Henry Trotter Has His Audience “Hooked” at Sugar Girls and Seamen Launch

by Russell on July 14th, 2008

Jacana and the Book Lounge pulled up all anchors (so to speak) at the launch of Henry Trotter’s Sugar Girls and Seamen this past Thursday.

Bookloungers could be seen wearing sailor’s hats and individually wrapped servings of fish and chips were the dish of the day. And how appropriate – for Trotter had his audience “hooked” with tales of his experience patrolling SA’s docksides. Listeners were so involved that the Q&A went on for quite some time after Trotter concluded his speech. It seemed no one wanted to leave the fascinating world of the sugar girls – sex workers – and the seamen who comprise their client base.

The book got its start as Trotter’s PhD dissertation for Yale University about Port Culture. Having written various journal articles in preparation for his thesis – as well as kept a blog – he was approached by Jacana to write the book.

Trotter read briefly from a chapter titled “Cunning Linguists”, which tells the story of the woman named Renata and the club called Shanghide. (Trotter assured us that all the names were changed to protect the people and places he wrote about.) The audience delighted in the puns. The main aim of the passage was to tell us of prostitutes who learn Mandarin to seduce the Chinese sailors. Renata was one of these – in the book she can be found singing in flawless Mandarin. The audience was stunned with the information that “Renata” – a 31 year old drug addict – hailed from the Cape Flats.

But Trotter also mentioned that not all of the women learn these languages and those that do “cannot now become tour guides or interpreters. They wouldn’t put this on their CV.” For them, it is the very thing that marks them as prostitutes.

Trotter ended with a description of the dockside as a ‘cultural condom’; in which “languages and culture gush forth – but that’s as far as they can go.”

Meanwhile “cultures and legs can spread at the same time.” was the Catch-phrase of the Day.