Rivière-Salée sits in the interior of Martinique, an island in the Antilles roughly the size of the municipality of Rio de Janeiro (dados mundiais). The region of Rivière-Salée is home to a Carrefour Market, a middle school by the name of Seminaire College Sainte Marie, and a Catholic church, Eglise Saint-Jean-Baptiste, whose European twin can be found across the Atlantic in the department of Pyrenees-Atlantiques in southern France. French influence can be found everywhere in Martinique, from the names of its churches to its own capital, Fort-de-France.
Unlike its Caribbean neighbor, Haiti, who succeeded in permanently overthrowing the yoke of French slavery in 1804, France only abolished slavery in Martinique in 1848, nearly a half-century after Napoleon Bonaparte reinstated slavery in the French colonies in 1802. These two Antillean countries nonetheless share much in common, specifically a geography, history and economy shaped by sugarcane production. It is this parasitic relationship between sugar cultivation and Black enslaved labor that forms the backdrop of Euzhan Palcy’s 1983 masterpiece Rue Cases Negres or Sugar Cane Alley in English. This paper will look both at the persistence of nineteenth century colonial systems in twentieth-century Martinique and how the film portrays the myriad ways in which the island’s peasant class navigated these harmful structures in order to better their lives and those of the people around them.
Based on Joseph Zobel’s 1950 semi-autobiographical novel, La rue cases negres, Sugar Cane Alley the movie follows the trajectory of a young boy, José Hassam, as he lives with his determined but strict grandmother, Ma Tine, on a former sugarcane plantation in rural Martinique in the 1930s. As a woman whose entire life had been shaped by days spent under the grueling sun cutting sugar cane, Ma Tine’s sole mission is to ensure that her grandson does not have to one day share a similar fate. Fort-de-France is the city both José and his grandmother have their eyes set on, as they trade their tight-knit small town for the unknown Martinican capital so that José can attend its prestigious lycée. This higher education, afforded to just two students in José’s town, would make certain that José would never have to work on a sugar cane plantation– a destiny already carved out for the majority of his childhood friends. Such sacrifice is a difficult one to make, but as José loses loved ones along the way, he comes to realize that the connections from Black Shack Alley, the English translated name of Zobel’s book, will accompany him wherever he goes.
While Sugar Cane Alley is set in 1930s Martinique, the presence of worn-down huts, beleaguered sugarcane workers, and overseers brandishing whips seems incoherent to the supposed image of a society nearly a century into its post-emancipation era. The 1930s saw the publication of C.L.R James’ The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, one of the first major analyses on the Haitian Revolution and its connections to the French Revolution. It saw the rise of Paul Robeson’s career in Hollywood, and the release of films like The Emperor Jones (1933) and The Song of Freedom (1936) that featured the actor as Black monarchical figures, albeit despotic ones.
“There is no drama like the drama of history”
C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins
Nevertheless, the 1930s also ushered in the second decade of the US Occupation in Haiti that saw the reinstatement of the French corvée system of forced labor by US Marines. It was also the decade that introduced the banana industry in Martinique, Jamaica and Guadeloupe, which in addition to sugar cane production represented another crop that would be sold and exported for the benefit of the French market. As Haitian writer Jacques Roumain described in his 1938 novel Gouverneurs De La Rosée, “Some of us fall, but the rest hold firm in spite of hunger, police, prison. The refinery is waiting with idle teeth in its grinders. The boss is waiting with his calculations of all that he expected to fill his pockets with” (Roumain 90). Be it triumphs or setbacks, these events illustrate the continued impact of the transatlantic slave trade on twentieth-century Carribean life.
Although Roumain, a Haitian mulatto intellectual who wrote during the American occupation years, never faced the same challenges to education and upper mobility that Sugar Cane Alley’s young protagonist faced, his radical writing as well is an example of a larger understanding in Caribbean intellectual circles that the fight against European colonialism would only come through a unified front. Such twentieth-century beliefs can be traced to the Haitian Revolution of the late eighteenth-century that saw enslaved Black people violently reject not only the slave trade but French colonial rule. It is this same understanding of the interconnected nature of Black liberation that would lead Haitian revolutionary Jean-Jacques Dessalines and first general of the newly independent Haiti to declare, “Yes, I have saved my country – I have avenged America ” (Haitian Constitution 1804). The world would never be the same.
