Point of View

The unnamed speaker in "Sugar Cane" examines the plant as a being in its own right as well as a metaphor for the enslaved people forced to tend to it. By personifying sugarcane as a "he" and later using the collective pronoun "us," the speaker places herself in the category of being human. By using the first-person plural pronoun "we" in the lines, "we feel the / need to strangle / the life / out of him," the speaker casts herself as being somehow complicit in the harm done to the sugarcane. Other poems in the collection I is a Long-Memoried Woman shed light on the experiences of enslaved women, so when read in the context of the entire collection, one might assume that the speaker in "Sugar Cane" is an enslaved woman. However, Nichols does not explicitly specify this speaker as such. She speaks in a Caribbean...