Their voices proceed in isolation until the very end of the story, where they come together in a moment that’s transcendant for being so utterly unexpected.Ĭlarke uses this technique a lot, often without contextualizing who the different voices belong to. Neither of them is aware that the other is also narrating. Their dance of mutual misunderstanding, frustration and need is conveyed by each woman in turn they tell their stories in parallel, the older woman recounting the backstory that explains her present. Clarke’s first story, “David”, explores the conflict between a second-generation woman born in Australia to Sudanese parents, and the first-generation immigrant woman she meets on her way back from buying a bike. It’s not necessarily, or always, a collection “about” racism, or race relations, which is why I’m doubly pleased that it’s been published in the UK there remains this lingering conviction that writers of colour are always somehow writing about that (and, by extension, about white people). It’s mostly a collection about the experiences of black people separated in some way from a community.
But Maxine Beneba Clarke’s Foreign Soil, oh man. They disorient me, especially if a collection doesn’t have some kind of unifying thread. Most things I’m good on.) It is definitely the case, though, that I am not very good on short stories. I think I’m going to start referring to 2016 as the Year When I Found Out I Was Wrong About Everything. This casual unguardedness that comes from never really knowing fear
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