Caribbean Literature A Bitter-sweet Heritage- Andrea stuart

 

A Bitter-sweet Heritage

            A Bitter-sweet Heritage unearths the slavery tainted history of Britain’s manors, ports, roads, and countryside. She uncovered a 400 years old tale of slavery and oppression. She explores the relationship between the wealth of slave-owning elites and the landscapes of Georgian Britain. She reveals that how profit from Caribbean sugar plantations fed the opulence of stately homes and the landscape gardens. Trade in slaves and the slave grown products boost the prosperity of Britain and shift cultural influence towards the Atlantic West.

            In the late 1630s, Stuart’s oldest identifiable ancestor, a young blacksmith called George Ashby set sail from England to Barbados in search of a better life. Barbados was an island in the South-eastern Caribbean Sea. It was a wild land populated by a handful of unfettered young men with little to lose. Life as a planter was exhausting and the crops he had hoped would make him rich- indigo, tobacco, cotton allowed him to scrape a living. However, his contemporaries turned to sugar and their life was transformed and becoming known as “white gold”. Planters like George Ashby sought more cost-effective means of production and replaced their indentured white servants with a more oppressed African slaves.

These “forced migrants” become more than the white settlers who had initially colonized the island, a subjugated majority with every reason to hate their masters. Slavery had been widespread in Africa. System of servitude and slavery were common in the parts of Africa. Over generations, Ashby’s family mutated from a traditionally English one, to a multi-hued one with white, brown, and black faces. His descendant had at least 15 slave children, all of whom lived and worked on his plantation. Racial prejudice is to justify keeping a group in a subordinate position such as a lower social class. Stuart stresses the role of racial and ethnicity as a way for the dominant group to keep intact its position of status and power.          

            Stuart wants her non-biological daughters to comprehend the atrocities of the salve system and to recognize how the oppressors were even more debased by the process than their victims. Hence, there is an exploitation of own skin. She has three daughters but neither of her children is genetically connected to her. One is her partner’s birth child, and the other is white while the other is of white and black Caribbean heritage. Her elder daughter, a blue-eyed was six-year old at an age, trying to make sense of her world and her family. She had a great curiosity, but also a strong need to see the world as a safe and fair place. Her younger child was brown skinned three-years old who just beginning to question why people have different color skins, why she looks so different from her sister. She wants to educate them about contemporary racism without distressing and dividing them.

            The intertwined forces of sugar and slavery created an enriching Britain. However, it also leads to bigotry that means descendants of Africans remain disadvantage in comparison to those who promoted the trade against them. Planters did not respect the family bonds slaves brought with them. They abused women they owned and treated the men as studs to create new workers. The Jamaican slave woman declared that she knew she would die but her children would be free. Stuart daughters would understand their heritage and would receive messages from friends, school, and the wider society about whom they were and where they belonged. She saw her non-biological children displaying her own traits. So they could inherit her history.