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This essay is a post-colonial interpretation of the short stories in Maxine Beneba Clarke’s collection ‘Foreign Soil’.
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Confronting the complex “influential social and cultural issues” [Pourjafari, F. and Vahidpour, A. 2014] that are persistent in a predominantly white Australian community, Maxine Beneba Clarke’s 2014 “Foreign Soil” seeks to question the discomfort that “Australian readers” feel when challenged with “characters like these.” Comprising the “powerful” collection, each “intimate narrative” follows one of ten “voiceless” individuals and in so doing, disputes the preconceived assumptions of its Australian readership base. Developing as a sub-branch of postcolonial theory, migration literature is a lens through which to view Beneba Clarke’s work. The tension between the “traditional settler life-form” [Pourjafari, F. and Vahidpour, A. 2014] and a “new nomadic lifestyle” [Pourjafari, F. and Vahidpour, A. 2014] is a pervasive trope that runs through the collection. Beneba Clarke’s efforts in subverting the pre-existing paradigm that deems her work to be un-book-club worthy highlights the persistence of a white settler mentality that excludes the voices of diversity.
