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10 The boys’price in martinique Visions of the Bildungsroman in Sugar Cane Alley Tarshia L. Stanley It has been the literary definition of the bildungsroman to articulate the coming of age of the male child, a process necessarily fraught with exodus and death as the child is divested of the things and people that connected him to his youth. This essay examines Euzhan Palcy’s translation of the literary into the visionary bildungsroman in her film Rue cases nègres (Sugar Cane Alley) (1983). 1 The film is effectual and compelling because she taps into universal allegories about boyhood by way of a uniquely postcolonial prism. 2 Through the eyes and in the voice of Jose, the narrative speaks to the ways in which boys surreptitiously become men in a society that would deny them the opportunity. Coming of age is difficult for any boy, but it is particularly so for one who must fashion his definition of manhood from the social, cultural, and economic wreckage of colonialism. Since its initial screening Sugar Cane Alley continues to be the emissary of Caribbean cinema (Cham 1992, 6), with studies of authentic Caribbean cinema still centering on it nearly two decades after its premiere.This is due in part to the limited number of films emanating from the Caribbean,but is also attributable to the reception of the film itself (Warner 1995, 266). It is a film with which a wide variety of audiences identify because it invokes specific psychic archetypes about growing up. In it we find the kind of story Jung says every society tells itself to understand and survive its psychosocial structuring (Shelburne 1988, 50). We watch Jose as he excels in school despite abject poverty. We are charmed by the quintessential struggle of good vs. evil, right vs. wrong, and the individual against the establishment. Palcy manages to tap into a primordial theme common across time and cultures. Jose becomes David and the postcolonial society against which he struggles is Goliath; he is Beowulf and the cane field is Grindel. He is the black American child in the era of the Civil Rights Movement who has 203 tarshia l. stanley 204 been nursed on King’s dreams and suckled by the blood of the countless men and women who struggled in their own cane, tobacco, and cotton fields so that their collective “child” could have a better life. Indeed even the history of Martinique itself is laden with the desire of her people to overcome. In 1848 several factors contributed to the slaves rebelling against the masters and demanding their freedom. Slavery had been abolished in the English-held islands in 1833, and the same abolitionist fervor that was sweeping America was prevalent in Martinique. In addition, there were almost ten times as many slaves on the islands as there were white owners. When the slaves in Martinique revolted, France had little choice but to abolish slavery. Yet, as is evidenced in the stories the young protagonist hears of his peoples’ history, while the slaves were officially set free their living conditions and their political and economic status remained largely the same (Watts 1998–2000). Sugar Cane Alley continues to be popular among Western audiences precisely because it recounts the parable of picking oneself up by one’s bootstraps. In the film the assurance is reiterated that intellect, self-determination, education, and a sacrificial parent are what one needs to “beat the system.” Yet, there is much more to Sugar Cane Alley than the assurance that postcolonialism can work if you work at it. At the crux of the film is the story of what it means to come of age in the wake of colonialism. While the Horatio Alger myth is alive and well at the film’s surface, when we look carefully we can see another story about coming of age and this one may be more nightmare than fairy tale. In Ten Is the Age of Darkness: The Black Bildungsroman Geta LeSeur scripts the formula for the European bildungsroman and illuminates the way in which writers of the African diaspora have adapted the form to fit their literary needs. According to LeSeur the black bildungsroman uses the same foundation as the original: “The European bildungsroman in the 19th and 20th centuries concerned itself with the development of a single male protagonist whose growth to maturity was the result of both formal and informal education, the latter acquired largely through his relationship with various women...

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