Anil Persaud

The Working Animal and the Sugar Archive Chewing on Cane while Waiting for a Visa Anil Persaud

What follows is an excerpt from a book in progressive stages of writing and re-writing, tentatively titled A Working Animal’s History of Sugar. Non-social sciences are increasingly rendering meaningless the distinction between human and animal. On the one hand, the animal in this book refers to the animal that humans must now accept that they are. On the other hand, the sugar archive overflows with knowledge of and, as the book aims to show knowledge, by a disappearing subject: the animals that humans once were and hope to never again be, i.e., the animals that created so that animals could be human. The working animal’s past includes but is not restricted to the slave, the indentured labourer and the worker. The present paper - by focusing on chewing, as in ruminating on or re-searching cane, waiting for a visa, which is never a self-explanatory process, and the interdisciplinary possibilities of a commonplace called Adversaria - seeks to raise the question, Why not the working animal? in order to then be able to engage with the history of sugar and sugar cane from the perspective of a working animal.

(Based in the sugar archive, themes to be covered in the book in progress include: The Working Animal and Exchange (between Production/Consumption and Extraction/Abstraction); The Working Animal and Chemistry (On Interdisciplinarity); The Working Animal and Reproduction (Seed versus Ratoon); The Working Animal and the Sugar Archive (the Labour of a Re-search); The Working Animal and Sugar (Raw Stuff and Raw Materials). Warning: The following excerpt contains material that may offend.

The Working Animal

The sugar archive is populated with an astonishing variety and number of working animals, including parrots and snakes and horses and elephants, dogs and oxen and a remarkably astounding number of life forms whose place in the animal kingdom took several centuries to establish. (There may still not be a complete consensus on what that place is and besides the death knell has been sounded on the entire exercise anyway with the already predicted and much anticipated end of the human.) The latter of course refers to those whom the reason of the designers of the form and, for the most part, the writers of the content of the archive, gradually and

Page 1 of 9 Anil Persaud at times grudgingly moved along the then strongly calibrated animal/human scale from not to lesser to also human. The sugar archive is replete with organisms that blurred that contemporaneously important distinction between animal and human, who occupied that fearful place of the working animal. Yet, the histories of these organisms that emerge from these archives have overwhelmingly told the stories of those working animals as the stories of workers or of animals and where the two are brought together (working and animals), it is done to demonstrate that non-human working animals were workers or that the offence to human working animals lay, in no insignificant part, in their being treated as if they were animals. While we do dispute those findings and arguments, our purpose here is to push them further, to build on them, in order to open up a scholarly space for working animals to tell their own histories. For our purposes the two scholars whose thorough and deeply insightful research and analysis best articulate these two approaches to the working animal are Jason Hribal’s on working animals1 and David Brion Davis’ work on animality and labour2. Before turning to their work, however, it may be helpful to present a reminder of what is widely accepted as the working animal.

Within both popular and scholarly knowledge, a working animal is a non-human animal, usually domesticated, that is kept by human animals and trained to perform tasks. They may be close members of the family, such as guide dogs or other assistance dogs, or they may be animals trained to provide tractive force, such as draft horses or logging elephants. The latter types of animals are called draft animals (draught animals) or beasts of burden. Most working animals are either service animals or draft animals. The history of working animals may predate agriculture, with dogs used by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. They may also be used for milking or herding, jobs that require human training to encourage the animal to cooperate. Some, at the end of their working lives, may also be used for meat or other products such as leather.

Furthermore, working animals are usually raised on farms, though some are still captured from the wild, such as dolphins and some Asian elephants. Humans have found uses for a wide variety of abilities found in animals and even in industrialized society many animals are still used for work. Several animals including camels, donkeys, horses and dogs are used for transport, either riding or to pull wagons and sleds. Other working animals including dogs and monkeys provide assistance to blind or disabled people.

