I used to think that “sugar” was a popular synonym that meant diabetes. But over time, I came to think that these labels often slipped into each other but were not exactly the same. The effects of sugar routinely exceeded common understandings of diabetes problems. Sugar was alive in the landscape. It named something that escaped from the many containers—biomedical, historical, scientific—of expert accounting. I began to think that any stable account of sugar’s contradictory meanings and excesses would miss the very thing that people like Sarah named as the conditions they were trying to live with.
Belize is among the less cane-saturated places in the Caribbean. Neither Sarah nor her children worked in the sugar fields. Many people in this book never talked about field labor or would trace their diabetes to sugarcane. Yet they lived in a region not only dotted with its ruins, but also fundamentally shaped by its far-reaching material legacies: where people lived and how their ancestors arrived; the way land was partitioned and used today and what kinds of things could grow there; the system through which they bought foods and what foods those were. Other associations were less literal but more pervasive. When a woman drowned together with her four children after she dove into a shallow pool trying to save them, people made sense of the tragedy by attributing her terrified actions to diabetic sugar: “The sugar made her panic.” A man whose loved one had “gone mad” explained her breakdown in this way: “The sugar went to her brain.” Sometimes sugar was not amenable to intervention, but simply a way of speaking about terrible things one could not change.
The way people talked in sugar, though rarely about it, brought to mind Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s notion of implicit memories: “Tying a shoe involves memory, but few of us engage in an explicit recall of images every time we routinely tie our shoes,” he wrote. “Remembering is not always a process of summoning representations of what happened.”8
People spoke in sugar so often that I began to hear it as a kind of implicit memory. Trying to understand what hung in its silences, I called someone who worked in curating more explicit memories of sugar: Mr. B, one of Belize’s resident experts in sugarcane history, who suggested a drive north. We met in a pickup truck with seats full of books. As we shook hands hello, Mr. B said that shaking hands with a cane worker can leave your hands itchy all day with the feeling of little fibers under your skin, and I tried not to feel unsettled though that sensation is a common symptom of diabetes. We talked on the road north to Libertad, past Corozal’s British brick pillbox structures with gun windows.
Cane Cutters, by Pen Cayetano.
Since sugar has no season, the fields outside the window were not uniform, each property in its own stage: burnt fields, high ratoon, the overgrown dense green known for snakes and bugs. Harvest leaves a field of stumps that have to be scorched to prevent stubble from sprouting from the stalk’s joint-like nodes. Planting new sugar fields entails burying old cane billets in the ground, which sprout regrowth called stands.
When we got out of the car at Libertad, I thought how that field was the same one that many workers from Stann Creek District had once traveled to reach. Pen Cayetano, a famous impressionist artist in Dangriga, was among the Garifuna men who left home in southern Belize to work in the northern sugar fields of Libertad when he was a teenager. In his studio—fragrant with oil paint and smoked fish and bustling with family at work on art projects of their own—we sat on an overturned canoe, and he recalled how the sugar fields barely felt like vegetation at all: bright but not lush, sticky, known for the blind heat of the two o’clock sun. When I asked if he might want to paint an image of his memories of sugar work in Libertad for this book, he looked startled by my mental image of sugar fields as plantlike bright green. “You think I’d paint the sugar green?” He shook his head. “It felt red.”
By the time Mr. B and I walked through Libertad on a hot day in 2017, the sprawling cane fields and laboratory buildings were long overgrown. As we passed broken-down conveyor belts towering above stacks of rusting vats, it was not difficult to see why historians like Eric Williams viewed the sugar industry as a pivotal “synthesis of field and factory.”9 A single watchman kept an eye on the abandoned estate. He led us past a pumpkin patch he was cultivating near the old office, still hung with the rusted sign FACTORY MANAGER. Inside the derelict office headquarters, the wood desk had rotted and most of the inside walls had collapsed. But a metal filing cabinet in the middle of the room was fully intact, sinking into the dirt.
“Time and space have no meaning in a canefield,” Jean Toomer wrote in Cane.10 If efforts to enclose sugar in time and space often seemed to unleash further misrecognitions, I thought from Libertad, then I wanted to try following its wild entwinings instead. Somehow that sugar factory’s feral filing cabinet became a helpful mental image for me as I gathered together the notes for this chapter, a container to temporarily order these bits of sugar’s far-flung histories.
More intense stories of “sweetness and death”11 elsewhere in time and place shaped how people ended up living where I met them. On Saint Vincent, sugarcane had become especially symbolic of Garifuna people’s struggle to preserve their ancestral homelands at the end of the eighteenth century. As Paul Johnson notes: “Though never laboring as slaves, the Black Caribs lived under the continual threat of enslavement, and very much within the expanding sugar plantation system.”12 Legendary freedom fighters of what historian Julius Scott illuminates as the “masterless Caribbean,”13 Garifuna fighters set fire to sugar fields to combat encroaching British settlers. Sugar’s potent symbolism reached such a point that during one war, Garifuna leaders found it fitting for plantation overseers to meet their end “crushed between the cylinders of a sugar mill, the symbol of British greed for Carib land.”14
Nearly two thousand miles away, in the mainland territory that later became Belize, commercial plantations were legally prohibited by the Spanish during the colony’s early history.15 Kriol people like Sarah descended from the enslaved families in Belize who once worked in logging, but were still caught and sold within a broader regional system founded on sugar markets. Most who ended up in Belize were traded through markets of the sugar islands, primarily Jamaica and Bermuda; some labored on sugar plantations elsewhere in the Caribbean before arriving in Belize City.16 Creating dependence on economies of imported food became integral to control within the logging camps of Belize, especially rationing sugar.
Farther north along the border between Belize and the Mexican Yucatán, sugarcane became a key crop that Maya laborers were forced to grow on encomienda plantations17 and also an instrument of control and even torture. Thomas Gann gives the example of a “well-known merchant” in Bacalar known to punish Maya servants, “for no very serious offense,” by shaving their heads and burying them up to their necks in the island’s hot sand; “their heads were then smeared with molasses and the victims were left to the ants” to be eaten alive.18
When Christopher Columbus arrived in the Caribbean, colonial strategies initially favored capturing Indigenous peoples from the Americas and bringing them east to provide labor on sugar plantations in the Canary Islands. Sugar was used to ply local inhabitants and sow discord, as one chronicler on the third voyage of Columbus recalled when greeting the first Taíno boats: “I gave hawks’ bells and beads and sugar. . . . after they knew the good treatment, all wished to come to the ships.”19
While colonial strategies for both labor extraction and cane plantations’ locations shifted dramatically in the face of subsequent epidemics, sugar continued to impact Indigenous populations of the Americas in a more subtle way than the better-known plantation histories of the Caribbean. Though sugar was often less of a key export (outside Brazil), mainland sugar plantations across Latin America provided a central source of funding for Jesuits and other