Author Archives: markdowe1

Arts, Books, History

Book Review – Coffeeland: A History

LITERARY REVIEW

Coffeeland

IF you’ve ever been to your nearest Costa and scanned the blizzard of drinks on offer, I wonder if your immediate thoughts were “I just want a cup of coffee”? If so, then maybe this book – in excess of 350 pages of dense political history of the erogenous little coffee bean – isn’t really for you.

But on second thoughts, perhaps we should know the extraordinary story behind our morning cortado. Where would we be without coffee, the wonder drug of the world?

Honore de Balzac, the great French writer, was a manic consumer. He worked relentlessly through the night, kept going by a continual stream of strong black coffee, often up to 50 cups. He died at just 51, not unsurprisingly of caffeine poisoning.

The best sitcoms on TV would certainly be lost without it. Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Larry David opened his own coffee shop, called Latte Larry’s, naturally; the cappuccino-sluicing twenty somethings of Friends lived on the stuff on the sofa at Central Perk (Phoebe drank the most which might explain her general excitability). As for Frasier and all the Cranes, they were regulars at the Café Nervosa, ordering pretentious macchiatos.

The theme of Augustine Sedgewick’s hugely detailed book is, however, considerably darker than all of that. A Leftist New York historian, Sedgewick wants to portray the coffee industry as a metaphor for worldwide exploitation. Coffee, he writes, “is one of the most important commodities in the history of global inequality”.

But is that true?

 

THE story of this book is largely focused on one plantation owner in El Salvador and his family since 1889, and it certainly has its fair share of exploitation and brutality. But that doesn’t mean that globalisation is the universal evil Sedgewick implies. We enjoy our morning coffee; the Brazilian coffee farmers grow it because they want to build a decent life for their families.

Billions of cups of coffee are drunk around the world each year, bringing in vast amounts of money in exports. The word itself is one of the most widely used on the planet. In the American Civil War, soldiers’ diaries referred to coffee far more frequently than bullets or rifles.

Coffee was native to Ethiopia, then took root in Yemen and was exported to the world from the port of Mocha. The first recorded coffee shop was in Constantinople in 1554.

In the middle of the next century it took off in Europe, where its medicinal qualities – giving the consumer a massive pick-up – were quickly appreciated. By the 1660s, hundreds of coffee houses were emerging and growing all over London, places were men could escape their wives and put the world to rights – and wrongs.

But it was more than two centuries later that coffee started to spread across the world – and it was James Hill from Manchester who was behind it. Hill was born in 1871 to a textile family and brought up in the teeming heart of the Industrial Revolution.

By the time he was 18 he was on a boat to Central America and made his way to the tiny country of El Salvador, arriving in 1889.

The coffee industry was beginning to take root and Hill, in marrying a local girl, inherited some plantations. El Salvador was a stable farming community, with its rich soil perfect for growing guavas, papayas, avocados, mangoes, tomatoes and much else.

But if Hill was going to get his coffee plantations to operate at full steam, he had to make sure that the local Indians needed work. Which meant making sure they couldn’t eat for free. Which in turn meant taking over common land and removing all the fecund trees and bushes.

Hill’s workers were required to turn up at 5.30am for a 6am start. He knew that, by being hungry, they would work in order to eat, so a breakfast of tortillas and beans with coffee was delivered as part of the pay.

Brutal capitalism, yes, and very effective in the short term. Within decades Hill had built up a vast coffee empire that had made him a colossal fortune.

The hard labour was backbreaking and the workers’ conditions were dreadful. In 1932, the inevitable explosion came: a few thousand Indian farmers revolted, equipped with just machetes, and were swiftly put down by the National Guard armed with machine guns. The death toll may have been as high as 50,000. A coffee house had become a charnel house.

 

THE decades after were a period of growing instability in Central America. Tens of thousands died in the Salvadoran civil war of the 1970s and 1980s and, in 1979, Hill’s grandson Jaime Hill was kidnapped by guerrillas.

He was freed after a $4 million ransom was paid. Now there is relative peace and Salvadoran coffee is a high-end product.

It’s a rich and complex story and the book is full of historical glances of the times, including the movement that legalised your morning coffee break, which has been enshrined in U.S. law since the mid-1950s after a difficult legal tussle.

Phil Greinetz owned a weaving business in Denver, Colorado, employing young men to work his looms in what was a very draining job.

When the men went off the war, Greinetz hired some middle-aged women who were quickly exhausted by the “primitive” looms. Eventually, broken by fatigue, they suggested a couple of 15-minute breaks twice a day. With coffee.

Greinetz agreed and quickly noticed a rapid improvement in his workers, but he deducted 30 minutes a day from their pay.

In the ensuing legal actions Greinetz argued it was free time and he shouldn’t pay for it. Eventually, after protracted legal arguments the Court of Appeal said that was wrong: coffee breaks counted as work time and should be regarded as such. Which became good news for all employees everywhere in any place of employment.

