Maxine Beneba Clarke

Canberra Writers Festival 2025: 6, Poems of love and rage

/ Whispering Gums / 8 Comments

Evelyn Araluen, Maxine Beneba Clarke and Omar Musa with Jacqui Malins

The program described the session as follows:

An electrifying highlight of this year’s program, our poetry panel features some of Australia’s most acclaimed and innovative poets putting love and rage on the page. Overland Poetry Prize winner Evelyn Araluen (The Rot) joins Maxine Beneba Clarke with Beautiful Changelings, and hometown spoken word artist Omar Musa. This session delves into the power of love, and the ongoing fight against oppression in its many forms. Don’t miss this powerful event. Moderated by Canberra author, artist and performance poet, Jacqui Malins.

For this event, we hardy festival attendees had to leave the warmth of the National Library building (or whatever building we’d previously been in), and walk through a little rain to a marquis on the Patrick White Lawns. It was worth the effort. Actually, it wasn’t that cold and wet, and the venue, with chairs on the grass and some lovely potted trees, made for a nice change.

As this session included poetry reading and performance, your scribe had a bit of a break from intense scribbling, but the notes I took have still ballooned. After acknowledging country, Jacqui asked each of the poets to choose a poem to read (or perform) that explores rage.

On rage

Evelyn explained that her collection is all love and rage, that it was written in the context of love of communities, network and solidarity, but informed by rage, by the futility of witnessing genocide from our phones while the government continues to provide material for weapons. She was thinking specifically about global capitalism. She read her poem “Girl work” from The rot. As I’m sure you all know, there’s something special about hearing a poem read by the poet. They know what nuances and rhythms they intended for their words. This is a deeply satiric and ironic poem about girls and work, girls and girly aspirations, set against “the machine” that will swallow them up. It’s confronting (“girly, you glisten in your soft tailoring … your coolgirl cleangirl chic”) and confrontational (“o girly, lift your head…”). The words are cleverly angry.

Jacqui commented on its exploration of how to live in the face of the onslaught while also trying to live day-to-day. She likes the thread in the collection of what to do with our hands, the twitching to act.

Omar, poet, novelist, musician and artist from Queanbeyan, “Palace of the Palarang, Venice of the Eden Monaro”, has published four books of poetry (the last being Killernova, see my post on its launch). A performance poet, he performed rather than read two poems, “To burning” (which you can see on YouTube performed with music by his wife Mariel Roberts) and an older one I’ve heard before, “UnAustralia” (on YouTube too). He too is enraged by politics which cares more about money than people (particularly brown, Muslim, and “other”) and the environment.

As Jacqui said, his poems contained an “extensive catalogue of rage” that hasn’t changed over the years since they were written.

Maxine, reading from her just published book, Beautiful changelings, took us to somewhat different places. Like Araluen’s book, her focus is women. Araluen’s is described as a “liturgy for girlhood in the dying days of late-stage capitalism” while Clarke’s is about “ageing, womanhood, motherhood” with “wrecking-ball revisitings of the myths, mantras and fairy tales fed to girls” (from back covers and promotional materials). The first poem she read, “A good wait”, was inspired by her role as chauffeur for teenage children. It is more humorous than overtly angry, but has a layer of anger all the same for parents, particularly women, who are expected to put their needs – including their work/careers – second to those of their children.

She then read a section from a longer poem, “Major complications”, which explores rifts in contemporary feminism. It was inspired by feminist witch t-shirts and the Salem witch-hunts, and draws on the story of Tituba, “the witch that would not burn”. I loved the line – I think I got it right – “Tituba made sure they got the complication they asked for”.

On writing poetry inspired by rage

Omar grew up angry. Ppoetry was is pressure relief valve. He talked about his Malaysian inheritance and a way of expressing yourself that alchemically transforms rage to a different state, that enables you to legitimate anger. (I missed the details because I didn’t catch the Malaysian word.) It’s reductive to delegitimise rage.

For Evelyn, rage was explicit to her project. Referring to the success of Dropbear (my review), she said what an enormous privilege it is for a poet to be read. It’s unusual. Her book is in schools, and she hears from teenage girls. This made her think about her responsibility to her audience. She feared she could be immobilising girls into despair. She was inspired by Revolutionary letters, a poetry collection by Beat poet Diane di Prima, who turned practical things into revolutionary action.

Maxine (whose memoir, The hate race – my review – is also in schools) related to this audience idea. She talked about being a woman and getting older, and the rage that brings. There’s poetry and reaching for poetry. Bigots, she said, aren’t going to pick up poetry. Further, more than with prose, people come to poetry with openness. An interesting point. How, she said, does she make sure that her rage is poetry.

Jacqui wondered about rage turning into polemic, and love into sentimentality. Are these risks ?

Omar said not necessarily. “UnAustralia” is a polemic poem. He hopes poems can work on different levels, such as rallying the base and educating others. Poets use their tools to smash open the door, using different weapons for different battles. Jacqui agreed that preaching to the converted has a role.

Evelyn commented that “people like shitting on sincerity”, that the elite will say they “hate slam poetry” but don’t go into those rooms and see the work. This is “cringe culture”, at work. We have a bad relationship with sincerity. (This idea spoke to me.) Performance offers a strong introduction to poetry, performance poets put their whole heart into their work. What is it that brings people through the door? How much affect is effective? Research suggests that the most significant trigger for engaging people is to activate emotional sensibilities.

Maxine added that in 2025 earnestness is not cool, but then people will perform emotions on Instagram!

