Sugar Cane Alley (1983)

★★★½
José (Garry Cadenat) lives a hard life in the sugar cane fields of 1930s Martinique. He is an orphan being raised by his grandmother. His childhood is only a brief respite before he is strong enough to work in the fields for the rest of his life to make a paltry sum that will barely sustain him. His prospects don't appear too bright. We see that in the early scenes. Slavery is officially illegal on these Caribbean islands, but the workers toil away as if they were still chained to an existence imposed on their ancestors. The workers are free, but they are free to do what? They have no resources to move out of the shacks to learn new skills. Slavery is still in the recent past, but maybe someone like José represents the future. He's a smart kid. He is resourceful. He sits and listens to the wise Medouze (Douta Seck) tell stories of Africa. He wants to travel there one day.

Director Euzhan Palcy based her film Sugar Cane Alley on the novel by Joseph Zobel, himself a native of Martinique. He saw firsthand the poverty and discrimination faced by the black workers of the sugar plantations. The French administrators are no longer slaveowners but are now business owners and managers, but their methods have barely evolved. That is still years away from happening. Zobel's hero José is partially based on him. He used his education to move out of the rural fields and into universities to better himself and later write about his experiences. Palcy, a director motivated by a commitment to social change, vividly explores the harsh poverty of the workers who labor in the sugar fields, but her movie is also about a childhood made less ideal by rigid social structures but nevertheless strives for normalcy in hostile conditions.

This movie was required viewing during my French studies while attending college, and I recall writing in my essay that the movie is about José's journey to find his place in the world (sa place dans le monde). He had to search for it, because he couldn't follow a blueprint laid out by those before him. There were well off black men and women in the cities, but they didn't see the world like José saw it. During a visit to the theater in the capital Fort-de-France, he meets a distraught ticket seller who laments the thievery perpetuated by fellow blacks. She rejects them and finds more civility in the white population. If José is going to carve out his path to a better future, he's going to have to chart it through unknown waters.

He excels in school and earns a partial scholarship in Fort-de-France. Finally, after years of watching the adults around him suffer the indignity of earning virtually no money for all their hard work, José has a chance to advance his education and live a life far away from the plantations. Even then, challenges await him. His scholarship is partial, so his grandmother Ma'Tine (Darling Légitimus) gets a job doing laundry to help pay for school. A teacher accuses him of plagiarism for doing nothing more than writing about his experiences and about Medouze. Through it all, José perseveres. He is smart, but he is also determined to realize his potential. Even in the face of tragedy, when those closest to him succumb to the weariness that dominated their lives, José presses forward.

Sugar Cane Alley isn't just about a plucky young boy growing up in an environment of never-ending servitude. Euzhan Palcy's film is a journal of the daily challenges of living in poverty in a system that is one rung above slavery but ten rungs below freedom in a just society. The children have time to laugh and play, but this will not last long. We see how the workers have resigned themselves to this life. We don't see much of the French masters. Some live nearby. One is the father of José's friend Léopold, and in a heartbreaking subplot, Léopold's father declines to pass down his name to his son, feeling that such a noble name cannot be bestowed on someone unworthy. Sugar Cane Alley examines a bygone era of post-colonial France and gets all the details right, from the lives of those who had to endure it to the culture that sprang up in the aftermath. At the center of it all is José, who dreams of a life beyond Martinique.

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