The assistance provided to humans by animals has also extended to the health sciences by way of the questionable use of animals in laboratory research and to the more recent One Health approach that ‘recognizes that the health of humans is connected to the health of animals and the environment’, that ‘animals also share our susceptibility to some diseases and environmental hazards’ and ‘because of this, they can serve as early warning signs of potential human illness’.3 By fostering cooperation across the human health, veterinary health, and environmental health communities, this public health initiative seeks to achieve ‘optimal health outcomes for both people and animals’. The knowledge gained by veterinarians through their care for ailing pets for example have proven of immense value to treating illnesses in humans. Caring for animals has more to offer humans than just good karma. There seems little reason why animals used for research do not also qualify as working animals.

There are a few points to note from the above summary. 1) The above is the story of non-human animals at work for their human-animals. Nowhere in this story is any hint of the human as a working animal presented. 2) While there has been a long documented history of scientific research using non-human animals for the benefit of human animals, there is now a perceptible shift in justification: the benefits flow both ways, they improve the lives of both types of animals. 3) Underlying this is the third point to be made here that I would like to hold on to as a productive tension in my work. That is, the growing awareness that not much science separates human

1 Jason Hribal, “Animals are part of the working Class”, in Labour History 2 David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World 3 One Health is linked to the American Department of Health and Human Services through the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention: http://www.cdc.gov/onehealth/index.html

Page 2 of 9 Anil Persaud animals from non-human animals. After Jared Diamond’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee, it is now popularly known that, for example, “humans differ from both common chimps and pygmy chimps in about 1.6% of their (our) DNA, and share 98.4%. Gorillas differ somewhat more, by about 2.3%, from us and from both the chimps.”4 The social sciences pronounced the death of god and have heralded the end of the human, are natural sciences now 1.6% away from obliterating the animal as well. Is that 1.6% also a measure of what remains of the difference between the social and the natural sciences? It is worth recalling that much of the knowledge produced by human animals has been both motivated by a need to distinguish themselves from non-human animals and also served as evidence of that difference; the Who am I question was also a What am I, an Am I an animal question. From Descartes (the living machine) to Marx (the wage slave), the answer was clear, we are human. In Marx, as Hribal clearly demonstrates ‘cattle couldn’t be labourers’,

We are not dealing here with those first instinctive forms of labour which remain on the animal level. Man changes the material form of nature and realizes a purpose in this materialization process. He modifies and manufactures with a vision and creativity that other animals do not have. Thus, when a bird builds her nest or a beaver constructs his dam, it is only instinct guiding the process. These actions are in no way comparable to those of man. Labor is ‘an exclusively human characteristic’ (Marx 1990, pp. 283-4).5

Given that the history of the slave and their progeny the worker or the wage slave has been the history of the human, it is not difficult to argue that the animal has long been dead. Let us not be mistaken, the histories of the worker, and there have been many that have been written from the sugar archive, teleologically mapped onto every activity of the human animal are not the same as histories by working animals.

Between Descartes and Marx, however, as Brion Davis carefully documents, there were many ‘humans’ who were treated like animals. The sugar archive is full of them. The archive may be short on emotion, but it is big on treatment. One cannot read the depravity in the sugar archive without being repulsed and offended. The archive, for all the beautiful things that Stoller and Farge have to say about it, is also an offence that keeps on offending. This partly accounts for why the working animal today, connected by the time of experience to the plantation, must forget in order to enter it.

The time of experience here refers to the institutional repetition of offence, of the offence that maintains the split between manual and intellectual labour, repeated from the plantation to the university and written down in the archive.

It is important to be specific about the nature of the offence against the working animal. This offence is clearly captured in the following extract from the archival sources that I work with.

