Sugar Cane Alley By Euzhan Palcy: Issues Of Ethnic And Social Stratification
Léopold's story merges — with a few modifications — what appears in the movies as dispersed references to problems of ethnic and social stratification. By combining these features into a comprehensible character and subplot, Palcy is able to blossom a story into an exploration of the conflicts of the mulatto experience, privileged in Martinican society as compared to blacks. The introduction of this subplot permits Palcy to portray the development of a color-based stratification through little vignettes in which both his black mother and his white father scold Léopold for playing with the black children. His parents' chastisements denigrate both blackness and the use of Créole, the language spoken by most blacks in 1930s Martinique. Palcy also captures the complexity and irony of the position of Honorine, Léopold's mother, when she proudly puts on a new song by Josephine Baker, the black American singer who had achieved fame in Paris. In two bars of a song, Palcy generates a multi-layered anti-colonial intertext with a legendary black female (also) caught between two worlds. Leopold exemplifies the hybrid but troubled nature of Carribean identity.
The film draws a direct connection between Leopold's coming to political consciousness and his white father's rejection. However, it is only after his father's betrayal that Léopold begins to identify with the oppressed segments of Martinican society, having up to this point steadfastly defended the reputation of whites against his little black friends' beliefs about their evil nature. The character of Léopold — who is arrested after he attempts to steal the ledger at his father's sugar factory in order to expose the doctored books that deny the sugarcane workers their rightful pay — also departs from archetypal mulatto-as-betrayer of blacks, as he himself becomes the one betrayed through the rejection of white father he loves. Although acknowledging the hybridity of Caribbean identity and culture, Palcy is careful to expose the underlying biases against African cultural heritage concealed by the discourses of hybridity.
Through manipulation of the medium, the filmmaker portrays this great contrast as the very center of the narrative. In essence, Jose is a metaphor for this dialectical perspective on life. Culturally, he is torn between two worlds. Already, his people are faced with this divergence of culture due to the mixture of African and imposed European influences. But Jose, the "white blackbird", is faced with this issue to an even greater extent because his only means of transcendence of the of poverty and suffering that would normally await him is education whose very structure and substance is dependent on European influences. "Learning is the key that to our freedom, " the teacher states. But his education is rooted within European culture.
