Christian Hall's Sugar Cane Alley Response

The film “Sugar Cane Alley” was intriguing to watch in class and relate it to our studies of colonialism. The film follows the journey of Jose, a boy of African descent living in a village in Martinique, a French colony in the Caribbean. The film is set in the 1930s and displays a visible divide between the treatment and quality of the life of Jose and his people compared to others in the French colony. Jose faces hardships as he works on the sugar cane farm while balancing his academics and family.

A scene in the film that I found interesting was the part of the film in which the children of the village have an alcohol infused celebration, set a hut on fire, and are then punished for their irresponsible actions. The children are having fun together, unsupervised, with some drinking alcohol and getting drunk. The children continue to hoot and holler while a fire is light at a nearby hut, causing the structure to catch fire. Later, the children are seen standing in a line being whipped by a plant leaf and beat by angry adults for their reckless actions. The editing is fast paced when the children are drunk, with close ups of reactions of the children to give the film a delirious and dangerous effect as the children become more irresponsible and less coherent.

I found this scene representative of the effects of French colonization and imperialism. The children are driven to act reckless because of the strict rule that their elders impose upon them. The children are simply acting out and breaking rules in order to have fun and enjoy freedom in contrast to the constant work they endure. The parents later beat the children to punish them (although one mother tries to stop the owner of the destroyed hut from beating her child too severely) for their reckless behavior, which is representative of the power in charge enforcing their rule. I believe that the children in this scene represent the people of African descent working on the sugar cane farm as a whole, and are looking for something to fight for in their life of oppression and discrimination in society.