49 pages • 1 hour read
The Yield: A Novel
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Symbols & Motifs
Food
Food symbolizes community and hospitality throughout The Yield. Elsie cooked constantly in her and Poppy’s home, even teaching cooking classes as part of their informal community outreach programs. Her walls were lined with cookbooks, and cooking and eating was a key activity for her and August together. Elsie represents a strong force for positive family and community ties, and her connection to food makes this particularly clear. Poppy is also connected to food, often using his dictionary entries to discuss traditional food gathering practices and preparations. His focus on community knowledge is shown through these instructions, and the importance of traditional food sources and his knowledge of them is emphasized.
Struggles with food are also expressive in the novel of hardship in the wider community. The Prosperous Mission regularly struggled with finding a stable food source, indicative of racial inequalities and also of the colonial and post-colonial dislocation from the land and the damaging removal of cultural knowledge. It is only when Greenleaf agreed to let the Indigenous population of the mission gather food using traditional methods that they had enough to live on. The literal sustenance of food here parallels the spiritual sustenance of culture, community, and freedom.
The complex relationship between food and emotional well-being is also explored through the character of August, who struggles with food. She ate compulsively when neglected by her parents as a child and refused to eat after losing her sister. Significantly, once she finds her purpose in attempting to save Prosperous and begins to cultivate her connection with the land, she becomes hungry again.
Nature
Nature, specifically the native flora and fauna of the land around Massacre Plains, is used as a motif within the story to help drive the themes of grief and colonial violence. The variety of native flora and fauna makes it useful to explore a number of distinct themes and ideas. Natural phenomena often symbolize a resurrection, with the brolga showing Jedda’s continued presence after her death and the rain coming after Prosperous is saved from the mine. It is discussed lovingly by most members of the Gondiwindi family, expanding to include Mandy and the others who try to protect it.
The exploitation of the natural world is also symbolic of the colonial and post-colonial exploitation of its people. Jedda’s death is compounded by the planned destruction of the area that was her home and likely her grave site. Indeed, the land is revealed to be the whole community’s historical burial ground, a strand that parallels Jedda’s story and that also coalesces the ideas of history, culture, the people, and the land, in that burial literally brings all these elements together in one physical place. It is made clear that Jedda and Poppy both have an emotional and spiritual presence in the landscape after their deaths. This, combined with the visits from the ancestors that Poppy experiences and the continued concern in the Gondiwindi family for the land, shows how important the physical location is as a habitation for both the living and the dead. Just as violence upon the landscape reflects the violence visited on the people who have a bond with it, the vibrancy and life that exists there also reflects the vibrancy and life that is brought by the people who love the land.
Books
The motif of books runs through The Yield, representing escape, knowledge, and preservation. August turns to novels for escape and tries to craft herself in the image of the protagonists of her childhood favorites as a means for self-reinvention, and she retreats to them when life becomes difficult, thinking of her favorite authors and making literary parallels to help her process her life events. August shares this love with Poppy and takes comfort in the bond with him that this creates for her after his death; she cares for his books and is the driving force in finding the dictionary he created. The dictionary strengthens August’s emotional connection to Poppy, as well as her cultural knowledge and understanding, and helps to resolve many of the family’s difficulties in a practical and structural way too. It is through this book and the knowledge it contains that the family is restored to their land.
Poppy’s love for books is also reflective of a love of history and preservation, and this parallels Winch’s own purposes with her novel. Books in Poppy’s hands symbolize what he calls “time travel,” a way not only for traditional knowledge to be passed on but also for the reader to inhabit and assimilate the past. His dedication to the dictionary and his recognition of the importance of Greenleaf’s recordings show the need for recordkeeping in order to protect the truths of history. His dictionary also protects the Wiradjuri language itself, which it actively records and disseminates.
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