Sedgewick delivers a staggeringly well-researched piece of work. You might well suspect that it started life as a dissertation: the Bibliography alone is nearly 20 closely printed pages.

Some illustrations would have helped: the story is peopled with vivid characters and scenes, but it would have been good to see them at various stages throughout the book in what is a serious story.

‘Coffeeland: A History’ by Augustine Sedgewick is published by Allen Lane, 448pp

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Arts, Literature, Poetry

(Anthology) Poetry by Edward Thomas

Adlestrop

Yes. I remember Adlestrop—

The name, because one afternoon

Of heat the express-train drew up there

Unwontedly. It was late June.

 

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.

No one left and no one came

On the bare platform. What I saw

Was Adlestrop—only the name

 

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,

And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,

No whit less still and lonely fair

Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

 

And for that minute a blackbird sang

Close by, and round him, mistier,

Farther and farther, all the birds

Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

 

Source: Poems (1917)

Analysis

Adlestrop is reflective and peaceful, almost certainly autobiographical in nature. Written in free verse it is presented to us in four stanzas each containing four lines.

The consistent rhyming pattern where the second and fourth line of each stanza ends in a rhyme helps to give the poem a gentle feel, thematically appropriate given the poems lilting content.

The reflection on the natural world could classify the poem as romantic in style. It’s a snapshot of a small and seemingly insignificant moment in the poet’s life.

. First stanza

‘Yes, I remember Adlestrop —

The name, because one afternoon

Of heat the express-train drew up there

Unwontedly. It was late June.’

The first line of the first stanza addresses the reader directly and is striking. It’s as if he is either answering a question, or, more likely, recounting a specific moment in his life. The poem thus becomes a story. This approach is unsurprising for a poet who was also a novelist. Thomas helps to create a vivid and mental picture of what the scene would have looked like by describing it as an afternoon of heat. Yet, it also gives you an idea of the weather at that moment and helps to set the tone of the poem.

He goes on further to say that the train was an express train. Presumably to emphasise that he was looking for a direct route (and didn’t really want to be hanging around). Was he frustrated on being late? Possibly. This notion is supported by the first word of the fourth line: ‘Unwontedly’.

Whilst we may note that the poem ends in a blissful and idyllic fashion there are hints of a discordant feel during the first stanza.

. Second stanza

‘The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.

No one left and no one came

On the bare platform. What I saw

Was Adlestrop — only the name’

The poet manages again to evoke a clear image of the surroundings using very few words. This is clever.

The first line of the second stanza is centred on the sound of the event. In the previous stanza it was more of a description of the physical atmosphere. The reader could perceive this description as meaning that the train was (quite) noisy. Or is the opposite true? Perhaps there is a dull background noise from the hissing steam and the only accompaniment to that sound is a man clearing his throat.

He later goes on to describe how nobody entered or left the train. This is quite obvious given the evidence from the first stanza where we can see this is an unscheduled stop for the train. He describes the platform as being bare, a bleak adjective. He then claims the only thing that appears on the platform is the name of the station, Adlestrop. This is interesting as the station has a Germanic sounding name. Although Thomas has a reputation for being a war poet, this is unlikely to have pertinence to the war and more than likely to just be a coincidence.

. Third Stanza

‘And willows, willow-herb, and grass,

And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,

No whit less still and lonely fair

Than the high cloudlets in the sky.’

Hitherto Thomas hadn’t seemed particularly positive in his comments regarding the train station, seemingly seeing his unscheduled stop as a burden and a chore. But that view seems to dissipate in this section of the poem as the narrator describes the natural world’s influence on the area. He begins by describing the plant life: he lists beautiful plants which paints a serene picture in the mind’s eye. This stanza now becomes visual (whereas previously the narrator explored sounds and atmosphere). He does, though, use personification by suggesting the clouds are carefree. Using the phrase ‘no whit less’ effectively means that they couldn’t care less. This promotes the idea of nature being free-spirited.

Then, interestingly, Thomas describes the clouds as cloudlets. Does this suggest that there is only a spattering of cloud? Is this why the clouds are ascribed as being lonely? All these mental images create a scene of what this area is like.

What we have is a story being told in several different ways; but, the main character is the scenery itself, rather than on the narrator who is sat on a train taking everything in.

. Fourth Stanza

‘And for that minute a blackbird sang

Close by, and round him, mistier,

Farther and farther, all the birds

Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.’

The first line of the fourth stanza makes it clear that the stop at Adlestrop hasn’t been particularly long. They were only there for a minute. The poet calls again on nature to make his points. No longer moaning, it seems, but instead is impressed by the display that is being put on for him. He engenders an image of grandiosity. We cannot think for one moment that he actually believes that of all the birds between Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire are actually singing – although that appears to be what is happening. It’s this use of hyperbole that lends a sense of majesty to an otherwise dull and, at first, frustrating occasion.

What is most interesting is that the poet uses so many place names throughout the poem that it helps to cement in the consciousness a physical positioning on the map. Such an approach adds to the gravitas and believability of the images and sounds the narrator has created in the mind of the reader.

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