MAXINE BENEBA CLARKE Foreign Soil. Reviewed by Lou Heinrich

These stories add complexity to racial and cultural stereotypes and explore a wide range of human experiences.

Foreign Soil won last year’s Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, and for good reason. Clarke’s stories contain despair, enormous love, seething resentment, and hope for a better future;

they speak to emotionally intense human experiences.

Clarke is a prize-winning spoken word performer, as well as a poet, and this lends a certain rhythm to her pieces. A Mississippi mother in ‘Gaps in the Hickory’ muses:

An that mama, in the Bible, she float that baby right on down the river, away from the strife that was headin to him, even though it broke her heart.

The ear for how people speak – in London, in Jamaica, in Mississippi – is a great strength of this collection. Clarke spells out accents and, before we know it, we’ve internalised the voices on the page.

This technique is notable in ‘Big Islan’, which illustrates the temptation to leave home for something bigger. Nathanial lives in Kingston with his wife, who is teaching him to read and dreaming of England.

‘Oh, di‘s islan,’ Nathanial Robinson whisper softly te imself. ‘Any red-blooded man on God’s own eart gwan get excited bout de view stretch out before mi.’ Im nyah crazy fe wantin te stay on de islan. Fe refusin te budge imself, wen almos every udda young man im know wid de means fe doin so desertin de place sly-sly an quick like a fox de firs time opportunity come a-brazen knockin.

The voice commands readers to struggle as they learn to follow the rise and fall of the accented narration, often needing to read out loud to get the meaning. This mirrors Nathanial’s own labouring through sentences, increasing empathy for his plight.

It is extremely difficult for the short story writer to get readers to barrack for characters in such small spaces, but Clarke has a unique talent for this. She accomplishes sympathy within the first paragraph of the standout story of the collection, ‘The Stilt Fisherman of Kathaluwa’. Here we are introduced to Tamil teenager Asanka on his boat journey from Sri Lanka to Australian waters. After a traumatic trip across hostile seas, he is imprisoned in Villawood Detention Centre, and in Asanka we see the human face of a soulless government policy.

‘The Tigers had come back for him after half a day in the potato chest [where they had imprisoned him], but these people have locked him up for one and a half years.’ In this startling comparison, the government’s cruelty far outstrips our favourite villains, the lawless terrorist army of a developing country.

In contrast to his despair, Villawood volunteer Loretta lives a typical middle-class lifestyle. She holds a restless contempt towards her comfort, but remains tight within the system that provides her with a secure income.

Perhaps this is why this story stuck with me the most: because it is a brilliant depiction of reality. Many of the middle class – with our remote-control garages, our comfortable houses, our quiet cars – are horrified by government policies towards asylum seekers. But we feel helpless to release the broken, caged teenager.

In an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, Clarke revealed her opinion on the detention of refugees: ‘I feel this immense shame. Why are people allowing this to happen?’ A member of Writers for Refugees, she has used her fiction as activism, to wake up her readers to the real state of the world.

Another issue strongly present in Clarke’s work is race relations. An Australian writer of Afro-Caribbean descent, she has worked for the Anti-Discrimination Board of New South Wales, and is writing a memoir on her experience as a black woman in Australia. Foreign Soil throws racism in our faces, and adds complexity to societal stereotypes.

This thread runs through every story, as Clarke gives space to people often ignored. Her unconventional protagonists (an aging transgender woman, a black teenager, a semi-literate Jamaican man) are far from the cardboard characterisations of minorities often found in fiction.

In ‘Railton Road’, we see how cultural stereotypes influence everyday interactions when Solomon remembers sexual experiences with white women:

One of them had pushed him inside a specimen freezer in the science lab, pulled him down on top her like she expected, wanted savagery, like she got off on the taboo of him … and she’d smiled, daring him to pin [her arms] down. And when he had, she’d smiled at him. Smiled.

Is this post-colonial literature? Or is this a collection of writing that, like Nam Le’s The Boat, seeks to tell the stories of marginalised people in a society that privileges white, middle-class male voices?

However it can be classified, Clarke’s startlingly emotive collection encompasses the scope of human experience: betrayal, love, foolishness, hope, helplessness and anger at ‘the way things are’. Any reader who begins Foreign Soil will be held captive by each and every story – and once you begin reading, it will be very hard to stop.

Maxine Beneba Clarke Foreign Soil Hachette Australia first published 2014 new edition 2017 PB 304pp $22.99

Lou Heinrich is the Books and Literature Editor at Lip Mag, and writes on women and pop culture. You can find her on Twitter at @shahouley, where she tweets between sips of Earl Grey.

You can buy this book from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here.

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Tags: Australian women's fiction, Maxine Beneba | Clarke, short stories