Social Structure in "Sugar Cane Alley"

Paper Summary:

The paper analyzes the film, based on the novel "La rue cases-Ngres" by Joseph Zobel, looking carefully at the narrative structure that illustrates the social dynamics of the place and time of the narration. The writer looks at the impact of the economy on the characters, then describes the way in which the language and drama can leave a lasting effect on the viewer.

From the Paper:

"The economic structure of this society is always at issue and is addressed in the film from the first as the determining factor in the lives of the people. They work at this particular task because they have no choice--economic necessity takes their choice away. Education is the only way to escape from the cycle represented in this village by the work passed from one generation to the next, with the children working as hard as the adults and seeing nothing in their lives but more work stretching ahead to their death. Much of the economic lesson of the film is told through the eyes of the children, who in most societies would only be observers, but who in this society are direct participants. The children see wealth as distributed for work--they tell Jose that they will be paid on Saturday because they are working, and Jose will not because he is not working. They reflect the way the village lives--the people work all week, they get paid, and they find that they are not paid enough to live. It is an endless cycle, noted later by Jose in his essay when he says that the cane fields killed his friend and that the cane fields are a trap for the young children who start working at age eight and continue until they die. Leopold's view is not different from this except that he believes the whites cheat the blacks and that the books they keep would show this fact, which is why he tries to steal the ledger. Economic issues drive the actions of each individual and of the society as a whole, and economic relations define how each person fits into the whole, not just the whole of the village, but the whole of the colonial structure."

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