Traveling with Sugar. Amy Moran-Thomas
selling sugarcane within what became the countries of Mexico, Peru, and Paraguay, among others.20 Colonial and military projects of all kinds were indispensably funded and amplified by such sugarcane profits, giving rise to the axiom “Without sugar, no colonies.”21
Sugarcane distillation laboratories also became sites for refining racial classifications of the era.22 On conquistador Hernán Cortés’s cane plantation in Mexico, which helped fund his later military expeditions across Central America, efforts to make sugar “emerge perfectly purged and whitened” were key to its market value. Some 90 percent of the sugar emerged in shades of brown, deemed low-value prieta—the same name people with dark skin still get called in that part of Mexico today. After boiled sugar was transferred with a “shoe-like scoop” for settling into sugarloaf molds, darker molasses leaking from the open bottom of the sugar cone was declared “poorly purged sugar [and] removed with a knife.” Once severed, sugar’s “foot form was separated from the rest to be returned to the purging house,” the name of the building where sugar was whitened.23 The foot of the sugar cone often accumulated heavy metals and other toxicants from the distilling machinery and collected any debris from the vats, at times including (as Edwidge Danticat notes) blood and bodily matter from laborers’ injuries.24 It was fed to enslaved people and horses.25
The English word “amputate” came from the Latin root amputare, meaning to trim plants or cut off the limbs of trees. Somewhere in the late 1500s or early 1600s, the word began to also mean cutting off human limbs.
“Sugar was a murderous commodity,” Vincent Brown observes of the patterns of its violence during that era. Plantations functioned through “symbolics of mutilation,” powered by people “who were themselves consumed” by sugar production.26 Many enslaved families were forced to live in houses with roofs of thatched cane tassels.27 “When we work at the sugar-canes, and the mill snatches hold of a finger, they cut off the hand; and when we attempt to run away, they cut off the leg,” an enslaved character from Suriname famously describes in Voltaire’s Candide.28 In Black Jacobins, C. L. R James describes how some enslaved individuals were forced to wear a “tin-plate mask designed to prevent the slave [from] eating the sugarcane” in the fields.29
Historian Sir Hilary Beckles notes that the disembodiments related to diabetes therefore have especially discomforting resonance in Caribbean and Latin American regions today, as places long known for these trademark injuries of sugar are again called “the amputation capital of the world. It is here that the stress profile of slavery and racial apartheid; dietary disaster and psychological trauma; and addiction to the consumption of sugar and salt, have reached their highest peak. The country is now host to the world’s most virulent diabetes and hypertension epidemic. [The British] parliament owes the people of Barbados an education and health initiative.”30
Beckles, whose enslaved great-grandparents were owned by the ancestors of actor Benedict Cumberbatch, opens his book with homage to those Garifuna and other Kalinago and Maroon peoples who managed to elude plantation captivity and share sanctuary with others, honoring their “principal contribution to the freedom traditions of the Caribbean.”31 But he also wrestles with the legacy of those like his own ancestors in Barbados, who either could not escape to nearby Saint Vincent or tried and were apprehended in their journey.
Left: Enslaved man who had his leg cut off for running away. Right: Debilitation device meant to prevent slaves from escaping, c. 1697.
Besides violently cutting off mobility, amputated legs were intended to be a grisly and shame-inducing public spectacle. Colonial-era sugar planters in the Caribbean even invented devices of psychic terror that mimicked amputation—forcing enslaved people to physically experience and imagine something of what it would be like if they were to have a limb cut off in the future.
“What’s past is prologue,” the old truism from The Tempest goes.
But what does that mean when it comes to sugar in the Americas?
“The machinery of the sugar mill, once installed and set in motion, soon becomes almost indestructible, since even when it is partially dismantled, its transformative impact will survive it for many years,” Antonio Benítez-Rojo once wrote. “Its track will be inscribed within Nature itself, in the climate, in the demographic, political, social, economic, and cultural structures of the society to which it once was joined.”32
The old pipe jutting over the river at Libertad looked like an oil pipeline, but it was built for molasses. For a brief time after 1989, a Jamaican company called PetroJam leased the old sugar estate and used its molasses to refine into ethanol for U.S. markets. But by the time I visited, only sugarcane was being loaded into the tugboats I watched preparing for export. Staring into the water that some call “the river of strange faces,” I thought of Kara Walker’s art installation in the old Dominos Sugar Factory in Brooklyn, where pools of dissolved sugar water reflected each visitor back at themselves. Now that sweet crude oil has been drilled in Belize, there are jokes that even the land has gotten sweet blood.33
WELCOME TO LIBERTAD read a sign at the edge of town. Welcome to Liberty. If you follow that road going north, a crumbled sugar distillery from the 1700s sprouts vines, a reminder of when Bacardi owned those fields and the ensnared cane workers were mostly Yucatec Maya men. Or go south, where remnants around the British brick sugar mill at Indian Church tell a story of robust Indigenous agriculture until the time of colonial contact, when Maya land use and diets became violently constricted and malnutrition skyrocketed.34
In another direction lies the sugar village of Calcutta. It was founded by East Indians branded “Sepoy mutineers” by the British and deported to Belize for participating in India’s First War of Independence in 1858,35 “sent to sugar estates in the north.”36 Or cut closer along the border, where the cane fields are transected by what people call “the sugar road.” A signboard from Hershey marks the sugarcane’s eventual destination for processing in Pennsylvania. Animal blood is no longer used to clarify industrial sugar, but charred cow bones are still a medium in the process many companies use to whiten sugarcane.37 Before long, some of this refined sugar will return again to Caribbean and Latin American markets as sweet packaged food products, part of the global circuits of production and consumption that Frantz Fanon long ago foresaw as the next stage of exploitation: “The colonies have become a market. The colonial population is a customer who is ready to buy goods,” which Fanon viewed as part and parcel of “that violence which is just under the skin.”38
Colonial sugar economies were driven by “unequal ecological exchange,” Jason Moore noted, not only human labor extraction.39 Sometimes I tried to picture what the old forest in Stann Creek District looked like before it was logged and later burned to clear fields for plantations. Inhabiting a hobbled landscape, some interviewees told me they wanted to grow vegetables, but the soil along highway was too poor to grow anything but oranges and bananas. Was it always? This legacy was not only about land in law, but also about its biology. Once cane grows in certain ground, it depletes nutrients from the soil. This paves the way for further industrial monocropping, since it often leaves behind exhausted land that requires heavy doses of petrochemical pesticides and fertilizers in order to grow.
I didn’t used to know the names of the chemicals they put on sugar in Belize, but I tasted them once. Biting to peel a cane stalk straight from the fields with my teeth, the white powder flaked dry on my tongue and dissolved without flavor. Later, a friend and I stood staring at the names of the agricultural chemicals advertised on a sign in town: Actara, Amistar, Cruiser, Curyam, Flex, Gesaprim, Gramoxone, Karate, Ridomil Gold, Syngenta. Somehow, the advertised list felt taboo to discuss: the shopkeeper did not want to talk about which ones he sold for sugar and which ones for other monocrops, like oranges and bananas. The term pesticide drift that I read about sounded like a sinister enigma. But lab tests in Belize measure it: glyphosate, better known by the brand name Roundup, was found in six out of six test sites in