Published 11 March 201016 March 2010 · Main Posts Literary littlies Maxine Beneba Clarke Sometimes I think having a writer for a parent (let alone for two of your parents) is a form of child abuse. My long weekend was full of literary commentary from my four-year-old. Here are the best of the lot, verbatim: 1. If William Winkle (Wee Willie Winkie) comes while I’m sleeping and tries to shove me in his sack, will you and Mama S grab great big sticks and bash him like an enormous piñata? 2. Why do I always have to wear clothes when Mowgli (of Jungle Book fame) gets to go naked every day? 3. Little Red Riding Hood’s Mama should take her to an op shop so she can get some other different coloured hoods nice and cheap. 4. In real life, would Goldilocks go to jail? 5. So why do the other animals still always listen to Brer Anancy when all he does is trick them every day? Why don’t they learn? 6. Well, that was just rubbish, wasn’t it? If I was Rapunzel I would cut off my hair and make a ladder to climb out of there all on my own. 7. When you fall in love, does it hurt really badly? (then, at my perplexed look) I mean, when that fat little boy (Cupid) stabs you with the arrow? 8. Mum, I just made a book. I stapled it and everything and now we can have a launch and invite everyone over. The only thing that’s missing is one of those prizes on the front cover. Do we have a sticker to put on the front for a prize please? It’s a really good book so it needs a prize. 9. But I’m not Mali, I’m Jenny the Library Lady and it’s not time for my lunchbreak yet (busily checking out books with a ‘beeping stick’). 10. Did Nana really give you dessert every single night when you were little (dubiously)? Well, what about the nights she went out and did her poetry shows? 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 First published in Overland Issue 228 25 May 202326 May 2023 · Main Posts The ‘Chinese question’ and colonial capitalism in New Gold Mountain Christy Tan SBS’s New Gold Mountain sets out to recover the history of the Gold Rush from the marginalised perspective of Chinese settlers but instead reinforces the erasure of Indigenous sovereignty. Although celebrated for its multilingual script and diverse representation, the mini-TV series ignores how the settlement of Chinese migrants and their recruitment into colonial capitalism consolidates the ongoing displacement of First Nations peoples. First published in Overland Issue 228 15 February 202322 February 2023 · Main Posts Self-translation and bilingual writing as a transnational writer in the age of machine translation Ouyang Yu To cut a long story short, it all boils down to the need to go as far away from oneself as possible before one realizes another need to come back to reclaim what has been lost in the process while tying the knot of the opposite ends and merging them into a new transformation.
