Australian author and poet Maxine Beneba Clarke uses a lifetime of racist bullying as fuel to succeed, but is troubled by the current resurgence of xenophobia

The cumulative effects of racism: it eats away at the essence of your being

The impetus for Maxine Beneba Clarke’s memoir came from a torrent of racial abuse. At the time, she was pushing a stroller and walking to pick her son up from school. A young man in a passing ute unleashed a torrent of expletives, telling her to drown her five-month-old daughter and “go the fuck back to where you came from.”

Clarke, a poet and author of Afro-Caribbean descent, had initially planned on writing a memoir tracing her family history back to West Africa, from where her ancestors were forced to leave as part of the slave trade. The ute driver’s hateful invective prompted further reflection on race relations in Australia, and the insidious attitudes and injustices that culminate in overtly racist attacks. “A lot of people don’t understand casual racism,” says Clarke.

Instead of tracing her ancestry, she began working on what could become The Hate Race. The memoir chronicles her childhood in Australia as well as the indelible effects of schoolyard bullying. The cumulative effect of racist remarks is “like a poison,” she writes. “It eats away the very essence of your being.”

Born in Sydney to a mathematician father and actress mother, Clarke grew up in predominantly white suburbia in the 80s and 90s. She was first made aware of her race in preschool, when a girl singled out her skin colour. In the years that followed, there came relentless taunts, spitballs, malicious letters and cartoons, and teachers and counsellors ill-equipped to confront racist behaviour or who dismissed it as just “a little bit of teasing”. The horrific name-calling infected Clarke’s self-perception. “I knew exactly what I was,” she writes. Coon. Blackie. Golliwog. Monkey Girl. The persistent bullying was crushing:

Somewhere along the line, we just give in.

Somewhere along the line, we stop reporting.

Somewhere along the line, we die a little.

Clarke’s longing for acceptance, to be one of the popular girls with “sun-kissed skin and wavy blonde hair”, was physically manifested. At nights she unconsciously scratched at her face, trying “to claw my way out of my skin”. Earlier, as a seven-year-old, she rejoiced when a light patch appeared on her cheek, because she had fantasised about her skin turning white.

“The metamorphosis was starting; the ugly duckling becoming a swan,” she writes. It turned out to be vitiligo, a pigmentation disorder, which later resolved.

For Clarke, whose short-story collection Foreign Soil won an Australian Book Industry Award last year, the bullying fuelled a desire to succeed. She was academically gifted and excelled at debating and public speaking – presaging her later success as a spoken word poet. The bullying has shaped her adult self, Clarke admits, but she is wary of her story being held up as an example of triumph over adversity.

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“For every one of me there’s probably a thousand other kids who have anxiety issues or whose experiences have snowballed into a negative adulthood or depression,” she says. Bullying by no means “makes kids tougher and more wanting to succeed. I think often it just crushes people.”

The resurgence of xenophobia in Australia troubles Clarke. She sees an “awful synchronicity” between past and present. Her parents left England in the 70s, soon after Enoch Powell’s infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech, which decried black immigrants and predicted that foreign children would overcrowd hospitals and schools. Two decades later, Clarke watched Pauline Hanson’s entrée into politics with a shockingly similar maiden speech, accompanied by a shift in public sentiment around race and immigration. Unsurprisingly, she is not optimistic about Hanson’s return, the rise of One Nation and Islamophobic rhetoric.

“I feel as if there is really a global post-colonial situation at the moment,” which especially victimises children, Clarke says. “There are children’s bodies being brutalised or being washed up on beaches. We see brown children being locked up on Nauru and in Villawood Detention Centre. We see things like Don Dale and Indigenous communities having their funding cut.”

But Clarke does see hope in Australia’s young people. “I look at my kids’ generation, and their outlook and the way they behave towards each other is different from anything I’ve seen in my lifetime,” she says. The cultural makeup of Australia has changed since Clarke’s childhood, and diversity in books, television, and online media have played a major role. Sharing stories breeds tolerance through understanding, Clarke believes. “It’s a wide big world and that there are lots of different kinds of people in it,” she says. “The best thing [a child] could possibly do is to learn to get along with everybody, because that’s just part of life.”

The Hate Race is published by Hachette. Maxine Beneba Clarke will give the opening keynote address at the Melbourne Writers Festival on August 26.

