In addition to Saccharum officinarum, “official sugar” (grown on most plantations), there is a species named Saccharum spontaneum, “spontaneous sugar.” Once “introduced by sugarcane breeding programs . . . S. spontaneum has the potential to become a serious invader of cultivated land . . . host to a large number of pests and diseases.”75 With both rhizomes and seeds, it propagates freely. Such cane “looks like wild corn has mated with bamboo,” bearing “fluffy, hair-like flowers.”76 Though becoming scraggly and less useful to humans, even “official sugar” breeds of cane can survive in the wild and move across landscapes.
In sugarhouse sketches, there are often circles marked “Still” centering the structure, its vats used for distillation. Seeing that term orient so many diagrams of sugar, the word’s other meanings made me think of a core of time as well as space. Still: ongoing; unmoving; but.
The Confederate families flying flags of Dixie are gone from southern Belize. The sugar industry came and went in the southern region, leaving only rubble on the edges of a global system where Belize was a fringe node at best.77 But sugar remains iconic of the larger shifts such colonial forms have unleashed on a global scale: motors of industrial agriculture and ecological extractions; chemicals used to grow crops on spent soils; plantations that led to corporations;78 machines rusted in place in fields yet in ongoing motion across landscapes and inside cells of human bodies, even when left behind by all accounts. Long gone; still.
When someone’s glucose is high, it is present not only in the blood but also in sweat, breath, saliva, urine, respiratory fluid, and tears. Once I was invited to a funeral for a friend’s father after his death from diabetes and realized how many people in her family must be crying sugar.
In today’s diabetes markets, even the sugar in tears holds potential capital. Some researchers have argued that such tears could be collected, dried, and cut into pieces for lab tests or public health metrics. “Persons without diabetic symptoms would be less reluctant to give samples of tears than of blood,” one policy proposal read: “Thus a fairly accurate estimate of the prevalence of diabetics could be made with less resistance from the public.”79
One could argue that in today’s global markets, the sugar inadvertently cultivated in people’s blood and bodies is more valuable than any sugar growing in the ground. These global sugar markets feed each other in ways that recall Lochlann Jain’s insights about how “key aspects of the economy involve both causing and treating” many chronic conditions.80 Importantly, Jain reminds us that such profit engines do not imply any malicious intent or human ill will. But when protecting local foods and environs has no global “market value”—while dietary and therapeutic products that both cause and treat diabetes are highly profitable—those incentives fuel systems that reproduce with a life force of their own.
A number of older people with diabetes I met in Belize diagnosed or monitored their glucose by smelling and tasting sweetness in their urine. Others first realized they had diabetes by noting insects gathering in the places they urinated, drawn to consume the sugar. For them, “sugar” was not an abstract unit mediated by technologies or paperwork—bodily sugar had a sensibility and flavor, a literal taste. And, of course, blood sugar reflects much more than the sweets someone has eaten. Since all carbohydrates turn into glucose in the body, foods like flour tortillas and white rice can cause high sugar levels in bodily fluids too. The ants can’t tell whether a glucose molecule was broken down from cane or white flour, once sucrose or fructose. By then it is just sugar, and they are there to eat it next.
Sugar not only reveals scales but also produces them, like the genes described by Ian Whitmarsh elsewhere in the Caribbean.81 When a diabetic ulcer refuses to heal, some hospitals actually apply a topical poultice of sugar, which for unknown reasons at times has more medical efficacy than many antibiotics.82 Certain foods may be disproportionately eaten due to a history of exploitation, but people have also learned ways to make “dietary disaster” delicious, and often there is “clearly life surging around the sugary rite.”83 Sugar holds contradictory meanings: eating and getting eaten; histories of hardship and labor, but also of love, pleasure, and luxury; both wealth and poverty; security and danger; terror and intimacy; violence and comfort; age-old, growing new; hunger and indulgence; invigorated and devastated agriculture; ancient human staple and disobedient Frankenfood.
The symptoms and injuries of sugar likewise hold contradictory meanings and intimacies. When “a source of value is extracted from the population being injured,”84 Jasbir Puar argues, wounding might be better analyzed as maiming, to mark the uneven ways that racial capitalism and settler colonialism play a role in “rendering populations available for statistically likely injury.”85 More than disability, she calls this debility—someone profits.
“Hurtful” was the particular word that Sarah used to speak about it. Her language is also helpful to think with—creating her own terms for recognizing pain, but distinct from the terms of “damages.” Sarah’s relational concept of the “hurtful” offers a different mode to recognize injuries and debilities that people were dealing with and actively seeking ways to share about more publically.86 Something hurtful points back out, asking us to examine the external forces and infrastructures inflicting hurt. It’s also already being dealt with—requiring recognition of the dignity with which injuries have long been borne, and implying that storytelling is also implicated in processes of cause and effect.
Listening again now, Sarah’s words sound as much gentle rebuke as kind invitation—not just to the searching student who kept coming to talk without always being able to understand, but also for whomever she imagined my voice recorder was a proxy for reaching. I like to think that this included anyone ready to author diabetes policy without consulting the people actually living with it.87
Of course, playing back her words in air-conditioned rooms is not without its own double edge. It could be easy, from there, to think we were outside the sugar machine. But on the contrary: sugar plantations across the Caribbean and throughout the Americas played a major role in endowing U.S. and European universities like the one that sent a student like me to study and report back on distant nutritional deprivations.
Who profits when bodies break down from sugar? And which bodies? Is it even possible to examine such unequally distributed problems without profiting too? I used to think this project could find an outside to these contradictions. Now, I just believe in more honest wrestling with the ways we each get interpolated by sugar’s legacies and ongoing effects.
“I’ll tell you, I have a great time, girl.” Sarah said she wanted to get a small Belizean flag to wave for Independence Day in September. “Are you going to the parade?”
In the face of irreparable histories, I wish I knew a better gesture than trying to co-create platforms for thinking with teachers like Sarah and the unauthorized expertise they shared. People are already speaking back—time and again, implicitly and directly—to common public health rubrics by which they are otherwise objectified, managed, and related to. They have ideas about the work of justice. But their insights often do not have a channel back to those who make science, design, and policy decisions that impact their lives. Which kinds of public efforts might help support and expand the vital grassroots care projects already underway? And which policy misrecognitions feed more limbs to the sugar machine?
In this view, any sugar machines that are possible to photograph—like the glucose meter with unaffordable parts that broke down in Sarah’s treasure chest or the colonial equipment rusting among the trees near her house—are only synecdoches, little pieces of a five-hundred-year-old engine. But the larger apparatuses they support are the mechanisms and infrastructures by which the death and dismemberment of nonwhite people had come to seem ordinary—forecast as acceptable or just inevitable, weighed against profits engines and global markets. This again