Reading Harm and Repair in Joanne Joseph’s Children of Sugarcane

Aylwyn Walsh; Sam Naidu

doi:10.25159/2663-6565/13634

Authors

Aylwyn Walsh University of Leeds https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1501-8804
Sam Naidu Rhodes University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25159/2663-6565/13634

Keywords:

historical novel;, gender-based violence, harm, repair, reparative, indenture

Abstract

In this article we theorise the trope of harm and repair, teasing out its benefits and drawbacks in relation to gender-based violence in Joanne Joseph’s historical novel, Children of Sugarcane (2021). We conduct a close reading of this text to elucidate how the trope of harm and repair is represented in a contemporary South African historical novel. On the basis of this theorisation, we explore themes of gender-based violence in the novel and the specific harms of the colonial plantation for indentured women. Drawing on feminist thinkers Pumla Gqola and Eve Sedgwick, we propose that in the text reading is an act of resistance to the perpetuation of harm. Joseph’s novel offers a complex narrative structure across time and space to conceive of how legacies of harm, which span generations, may be repaired. In so doing, the novel resists the assumed causal relationship between harm (gender-based violence) and the processes of repair and (in)justice that follow in its wake. We conclude by considering the effectiveness of the harm-repair trope in Children of Sugarcane, and the promise of reparative reading that it offers.

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Author Biographies

Aylwyn Walsh, University of Leeds

Aylwyn Walsh is Associate Professor of Performance and Social Change at the University of Leeds, in the School of Performance and Cultural Industries. She is director of postgraduate research and leads on teaching socially engaged arts, as well as convening the Participation Research Group.

Sam Naidu, Rhodes University

Sam Naidu is a Professor in the Department of Literary Studies in English, Rhodes University, South Africa. She teaches and researches African crime fiction and literature of migration and diaspora.

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