The 18th and 19th centuries saw the production of a series of sugar manuals aimed at improving the sugar cane industries specifically and agriculture generally both nationally and globally. Henry S. Olcott's, Sorgho and Imphee: The Chinese and African Sugar Canes of 1858 was one of them. In addition playing a central role along with Blavatsky in the setting up of the Theosophical Society, shifting its headquarters from New York to Madras between 1878 and 1883 and being regarded as instrumental in the Sri Lankan struggle for independence from British colonial rule, this 1858 work of Olcott’s is regarded as being largely responsible for the development of the sorghum industry in the United States of America. Sorghum6 being the American attempt to create an alternative

4 Jared Diamond, The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee. Pp. 51-52. 5 Karl Marx, Capital Volume I, Penguin Classics, (1990) in Jason Hribal, “Animals are part of the working class reviewed,’ Borderlands, Volume 11, Number 2, 2012 6 C. Wayne Smith, Richard A. Frederikse, Sorghum: Origin, History, Technology, and Production. John J. Winberry, “The Sorghum Syrup Industry: 1854-1975”, Agricultural History, Vol. 54, No. 2 (Apr., 1980), pp. 343-352 Page 3 of 9 Anil Persaud sweetener to compete with sugar from cane and beet. It is easy to get distracted by the sweetness and power of sugars.

Belonging to every estate there are a few old hands experienced in sugar-boiling, who can make just as good a strike of sugar as any sugar master, and to them is intrusted the operations of the “battery,” with the sugar master to overlook them. But, it may be said, if those negroes boil so well, why employ a sugar master at so much expense every year? The fact is, there is no dependence to be placed on the negro, for just at the most critical point when the sugar ought to be ''struck" into the cooler it is very probable, if left to themselves, they would lie down and go to sleep, not from fatigue, but laziness, or thoughtlessness, and yet they take considerable interest in their owner's concerns.

At the commencement of crop, when the first strike is nearly finished, all the interest of the sugar-house centers in the lazy, rich, golden fluid in the teach, which has ceased to froth or bubble, and from which the steam is now escaping in short puffs. The old negro, who has probably boiled at that train for twenty years, and knows exactly how the juice of the estate works, after taking a little of the syrup between his finger and thumb, and watching what string it made, informs the sugar master that the sugar is ready to strike into the coolers. He, who probably has never boiled on the estate before, and has yet to learn how its juice must be treated, has wisely left the matter in the hands of the negro. However, it will not do to let Sambo suppose that he knows more than his master. So the sugar master, who knows that half a minute will not make much difference, delays the strike for that time, pulls out his watch, if he has one, looking very wise, and at length consents to let Pancho or Pedro adjust the gutter, from the kettle to the cooler ten feet distant, and discharge the pan, bawled to to stop the fire, and the sugar is bailed into the gutter to be conducted to the cooler.

The working animal’s intellectual labour is always preserved and presented in the archive as manual labour, or at best as art. A visa is demanded from the working animal to gain access to their own intellectual labour7. The credentials that determine whether they will obtain that visa or not proof of their knowledge of money. The visa as a concept was first conceptualized by B. R. Ambedkar in his ‘Waiting for a Visa’. In deciding how best to ‘give an idea of the way the untouchables are treated by the caste Hindus’, Ambedkar explained his choice as follows:

A general description or a record of cases and of the treatment accorded to them are the two methods by which this purpose could be achieved. I have felt that the latter would be more effective than the former. In choosing these illustrations I have drawn partly upon my experience and partly upon the experience of others.8

He then goes on to narrate four brief but potent ‘events that have happened to me in my own life,’ without once mentioning the word ‘visa’ or referring to his international travels, but his argument is absolutely clear: the visa is a concept, it is ancient and pervasive. The piece was written about eighteen years after Dr. Ambedkar's return from America and Europe, which would put it in 1935 or 1936. From the 1910 Ambedkar was travelling back and forth between India and England and the U.S. It is around that time, around the first world war, that the visa began to be implemented around the world. He was familiar with applying for visas, one of the first working animals to apply for a student/research visa. As Craig Robertson reveals in his work, The Passport in America: The history of a document, one did not have to be an ‘untouchable’ to appreciate the humiliation of the exercise, citing experience from the local newspapers he explains,

It is difficult for any one who has not actually gone through it to realize the feelings of personal humiliation which the process implies. In many instances passport officials went apparently on the theory that every applicant was to be considered a spy until he had proved the contrary.

