Sugarcane as History in Paule Marshall's "To Da-Duh, in Memoriam" - Critical Essay

African American Review, Fall, 2000 by Martin Japtok

What the story has suggested before becomes clear here as well in a metaphorically urgent manner: The impact of imperialism and its accompanying technology on the Third World, on nature, on human beings, is that it kills. For the purposes of this analysis, it is important to note how the inhabitants of the island attempt to escape this impact: They flee from the planes into the canes, fleeing from technology into nature. But that nature is a nature already compromised by history, not a pre-colonial haven or shelter, and as such, it proves unreliable. Having served imperialist interests for hundreds of years, the sugarcanes do not harbor Barbadians in this moment of conflict but, almost as if in collusion with the metropolis, leave them exposed to the British fighter planes overhead by being flattened.

In what position does this leave the protagonist, the descendant of Da-Duh living in New York? A very ambiguous one, as she herself realizes in the last lines of the story:

She [Da-Duh] died and I lived, but always, to this day even, within the shadow of her death. For a brief period after I was grown I went to live alone, like one doing penance, in a loft above a noisy factory in downtown New York and there painted seas of sugarcane and huge swirling Van Gogh suns and palm trees striding like brightly plumed Tutsi warriors across a tropical landscape, while the thunderous tread of the machines downstairs jarred the floor beneath my easel, mocking my efforts. (283)

She imagines the island, tries to "recollect it in tranquility," to use a Wordsworthian phrase, but even that memory is jarred by the impact of technology, the very thing the act of recollection attempts to escape. The machines "mock" the narrator's efforts so that even her attempt at artistic recreation is compromised. Indeed, one can see that: While one imaginary trajectory in her painting leads back to Africa, to "Tutsi warriors," another one leads to Europe again, making her see a tropical sun through a European painter's eyes. The Caribbean present connects to an African past but cannot escape the present-day impact of the West. The Caribbean cannot be simply the Caribbean--even its nature always evokes reminiscences of other places.

Paradoxically, even the protagonist's paintings erase and reconstruct Barbados as much as the non-indigenous flora has. Rather than seeing the Caribbean landscape for itself, she sees a contest again, one between Europe and Africa. An earlier passage illuminates her paintings: When Da-Duh leads her grandchild on one of her tours of the island, she shows her "an incredibly tall royal palm which rose cleanly out of the ground and, drawing the eye up with it, soared high above the trees around it into the sky. It appeared to be touching the blue dome of the sky, to be flaunting its dark crown of fronds right in the blinding white face of the late morning sun" (281). Da-Duh's tall royal palm appears to symbolize Afro-Caribbean resistance against a "white" sun apparently representing the colonial powers, and the story's final paragraph becomes resonant with this struggle, with palm (reminiscent of Tutsi warriors) and sun (connected to Europe through Van Gogh) as antagonists in an almost mythical, timeless conflic t. As Beverly Horton has said in a discussion of Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven, "Buried under the surface of the island, and the sea surrounding it[,] are the intermingled histories of colonization and colonial resistance, the histories of contact between African and European peoples in the Caribbean." Marshall's vision here is more pessimistic than in her later fiction. Especially The Chosen Place, the Timeless People envisions possibilities for overcoming colonialist domination, but even there, the place the protagonist has to start from is Africa, not the Caribbean itself.