but cannot escape the present-day impact of the West. The Caribbean cannot be simply the Caribbean--even its nature always evokes reminiscences of other places.

Paradoxically, even the protagonist's paintings erase and reconstruct Barbados as much as the non-indigenous flora has. Rather than seeing the Caribbean landscape for itself, she sees a contest again, one between Europe and Africa. An earlier passage illuminates her paintings: When Da-Duh leads her grandchild on one of her tours of the island, she shows her "an incredibly tall royal palm which rose cleanly out of the ground and, drawing the eye up with it, soared high above the trees around it into the sky. It appeared to be touching the blue dome of the sky, to be flaunting its dark crown of fronds right in the blinding white face of the late morning sun" (281). Da-Duh's tall royal palm appears to symbolize Afro-Caribbean resistance against a "white" sun apparently representing the colonial powers, and the story's final paragraph becomes resonant with this struggle, with palm (reminiscent of Tutsi warriors) and sun (connected to Europe through Van Gogh) as antagonists in an almost mythical, timeless conflic t. As Beverly Horton has said in a discussion of Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven, "Buried under the surface of the island, and the sea surrounding it[,] are the intermingled histories of colonization and colonial resistance, the histories of contact between African and European peoples in the Caribbean." Marshall's vision here is more pessimistic than in her later fiction. Especially The Chosen Place, the Timeless People envisions possibilities for overcoming colonialist domination, but even there, the place the protagonist has to start from is Africa, not the Caribbean itself.

Sugarcane's role as a mirror of a tortured history is not confined to "To Da-Duh." The Chosen Place, the Timeless People represents cane fields in similar ways; canes appear "ranked like an opposing army...their long pointed leaves bristling like spears in the wind" (161), the passage echoing, in its militaristic imagery, the history of conquest alluded to before. In Barbadian author Cecil Foster's novel No Man in the House, the grandmother of the protagonist also associates a sense of danger and threat with sugarcane plantations, and she uses this threat as a pedagogical tool to keep children at home at nighttime:

"That is why I keep telling you young children to stay close to the house at night. You can never tell when some man looking for a young person's heart might pass through this village and grab one of you off the streets. An the next thing we know, one of you will turn up dead in some cane field." (61)

It is not surprising, then, when the protagonist internalizes this outlook on sugarcane fields, so different from the one offered in tourist brochures and commercials disseminated for Western consumption: "The houses in the villages along the highway had suddenly given way to endless fields of sugar cane....I didn't want to be caught in such a desolate, frightening part of the island" (237). In Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven, canes have a similarly threatening quality and are linked to exploitation and death. The novel's protagonist remembers walking through cane fields as a painful experience: "She did not get far; her bare legs soon stung and bled," or were" 'sliced fine,' "as her friend says, "'by the blades of the cane.. . sharp, sharp'" (131). Moments later, when talking to the protagonist about a slave hospital, her friend explains," 'Tek a lot of smaddy fe grow cane, missis. Cyaan have smaddy dying off--not when dem cost so'" (132), thus connecting the objectification and enslavement of Africa ns with the cultivation of sugarcane.

George Lamming, too, personifies canes and hints at ominous meanings when describing "fields of sugar cane [creeping] like an open secret across the land" (In the Castle of My Skin 17). Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat's novel Breath, Eyes, Memory continues this tradition of associating cane with danger. The protagonist's mother is raped in a cane field, and in a parallel to No Man in the House, the protagonist's grandmother tells children begging her for another story" 'to go home before the werewolf on the sugarcane cart came out, the one who could smell you from miles away and would come and kill you'" (126). Indeed, Barbadian folklore has also memorialized the threat symbolically inherent in sugarcane: The "outman," a spooky figure said to haunt and chase children, has sugarcane fields as his hiding place, thus imbuing them with a sense of danger. [4]

Sugarcane and the Middle Passage that sugarcane brought in its wake haunt Marshall's Barbados and the Caribbean of other authors. It appears that landscape in "To Da-Duh" is never merely landscape but always the mirror of human history, bearing record through proliferating the seeds humans have planted.

Martin Japtok teaches English and African American Studies at West Virginia State College. His essays have appeared in AAR, MELUS, The Southern Literary Journal, Literature and Medicine, and elsewhere. His edited essay collection Postcolonial Perspectives on Women Writers from Africa, the Caribbean, and the U.S. is forthcoming from Africa World Press.

Notes

(1.) To give an example from Jamaica: "By 1703, Jamaica had 45,000 slaves. By 1778, it had 205,300. Yet, between 1703 and 1775, the island had imported 469,893 slaves, or well over two slaves for each one added to the population" (Segal 40).

(2.) In 1936, Puerto Rico, for example, "was the second largest market for American wheat growers and millers; it bought more rice from the United States than all other countries combined" (Williams 449).

(3.) "The thirteen British colonies on the North American mainland were settled mainly by people of English, Scottish, and Irish origin. Their liking for sweetness predated their settlement of the Americas. As early as 1603, foreign visitors to England had commented on the immoderate English liking for sweet things.... In the mid-seventeenth century, British working people began to be accustomed to drinking tea, sweetened with molasses or sugar. Though the first English colonists were not people who could have afforded much sugar or tea in England, they were to become important users in the New World" (Mintz 125).

(4.) I am indebted to my colleague Litchfield O'Brian Thompson for this information and his support and encouragement in my research for this essay.

Works Cited

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---. "To Da-Duh, in Memoriam." 1967. Calling the Wind: Twentieth-Century African-American Short Stories. Ed. Clarence Major. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. 275-83.

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