When the uprisings in Saint-Domingue began in 1791 and culminated in the 1804 Haitian Declaration of Independence, it set the stage for the collapse of the French colonial empire. It would also radically change the international sugar market (Tomich, Slavery In The Circuit of Sugar 60). While the French colonial system grappled with the devastating loss of its recently acquired Louisiana colony in 1803 and its most prosperous colony the following year in 1804, both European and American powers looked on at the metropole’s implosion with greedy eyes. Even as thousands of French colonists fled to the United States, Jamaica and Cuba bearing news of the violence they had perpetuated but could not withstand, elites in these locations watched expectantly at the instability caused by the slave uprisings. Through careful analysis of correspondence between local colonial authorities in Cuba, historian Ada Ferrer has questioned the idea that the only perception of the revolution during this time was of fear that Black insurrection could spread to nearby colonies. Instead, reaction to the Haitian Revolution as it was happening was incredibly complex– both transfixed by its unthinkable success, horrified by what it meant for the slave order and yet enticed by all that it could offer in terms of economic opportunity.
British colonies, the American South, Cuba and Brazil all experienced expansions to their markets both during and well-after the uprisings in Saint-Domingue. Historian Robin Blackburn writes that between 1820 and 1860, the United States more than doubled its enslaved population (Blackburn in Slavery and Historical Capitalism during the Nineteenth Century, 60). While Cuba and Brazil may not have “succeeded” in expanding their enslaved labor as steadily as their Northern neighbor, they still remained largely attached to the economy of the plantation system well into the tailgate of the nineteenth century. Cuba and Brazil were the last two countries in the Western Hemisphere to abolish the institution of slavery– 1886 and 1888, respectively. Such occurrences thus problematizes the once-accepted theory that the fear of Haiti led world powers to largely shun the newly established state. Instead it seems that “terrified” spectators of the Haitian Revolution remained above all else loyal to their beloved monarchs: King Cotton and Queen Sugar.
While non-French powers saw the fall of Saint-Domingue as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, French elites looked with horror at the loss of their precious “Pearl of the Antilles.” Dale Tomich in Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar: Martinique and the World Economy 1830-1848, reveals how the loss of Saint-Domingue pushed the French colonial system to rely even more heavily on its other colonies, particularly Guadeloupe and Martinique, as it grappled with its newly fragile position in the international arena. Although significantly smaller than Haiti and even more so than countries like Brazil, Martinique had nonetheless been a competitive player in sugar manufacturing from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the late 1780s (Tomich, Slavery In The Circuit of Sugar 133). After 1804 and the installation of French protective measures in 1815, Martinican colonial authorities rapidly expanded local sugar estates and dedicated more land and labor to reinvigorate the weakened sugar market. Of course, an increase in sugar production was not an isolated phenomenon. It required both a sufficient amount of land, of which Martinique did not have, and the violent exploitation of peoples, which could be arranged but at a cost that was steadily increasing. While these attempts to stimulate sugar production may not have worked as ideally as France desired, these endeavors testified to the ways in which slavery remained the world order even after the radical proclamations of the Haitian Revolution (Tomich, Slavery In The Circuit of Sugar 136).
This intensification rather than downscaling of sugar cane production also demonstrated that the fear of losing out on what the international arena could offer was significantly more anxiety-inducing than the possibility of Black insurrection. Although Dessalines’ proclamation still stands as a powerful call to arms, it would somehow take more than overthrowing the French order, expelling Spanish and British forces, and declaring the first free Black state in the Western Hemisphere to fully avenge America.
