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Foreign Soil
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September 2019 - Foreign Soil
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Mod
Because I know some of us have already read this, I thought I would get us started with some questions.
If you have not yet read the book, please note the questions and answers may pose spoilers.
1. Foreign Soil portrays characters positioned on the fringe of society. How did you respond to these representations? Did they challenge you as a reader?
2. There are many versions of the ‘other’ in these stories: the visitor, the foreigner, the new student, the talented child. When considering the stories as a cohesive whole, what do you think this book is positing about this concept of the ‘other’?
3. Explain why you agree or disagree with the following statement from the reviewer for Australian Book Review:
These wonderfully performative stories thus have a decidedly old-fashioned but ethically crucial aim: to refine the reader’s sympathies, to educate the heart.
4. Many of these stories end abruptly and readers are whisked away from the narrative at a crucial moment. Consider how in ‘Harlem Jones’, the Molotov cocktail is lit but not yet thrown. Do you think this technique is effective in the short story format?
5.. Foreign Soil lends itself beautifully to performance (the author is an award-winning spoken word artist herself) and the rhythmic prose almost ‘leaps off the page’. Can you think of examples of this?
6. What was your stand-out story and why?
7. Do you have a favourite moment from the book you’d like to share?
Mod
So far my favourite is the story Foreign Soil, but it ends so abruptly, I want a novel about these characters!
Started it today. I am pretty sure I have heard Maxine read Harlem Jones at a writer's festival event....I could totally hear her voice as I read it.
I have been a bit behind with this month's read! I started When the Night Comes by Favel Parrett and it absolutely captivated me and couldn't put it down.Anyway, half way through now.
Still have 2.5 stories to go, but think Gaps In The Hickory will be my fav. A slow burn story, hard to grasp in language and character threads, but then....wow. Powerful little story.
Just finished. I found the first third or so pretty hard to engage with, but it picked up for me once I hit ‘Foreign Soil’ and when I hit ‘Gaps in the Hickory’ the rest was history and looking at the contents page again found it surprising that it was only 10 stories.
‘Gaps in the Hickory’ was my clear fave, with ‘The Sukiyaki Book Club’ a close second and was a great finish to the overall reading experience. I was frustrated by some of the abrupt endings, really didn’t engage with some characters and writing style, but absolutely loved others.
I guess between growing up in a single parent family in the Western suburbs in the 80’s and 90’s, and now working in the not for profit space in Melbourne there was nothing new, or surprising, or any ‘teachable moments’ for me in this, but found it all to be a pretty accurate reflection of experience.
I sometimes struggled with reading some of it, the author’s spoken word background was pretty evident in parts, and I’m not a huge fan of short stories at the best of times. Glad to have read it.
Mod
I found the first third or so pretty hard to engage with, but it picked up for me once I hit ‘Foreign Soil’ and when I hit ‘Gaps in the Hickory’ the rest was history and looking at ..."
This is pretty much my exact experience with this each time I have attempted to read it. Its is by no fault of the writing, I'm pretty sure its me. I just cannot engage, the abrupt endings drive me crazy. I think short story as a form just isn't for me. That said I read Roxane Gay's Ayiti earlier this year and that was amazing. *shrug*
I have DNF'd this for the 3rd time. Unlikely to pick it up again.
I’m so behind with this month, I’m hoping to get to it tomorrow!
"Bloody loved it! Was a bit worried that my enjoyment had come to an end with the story titled "Big Islan" the phonetic Jamaican-pidgin English narrated by the almost illiterate Nathanial. Almost did me in but once I got the hang of it, loved it! A is for Owstrayleah....."
Ha, yes Kim, that language was a challenge, but worth it in the end!
Finally done, I’m not sure I can pick a favourite. They were all so great! The Stilt Fishermen of Kathaluwa broke my heart.
Mod
I love that you say finally but I know you smashed it in like a day haha
Haha yeah the ‘finally’ is more in reference to me getting my backside into gear rather than the time it took me to read :)
In this collection of award-winning stories, Melbourne writer Maxine Beneba Clarke has given a voice to the disenfranchised, the lost, the downtrodden and the mistreated. It will challenge you, it will have you by the heartstrings. This is contemporary fiction at its finest.
In Melbourne’s western suburbs, in a dilapidated block of flats overhanging the rattling Footscray train lines, a young black mother is working on a collection of stories.
The book is called Foreign Soil. Inside its covers, a desperate asylum seeker is pacing the hallways of Sydney’s notorious Villawood detention centre, a seven-year-old Sudanese boy has found solace in a patchwork bike, an enraged black militant is on the warpath through the rebel squats of 1960s Brixton, a Mississippi housewife decides to make the ultimate sacrifice to save her son from small-town ignorance, a young woman leaves rural Jamaica in search of her destiny, and a Sydney schoolgirl loses her way.
The young mother keeps writing, the rejection letters keep arriving…
Shortlisted for the 2015 Stella Prize, the judge's report reads as follows:
Maxine Beneba Clarke is a performance poet, acutely aware of the accents, idioms and cadences of the spoken word, and her gift with voices – their origins, their meanings, their struggles and triumphs with alien English – is at the heart of this collection of stories. All ten stories deal with displacement in some form, and some of that displacement has been violent: there are stories of racial conflict in Brixton, of asylum seekers in flight from the Tamil Tigers, of psychological and physical violence between a naïve white-Australian wife in a strange land and her twice-displaced African husband.
Although these are stories about inequalities of power in the intersections of class and race, Beneba Clarke also uses narrative voices and the effects of dialogue to show characters attempting to create and assert a coherent self through the power of speech. Her work is profoundly political, but it is also more than that.
I know some of us have already read this one, so please feel free to jump in early with your thoughts.
Happy reading!
Em