BROWN SUGAR TOO BITTER FOR ME
Piracy of the Carribean
If you access Brown Sugar Too Bitter For Me (2013) via Guyanese director Mahadeo Shivraj’s official YouTube account, the first image that appears is a message in white on a black background: “Piracy is not a victimless crime”. What follows is a two hour long amateur production, a quasi-musical with Bollywood elements, about an Indo-Guyanese sugar cane cutter, his struggle for fairness at work, and the class issues he faces as his children aspire away from their working class upbringing. This is a shoestring-budget film, financed independently, with over 600,000 views on YouTube. As the film has been uploaded by the director, watching it for free doesn’t technically count as piracy, but Shivraj will receive no box-office returns for those clicks, nor ad revenue, as the whole film is ad-free. A significant number of independent Caribbean films from the English-speaking region can only be viewed online, and usually only via piracy. It would seem that a region made famous in history, literature and screen media by its proximity to piracy is still struggling to shrug off the association.
Film piracy is often deemed necessary for cinephiles to experience a breadth of world-class cinema which may otherwise never reach them due to geographic or socioeconomic factors. But the Caribbean is a unique region. Historically used as an idyllic tropical backdrop in Hollywood films, and known as a tourist haven for those wanting to indulge in its beauty, the Caribbean has long been expected to serve outsiders, without much attention given to local history or the issues facing its population.
But over a roughly 20 year period between the 1960s and 1980s a wave of emancipation rushed throughout the Caribbean as they gained independence from the British Empire. During these years, several of the English-speaking nations sought to change their outward perception through filmmaking, and the tentative emergence of a Caribbean New Wave seemed achievable, particularly with the phenomenon of the Jamaican film The Harder They Come (1972), which helped popularise Reggae globally. These films often dealt with the issues still affecting the region—namely the generational grief over slavery and the inequalities faced by contemporary plantation workers, the latter being something many Westerners stopped considering as soon as slavery was abolished. Trinidad and Tobago’s The Right and the Wrong (1970),the Caribbean’s first English-speaking feature-length film, uses an exploitation-esque delivery of an anti-colonial story where the Indo- and African Caribbean workers revolt against the pantomimic evil of the white plantation owner, It came as a bold debut from a nation now autonomous from the British Empire. Euzhan Palcy’s Sugar Cane Alley (1983) is perhaps the most illustrious example of films in this narrative vein in terms of accolades and attention from Western critics, about a young boy on a 1930s sugarcane plantation where the black workers still suffer by the hands of white overseers.
However, the complexities of what constitutes regional cinema are exemplified with Palcy’s film. In Mbye Cham’s seminal collection of essays on Caribbean cinema Ex-Iles (1992) Guadeloupean filmmaker Christian Lara established five key conditions for what makes a Caribbean film: “’the director should be from the Caribbean, the subject matter should be a Caribbean story, the lead actor/actress should be from the Caribbean, Creole should be used, the production unit should be Caribbean.” Despite Palcy’s Martinique heritage, since the film’s production and distribution were overseen in France, Martinique’s coloniser, Lara’s stipulations suggest it can’t fully be considered a Caribbean film. Certainly the European link allowed for a proper marketing and festival campaign, with the film receiving awards at the Césars and at Venice Film Festival—a run not afforded to the vast majority of Caribbean productions.
This sort of acclaim serves largely to validate self-congratulatory European audiences and festival juries, having deigned to pay attention to a previously neglected community. It falls flat when Sugar Cane Alley is now only available in certain regions via online piracy, unless one has access to a US-oriented DVD player. The Right and the Wrong doesn’t appear to be available in DVD or digital download format anywhere. The Harder They Come is available online only through Shout! Factory, an American distributor, which amplifies a frustrated impasse facing much of the Caribbean region, where local communities provide the labour, but receive no agency, with the means of distribution held squarely in the hands of wealthier nations with no interest in aiding the augmentation of a homegrown industry.
