Steve Ouditt, 'About the Sweet of my Brown: Poetics, Plots and Phobias of Sucrotopia*'
In: Annotations 4: Steve Ouditt: Creole-in-site. Edited by Gilane Tawadros. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1998, pp. 40-66.
1. About the Sweet of my Brown
How do I play the trick here to turn the 'sweat of my brow' into the 'sweet of my brown' and why? The two important words ant their transformations give us clues; sweat turns into sweet and brow turns into brown. Sweat from labour turns into sweet, a taste of extracted sugar (sugar labour). And brow from a coloured forehead; head; place of reason, intelligence and thinking turns into brown, that big organ skin which covers a body in a field under hot sun; a serf. It's a colour that’s not 'black' nor 'white'. So it is, and it is not an oxymoron. An oxymoron, because a serf, a labourer could never be sweet because that body is a salty, sweaty, sour one. It is not an oxymoron because millions of brown bodies worked in sugarcane plantations to produce two kinds of sweet, sugar and money.
This sweet of my brown then is an affirmation of the business of sugar that is inscribed in my skin, in my type. But like a trickster I shall turn this useful/useless term into a strategy for intervention in the historiography of contributions to the political and cultural economy of sucrotopia.
I shall compare this sweet of my brown to a much earlier term, the one of 'black is beautiful' which emerged in the United States during the civil rights uprisings of the 1950s and 1960s.
In this great struggle blacks were marching against whites who had everything, did everything, said everything, and were everything. But something else happened when this useful anthem was transported to and transplanted in communities and countries of diasporic blacks who shared their space with browns; a blackwashing happened which dissolved the political culture of brown. It was an oversight of great hope which assumed that the 'coolie' was a facsimilised post-emancipation 'nigger'. It was a weird euphoria which blinded people into debrowning a pigmentocracy to leave only White, Red and Black (the colours of the Trinidad flag).
Here now in the dynamics of modernity (or post-modernity) the brown must be made sweet. It must point out the problems of the foreign prefixing of the Caribbean as exclusively 'Afro'. It must ask what does 'black' really mean especially in Britain? If it does include 'Asian' then why are there 'Black' groups and 'Asian' groups? It must also ask 'Asians' themselves why they snigger at 'Indians' from elsewhere; South Africa, East Africa, Mauritius, Fiji, Guyana, Trinidad?
It is obvious that these questions and more will engage the big field of 'post' studies, hybridisation and nationalism, etc., but there are no guarantees that they’ll answer the need for psychological and spatial security, with or without those anxious referents like 'identity' and 'place', and questions like who comes first?
It is at this point that we can see in history how imperial legislation in the periods of emancipation and post-emancipation of the mid-1800s and colonial dismantling in the 1940s through the 1960s had set the stage for the now ever present political gerrymandering in the 'Third World'. Land, space, topos are what people are killing each other for in the hope of recovering a lost utopia or establishing a new and improved one. This hope diversifies wars to be over race, religion, resources, office, etc.
There are no simple correctives and any promise of trouble free homogeneity is fraudulent,
It is in this blind spot or irresolvable space then, that the sweet of my brown becomes like a mantra or poetic invocation that will remind me to watch my ethnographising and not close it down. I must defer from turning it into some stupid rallying cry for – and obviously against – identity.
It is now the trouble begins; the voice is anxious, terrified and in suspense of the onslaught of encroachments of one kind or the other and therefore to summon courage or to confront limitations it starts to perform 'in its gymnastic or choreographic acceptation.' [14]
1.1 No Man's Land, No Land's Man
Will I ever settle? (settlement, community, division of labour). I received early training in spatial speculation from my location-conscious elders who were always occupied with place and the future. Where will I be in ten years time at the age of seventeen?
These questions were normal in the sense that past, present and future are supposed to be normal chronologising. To refrain from answering is already to be in no man's land, it's to be without a plot – of intention, of land, of script – on which to plan – a future, a family, a building.
In this space of refrain (or ignorance) what does one hold on to? Where does one stand? This is a de-energised non-place where one must be propped, (or supported) so I must squat for life and coherence, and in this I shall claim that I do on no man's land knowing full well that someone owns it; the state, a millionaire; or I may even squat on someone else's ideas, like constructing a 'good' paper that reads like a boring anthology of paraphrases (see the shelf loads of squatters on the bookshelves of Charing Cross packed tightly, especially in the department of studies prefixed by 'post').
Every step I take it’s on someone else's land, but to me it’s on no man’s land. I am a no land's man, without compass, fences and instruments of measure. What is this obsession with territory and ownership? Will I become more secure if I own my space? And if the space is earth and therefore land or property, will I still think of myself as a trespasser?
To settle is to flatten, it's to be composed and remove all the bumps in my knowledge and acreage. Sometimes it is to become dogmatic, and remove the tendency to live in suspense. And this is the security of settlement; I can take only measured steps, I know what I have to know and have no further use for arguments. They are stupid but if I do argue, I will win.
Post-modernism which is said to be about fragmentation and splintering has put me in no man's land but still with a grave desire to settle somewhere in it. To find a space of security. Can I close off all the great and important interrogations of the post-modern thinkers? Is it not true that the interrogations 'happened' in the first place when people started to speculate on the multi-valency and multi-dimensionality of the cultures of land and its metaphors; of territory, of body, of historiography, of discipline, doctrine or ideology? Of possession and dispossession?
But to expel a squatter one must show a deed of ownership which is a piece of paper. Excavating a deed and proving its authenticity is like the practise of historiography and history. There are always contests, and arduous searches and scrutinies of facts; factology. I must do this, I must read history rigorously to be 'correct' about my 'past' and the 'past' of others.
If the past seems simple and especially attractive because of its horrors of slavery, indenture, concentration camps, apartheid, I must take care that I don't oversimplify my politics and my anger by seeing the worlds in good/bad, black/white binarisms. Here too I am in no man's land as a no land's man because I must 'extend' my mind and my 'knowledge' to places and speculations that no one is sure about. I will become suspended in theory with no place to land again; a nomad in the traffic of the unfinal.
[14] Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), p. 3.