Political Ecology

Political ecology is an interdisciplinary field that examines how social, economic, and environmental factors interrelate. In her poem “Sugar Cane,” Grace Nichols personifies the sugarcane plant as a “he” and draws comparisons between the plant and enslaved people. In doing so, she comments on how the system of enslavement forever altered people and the land. Between 1500 and 1870, approximately 13-15 million Africans were kidnapped, taken on ships along the Middle Passage, and enslaved in North America, South America, and the Caribbean. Those who survived the journey were then forced to labor on plantations, in mines, and in households. Nichols’s poem “Sugar Cane” touches on the brutal conditions that enslaved people faced, specifically those who had to work on sugarcane plantations.

Sugarcane is a species of tall, perennial grass with fibrous stalks rich in sucrose. The speaker in “Sugar Cane” declares that there is more to...