Bronte Coates talks with Maxine Beneba Clarke about her debut collection of short stories.

Foreign Soil portrays characters positioned on the fringe of society, often oppressed or downtrodden – an asylum seeker at Villawood, a pregnant young woman in rural Jamaica. What appeals to you about writing these kinds of protagonists?

All of the issues explored in Foreign Soil are part of my experience in some way. That said, I’m not telling my own stories, but my characters’ stories, grounded by what I know. I try to let my protagonists emerge unhindered, without worrying about mitigating their violence, or brokenness, or naivety. I enjoy creating touchable, heavily flawed characters. I also love to introduce my protagonists as they’re about to meet major changes or challenges. That’s when we really see people for who they are – what they’re made, and capable, of.

At a slightly sadistic, God-complex level, I find it intriguing to place a character in a pressure-cooker situation. It’s me in the laboratory, dropping the mouse inside the maze and observing what she does when I slowly block off every available exit. Will she scale the wall, or sit down and sob? How long will it take till she realises she’s trapped? Hang on. Wow. Look at that! She’s eating her way through the wall! Perhaps it’s me wielding a kind of power I feel I don’t have in life. When you pen challenging characters in unfathomable situations, the writing itself must do the talking. If the themes of a work are unsettling, and the protagonists perhaps no less so, then the writing must make or break the book. That’s the ultimate challenge as a writer: to stoke out the song beneath the screaming.

In many ways your book feels like it has a political purpose, as well as literary, reflecting on highly topical issues relevant to contemporary society. Is this your intention, or would you classify it more as a side effect of the work?

I found the character of Harlem Jones on CNN during the 2011 Tottenham riots: slinking around on grainy CCTV stills. I still see another of my characters weekly on SBS evening news, filmed through the razor-wire fences of our detention centres. Domestic violence and teenage pregnancy are more common occurrences than we like to admit. That said, I didn’t set out to write a book which gave voice to the oppressed, or to be a literary placard carrier for any particular cause. Foreign Soil is undoubtedly a highly political fiction book, but the depressing thing is that I simply looked around me, both locally and globally, and wrote a book about the world that stared back at me: a vast and breathtaking world, but one overwhelmed with sadness, inequality, anger, and the vicious societal and interpersonal atrocities we continue to inflict on one another.

You also work as a spoken word performer and poet, and I’m interested in how you see this book, your first prose collection, in relation to your other work. What is the relationship, or interplay, between your different practices?

My spoken word practice includes sound poetry and poetry written in patois and accented English. Writing Foreign Soil, I felt that to maintain the essence of my writing style, I had to successfully transfer the aural element of my work onto the page – to encode instructions for how a particular story should be heard or read. Once I decided to work this way, all the constraints I thought applied to fiction fell away. A significant part of the book ended up being written outside the confines of ‘traditional’ Australian English – in Jamaican patois, accented English, and English as a second language.

Spoken word is a notoriously unforgiving genre. Every time we step in front of the microphone, we face a room of critics. On the flipside, that also keeps you constantly in touch with your ‘reader’, literally within arm’s length. You become expert at knowing at exactly what point in the narration your ‘reader’ will be prepared to encounter the bizarre, the unsettling, the loud, the devastating or the extraordinary, and you learn to craft killer openings. Applying these techniques to short fiction seemed, in many ways, the next logical step in my writing journey.

Your prose has a bite to it that mimics the anger many of the characters feel. Is it taxing – emotionally or creatively – to write such powerful voices?

Some of the characters from Foreign Soil are still sitting inside my chest cavity. They haven’t truly stopped haunting me yet. I became a very expedient first drafter while working on this book. In most cases I lived with the initial seed of the idea for a month, or a few months. I’ll write about a young Jamaican woman with aspirations beyond her means. Little by little in my head I would add to the bones of who the character was. She has a large family. There’s something semi-magical about a banana plot in the yard. I’d go away and research banana plants in the tropics, 1940s Jamaica. Then I’d sit down and write the first draft blind. By that, I mean that most of the time I had absolutely no idea where the character would end up. Sometimes I would get to the end of the first draft and think, What is she doing there?! The stories which were the most emotionally taxing to write, though, weren’t the most dramatic or disturbing. They were those which cut the closest to home.

Photograph by Nicholas Walton-Healey

Recently, you spoke about your journey from ‘barely published, to having a certain literary future’ on the Emerging Writers’ Festival blog. Could you tell us more about this progression?

I was hesitant to submit my work when I first started writing seriously about seven years ago. It was a reluctance I couldn’t articulate, but I now realise it stemmed from not knowing if there was, or could be, a place in Australian literature for me. At school, and even studying writing at university, I wasn’t introduced to any Australian writers of African descent, or many Australian writers of colour at all. It seemed audacious to believe that a first-generation Australian woman of Afro–Caribbean descent could break out as a poet, or fiction writer, and have their work broadly distributed, or even taken seriously. Through spoken word, I started realising that people were interested in what I had to say, and I decided that instead of lamenting that I’d never read an Australian book containing a character like me, I’d just have to knuckle down and write that book myself. The rest, as they say, is Foreign Soil.

Finally, what’s on your reading list?

I’m re-reading Melissa Lucashenko’s Mullumbimby, and have just finished an advance copy of Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s debut fiction, The Tribe, which I’m reviewing for The Lifted Brow. Also on my milk crate (it feels like a total abuse of poetic licence to call it a bedside table) are Josephine Rowe’s Tarcutta Wake and Laura Jean McKay’s Holiday in Cambodia.