Abstract:
This article reads Gail Jones’s 2007 novel Sorry as a novel of White usurpation
of Indigenous country and culture. Sorry mobilizes a number of intertexts,
primary among them Shakespeare. In particular Macbeth features prominently as
a template for Sorry’s drama of usurpation. My analysis focuses on two extensive
quotations from Macbeth, recited by one of the novel’s White protagonists as she
surveys the scene of her husband’s murder, ostensibly at the hands of an Indigenous
servant, one of the ‘Stolen Generations.’ This recitation, however, proves
itself to be an act of usurpation, as it is Perdita, the White child protagonist of
the novel, who has stabbed her father during one of his repeated rapes of the
Indigenous girl. Perdita, in turn, recovers her memory of the act via the recitation
of the same passages from Macbeth, thus allowing Shakespeare to emerge in the
White post-colonial text as a self-critical element of White usurping culture but
also, possibly, as a collaborator in a coalition against the ongoing oppression of
the Indigenous population which characterizes contemporary Australia.
1 Cursed