On love

Jacqui asked the poets to end with a poem written through the lens of love. Maxine read her tribute to being an aging woman, her love letter to growing older, “I want to grow old”. It mentioned several older women models, like the late Toni Morrison, and included lines like “speaking slow and exact and only sense” and “I want to grow old spectacularly”. Omar read two poems, one to his cellist wife, and one to a childhood friend (noting that friendship can be our greatest love affair.) Evelyn, who at first feared she didn’t have one, read the last poem in her collection, “I will love”.

This event was in a small venue, but had a decent-sized audience. Poetry always moves me a little out of my comfort zone, but I’m glad I took the risk!

Postscript: It was notable that the three poets were people of colour, albeit from very different backgrounds. Interestingly, of the 7 sessions session I attended, five comprised only white (I believe) participants, and two comprised all people of colour. I did, however, only attend 7 of a large number of sessions, so mine may not be a good sample. Nonetheless, shaking it all up a bit – people’s backgrounds, genres, forms, and so on – could energise discussions.

Canberra Writers Festival, 2025
Poems of love and rage
Sunday 26 October 2025, 12-1pm

Maxine Beneba Clarke, The hate race: A memoir (Review)

/ Whispering Gums / 30 Comments

This is how it changes us. This is how we are altered.

Maxine Beneba Clarke, The hate raceMaxine Beneba Clarke’s Stella Prize short-listed memoir, The hate race, is one powerful book. I’ve been reading about racism since my teens during the Civil Rights years, and have read many moving novels and memoirs. Clarke’s book holds its own in this company.

The book chronicles Clarke’s life from early childhood through to the end of high school, but she bookends this chronological story with a prologue and epilogue which are set later, during her son’s first year of school. This approach to structuring her story is effective, because it enables her to reflect on what’s changed a generation later. And the answer is, not much, which is such an indictment on Australian society.

Before saying more, though, I need to back-pedal a bit, and make sure you know who Clarke is – besides being the writer of a well-reviewed collection of short stories, Foreign soil. She’s the Australian-born daughter of West Indian-born parents who migrated to Australia from England in 1976. As a young girl she was mystified by people asking her where she was from, and confounded when these same questioners became angry when she responded, honestly, Australia. This is, I know, a common story, but is not, I think, well-documented in our literature. However, as Clarke would say, what’s a story for, if not to tell how it went.

And that’s what she does, tells us how it went – and went, and went. The bulk of the story is, as I’ve said, told chronologically but Clarke hangs each chapter, each step in her chronology, around a specific topic, such as her involvement in sport or debating, or that transition period between primary school and high school. She captures beautifully the trajectory of thirteen years of schooling from the early 1980s to the mid 1990s. Although everyone’s experience is different, much of what she describes is universal: the first day of school, the yearning for a specific toy (like a Cabbage Patch Kid), parties, first love, getting braces, and so on. What isn’t universal, though, is her experience of being a child of colour.

This is how …

Reading her story is gut-wrenching. She faces racism – direct and indirect, intended and unintended – from her first day of pre-school to the end of high school. One high school class-mate, who ranks the girls in the class (as if that’s an acceptable thing to do anyhow), doesn’t rank her at all “because animals didn’t count. Greg Adams said that would be bestiality”. She’s called every name you could possibly think of – and more you probably couldn’t. She’s spat at and threatened. Luckily, she has friends too – otherwise it’s hard to imagine how she could have survived.

The disappointing thing is the inept handling by the schools, because it’s clear that for all the work ostensibly being done in schools to promote tolerance and harmony, only some of it is getting through*. There’s only so much schools can do, of course, given students’ main role models are their parents, but the least teachers can do is take the racist behaviour seriously and respond in a meaningful and supportive way. This, however, is not always the case: “He’s trying to wind you up. It’s just a little bit of nonsense. Don’t give him the satisfaction, Maxine”, says one high school principal, for example. That’s not good enough. Writing about her early primary school years, Clarke says this:

I knew before I started big school that, for me, the playground would always be a battlefield: a world divided into allies and enemies. At five and a half, racism had already changed me.

After a while, you start to breathe it. Another kid’s parents stare over at our family on the first day of school with that look on their faces. You make a mental note to stay away from that kid … You tell a teacher someone is calling you names. Blackie. Monkey girl. Golliwog. The teacher stares at you, exasperated, as if to say: Do you really expect me to do something about it? The next time you have a grievance, you look for a different teacher. This is how it changes us. This is how we’re altered.

Towards the end of the book, her boyfriend asks her to come to his place to swim in his family’s pool. She’s uncertain:

I had no reason to believe Marcus’ family would have an issue with the two of us, based on what I knew of them, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to put myself through the stress of finding out.

This is how we edit our lives.

How we brace against the blows.

The book isn’t unmitigated misery. Clarke mixes up the tone, sometimes using humour to make her point – it never hurts, after all, to see the absurd side of things – but the book is a memoir, not an autobiography. This means that it is not about the whole life but a part of it, and in Clarke’s case the part that she wants to share, to expose, is her experience of racism while growing up. Her goal was not vindictive. She writes in her Acknowledgements that she loves Australia, but she wanted to show “the extreme toll that casual, overt and institutionalised racism can take: the way it erodes us all”. That, she certainly does.

There are things about the book that I could quibble about, but they are petty in the face of its overall power. I don’t like to describe books as “important” or to say that everyone must read them, but for a readable and devastating understanding of how racism, in all its guises, impacts on a personal, rather than a theoretical or historical level, The hate race is essential. It’s a story that needs, as indeed Clarke aimed, to be “written into Australian letters”. It deserves the accolades it has received.

Kim (Reading Matters) also admired this book.

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Maxine Beneba Clarke
The hate race
Sydney: Hachette Australia, 2016
261pp.
ISBN: 9780733632280

* This is the 1980s and 1990s I know, but I use present tense here about schools because it’s pretty clear that not a lot has changed.