The Dark Side

No matter where sugar was introduced, it became an object of desire, enthralling. Yet beneath the idea of allure lies the core meaning of “thrall,” which points to the darker sides of sugar. Because even as sugar pleases, it subjugates. Though sugar can be cast into marvelous forms, it has historically cast people into thralldom—not only addiction, that bondage to excess, but also slavery. The once pure notion of sweetness, considered the most perfect of virtues (Matthew Arnold’s “sweetness and light”), has been forever tainted by the triangular trade of slaves, sugar, and rum; by the punishing labor in the sugarcane fields and the sugar plantations themselves; and by the exorbitant riches of the sugar barons. Sugar’s associations with the brutalities of the slave trade have been powerfully explored by artists like Vik Muniz (in his “Sugar Children” series, 1996), Maria Campos-Pons (Sugar/Bittersweet, 2010), and Kara Walker (A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, 2014).