France may have lost the war against Haiti, but this loss did not necessarily signify the end of its parasitic hold on the Caribbean. While the Boyer administration in Haiti gained some headway with the United States, it would ultimately take a regrettable financial pact with France in 1825 to finally have Haiti recognized as a legitimate nation-state. It would take more than forty years after Haiti’s independence for France to abolish slavery in Martinique in 1848. Unlike Haiti which is now an independent country, Martinique is still considered an overseas region of France. At the time of abolition, more than half of the island’s population, 67,447 of the island’s 120,357 residents, were forcibly working on sugar, coffee, and indigo plantations. (Hartkopf Schloss 11).
Originally, the process of emancipation in Martinique was meant to be gradual. After twenty-two thousands enslaved peoples marched onto the streets of St. Pierre on March 22, 1848, however, the governor decreed the immediate end of slavery on the island (Hartkopf Schloss 227). Five days later, abolition was declared in neighboring Guadeloupe. But not long after the exclamation of “Liberté!” gained momentum in the streets, did békés, Martinique’s former White elite class, devise strategies to remain in power. By the middle of 1848, a system of Association was put in place so that former planters could continue to “employ” the labor of newly freed workers. In exchange for dilapidated cabins, an insignificant amount of land and the weekend off, Black Martinicans were forced to return to the same plantations they had cultivated while enslaved (Hartkopf Schloss 227). As Roumain wrote, “The boss is waiting with his calculations of all that he expected to fill his pockets with.”
The cyclical nature to colonialism is a recurring theme in Sugar Cane Alley. Like the 1825 French indemnity in Haiti and Reconstruction in the United States, Martinique’s post-emancipation era did not necessarily signify the end of the economy built around the exploitation of Black bodies and the production of cash crops, just its evolution. Medouze, a wise older man and mentor figure to José, points out this ironic continuity. In the scene, Medouze engages in a centuries-old oral Haitian tradition known as Krik-Krak. This practice has the storyteller spontaneously ask, “Krik?” while listeners respond, “Krak!’ as quickly as possible. The fast-paced tempo to this storytelling forces the audience to pay close attention to the orator in fear of not responding fast enough. It is through this interactive medium that Medouze describes the emancipation and post-emancipation years in Martinique:
I was a young boy like you, Médouze. All the blacks came down from the hills with sticks, machetes, guns, and torches. They invaded the town of St. Pierre. They burned all the homes. For the first time, blacks saw whites shake with fear, lock themselves in their mansions and die. That was how slavery ended.
And the old Black man said… “I ran so much… I think I ran all around Martinique. When my feet refused to go on. I looked ahead and behind. I saw I was back in Black Shack Alley again. It was back to the cane fields.”
We were free, but our bellies were empty.
The Master had become the Boss! So I stayed on, like all the other blacks… in this cursed country…
The whites own all the land. The law forbids their beating us, but it doesn’t force them to pay us a decent wage
Euzhane Palcy, Sugar Cane Alley (21:04 – 22:40)
Medouze’s retelling of the 1848 rebellion of Saint-Pierre points both to the critical role of Black uprising in the abolition of slavery and its insufficiency in fully breaking free from the racist, economic system of colonialism. Historian Dale Tomich writes how following 1848, former slave owners were fearful that the majority of those they had enslaved would leave the plantation, thus creating a void in the labor force (Tomich, “Visions of Liberty” 165). By June of the same year, however, nearly two-thirds of those who had been forced to work as slaves continued to labor on these plantations; while their moniker may have shifted from slave to cultivateur, the state of their lives largely remained the same. As Medouze reminds his young mentee, “The Master had become the Boss!” Even after the formal termination of slavery, the cane field would continue to cast a shadow over the lives of those who had momentarily thought they had escaped its deadly grip. Echoing his own observations, Medouze dies in the same sugarcane fields he labored on as a slave.
As demonstrated by Medouze’s storytelling, the exploitation of the poor Black peasant class in Martinique is foundational to the film, but Palcy doesn’t allow this oppressive reality to flatten the vivid society in which it impacted. Kids play pranks on one another, finding mischievous ways to liven up the long summer days until school begins. Store owners put items on tabs to be paid when money is available. And when Medouze passes away among the tall stocks of sugar cane, community members gather around to remember the bravado of the wise paternal figure. Through Palcy’s vivid depiction, viewers are presented with a multifaceted and sometimes contradictory image of the plantation, a place of economic and racial exploitation as much as radical community organizing. No character more exemplifies this polysemic nature of the plantation more than José’s grandmother, Ma Tine.
