Sugar cane poetics

The first sight of the West Indies that J. A. Froude beholds upon arriving in Barbados is a beautifully tended island, ‘cultivated so far as the eye could see with the completeness of a garden’ and pleasantly coloured in ‘a vivid green from the cane fields’ (EWI 32). This welcoming vision, however, holds only from afar. As my discussion in the previous chapter showed, on closer inspection the place turns out to be less a familiar garden, more a bewildering natural site, where the English traveller most of all ‘missed green fields with cows upon them’, and instead sees only ‘Guinea grass’ that he finds ‘ugly to look at’ (EWI 104). Both his successful and his failed attempts at offering aesthetically satisfying views of Caribbean landscapes, therefore, centre on the growth of sugar cane – a plant that also figures prominently in the other travelogues. It forms both the botanical and the historical epitome of New World realities. Enraptured with the natural riches encountered on his journey, Kingsley (1890: 23) celebrates sugar cane as ‘a noble grass’, handsome and enticing with its ‘bold curves over the well-hoed dark soil’. But for all his praise of natural beauty, Kingsley’s phrase nevertheless includes a passing reference to the manual labour (‘well-hoed’) that has prepared the ground for such aesthetic pleasures. Even Naipaul, though rarely given to acknowledge the history of slave plantations, laconically remarks on his visit to British Guiana that ‘sugarcane is an ugly crop and it has an ugly history’ (MP 129) – thus conjoining a point of social commentary to his aesthetic verdict.