Published 27 February 2009 · Main Posts musings on black history month Maxine Beneba Clarke Our wanderings scar this great, green globe like keloid geography. For centuries we’ve criss-crossed this cobalt blue: backward and forward, north to south, circling for landing space. Our sea voyages scar the ocean’s memory like needle tracks, ruptured flesh. Here she sunk the bodies of desperate slaves, dragged to her murky sea bed by the muffled rattling of their ankle chains. Here sailed the Amistad, gently rocked to revolution, the ocean’s tears shining as she gently pushed the mutinied ship homeward. See here a mass black grave where a banana boat upturned on way to the new world, the too-few life boats on board assigned to first class white passengers. We have left a thousand homes: involuntarily, reluctantly, and now as eagerly and easily as if the up-and-run of it all were pure addiction. Some nights I dream I’m ancient Africa, stretched out wide and deep centre-globe, cradling a people. On my lower left shoulder in southern Togo, with their mahogany faces caked with thick white clay-paint, the Anlo-Ewe people stamp thanks to the sky God Mawu-Lisa. The blood of young goats sinks warm and iron-filled into the sandy earth of villages of my decolletage. Some nights I dream I am Africa, and the Songhay people are conjuring spirit Hauka which dance light-footed across the black earth ridges of my startled nipple, trapped inside the bucking bodies of taken tribes people. Village messengers, djembes slung across backs, gently drum their cryings up and down my ribcage, rocking me back to sleep. I dream I am ancient Africa and my history has no beginning. I dream I am forever, remembering more than centuries. Maxine Beneba Clarke Maxine Beneba Clarke is an Australian author and slam poet of Afro- Caribbean descent. Her short fiction collection Foreign Soil won the 2015 ABIA Award for Best Literary Fiction and the 2015 Indie Award for Best Debut Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize. Her memoir, The Hate Race, her poetry collection Carrying the World, and her first children’s book, The Patchwork Bike, will be published by Hachette in late 2016. More by Maxine Beneba Clarke › Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays 8 November 20248 November 2024 · Poetry Announcing the final results of the 2024 Nakata Brophy Prize for Young Indigenous Writers Editorial Team After careful consideration, judges Karen Wyld and Eugenia Flynn have selected first place and two runners-up to form the final results of this year’s Nakata Brophy Prize! 4 October 202418 October 2024 · Main Posts Announcing the Nakata Brophy Prize for Young Indigenous Writers 2024 longlist Editorial Team Sponsored by Trinity College at the University of Melbourne and supporters, the Nakata Brophy Prize for Young Indigenous Writers, established in 2014 and now in its ninth year, recognises the talent of young Indigenous writers across Australia.