Robertson continues, “The humiliation stemmed from the request for these documents over and above an individual’s word. Travelers took this rejection of their word (and appearance) as a sign

7 Farge (2013) The Allure of the Archive, describes this process in detail when discussing the question of access to the archives. 8 B. R. Ambedkar “Waiting for a Visa”, at, http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00ambedkar/txt_ambedkar_waiting.html

Page 4 of 9 Anil Persaud that officials considered them dishonest and untrustworthy – a response grounded in the association of identification documents with suspect individuals such as criminals.”9 Ambedkar went on to write the Indian Constitution, a visa for Indian citizenship. The mobility of the working animal, is always restricted, from the capture and confinement of slaves in forts10 and ships11 and sugar plantations, to the emigration passes of indentured sugar labourers to the critical skills visas required of today’s working animals in the sugar archive.

Brion Davis’ Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World, drawing extensively on the sugar archive, presents a detailed study, from Aristotle to Frederick Douglass, of the animal basis of the historical enslavement of working animals. This book is illuminating in many regards. From the local of slavery in the Americas,

slaves were deprived of legally recognized spouses or families and of genuine property ownership. As with most domestic animals, their lowly status was enforced by the threat of almost unlimited physical punishment. As Frederick Douglass put it, after describing the ways that the “slave breaker” Mr. Covey had “tamed” him: “I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!12 to the larger and longer historical trend, Davis continues,

slavery may well have been modeled on the domestication of animals, especially livestock and beasts of burden (i.e., “chat- tel,” from the medieval Latin capitale [and Latin capitalis], which was the root for both “cattle” and “capital”). The domestication of livestock began around 8000 B.C.E.,9 and as the laws governing chattel property evolved in the Mid- eastern Fertile Crescent and then in other food-producing societies, it was almost universally agreed that a slave could be bought, sold, bequested, inherited, traded, leased, mortgaged, presented as a gift, pledged for a debt, included in a dowry, freed, or seized in a bankruptcy.13

As Hribal convincingly argues, cows, and other members of the bovine family, are one type of working animal. By way of Roopia’s (of the Gowala, the cow herding caste) story, a fellow working animal, cows as a working animal are particularly illuminating for my understanding of the work I do (researching and writing on sugar) as a working animal myself.

9 Craig Robertson, The Passport in America: The History of a Document, OUP, 2010, p. 2. 10 Saidiya Hartman, Lose your mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007) 11 Mracus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A human Story (2007) 12 David Brion Davis, “At the heart of Slavery,” in Davis, In the Image of God: Religion, Moral Values and Our Heritage of Slavery (2001) 13 Craig Robertson 2010, p. 49 Page 5 of 9 Anil Persaud

The claim that ‘scholar’, researcher, academic is also a working animal is not intended to elide the lived and real differences that exist across the various classes of working animals. However, while those differences persist across time and space and present themselves as similar, but so do the similarities. The concern of this paper is with those similar differences that have persisted - between manual and intellectual labour, the elaborate visa restrictions enforced on migrant labour, the persisting patterns of extraction and abstraction of both (if still inseparable) material and

Page 6 of 9 Anil Persaud knowledge resources. This paper is meant to explore the possibility of the working animal as a valid category not only for analysis but for a praxis that rejects the distinction between the scholar and the savage, the scholar and the peasant, the scholar and the farmer, the scholar and the worker14; a praxis that is increasingly being reflected in both manual and intellectual labour.

