Azúcar 

Nii Ayikwei Parkes

(Peepal Tree Press, 2023)

Review by Suzanne Harrington

Peepal Tree Press publishes ‘Caribbean and Black British fiction, poetry, literary criticism, memoirs and historical studies’. ‘Lit crit’ aside, Azúcar contains a fat sprinkling of all the other ingredients, emerging as a fable-like novel written by a poet, and possibly a keen gardener; its pages are rich in the poetry of the soil, and the history of the land. Parkes, who is British-born, Ghana-raised, with a heritage spanning continents, explores ideas of diaspora via food and music, via planting and rooting and uprooting.

 We visit several different lands – there’s Ghana, a real place, Fumaz, an imaginary place that sounds a lot like Cuba, and the Sun Coast, which sounds a lot like Miami. In Fumaz, the political system is ‘Peopleism’, in terminal ideological opposition to the ‘Capitalites’ of the Sun Coast. North America’s ‘war on drugs’ is reimagined as the Global War on Dream States, an initiative to reduce the consumption of ‘dream-inducing narcotics’ or ‘DINAs, pronounced ‘dinners’’. The bearded leader of Fumaz is a Peopleist called Rosario, its local politicians are folksy revolutionaries.

Most of the story happens on Fumaz, a place of:

blue hills kissing an orange sky, where tobacco grows that dries as red as blood. The barks of the trees carry ingrown messages from rebels who sheltered in our forests, battled the Spaniards, Portuguese, USAs, frustrated the neo- colonialists and toppled the USAs-backed Capitalites…The entire nation was born between the soil and those trees. If you plunge your hand into the soil, raise it to your nose and smell it, the land will dwell in your heart forever.   

Azúcar is largely about place and displacement, threaded together by the overlapping stories of its protagonists Emelina and Yunior, recounted by an unknown narrator. The language throughout is lyrical, although in places it can read like a horticultural text book: ‘A vesicular arbuscular mycorrhizal fungus, it is unique because it is not symbiotic but parasitic.’   

Perhaps this level of detail reflects the fact that Yunior is an agricultural scientist.  Born in Ghana, he has moved from Accra as a boy on a scholarship to Fumaz, where his real name – Oswald Kole Osabutey Jnr. – is immediately forgotten by a teacher who renames him Yunior because it’s easier. He matures on the island, growing up to be a lover of music, horticulture, and Loretta, ‘a dark woman with loose black curls that tumbled to the shoulder of the clinging red dress she wore.’   

 Later in the story, he suffers a tragic loss: ‘It’s the sense of time that goes first.  When a body is in mourning, watching clocks, sunsets, recording births and deaths, becomes a kind of erasure of self.’  

There is an earlier, brief Cinderella moment when Yunior – playing in his band at a fiesta – fleetingly encounters the Sun Coast-born Emelina, whose wealthy family own the Sonada Santos rice plantation. Fumaz is as famous for its sweet rice, grown in sugar-infused water, as Cuba is for its Cohiba cigars. Emelina, who has never lived on the island, inherits the estate but the rice fields are clogged. Too much sugar. Yunior is called in to help.

The story meanders to a neat, sweet conclusion, having taken the reader on a gentle, plant-based trip to lands linked by the people who move between them.   This is a novel which, as well as being about romantic love and loss, is also about the love of land and soil, and how growing food connects us all, no matter where we are from, or where we are now. 

https://www.peepaltreepress.com/books/azucar

Suzanne Harrington

Suzanne Harrington is an Irish author and journalist.