3 - Sweet Food to Sweet Crude: Haunting Place through Planet

Summary

Merseycene Hauntings

At the University of Liverpool, we teach a module called ‘Literature and Place’ in which first-year undergraduates read a horror short story by one of our alumni, Clive Barker. ‘The Forbidden’ is a tale of urban decline, where an ambitious academic researcher visits a dilapidated housing estate and discovers that the city is haunted by a hook-handed killer, who smells of sweets and whose rotting torso swarms with honeybees. This monstrously saccharine horror is known as the ‘Candyman’. ‘The Forbidden’ might seem an odd choice of text for a module designed to encourage students to think about their degree programme and their chosen city of study in relation to questions of environment and decolonisation. They tend initially to see the Candyman as an overdetermined metaphor for the dangers of desire: for sexual fulfilment, for academic success, or, for those who pick up on the story’s nods towards Merseyside’s 1980s heroin crisis, for drugs. But there is, hiding in plain sight, another way to interpret the Candyman’s candy. As Barker himself later explained, the Candyman’s apian torso draws inspiration from the bee-infested lion’s corpse on the front of tins of Golden Syrup, a product manufactured by the most famous corporation from Liverpool: the sugar behemoth, Tate & Lyle. So perhaps the walking hive of the Candyman is a horrifying body politic: a beehive version of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, but with a distinctive additive? Maybe the Candyman is the spectre of sugar which haunts Merseyside: its original sin, its one-time sustenance, and, perhaps, its future doom?

This chapter takes Barker’s image of a commodity-haunted city as entry point (and exit wound) to show that Merseyside is a particularly compelling site through which to think about the trans-scalar dimensions of environ-mental crisis, where the slow violence of political and infrastructural histories haunts landscapes, bodies and climate. As Elizabeth DeLoughrey argues, it is necessary to ‘provincialize’ the geological and ecological transformations of the Anthropocene, because a ‘planetary scale needs to be placed in a dialectical relation with the local to render [both] their narratives meaningful’. Such a dialectical relationship between part (place) and whole (planet) must be diachronic as well as spatial, necessarily ‘entangled with the longue durée of empire and ecological imperialism’. With its extensive relationships with both sugar plantations and the oil industry, Merseyside is more entangled than most.