I stop, and when Josephine turns to me, I whisper the only words I can manage, my throat still thick and tight: “I don’t belong here. You’re all...I’m not...I’m not a Gutter child.”
I was handed an ARC of Gutter Child and told I ought to read it because it’s going to be a BIG and IMPORTANT book in the new year. I now understand that its author, Jael Richardson, is the founder and director of FOLD (the Festival of Literary Diversity) and she is an impassioned speaker on the fundamental necessity of encouraging and promoting diverse voices in literature — a movement I am 100% behind — but I’m afraid this book doesn’t read as BIG or IMPORTANT. There is social commentary, but it comes off as very basic; I think this might be better marketed as a Young Adult novel, and not only because the main characters are all teenagers and the writing is a touch melodramatic, but because this would be an excellent prompt for a discussion about the history of institutionalised racism — vile institutions like slavery and apartheid — in the same way that The Marrow Thieves provided teaching opportunities around residential schools and the history of racism against Canada’s First Nations. I want to stress that as a YA novel, this could be quite a valuable eye-opener, but it didn’t add to my own knowledge or understanding of the Black experience and the contrived melodrama didn’t reach me emotionally. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms. Some spoilers beyond.)
When I drew pictures of Mother and me, I used Peach for her and Chestnut for myself. “Why is your skin named after something soft and sweet and mine is something hard and bitter?” “Because you are so much tougher,” she said. I thought that was a very good answer. And maybe it’s true. But I am forced to be tough. It takes a particular kind of strength to exist in a world where you are not wanted that doesn’t feel like strength at all. Like giving up or giving in would be easier, smarter even. Maybe this is my chestnut, my toughness. The fact that I am still here.
Gutter Child opens with our main character, Elimina Dubois, being delivered to a boarding school. It is immediately apparent that whatever society this is set in (I found it helpful to imagine an alt-history of maybe Australia), people are divided into the white-skinned Mainlanders (who are in charge) and the Black “Gutter folk” (who do all the real labour). Elimina had been raised to this point outside of the system — by an adoptive Mainlander mother who died suddenly when Elimina was fourteen — so the trajectory of the novel is pretty much her being put into different settings and situations where people can tell her the true history of this country and her own people. Spoilerish: European colonisers came to an island country hundreds of years earlier, finding it rich in resources and inhabited by “primitive” Black people. The settlers claimed the best coastal land for themselves, forced the natives to sign treaties they didn’t understand, and then moved them inland, charging the displaced folks for all the necessities of life now that they no longer had access to them. As the coastal cities grew richer and the self-named “Sossi” people poorer, there was a great rebellion which the settlers barely squashed, and the cost of which the Sossi people are still paying off, many generations later. Immediately after the rebellion, all of the Sossi people were moved to an offshore island (called the Gutter) and every baby there is born owing a share of the original debt of their people. Gutter folk work at menial jobs, hoping only to live their lives without adding to the debt of future generations, but there is one glimmer of hope: Gutter children can be sent to Mainland academies, where they are trained in trades and service jobs, and if they get good jobs upon graduating, there’s a possibility of paying off their academy fees by the time they’re sixty or sixty-five, thus gaining “Redemption Freedom” for themselves and one family member from the Gutter. Very few people earn Redemption Freedom, and it’s unclear where they could happily live if they did — there’s one fabled Black community, “the Hill”, but it might not be what it seems — so while every Gutter child who grows up on the Mainland knows that the white people there fear and despise them, the dream remains to join their ranks as “free” people. In this way, the society blends slavery and apartheid, and when the Headmaster of the academy describes it to Elimina as the envy of many other countries (if only they had the ability to start such a nation from the ground up as the Mainlanders did), I wouldn’t call that far-fetched; I would never argue that the racism that would lead to this kind of society doesn’t exist; that it didn’t exist at the beginning of our own country.
Gutter folk are poor in position, but don’t nobody do family like us. And we don’t have to be family to be family, if you know what I’m saying. Wherever we are, we find family.
Despite believing that her adoptive mother had loved her and had done her best to protect Elimina from the horrible Mainlanders outside their door (Elimina wasn’t allowed to attend school or eat in restaurants, she couldn’t even walk down the street with her mother without suffering abuse), a main theme in the story is that Black folks should stick with other Black folks; that supporting one another within the Black community is more important than trying to gain acceptance in the white world, which leads into the sad irony of Gutter parents sending their children off to Mainland academies, believing that the freedom they might eventually gain is the most important thing in life, while these children yearn to be back home with their families. The ending looks like it could be setting up for a sequel that will redefine the meaning of “free”, and while I think that could be interesting, it also added to my YA/The Hunger Games vibe.
I’ll say again: Gutter Child really felt YA. Elimina has a lot of angst trying to fit in at the academy and make friends, there are awkward (and non-explicit) romantic interludes, the history and social systems are revealed in a series of infodumps, and every chapter ends on a squishy bit like this:
There’s a long quiet where I just sit and think, listening to the wind. Part of me wants to be angry, but part of me wants to forgive. And I lift my knees and put my head in my hands because I don’t know which feeling to let in.
And I’ll say again: if this is marketed as YA, I think it is an easy and relatable enough read that high school students would find it interesting, and even more importantly, I think they might find it illuminating. This is not meant as a slight against YA, but I don’t feel like I was the right audience for this.
