The Hate Race review: Maxine Beneba Clarke's urgent writing is unique and vital

The Hate Race review: Maxine Beneba Clarke's urgent writing is unique and vital

• Fiona Wright

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MEMOIR & POETRY

The Hate Race
MAXINE BENEBA CLARKE
HACHETTE, $32.99

Maxine Beneba Clarke, Australian writer and poet of Afro-Caribbean decent whose first book, Foreign Soil, won the Premier's unpublished manuscript award. Photo: Michael Clayton-Jones

Carrying the World
MAXINE BENEBA CLARKE
HACHETTE, $26.99

A few years ago, my writers' workshop, based in Bankstown, left a meeting to celebrate at the nearby sports club – a place that, despite its location and status as a glorified RSL, makes amazing pizza. I walked through the door without a second thought, as did the two Anglo-Australian men I was walking with. A few steps behind us was our colleague Mohammed, and as he entered the building he was immediately intercepted by security, asked to take off his hat and show his licence, and told not to give any cheek.

The Hate Race, by Maxine Beneba Clarke. 

Mohammed shrugged it off – this happens all the time, he said – but I was rattled to the core. This is what it's like for you, I remember thinking, this is what you have to deal with every day.

This is the territory that Maxine Beneba Clarke's memoir, The Hate Race, charts. It is a chronicle of the everyday injustices of racism that are always present in this country, no matter how hard we try to deny that they exist, and the way they accrue, and slowly wear away at the people against whom they are directed. ("This is how it changes us," Clarke writes, "This is how we're altered.")

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Clarke introduces many of these incidents with a refrain that breaks into the text at points where a new anecdote is about to begin or comes to an end: "this is how I tell it, or else what's a story for." It is at once a reference to the Afro-Caribbean storytelling tradition from which Clarke is descended, a consciously poetic interjection, a structuring device, and an allusion to the deliberate selection of these details and anecdotes.

Clarke states explicitly in in the acknowledgements of the book that this memoir charts a "very specific aspect" of her childhood, the confusion, anxiety and often downright hostility with which her race was met by the people she encountered in outer-suburban Sydney in the 1980s and '90s. It is a partial memoir – as all memoirs must be – but it is always conscious of its agenda, and its importance.

Carrying the World, by Maxine Beneba Clarke. 

The most damning of these interactions occurs early in the book, during the young Maxine's first year of school. A well-meaning teacher has a ritual in her class, whereby each child, in turn, is nominated "Student of the Week", and the rest of the class writes "something nice" about that student on a card.

Maxine's card, returned to her at the end of the day, reads "Maxine is brown. Maxine has brown skin. Maxine has funny curly hair … Maxine is nice and Maxine is black…Maxine is brown and she does dancing.'' There's something awful in how terribly wrong such a simple exercise, with such young children, can turn out, let alone in how such comments can make someone feel so unrecognised, so unseen.

Other stories within the book outline a subtler, or less unambiguous kind of cruelty – a gymnastics teacher who scolds the young Maxine to tuck in her "rounded backside", a boyfriend's parents who try to start conversations about the attractiveness of "mixed-race babies", dermatologists and hairdressers who are ill-equipped to deal with dark skin and tightly-curled hair.

These incidents Clarke relates with a sense of humour and an eye for absurdity, and this skilful move offsets the horror of the more frequent kind of anecdote that makes up the majority of the book – descriptions of the very deliberate mockery and bullying levelled against her by classmates, and ignored or abetted by teachers in her school.

Clarke's descriptions of this schoolyard bullying – and the effect that it had on her – mean that The Hate Race is, in many ways, a book about the cruelty of school children, and the pack-mentality nastiness that is endured by any child who is different, or who stands out.

Set against this are lovely descriptions of Clarke's suburb, her home and its rituals – picking out a birthday cake from the Women's Weekly party cake book, gathering tadpoles in ice cream buckets at the local creek, shopping at the local K-Mart. Again, this speaks to Clarke's skill in balancing – the familiarity of these gestures make the particularities of her racialised experience all the more confronting.

Clarke is an assured and direct narrator, although at times, the perspective she grants to her younger self seems a bit too precocious. The most striking example occurs when her second-grade class discusses the "discovery" of Australia as a part of bicentennial celebrations. Clarke's narrator, here, is six or seven years old, but nonetheless canny enough to question the version of history her teacher is telling.

Clarke's suggestion is that she is particularly alert to the suffering of Indigenous Australians because of her own experiences of racism, but there's something deeply uncomfortable about this alignment that elides very real differences of historical context and oppression.

This is a strange discomfort, because one of the most exciting things about Clarke's writing is her ability to inhabit different perspectives, and to draw links between different histories and experiences – and thereby enlarge the kinds of stories we consider "ours".

This facility is clearly evident in her new collection of poems,Carrying the World, which covers some of the same territory as the memoir, alongside broader stories and encounters.

Here, the poem marngrook, about the racial vilification of the Indigenous AFL player Adam Goodes, acknowledges in its opening stanzas that the poet has "no traditional name/ or right/ or tongue for" Indigenous stories, but also describes her own ancestors as being "chained and stolen too". This is, of course, true – other poems in the collection attempt to come to terms with the long history of slavery that brought Clarke's ancestors to the Caribbean – but there's still something problematic about comparing this to Indigenous experience.

The strongest poems in Carrying the World are the most personal ones, which deal mostly with family – especially with motherhood, and with coming to terms with family history. Demerara sugar, for example, describes a research trip through England, weaving together observations, oral histories, and chant-like invocations of place-names and the products – sugar, molasses, coffee beans – produced by slaves.

Also powerful is nothing here needs fixing, which charts the breakdown of a relationship and establishment of a new home as a single mother, and is a beautiful meditation on grief, resilience and the joys found in small moments.

As a whole, however, Carrying the World is uneven. Many of the poems – including marngrook and imkarikaturaustralischdeutsch, where the bottom-tucking gymnastics teacher reappears – are written for and with the energy of performance poetry, but feel flat or awkward on the page.

Others, such as armageddon and i is the revolution offer endings that feel too neat and come across as moralising. This unevenness makes the collection somewhat disappointing, because the impact of the very powerful poems that it does contain is, inevitably, lessened.

Nonetheless, Carrying the World is impressive in its passion and vigour. Clarke's writing, in this collection and in The Hate Race alike, is fresh, and her voice is confident, and unlike anything else in our literary landscape. But the inconsistency and unevenness across both works do mean that they are vaguely unsatisfying, despite the urgency and energy that drives them.