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Travel
Delving into the history of sugarcane production in Guadeloupe proves fertile ground for both fiction and painful, first-hand discovery.
ByNii Ayikwei Parkes
Published November 22, 2023
• 6 min read
This article was produced by National Geographic Traveller (UK).
There’s a line in the poem Goodman’s Bay by the Bahamian poet Christian Campbell that reads, ‘God, there is too much red in the sky!’ I consider the line beautifully dramatic until I stand on the shore at dusk in Basse-Terre and find it apt. My unfamiliarity with the immensity of sky and sea on a tropical island in the Western Hemisphere makes everything seem unreal — every colour more intense, every horizon more distant. This aura of the surreal makes my arrival in Guadeloupe feel like it belongs to both fiction and reality, a liminal universe not unlike my writing, which questions the world by seeking to reimagine it from the perspective of suppressed cultures — the inverse of what we’ve come to accept as official history. It’s wondering writing, it’s wandering points of view.
I’ve arrived in the midst of writing a novel, Azúcar, set on an imagined Caribbean island that was a major sugar and rum producer. While you can find sugarcane almost anywhere in Guadeloupe, the oldest rum distillery — Distillerie Bologne — is in the island’s capital, Basse-Terre, where I find the sky red. I’ve come for personal reasons, too: one of my direct ancestors, a Thomas Parkes, was born here during the period when Basse-Terre was captured by African men who’d become pioneers of Britain’s West Indies Regiment. My plan is to walk past the sugarcane farms that feed the distillery on my way to a factory tour. I have notes from my novel and questions on my family, and I spread them on the floor of the apartment I’ve rented in Saint Claude. I spend the night reading. In the morning, I eat some bananas and head out, a bottle of water in hand.
The road I must walk shows up on Google Maps as D26. Just under a kilometre in, I realise it’s not meant for walking; the road leaks directly into the flora on either side, so every few metres I have to stop to let cars pass by. In these traffic-enforced pauses, I process the history I read the night before, while taking in the vast skies. 1764, when Monsieur Bologne de Saint-Georges fell on hard times and put the distillery estate up for sale, was just one year after the period of British occupation of Basse-Terre that lasted from 1759 to 1763. Had that administrative shift affected profits? It doesn’t escape me that the now-famous French composer Joseph Bologne — the nephew of Bologne de Saint-Georges, born to an enslaved girl here 19 years prior to the estate sale — was already in France making a name for himself. Not yet for his music, but for possessing the ‘greatest speed imaginable’ for a swordsman.
After another kilometre, flanked on both sides by cane fields, I come upon a private road on my left, a clear path through towering sugarcane plants, tapering to merge with a thicket of trees and hills beyond. Above it all, the sky is endless. It’s the second time I’m stunned by scale in Guadeloupe, but it’s the trees in the far distance that strike me. They represent for me both the majesty and horror of the plantation. Those trees are reflective of the island’s natural flora, and to fill in so many hectares with sugarcane, somebody must have cleared the lansan, the ikaku, the courbaril, the acerola, the acacia — and as the chainsaw wasn’t invented until the 19th century, the clearing was done by hand.
I have an unexpected somatic reaction. I’m overwhelmed by emotion, and I remember a key detail from the bill of items when Distillerie Bologne was put up for sale: a jail. Sweat pools in my armpits and tears run down my face. My ancestors worked under these skies, caught between the cane fields and the jail; if you didn’t work, you were punished, scarred by whip or placed behind bars.
I realise I’m not emotionally prepared to take a tour of the distillery. I reach for my phone, take a photograph and turn back the way I came.
What I’ve learned is that history haunts all stories, it gives as much as it withholds and there’s no telling how it’ll seep into the present. The narrative energy of Azúcar reflects this truth as well as the specifics, such as one of the protagonists playing a section of Joseph Bologne’s opera L’Amant Anonyme. As I walk back towards my apartment, I’m almost grateful that the road is called D26; when your history is trauma, sometimes you’d rather it had no real name. Sometimes all you can do is take a photograph filled with light, devoid of the earth’s heat and the trembling in your body, framed by the cane that gives us the burn of rum and the salve of molasses, capturing the simultaneous closeness and distance of those island skies.
Azúcar by Nii Ayikwei Parkes is published by Peepal Tree Press, £10.99.
Published in the November 2023 issue of National Geographic Traveller (UK)
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