The Yield: A Novel

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).