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

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.