Aside from the bones of cows and other working animals that were used in the form of charcoal to bleach brown sugar white (which we are dealing with in a chapter on ‘Sugar and Chemistry’), cows have significantly structured the work of scholars and the way scholars work in even more fundamental ways. I am referring here to chewing and writing of course. It is from the cow that the word ruminate and the way we write words onto the page were derived. Etymologically the word ‘ruminate’ derives from the act of ‘chewing the cud.’ It connotes contemplation. Thought. At the same time, the word, boustrophedon, the Greek term for describing the physical ordering of words on the page, derives from the pattern made on a field as the cow moves over it pulling the plough. The scholar and the working animal, intellectual and manual labour are historically contained in each other. The labour theory of value, the relationship between theory and practice and the growing scholarship that aims to re-conceptualise the human and trouble received notions of animality have as both the object and subject of their ruminations the working animal.

The cow, however, according to the best of human knowledge, did not theorise herself as a working animal. Theorising, abstraction and conceptual thought are the work of the human animal. The division of animal life on our planet between humans and animals, between working animals and human animals carries over into the genus homo as well into the split between homo extractus and homo abstractus; humans within which is contained a subset of human working animals. Policing the border, ensuring the integrity of the membrane15 that contains the subset - . Delimiting the grazing ground of the working animal has always been a vexing task for immigration officials. The cow, like the scholar, is a nomad, a migrant, a refugee, a trespasser always checking that his documents are in order or else face disciplinary action.

The concomitant offence produced by the persistent distinction between manual and intellectual labour, between homo extractus and homo abstractus, has been addressed at the level of the subject in three ways: a) the labour theory of value (Karl Marx et al, b) the value theory of labour (Diane Elson et al), and c) mounting the class struggle while thinking The Human Condition a la Hannah Arendt.

The difference between cattle and humans as chattel, I suggest, rests in a question that occupied the minds of those conducting the various inquiries related to the abolition of slavery in the British empire in the twenties and early thirties of the 19th century: that is, Do the slaves understand money? This issue was central to the abolition inquires: it appeared from the blatant, Are they familiar with the concept of wages? to Do they buy shoes and fine clothes? Were all questions regarding money. In other words, Will the emacipated slave also spend to consume? The apprenticeship period, recognised in the historiography as a schooling into contract, was also the time when the slaves in general were made to be acquainted with the value and meaning of the wage as money. To be clear, I am interested in those working animals who having been certified as possessing an understanding of money and therefore valuable no longer as only producers but as also consumers. This apprentice period, in the language of a metaphor I am proposing we recognise we live by, (drawing on George Lakoff and Mark Johnsen’s (2003) insightful education into the way metaphors work, Metaphors we live by), was that period of time, after the application has been submitted, when the applicant anxiously waited for their visa. Had Walter Benjamin lifted

14 These last three are various titles of William Jones’ (founding member of the Asiatic Society) pamphlet published before leaving England for Calcutta in the late 18th century and continued to be published well in the mid 19th century under these various names. 15 Membrane: ‘that which covers the members of the body, from skin to parchment (i.e., skin prepared for writing),’ but also arrive on the ear drum as membrain.

Page 7 of 9 Anil Persaud his nose16 out of the city archive, had he explored the sugar archive instead, he would have discovered a longer history of the connection between work and gambling17. Applying for a visa is to take a chance, it is a gamble, a lottery.

Conclusion, Or A Commonplace called Adversaria

How to resist doing an ethnography that turns the working animal into objects, including objects of labour? How to avoid the impasse that Barbara Noske identifies in her book, Beyond Boundaries: Humans and Animals (1997), as ‘Basically we face a dilemma in that there seems to be no option to imposing upon animals either object status or human subject-status’, but to which, according to Jason Hribal’s review of her book, she like several other scholars in this area eventually ‘succumb’? How to avoid worshipping at the alter of supreme capital whose temple is the archive. How to combat the fictions that the archives conjures up; that working animal lacks agency, the ability to resist, knowledge of money, the capacity for abstraction. How to avoid falling into the charitable cul-de-sac of speaking on behalf of, made popular in the prescribed methods of academic scholarship? These are some of the questions.

