English News

Maxine Beneba Clarke Excursion

Foreign Soil by Maxine Beneba Clarke is an anthology featuring the voices of the silenced, disenfranchised, lost and mistreated written with excellent prose and powerful, hard-hitting characters.

The Year 12 Literature class were lucky enough to hear Clarke speak at her twilight seminar located at Library By The Docks. The Seminar was being held specially for VCE students and Literature teachers who were studying her text in their curriculum. We got to hear about Clarke’s writing process and discuss the works’ themes of race, resilience and diversity, followed by a Q&A session and the opportunity to have our books signed.

Clarke is an incredible speaker, especially when she did an evocative reading of one of her short stories included in the anthology Big Islan’, in which she adopted the Jamaican patois her main character speaks in. Her engaging speaking skills may be attributed to her past as a slam poet, but also to the incredible amount of research and thought she put into her work.

It was extremely eye-opening to see how much time and effort she put into each of her short stories to get the details exactly right. Clarke told us how she journeyed to the places she wrote about, often local if she was writing a story based in Fitzroy or Footscray, where she noted details as small as restaurants and the types of people that came in at different hours of the day, but also further away , such as when she travelled to Jamaica for research purposes. There she took photos to re-create scenes of her story with absolute accuracy, often drawing on her own past and family history.

One of the most common phrases I have heard regarding writing is ‘write what you know’ but Clarke said something even better that really stayed with me which was ‘write what you know to be true’. This is one of the best things I observed about her; throughout the entire seminar, and when answering questions, she was honest and open: about her work, her writing process and her experience as a woman of colour.

Maxine Beneba Clarke is an incredible writer and person and it was an absolute honour to have the opportunity to hear her speak.

Also thank you to Dr Schroor and Ms Faulkner for accompanying us there, and enabling us to have this wonderful experience.

Anisha Gupta

Year 12