49 pages • 1 hour read
Tara June WinchThe Yield: A Novel
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
How Grief Impacts People
Many different types of grief are portrayed in The Yield, and many different ways of dealing with it are explored. The book deals closely with loss: It begins with a death notice and engages with the legacies of colonialism and dispossession of Indigenous people. Different types of grief (personal, familial, cultural, historical, geographical) are shown to intersect and intertwine in the novel. A cycle of grief and loss is revealed in the Gondiwindi family: Poppy assuaged his grief at being taken from his family by offering a home to his sister and her son, Jimmy, and Jimmy’s presence led to the abuse of August and Jedda and Jedda’s disappearance, both of which shape the course of August’s life; she finally returns in the midst of her grief for Poppy. There is also a larger and longer-lasting grief at play: centuries of built-up trauma and violence from the colonization of the Gondiwindis’ land. This grief is directly connected to the physical space of the land, as with August’s experience at Poppy’s funeral: “A breeze felt as though it came off the water of the Murrumby, where it couldn’t. She’d once heard Aunt Missy talking about the grief coming from upriver—or had it been from underground?” (126). Here, the land itself seems to express grief for Poppy’s loss, just as the people have grief for the loss of their homeland. The spiritual connection, however, is shown to be innate, despite legal and physical dispossession.
Individual reactions to grief can be particularly painful due to its compounding nature. Elsie, having just lost her husband, lets her old grief at August’s running away surface upon her return. The guilt August feels for leaving in turn makes it hard for her initially to bridge the gap that has grown between her and her family in the intervening decade. Similarly, Poppy’s grief over Jedda’s disappearance made it hard for him to comfort or confront August’s grief. Each person, left on their own to deal with the heavy weight of intersecting grief, struggles and becomes more isolated. In its treatment of grief, the novel again shows the importance of collectivity in order to overcome difficulties. showing that grief can be a bonding experience when it is shared openly. When the Gondiwindis learn more about Jedda’s murder, it does not serve to isolate them but instead allows them to process their grief together. Even though the news is painful, August does not run away. In part, it is the grief August feels over the land that drives her to stay and reconnect and that offers her means to feel connected to her sister. The memories that are brought to the forefront of her mind by her return to Massacre Plains, and the increased grief they create in her, force her to seek out her community to help. The novel shows this reconnection as a mutually healing and beneficial process.
Memory and Time
Poppy’s “time travel” connects historical knowledge and memory to ideas of time. This is called “deep time” by Poppy, capable of passing through the generations and overcoming loss to ensure the continuation of culture:
The story goes that the church brought time to us, and the church, if you let it, will take it away. I’m writing about the other time, though, deep time. This is a big, big story. The big stuff goes forever, time ropes and loops and is never straight, that’s the real story of time (12).
The visits he receives from his ancestors preserve memories through time as a form of “emergency” cultural memory, leapfrogging the normal sequence of the generations. This has become necessary because colonial and post-colonial culture and practices have broken the line of connection between the Wiradjuri of the past and the present.
Time and memory also affect physical space in the novel. Poppy, in one of his dictionary entries, writes, “The map isn’t the thing, this country is made of impossible distances, places you can only reach by time travel” (34). The land has been changed greatly over years of colonialism and dispossession, with animals becoming extinct, rivers being diverted, and nutrients in the soil being used up. Some lost aspects of the land can only live on in memory. However, lost memories can also be preserved and protected through time by the land. The mission cemetery, unearthed by the mining company, acts as a resurrected memory. It provides proof that everyone had forgotten, encased in the land itself. Similarly, August’s memories are sparked by her return to the physical space they occupied.
August struggles with memory and time, with her recollections of her sister continually sending her back to childhood. Her arrival back in Massacre Plains, especially to Prosperous house, is particularly effective at forcing August through time by way of memory. The scene when she first returns to her childhood bedroom shows memory taking over:
She took in the room. She thought to herself—I know this place, but it had bunk beds before; it was we back then. In her mind ten-year-old Jedda is backlit, running from the attic room, down the stairs, leaping off the verandah and through the fields before the cutting (24-25).
August’s body is physically affected by her pain: her lack of appetite and trying to stay girl-like are attempts to hold herself in the past. As August learns how to embrace memory, and how to do so without hurting herself unduly, she is able to better understand and appreciate her past and that of her family and community, using it to work toward the future.
The Power of Language
The value of words and meaning within The Yield is a central theme of Poppy and August’s story. Poppy’s love for words manifests in his dictionary creation. He finds stories within words and their connections to each other, reading the English dictionary Elsie bought him in a variety of ways. Words are also a resonant sign of cultural affiliation because they require collective understanding memory to remain meaningful, and so their continuance shows a collective effort to preserve them, and a living community. The recovery of the dictionary means that “all the words that Albert wrote, and other old people remembering the words too, that it [Wiradjuri] would now be recognised as a resurrected language, brought back from extinction” (232).
While building his mission, Greenleaf recognized the importance of language. As he built his rapport with the local Indigenous people, he “endeavoured thereafter to greet them in their own language—which seemed to please them deeply” (84). This understanding of the importance of one’s own language led him to compile a rudimentary Wiradjuri-to-English dictionary; 150 years later, this helps Poppy, and then August, prove Native Title on the land. Greenleaf’s use of the Indigenous word for God in his sermons is another example of his awareness of the value and variance in the meaning of words. He knows that the Wiradjuri word cannot be a one-to-one translation with the Christian “God” and that there must be unique spiritual meaning and cultural heritage connected to it. In using it, he displays a tendency to cultural assimilation also connected to his gradual loss of faith, as his attachment to the Christian God has been increasingly challenged by his experiences.
That culture is a part of language is something that Poppy especially recognizes:
A dictionary, even if this language isn’t mine alone, even it’s something we grow into and then living long enough, shrink away from. I am writing because the spirits are urging me to remember, and because the town needs to know that I remember, they need to know now more than ever before (12).
In this way, Poppy sees himself as a conduit between the past and the future rather than an author in his own right. Poppy’s dictionary entries combine definitions with stories of life on the land and cultural practices and mythology, inextricably connecting ancestral and personal experiences of the world to the words used to describe them. The dictionary itself needs to be shared to be useful, requiring collective attention to the community’ history. As Mandy says to August before the protest, “[W]e don’t have the vision, the respect, to bother learning the native language! To even learn to respect the culture where we live?” (225), expressing the need for all Australians, not just Wiradjuri, to revive an understanding of native language(s). August and the rest of the family’s efforts to find the dictionary answer the final question that Poppy poses there: There are people who value words as much as he does and who want to remember.
