Sugar and interconnected relations of migration

Burnt Sugar explores francesca ekwuyasi’s interest in “sugar as a symbol for the interconnected relations of migration, the transatlantic slave trade, Blackness, and food…,” as explained in the curator’s essay, which was available during the walk through. Featuring artists Adama Delphine Fawundu, Shaya Ishaq, Bushra Junaid, Kosisochukwu Nnebe, and Oluseye, these works delve creatively and critically into “the history of sugar production (and other commodity goods) and its interconnected stories of enslavement, labour, migration, and power – in that the initial large-scale production of sugar was made possible due to forced labour and exploitation of enslaved people on stolen land”, the essay continues. This room of bittersweet instillations collected Blackness together in a way only francesca’s work could: with pleasure, power, purpose, and the mystical. Each piece told stories about the co-survival of Blackness and natural resources to create in resilient, ever-lasting, intricate sympoiesis together.

I was buzzing with excitement. My literary inner child finally met the author who sharpened the scope through which I understood words, the world, and my utility of them both.  For context, ekwuyasi gave audiences an excerpt from the first chapter of her first book, Butter Honey Pig Bread, for Rungh’s volume 7 number 4. Meeting this writer, now as curator, was a grounding moment of humility, comradery, and inspiration.

The room was very small, with the work of each artist taking up its own section. I started my perusal of this work on the wall that included none of the featured artists. I sat on the only seat, a bench along the wall of the reference corner, which included a book by Jamaica Kincaid and Kara Walker, An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children. Each page used a letter from the alphabet to introduce children to plants, while also finding as light a way as possible to explain that this knowledge is important because without it, oppressive forces win. Printed was francesca’s curatorial essay, as well as Sugar – fragments of a narrative assembled by Yaniya Lee.

I read them all. I sat on a wooden bench, against the white wall a black and white video of Black people on a sugar plantation somewhere in the Caribbean was playing. It was later explained by francesca that this particular archival footage was chosen to show not joy, but the filtered, twisted version of joy that those slaves experienced working in the sugar fields. It showed the might of human will, distilled for its dignity.

The talk began with an explanation of And it Don’t Stop... and the story continues in

Toronto by Adama Delphine Fawundu. It was a tapestry of photography woven together, swooping, hung, dangling. It included gold earrings from the ‘90s, hair, and debris from its life outside. The images were of Black iconography including the Fugees (before all the success) in Crown Heights with Lauryn wearing a Maurice Malone t-shirt. Fawundu emphasized that she also deliberately included images of the local bodega, and how her neighbourhood in Brooklyn has changed over the years. It was a harmony of Black life, from streetwear, style, celebrity and community. It was a conversation in harmony, not a power struggle.

There were layers: she said “memory is never 100%.” She described the cyanotypes and photo lumens, describing their mix with hip hop, sampling, code switching, call and response. She also described that she made purposeful links to Ontario and explained the story of Horace Hawkins. Born into slavery, he could have stayed in Canada but went back to the US to negotiate his freedom. He bought his freedom for $200, down from $500. Fawundu spoke with fervour and beamed as she described that she was inspired by his ability to see himself beyond the systems put on him. He resisted. He imagined outside his current conditions. Her work is both container and stereoscope.

Along the wall was the work of Bushra Junaid, a series of lights illuminating the words “it is all up to you!” Beginning by honouring her elderly mother and thanking her for a “sweet childhood,” Bushra spoke of “the seamless choreography of migrant women.” Having Jamaican roots, I knew about the Windrush generation. I did not know, however, that Canada had its own version. Called “The West Indian Domestic Scheme” (1955-1967), Junaid’s work uses the context of a pamphlet that was circulated around Barbados teaching women how to groom themselves, to be missionaries, to best represent their country’s womanhood. The “Advice for West Indian Recruited to Work in Canada as Household Helps” booklet made its way into the hands of women who were upper or middle class themselves. Their desire to advance their families was exploited as these women came to Canada and were plunged into the lower classes.

There is always something that pulls at me when I see neon and Blackness together. The potential for Blackness to be fluorescent, or the backdrop without which the light could not be illuminated. The idea of being so Black that you’re blue. There is so much that my mind wandered to. Junaid explained that she replicated the typeface of the original pamphlet and that she used the colours of sugar to make her piece. Neon lights were chosen to replicate the feeling of coming to a big city. She explained that in 2020, Canada recognized the legacy of these women. At the Burnt Sugar event, we honoured their legacy in our own way, not from a settler-apologist lens. In a way that was felt through the skin, the eyes, with a sensory understanding of what a dream turned to ash in one’s mouth must taste like.

Next to speak was Oluseye, whose work uses antique vending machines to store different types and colour gradients of sugar. This work was a reimagining from his “Hot Commodity” installation, originally featured in In These Truths, a 2022 group exhibition at Albright-Knox in Buffalo, New York. He explained that the vending machines were made outside of Hamilton, Ontario, and were the biggest supplier to the US. The notion of migration, border crossing, outsourcing of labour and materials, as well as the vending machine being “the smallest exchange into capitalism” all come to mind. Filled with “diasporic debris,” he described the vending machines as another type of vessel, similar to slave ships, and explored the stratifications of colourism and the ways we divide ourselves and how we have been divided. His work evoked the imagery of Black bodies as ballast, as machinery used to keep slave ships buoyant – an intermixing of both being the machinery of the ship, while also enveloping this experience of offshore humanism. Candy, vessels, the hold, and the calculations necessary to transport across water without losing precious cargo are a kind of checkpoint that negotiates subject and object. He described Black women as Atlas, carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders and the ways sugar can be connected to skin: scrubs, moisturizers, self-care.

Nnebe’s work was of framed portraiture showcasing the process of preparing cassava. Titled An inheritance, genealogy was called forward. We Black people know this food, know how to make it into delicious bammy or banku. The captions of the photos read “cut and peel,” “grate,” “wring and let putrefy,” “harvest,” “leave to dry, crush,” “load.” To the untrained eye, the portraits look like a cooking demonstration; a femme-presenting Black woman is showing us how to make something yummy. That is usually the gaze through which Black women in a kitchen are viewed. francesca explained that these photos, the order they are hung in, their captions, are also instructions on how to make arsenic or cyanide. This remix is poetic: cassava is food for us and poison for them. The chemistry, the alchemy, the botany that was learned, used, and practiced by enslaved Black people to free themselves I can only describe as survival, by any means necessary, and there is something brutal, beautiful, and even sweet about that.

If you research burnt sugar, you will get information about a book by Avni Doshi, as well as the explanation of the caramelization process: burning sugar produces a very deep, rich, brown-coloured syrup, used to flavour and colour many dishes. Now think of the entire planet as that dish. Syrup is a fitting way to think of the radicality of Blackness: there is a thick, slow moving, enticing, richness to it that always reminds us of pleasure, of the joys and ingenuity of our cultures. The inventiveness extracted and peppered all throughout the diaspora. The beauty of this exhibition was that it evoked the familiar pain of our Black ancestors but it did not leave us there. It invited us to dissolve some of the resin and realize that no matter what we make, we make it our own, and that sugar is ours to envelop in, to devour, to share, pass down, learn from, and tie into our stories.