NAW Reading Challenge: Foreign Soil by Maxine Beneba Clarke
To celebrate our inaugural New Australian Writing (NAW) Award shortlist, we’re running a NAW Reading Challenge.
This week our participants have read Foreign Soil by Maxine Beneba Clarke. Here are our favourite responses from them to the book. (Ed. note: may contain spoilers!)
Jill says:
After the first story, ‘David’, I wondered if I could simply write “Wow!” about this collection and leave it at that. This powerful piece intertwines two stories, the young woman in Australia and the violent Sudanese backstory overlaid with the tentacles of traditions forcing themselves into the young woman’s new life. The prose is assured and alive; the story moving. Short story writers such as George Saunders and Nam Le came to mind.
The rest of the collection is more uneven. What Clarke does well is voice, whether it is a Caribbean man confronted by rapid change, a southern American accent or a young Tamil asylum seeker. I was forced to slow down as a reader, to inhabit the cadence and modulations, to more concretely inhabit each character as a result of this technique. Where Clarke struggles a little is in the narrative. It is almost as if the effort that has gone into creating character and voice has left less room for the actual story. The last story, ‘The Sukiyaki Book Club’, actually plays with this tension.
The book as a whole focuses on what it is to be an outsider and how this plays out in various scenarios. There are positive and negative outcomes for the protagonists of each story. Narratives like these counter-balance the Orwellian “if you see something, say something” times that we live in a fresh and surprising set of voices.
Alice says:
Each of the ten stories in this volume contains within it a moral turning point of the imagination. The kind of turning point where circumstance and destiny make a mockery of choice.
In the title story of the volume, ‘Foreign Soil’, Ange chooses, in the face of parental doubt and opposition, to follow her lover to Uganda. Here she finds herself trapped without a passport in a country locked by land [so that] Sudan, Rwanda or Tanzania were the furthest she could run if she wants escape from the abusive Mukasa, a man she thought she loved: ;Every escape would be more foreign soil.‘
In 'Shu Yi’, Ava is faced with a choice between ‘taking on the problem’ of ‘the most beautiful creature I had ever seen’ or distancing herself from the bullying that Shu Yi endures. She chooses the latter – telling the ‘filthy Chink’ to ‘fuck off’ and pandering to the laughter of Melinda and her bullying mates. Do we blame her? Are we disappointed?
In ‘Railton Road’, Solomon has enough insight to recognize that he doesn’t really have the makings of a black vigilante, and even recognizes his own hypocrisy. Just as he conspires to place the ‘slave pacifier’ around the neck of a ‘young beautiful sister’ accused of sleeping with a white man, he remembers the two English girls ‘whose bodies he’d known like he shouldn’t have’. And even as he hates the female victim of his own and De Frankie’s cruel action, he hates himself even more both for not having the key to release his victim from the thick metal ring around her neck, and for wanting it.
The image of ‘The Stilt Fisherman of Kathaluwa’ haunts the story of Asanka and Loretta. Did Asanka choose to get on a boat to escape from the Tigers, or is it destiny/ fate/cruel fortune that has left him abandoned in Villawood Detention Centre suffering from post-traumatic stress? Does Loretta really have a choice to abandon her marriage, her husband, her new job and her chance of having a baby to devote herself to helping people like Asanka? Should she?
The lyrical prose of this orderly Decameron contains a masterful use of disordered language, dialect and vivid imagery. Nathaniel Robinson’s love for his native Kingston is evoked through all the five senses. But E is for Inglan, O is for Opportunity and R is for Restlessness. By the end of the story, after seeing Owstrayleah on the map, ‘Kingston feel insignificant small’, and Jamaica can never be considered a Big Islan again.
The last chapter of the book brings us back to ground level (in all senses of the word) – back to the reality of an author alone in a room with a bunch of words and all the responsibilities of daily life on top of them. In this case, an author trying to decide what to do with a girl left hanging upside down on a monkey bar – struggling with the question (of destiny?) of how to bring her safely down to the ground.
Laura says:
Clarke’s book beautifully captures so many voices and experiences. It is confronting, yet easy to read and therefore easy to take in the difficult themes she touches on.
However, there are chapters that I felt reverted into more of a stereotypical view. Having lived in the northern and western suburbs as well as coming from a migrant background, I would have liked to heard more in some of the stories. Sometimes, they seemed to skim over certain emotions. I think I would have preferred for the stories to stay in one location and focus on different perspective rather than jumping around.
However, I loved the start and end of this book. Though different characters, the start seemed so bleak. Even when the girl managed to save for her dream bike, things didn’t look up, like she could never get a break. The contrast between this and the end, when this young girl manages to land of her two feet after the awful tragedies she has endured was beautiful.