There are no conclusions yet, negotiations are still on. The working animal makes notes, mental notes, from the archive and from memory. Richard Yeo18, in the inaugural issue of Memory Studies, tells us of a ‘commonplace’ called Adversaria, it is a note book in which the working animal John Locke kept and organized his thoughts. Adversaria: ‘Originally, a book of accounts, so named from the placing of debt and credit in opposition to each other. A collection of notes or commentaries; a commonplace book.’

Location has always been understood as key to growing the healthiest sugar cane and making the sweetest sugar. The working animal is interdisciplinary, adversaria is an interdisciplinary place. Weather, labour, botanical, technological, developmental, alchemical then chemical knowledge have made it historically to grow sugar cane and refine sugar refined the world over. The working animals are the teachers of teachers. That is why teaching jobs are being cut. Galloway’s three distinct stages that divided the sugar industry - a) cultivation and harvesting, b) extraction of the juice from the cane and c) the conversion of juice to crystalline sugar, for much of the industry’s history took place in at least three distinct locations, plantations, mills and refineries being the most obvious with the working animal and knowledge geographies creating further sites of production and consumption, and extraction and abstraction of the source of satisfaction of this ‘particular desire,’ i.e., the ‘human liking for sweetness’. From medicine to sweet to poison, from scarcity to commonplace, from a grass to a cash crop, from being a source of energy for life to being a fuel for machines, from the ooze of the sticky juice to the granular crystals spoon filled into cups of tea and mugs of coffee, in other words, from chewing cane to eating sugar, from exploitation to development, from the jungle to the plantation to the university - in other words, from the commons to what Moten and Harney19 have renamed the undercommons, from manual to intellectual labour, from craft to science, from Asia to Arabia to America to Africa, from cane to beet to sorghum, from plant to money, from the material to the metaphor, or put differently, from the concrete to the

My reference here to Benjamin’s nose here is not to his nose as a Jewish Nose, for work on same, see Sander Gilman’s chapter titled, “The Jewish Nose: Are Jews white? Or, The History of the Nose Job” in his The Jew’s Body, (1991). The nose of Benjamin’s to which I am referring is his researcher’s nose, the one hinted at but not fully developed in such sensorial works on the archive as Ann Laura Stoller’s Along the Archival Grain (2010) and Arlette Farge’s The Allure of the Archives (1989 French, 2013 English translation). 17 For Benjamin’s truly brilliant and remarkable essay on work, gambling and the wage slave, see his piece titled, “Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” 18 Richard Yeo, “Notebooks as memory aids: Precepts and Practices in Early Modern England”, Memory Studies, 2008; 1;115 19 See, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. Minor Compositions, 2013 and “The University and the Undercommons: Seven These”, Social Text, 79 (Volume 22, Number 2), Summer 2004, pp. 101-115. Page 8 of 9 Anil Persaud concept, sugar is all of the above with the capacity to be more; the elements that make up the formula of the various sugars, from sucrose to maltose to fructose to glucose and lactose are Carbon, Hydrogen and Oxygen, or CHO.

In several senses, sugar is always a from commodity; sugar is from somewhere, as in where is this sugar from? From as in sugar from beet or sorghum or cane. West Indian sugar, South African, Indian, Chinese sugars? The ‘Demerara’ printed on the sachets of sugar served in cafes in Delhi for instance, is qualified in the fine print, the non-academic version of the footnote, with the added declaration ‘Made in India.’ The question of location, it appears, cannot be avoided with sugar. Adversaria is the working animal’s archive. They contain notes that never make it into or out of the archive. Memories of a job yet to be done. Jottings in Adversaria. The working animal is between jobs, looking for a job, out of a job, has given up on finding a job. The working animal always has a job to do. Building a commonplace called Adversaria.

Page 9 of 9