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THE ALLEYNIAN 709
OPINION, INTERVIEWS & FEATURES
In December 2020 Dulwich College students and staff, and students from partnership schools, attended a workshop on the troubling history of the sugar trade, which was part of the Being Human festival. Here Jamie Chong (Year 12) describes this enjoyable educational experience, which combined historical insights with a creative writing opportunity NOT SO SWEET
We began with a presentation by Dr Cocks on the colonial past of sugar, which explored the horrendous conditions in which the enslaved labour force enabling this trade were forced to work. We were introduced to the boiling houses in Barbados, and then to the prosperity created by the trade, both for slave owners in the West Indies and for the sugar capitals in Europe, such as Antwerp. Even Britain, which was decidedly abolitionist by this point, could not cease its involvement in the transatlantic slave trade due to the demand for sugar. Dr Cocks’ presentation was sobering and allowed us to think about the reality of sugar’s place in our history and culture. After this, artist Karen McLean, whose work explores the impacts of colonialism on the Caribbean, led a sugar sculpture workshop, during which we were able to create a sugar replica of the manillas used in the slave trade, which were metal armlets used as currency. This involved heating sugar until it was liquid, and then pouring it into moulds; the sugar then set into solid, clear forms. During this hands-on part of the workshop, it was interesting to learn about the more technical aspects of crafting these objects; heating the sugar to the precise temperature required was one of the most important parts of the project.
The last section of the workshop was a poetry session led by writer Keith Jarrett, whose work addresses issues of race and identity. This allowed us to reflect on our own experiences of sugar and to reconcile them with what we had learnt throughout the workshop. Jarrett’s tasks encouraged us to be creative with the written word, through exploration of figurative language, wordplay and, to quote him, having ‘fun’ with poetry. We also looked at poetic form, reading Wallace Stevens’ ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’, before devising our own ‘list poems’, through which we connected our personal memories relating to sugar with its wider history. We finished by opening the moulds for the manillas that we had made, which had just about set, and we heard from Karen McLean about the background for her sugar sculpture display, White Shadows: Presence and Resistance , which was based on her research on the chattel houses that were part of sugar plantations, and which have become emblematic of the sugar trade and its associated exploitation. The entire workshop was a new learning experience and encouraged us to use history as a creative outlet to understand the disturbing past of this seemingly innocent product.
We connected our personal memories relating to sugar with its wider history “
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