Foreign Soil by Maxine Beneba Clarke

JUDGES' COMMENTS

The protagonists of Maxine Beneba Clarke’s stories are human beings who find themselves on foreign soil at what we might charitably call unpropitious moments. They do not have the luxury of roots. Instead they heave along on stunted radicals, torn from any fixed ancestry, drawing bare sustenance from the surrounding earth. Indeed it is this mobility that most offends and terrifies the ‘natives’ whose space they invade. Sometimes menacing, more often abject, they are the Triffids of the globalised present.

Beneba Clarke specialises in describing the pain of the stranger hurt, in particular circumstances, by the grand diaspora of the poor world towards the rich. Yet the palette she employs is marvellously broad. Beneba Clarke’s creative ruthlessness, her willingness to invert the usual liberal pieties, saves her stories from being politically impeccable agitprop. The anger and despair stalking her characters, possessing them in an almost demonic fashion, stay with the reader even after the words with which they were summoned fade away.