I find it so suggestive that Grainger embeds this image of night-blooming cereus in a stanza about enslaved Africans traveling between plantations at night. What happens at night that is beyond the perception and surveillance of enslavers?

Grainger tropes the Caribbean landscape as an "Indian" garden even though what he has been describing in previous stanzas is a heterogeneous landscape composed of American, African, and European plants.

This article goes into the cosmological/mythological significance cassava today among indigenous peoples in Guyana: https://www.commodityhistories.org/research/cassava-spirit-and-seed-history-biocultural-history-staple-crop-amazonian-guyana

I do wonder who the "natives" are (if this term is being used her as an equivalent for "creoles," perhaps). I also am intrigued by the ambiguity of the lines on this page: on the one hand, they could be read as Grainger's romanticization/naturalization of the rhythms/temporal discipline of plantation labor. On the other, they hint at a different time scale determined by plants other than sugar.

Although Grainger emphasizes that obeah practitioners or healers need to be kept in "proper subordination," he still acknowledges that they can "do good on a plantation." I wonder how self-aware Grainger was of the limitations of European medicine (i.e., his own practice), as well as of the failure of enslavers to provide medical care.

Grainger admits that enslaved Africans knew how to deal with this illness/parasite themselves.

At this moment, Grainger imagines himself directly addressing an enslaved individual.

I'm noticing the quick transition from "soothing words" to "blows" here--and then back again in the second line.

I wonder who "the American fortune-tellers" are, exactly?

From Grainger's point of view, there's a practical reason to know what foods enslaved Africans ate in Africa, but I wonder if we can read this against the grain to see how the poem reveals details about African foodways and their survival/persistence in the Americas.

Even the "argument" or summary makes clear the difficulties involved with reading and interpreting this section of the poem, which Grainger uses to classify African peoples according to their tractability/suitability for plantation labor and enslavement.

I wonder if this line could be connected to discussions/debates over African cultivation of rice and the transferral of African rice planting cultures to the Americas.

The contrast between "care" and the objectification of enslaved Africans in this line really sticks out at me on this re-reading of the poem: Grainger's definition of care is conditioned by his desire to construct a docile, productive workforce.

To continue the conversation from this morning's hypothes.is workshop: what role is the muse playing here? Does the muse enable disavowal of the realities of slavery? Or something else? What happens if we track references to the muse throughout the poem?

We invite you to annotate Book IV in particular because it is the section of The Sugar-Cane that discusses slavery in the most detail. It is also the most commonly excerpted section of the poem.

Grainger sees sugar cane as a patient subject to "ills."

Trapham?

Are we going to translate?

Meaning?

What about the tag "Freedom"?