INTERNATIONAL PROFILE POET MAXINE BENEBA CLARKE ON WHAT MAKES A GOOD HUMAN BY SISTA ZAI ZANDA “IT’S ALWAYS HARD – DIFFICULT – CHOOSING A TITLE. And you feel like you don’t know until you’ve got it,” says award-winning writer, poet, and illustrator Maxine Beneba Clarke over a cuppa on Zoom. It’s the publication day of her latest poetry collection How Decent Folk Behave, and we’re chatting about how it got its name. It’s taken from one of her poems, ‘something sure,’ a conversation between a mother and a son about the murder of Hannah Clarke and her three children, and what this act of domestic violence means for both the little boy and his mother’s social responsibility to raise him well. “You know, the mother in the poem says, ‘I taught you well how decent folk behave’ – and I thought to myself Well this is what this collection is about: it is about what is it to be a good human, what does it really mean?” The author of over nine books for adults and children, including the short fiction collection Foreign Soil (2014), her memoir The Hate Race (2016), and the Victorian Premier’s Award-winning poetry collection Carrying the World (2016), Beneba Clarke identifies her poetic lineage as beginning with the oral storytelling of the West African griots and unfolding into the Caribbean and Black British dub and reggae grassroots poetry traditions popularised by Benjamin Zephaniah, Jean “Binta” Breeze, and Linton Kwesi Johnson. She also named the soulful protest folk songs of Tracy Chapman as another major influence on her writing and performance style that, as a child of Black British settlers in Australia, she now brings to bear on her poetic observations about the world today. “[How Decent Folk Behave] was written in the last two years, during which Melbourne was locked down, on and off, for so long,” says Beneba Clarke. “It really made me think more about what is it we miss. And, when we get back out there, what is it that we need to do to look at things like violence against women, climate change, racial justice, and things like that… Instead of having those conversations with friends – because I wasn’t able to sit around and have those musings – it happened on the page.” There’s an emerging trend, particularly among Black women and non-binary writers, to publish work that encourages readers to imagine what the future could possibly hold. Because we already know the world’s problems, the questions now have to be where are we going? What are we creating? And how are we getting there? Would Beneba Clarke situate How Decent Folk Behave within this genre of Black futurist writing? She laughs and nods, “Yeah, I think that. And during the coronavirus, Black Lives Matter galvanizing after the death of George Floyd, and more interest in talking about Aboriginal deaths in custody in Australia and,” she pauses to reflect, FREE HOT MEALS Capitol Hill Community Services at Trinity Church 1820 Broadway HOURS Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday 11:45 – 12:30 11:45 – 12:30 closed 11:45 – 12:30 11:45 – 12:30 Closed on National Holidays YOU ARE WELCOME HERE MAXINE BENEBA CLARKE. PHOTO COURTESY OF THE BIG ISSUE AUSTRALIA / INTERNATIONAL NETWORK OF STREET PAPERS 10 DENVER VOICE April 2022
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