The following version of this poem was used to create this guide: Nichols, Grace. "Sugar Cane." I is a Long-Memoried Woman (Karnak House, 1983).

Note that all parenthetical citations refer to the line number from which the quotation is taken.

Issues of land, history, and culture appear in "Sugar Cane" as well as in Nichols's entire body of work. In interviews, Nichols cites her childhood in Guyana, mythology, history, dreams, and landscapes as her primary poetic inspirations. As a Caribbean person of African descent, Nichols is deeply concerned with how enslavement forever altered nations, lives, and the land. In the poem, the speaker describes how a lack of agency impacted both the sugarcane plant and the enslaved populations forced to labor in sugarcane fields. Nichols won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1983 for I is a Long-Memoried Woman, which was her first collection.

Divided into three parts, "Sugar Cane" focuses on both the crop and the people who grew, harvested, and processed it. The speaker scrutinizes sugarcane to uncover its deeper significance, and ultimately comments on who is complicit in its suffering.