Sugar, Keith Jarrett

SUGAR

SUGAR

Keith Jarrett

Sugar is at the heart of so much we consume. From breakfast to dinner, and beyond, from what we drink to how we celebrate, almost wherever you are in the world, it sticks to the tongue. Sometimes hidden in foods you least expect, it appears on the labels, in many guises. Recently, in order to reduce sugar’s hold on our cultures, governments around the world have taxed it, and many food and drinks companies have sought ways to replace it. Sugar has become controversial, something to reduce.

How did this once-luxury product originating in Asia become so common? How does this relate to the transatlantic slave trade, to wars and revolutions, and to European empires establishing themselves in the Caribbean as we know it now? The answer is a long and complicated one, complete with tales of brutality, human trafficking and many such unpleasant things, a far cry from the sweet taste that we are all so familiar with.

5 facts to get started: On the history sugar and slavery

1. We get the word ‘sugar’ from the Arabic sukkar السكر The sugar crop originated in Northern India before being introduced to Europe via the Arab world, where it quickly became a popular trading product in the Middle Ages. Sucre, Azúcar, Zucker… all these words sound similar in many European languages because they all have the same root.

2. By 1750, sugar was the most valuable commodity in the world! European nations gradually colonised the Americas, beginning in 1492. During this time, the Portuguese transplanted the crop to Brazil, and enslaved Africans were trafficked there to work on plantations to produce even more. Demand for sugar in Europe continued to increase, and nations such as Britain, France and the Netherlands used forced labour in the Caribbean region to produce sugar and increase their power and wealth. Cities such as Antwerp and Bristol became extremely wealthy from the sugar trade, and we can still see evidence of this wealth in buildings and places where sugar was imported.

3. The 1791 Haitian Revolution set the course for the end of the transatlantic slave trade.

As the sugar crop thrives in a tropical climate with lots of rain, countries in and around the Caribbean became important for its production. Plantation conditions were brutal under chattel slavery; the enslaved were not seen as fully human, and so had no human rights. From the back-breaking task of harvesting the cane, to the intense heat of the boiling houses where sugar was extracted, the process of sugar production was a difficult and

treacherous one. Many people died, or were killed when they rebelled or tried to escape. In Haiti, a successful rebellion by enslaved people led to their independence from France, and to freedom from slavery. The country became the first independent nation in the Americas since Christopher Columbus’s ‘discovery’!

4. The Slave Trade Act 1807 followed suit (then the Abolition Act in 1833) Haiti’s new status alarmed the European nations with colonies in the Americas, and it also energised the abolitionist movements on both sides of the Atlantic. Within a few years, the 1807 Act was passed in Britain, prohibiting further trafficking of enslaved Africans to the American continents. Finally, in 1833, slavery was abolished in Britain’s colonies, although formerly enslaved people living in the Caribbean were forced to work for their plantation owners under an ‘apprenticeship’ for six further years, and people from India and China were brought to the Caribbean to work on plantations for a period of ‘indentureship’.

5. Cuba maintained chattel slavery until 1898 (the average life expectancy is over 75 years old) Slavery continued in other countries such as the USA, Cuba and Brazil for many more years. Even though the Atlantic triangular trade in humans had diminished, plantation owners considered the children of enslaved people to be their property, too. And even though Britain had abolished chattel slavery, sugar companies and merchants continued to trade with countries like Brazil and Cuba, which had not - and then invested their wealth in property in and around important trading cities such as London, Liverpool, Bristol and Cardiff, where they bought influence. Some organisations like the Tate are just starting to acknowledge the indirect relationships between chattel slavery and their own wealth.

Residue

Keith Jarrett

diabetes & capitalism & stalks & bagasse & the boat’s bottom deck & docks & chains & boiled bubbling of bones & pulp & pulpits & bronze manillas & blood & molasses & dental floss & fillings & open vowels & the Atlantic & Olokún & duality of meanings & that D’Angelo track & fillin in t e g ps & we don’t discuss it & heart dis-ease & (museum) artefacts & the tip of the tongue & the duality of meanings & the cartography of my sister’s hair & canerow & reparations & monuments & (the overthrown ones) & (the overlooked ones) & always the sea & dissolving in the mouth of history & [ & ]

the granular

Keith Jarrett

until you have scraped the hurricane wind from your tongue bent yourself back to touch the earth and sprung up again until you have licked clean the machete’s blade watched yourself lit aflame in the fields of your fallen brothers until you have been bundled into the arms of a truck felt your bones crushed until you sing sap and boil and boil again until your sweat becomes liquor until it is swept into sand until you have spooned toothily into cargo ships and crossed the waters in bottles cartons and tins do not speak to me of sweetness

Waiting for that kind of crystallisation

Keith Jarrett

where all you under-understand of processes language and lands lands with precision on the page speakey-spokey refined and aligned with purpose but as playful as rum running rings round buckra’s tongue buckled down with history’s sour servings you’ve devoured in small portions of the night between sips of its sweet and sticky embrace while you try to place our place inside this twisting story that runs down the chin messy and manypronged and prolonged and unfinished

Poems by Y12 and Y13 students at Dulwich College

Sugar-Coating

Ned Wildgoose-Bulloch

I They dance like lights, not bright Yet bright in my eyes, In their hues, Lime, neon pink, electric blue Popcorn, And their promise of sugar.