This leaves anyone, but most notably white people, interested in watching films from this region in a rather uncomfortable position. What do Caribbean people, whose labour has been so continuously abused, gain from white cinephiles finding and watching their films for free? In her essay Share Cropping Blackness: White Supremacy and the Hyper Consumption of Black Popular Culture (2016), Nyambura Njee argues that “From the misrepresentation of Black culture, to the commodified images of Black bodies, Blackness serves as a ‘sharecrop’”, referencing the Reconstruction-era practise of sharecropping, where freed men and women in the American South returned to work the land in return for a share of the profit, having not been granted land ownership or assets alongside freedom. In this sense, the injustice facing the characters in Brown Sugar Too Bitter For Me, The Right and the Wrong and Sugar Cane Alley mirrors the struggles facing historic and contemporary filmmakers in the English-speaking Caribbean nations. The ongoing situation is considerably worse than what Njee references in her essay, since its focus is on consumption of Black American art and culture, which in the modern era enjoys more visibility and resources than in the Caribbean. The same can be said for the Indo-Caribbean population and its creative output compared to Bollywood. Caribbean cinema is far more niche, and therefore the piracy of such works only highlights the lack of resources and financing afforded to these projects, the white audience becoming little better than the planter class of old, watching idly without offering recourse.
That is not to say that there isn’t a sense of pride in the independence afforded by working outside of state-level funding and European or Hollywood support. Especially as it means the filmmakers aren’t beholden to wealthy benefactors, they aren’t expected to make films which suit a white agenda, or that fit an outsider’s idea ofthe Caribbean. bell hooks saw this as a perpetuation of white supremacy: “As White cultural imperialism informed and affirmed the adventurous journeys of colonizing Whites into the countries and cultures of ‘dark others,’ it allows white audiences to applaud representations of Black culture, if they are satisfied with the images and habits being presented”. Euzhen Palcy herself once said that despite successful Hollywood funding for her film A Dry White Season (1989) she was resistant to the idea of prolonging her time there: “I am not interested in doing Hollywood stuff. When they give you more money, you get pressures from the studios and you lose control of your material.”
Brown Sugar Too Bitter For Me clearly resonated with many in the region. This would explain its relatively high number of YouTube views, and popular demand led to a sequel in 2023 with a theatrical roll-out in Guyana. The Right and the Wrong was rinsed by critics upon initial release, with the Trinidad Express declaring that “the abominable low quality of its product is obvious to everybody” and critic Richard Combs calling it “penny dreadful material, whose account of how slaves lose their chains through hard work, meekness and Christian piety would have won the approval of the fiercest Dickensian capitalist.” But according to Paddington and Warner in their article The Emergence of Caribbean Feature Films (1992) the film was hugely popular with the T+T public. Feeling emancipated by the recent Black Power Revolution in the islands, they were “proud that a small country could produce a feature film, especially one that looked at the sufferings experienced by black and Indian people and called for resistance.” (p.99) In a historical sense, these filmmakers harken back to the maroons who fled to the wilderness, to start their own journey to freedom, and build a world away from the control of white supremacy.
The ethical dilemma attached to pirating Caribbean cinema is bound up in historic neglect and exploitation, a cycle not easily broken. It compels viewers from outside the region to seek the proper means for supporting its output, both past and present. Pempaleh Productions, the company which produced several indie Trinidad and Tobagionian films in the 20th century still offer their films on YouTube with an option to donate to their PayPal in return. Third Horizon Film Festival, a Miami-based Caribbean film festival, now offers a digital pass and library for those not based in the US. In London there is the community group Cold Islanders who regularly hold screenings through their Film Club, and which recently held a screening of seminal Jamaican indie Dancehall Queen (1997). There is also the Twelve30 collective, who recently collaborated with T Girls on Film and Club des Femmes to screen queer underground hidden gem Serpents of the Pirates’ Moon (1973). Trinidad and Tobago has been hosting a steadily growing annual film festival since 2006, and has expanded into online screenings for international audiences since the pandemic years. The career-long efforts of curators like June Givanni, the British-Guyanese film curator who was a founding member of the Caribbean Film and Video Federation, are finally being recognised on a larger scale. Nevertheless, the longevity of Givanni’s work contrasts starkly with the slow progress surrounding it; it is a reminder that white audience engagement is limited in its influence, and merits little while industry-wide change stagnates. Ultimately for the curious white Westerners out there, if there are ways to watch Caribbean films while supporting filmmaking in the region, as they say in T&T, “don’t walk with your two hands swinging”.
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