Ma Tine acts as José’s caretaker throughout the film. Stern and uncompromising, she is certainly not an easy maternal figure to contend with. Nonetheless, her headstrong nature is critical in José’s journey to upper mobility. When he is awarded only one-fourth of a scholarship at the lycée, Ma Tine remains determined to see José continue his studies. “They don’t know I’m a fighting woman!” she proclaims (1:14:09 – 1:14:30). The pair move to Fort-de-France shortly afterwards. Ma Tine’s sense of justice also extends to her former home in Rivière-Salée and its residents.
Like Haiti, Martinique is a country whose history has been molded by stark differences in infrastructure between its rural areas and urban centers. For starry-eyed peasants searching for self-betterment, Rivière-Salée and the interior provinces of the island seem backwards in comparison to the bustling metropolis of Fort-de-France that promises rare opportunities for a lucky few. Even so, Ma Tine rejects the notion that she should abandon all sense of connection to her home and trade it in for a “modern” urban identity. When Jose suggests for her to buy a new suit in Fort-de-France instead of the village, she responds, “No! We can’t do that to poor Mr. Singer / And why enrich city folk who can’t even sew? / Mr. Singer needs the money.” Jose jokingly responds, “Could you be waiting to see your shack?” from which his grandmother, clearly having affection for her previous home, responds brusquely, “What shack? That toed-hole?” (1:28:38 – 1:28:56).
Ma Time’s love and loyalty to her community may not appear at face value as radical as Medouze’s recounting of the 1848 rebellion. Both, however, represent a refusal to leave tradition and community behind in the wake of modernization. Thus, Palcy presents both insurrection and social cohesion as tools critical to the survival of the peasant class in Martinique. Even so, the Martinican-French director is not naive in her portrayal of the hardships these characters confront and the tactics they are forced to utilize to survive. Ultimately, Medouze’s story of the 1848 insurrection does not end in triumph but in an acknowledgement that the system has only evolved, “The Whites own all the land. The law forbids them from beating us, but it doesn’t force them to pay us a decent wage” (22:28 – 22:40). Even Ma-Tine confesses that her iron steel resolve was cracking under the intense labor in Fort-de-France.
As a quick-witted and self aware child, José is not ignorant of the burdens his loved ones have had to bear. One could even say that José inherits both the determined spirit of his grandmother and the intellectual resolve of his spiritual father. It is this determination that sees him achieve a full scholarship to the lycée even after his professor accuses him of cheating. And yet even amidst these triumphs, Palcy is clear in showing that upper mobility does not come without its traumas. Looking at the sickened state of his grandmother, a teary-eyed José promises her that, “we’ll have a big house, with flowers, hen, rabbits, pigs… You won’t have to go to the cane fields” (1:00:7 – 1:00:30). The ever serious Ma Tine can’t help but smile. She dies shortly afterwards. But José is not alone in carrying this pain. It is an inheritance thrust upon all those who have been marked by the bittersweetness of sugar cane: Leopold’s devastation at realizing the limitations of his mulatto identity; a female friend who abandons her studies to help her family; and all the other children who were forced to trade in their carefree childhood days for hours weeding under the scorching sun.
Sugar Cane Alley is not a film that promises radical, flashy solutions to dismantling colonialism or capitalism. It is a film dedicated to the struggles of ordinary human beings who were forced to navigate an unjust world order with the immediate tools that they had. Some faced those challenges head on, unrelenting until something or someone gave. Others sought to benefit from the system and attached to any semblance of security, as fraught as it may have been. Many sought refuge in futures yet to materialize, hoping to either return home or to carve out a new one. In the meantime, tides from other parts of the Antilles arrived on the shores of Martinique. The roots of sugarcane trees continued to extend deep into the Caribbean’s core. And people carried on gathering stories for those who would listen.
“Krik?”
“Krak!”
Where in the world 
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