II Foreign plants fill native lands, For foreign dreams and foreign hands, Laboured by another band, Strangers to those dreams of sugar And to these lands They’ve lived within for centuries.

III It’s like digesting rocket fuel. There’s power and strands of excitement. Your spinal cord untethers from the Earth as Your brain flies into a Busy oblivion.

IV Sugar powder will catch fire. Do not let it spark. Sugar’s power’s earning money. If your factory burns, Post a note through my door And we’ll smother your problem with Chocolate.

V It had been imported; The Curly Whirly’s whirls curled around my awareness As it curly whirled around my tongue, and tied tight, bound To me and my country of origin. It shortly went slack in the heat, but the moment Remained, Twisted between my neurons.

VI In what society do you belong, grain of sugar? You form cubes when forced, but otherwise Lack structure. We accept you without a plan of how you Will complement our bodies. You can’t sugar-coat your laziness And we can’t sugar-coat our impulsive nature.

VII Do there exist many sugars or is there but a single sugar?

VIII After draining the tub of popcorn light, I see that there is darkness. Each piece I consumed had nooks and crannies That I assimilate.

Sugar, Sugar

Jamie Chong

I am a bleached grain of sand that has seen too much: boiling houses like smog in London rising and coming down like hellfire; my brothers melt and reappear in crystallisations of ecstasy. So preserved that we are toxic, poison, dangerous; we are death between your lips. The hands that churn and turn, calloused and worn out, are replaced by another man’s, his life paid out by metal sums. I see the ones who eat, eat, eat, do nothing but consume, from their porous skin exudes the blood of those they killed. All returns to where they once came. Born from red streams, destined to dissolve back into those fat arteries, I am bound and birthed for this fate. Homeland stripped, left me naked like women misused, abused. I am so empty yet full of regret. Born dark from pounded cane, I am made lighter and lighter. Powdered gold cannot look like the hands of their maker. From that day when I am white like them and the statues that they have stolen, I am Aphrodite Areia and I will wage vicious war.

Invade their mouths like salvos as they turns black, black, black. All returns to darkness again. They made me to live eternally, wrapped in flawless foil where I crinkle like cracked cellophane. Flash like Hector's helmet, metal like the gold of their decaying lives. I am the root of their dying rust, my death will bring a victory to all who've lost their lives for the sickly sweet, saccharine stickiness of self-destruction. I am dopamine, death, Dionysus, the bubbles of champagne and wine, master of addiction, the king of highs. The birth of an empire and its end, a capitalist currency, drowning, dying. I was born to die and die and die again. What a curse it is to be immortal, so I will throw myself at death and be unafraid. After all, we return to darkness again.

Sugar

Ekow Amoah

I The choice churns in my head Of cocooning crystalline precipitate.

II 60 for 16 Blasé

III 10 billion grams of sugar in the new coke zero! Crinkling coke containers Did it really happen if nobody gave out coke?

IV Synesthetic markers of a time that fades from thought What is your role in human development? Where there's coke, there's fire. In the beginning was the coke and the coke was sugar, and the sugar was coke.

Poems by students from London Academy of Excellence, Tottenham

Sugar

Kay Sokunbi

Alcohol & glucose & diabetes & science & respiration & photosynthesis & freeness, breathing & reparations & illicit yet magnificent feelings & intoxication & bacon butty breakfast & sugary smooth syrup & honey & tummy aches & forbidden foody obsessions & reminiscing on childhood confessions & 1833 free & 1898 reality

Refined Sugar

Refined sugar had to be dried thoroughly if it was to be as white and pure as the top merchants demanded. This necessity was sometimes a problem in tropical climates. Sugar of lesser quality with a brownish colour tended to be consumed locally or was only used to make preserves and crystallised fruit. (https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1795/life-on-a-colonial-sugar-plantation/)

The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice; the darker the flesh, the deeper the roots*. But not for the white man’s table. Not the right kind of sweet, Not the white kind of sweet, Not the fine kind of sweet, For this table. A table piled high with jellies and almonds and ices and pain, sweetmeats and puddings, all wrought from the cane. Wrought from the cane and dried in the sun, until history, labour and roots are gone. Washed white. White washed. Leaving nothing but Pure White Refined Sugar.

* Black by Dave

Hidden Sugar

Where breweries belched beer breath And crumbling warehouses stored sugar Now office lights beam bright Like a never ending fruit machine. Walking heart attacks in pinstripe trade rotten smiles Thinking of deadlines and the sweet taste of success. While down on the Isle of Dogs The scars of the docks and basins Are hidden amidst skyscrapers, Of hedge funds and Investment banks who Hide money in shell companies on Caribbean islands, where once the moneyed Men of these isles kept slaves. Compensation money given to wealthy Families and West India Quay The statue of Milligan and the legacy Of wealth built on the backs of chained People whose names they changed.