“Wow, it’s been a lot.”
Maxine Beneba Clarke is speaking to SBS Voices about the events of the last few years, ahead of the release of her poetry collection How Decent Folk Behave.
The collection is made up of Beneba Clarke’s reflections on a broad spectrum of issues - race relations, climate change, the pandemic, feminism - that have been at the forefront of the collective consciousness over the last two years.
“We all feel exhausted from the pandemic but just the realisation that it’s not just that, it’s all of these other things,” she explains. “What I wanted was to have a snapshot of what’s happening at the current moment because it just feels like such a pivotal point in history.”
Beneba Clarke hopes that How Decent Folk Behave gives readers the space to step outside of the 24-hour news cycle and sit with the magnitude of what we’ve all experienced. “This more than any of my books was kind of like an outreach,” she says. “It’s kind of like, ‘Let’s talk about the things that have happened and reflect on that.’”
Beneba Clarke hopes that How Decent Folk Behave gives readers the space to step outside of the 24-hour news cycle and sit with the magnitude of what we’ve all experienced.
The writer’s desire to capture this moment in time stems from her experience as a mother. “Once I had children, that desire to create stuff that reflects the world and interacts with the world just heightened,” she says.
How Decent Folk Behave also comes from a place of looking to the future for the sake of all children. And Beneba Clarke makes it clear that children and young people have been a catalyst and inspiration for this collection.
something sure; the poem from which the collection’s title is taken, speaks to the idea of young people creating a better future. Written after the murder of Queensland mother and her three children, the poem is a blueprint for the conversations that need to be had with young boys and men about how they can make a difference in the world.
Beneba Clarke tells SBS Voices, that she chose it as the poem that dictated the title because it encapsulates the “hopeful and hopeless” emotions that sit at the heart of the collection.
“When I say it’s hopeful and hopeless it’s that recognition of ‘Maybe we can’t save ourselves, but maybe we can save our daughters.’”
But Beneba Clarke also sees young people fighting to save themselves.
“For example, the poem fridays in the book, which is about the , came just out of watching one of my own kids go and catch a train and go to this protest. And then thinking, ‘Wow! This poetic image of schools just being abandoned and these kids just all hopping on the train and going to the city.’ And like it’s so profound, this idea that you would leave your education because the world is burning.”
It’s so profound, this idea that you would leave your education because the world is burning.
While Beneba Clarke drew inspiration from watching students leave their classroom, she’s been equally inspired by joining them inside it. Since her book Foreign Soil was added to the syllabus in Victoria, she has been in and out of schools, talking to students.
Those discussions have changed the way that she writes. “Whether it’s the inability of kids to be vaccinated, or the fact that it’s kids that are driving the climate change movement at the moment, or you know seeing kids left behind because of racial injustice,” she explains that she now considers their voices as she writes.
As a Black woman, Beneba Clarke is cognisant of the fact that she has a platform to write about things that matter, not just to her but to the young people she meets. “This book is like a love letter to the future,” she says.
She draws joy from being able to connect with readers across generations. Beneba Clarke admits that part of the reason she writes is because she often hears from readers: “‘Oh my gosh, this poem articulated exactly what I was feeling, and I have never been able to say that.’”
But she is also still deeply in love with the process of writing: “I get so much joy out of words...and trying to hopefully make them beautiful.”
To take the last few years and make them beautiful takes skill and artistry, and in How Decent Folk Behave, Beneba Clarke has done it.
by Maxine Beneba Clarke, published by Hachette is available in bookstores and online from October 27, 2021.
Source: Hachette
