No Sugar

Aside from water, soap is the most basic element of cleanliness. It is significant that soap is one of the first things taken from the natives in No Sugar. An unclean child cannot attend school. A child who is not in school cannot learn. An unclean body is more likely to contract and spread germs and disease. A diseased body can be relocated with the stroke of a government official’s pen. 

The Aborigines are seen as a dirty people, both metaphorically and literally. By withholding soap, the whites can see them as being as dirty on the outside as they already believe them to be on the inside. The removal of soup allows them physical evidence to vindicate their toxic, racist ideology.

Each time Billy’s whip appears, the playwright uses it to make a startling point. A whip has little practical value unless being used as an object of coercion. Anyone who wields it acts in the service of making others follow orders. To see the whip in the hands of Billy, a black man, as he uses it to wrangle other natives on behalf of Neville’s orders, is meant to raise questions about his complicity in the subjugation of the families.