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 how we're altered.
Throughout her memoir, Clarke comments on the everyday racism she endures as a Black minority growing up in 1980s Australia. With her anecdotes, Clarke paints a damning portrait of a time and place when racial insensitivity was widespread. As a child, Clarke is taunted mercilessly, and to make matters worse, many teachers provide no support. In this passage, she comments on how this lack of positive leadership from teachers shows students they can get away with their racist bullying because no one will discipline them.
"You're so sensitive, Maxine," the playground duty teacher would say when I complained. "Just ignore them darling, okay?"
I learned to stay quiet. I learned that nobody much cared. I learned that it was probably my fault anyway, and that what they were doing to me was perfectly okay. This is how it alters us.
In a similar passage to the one above, Clarke relates an instance in which she sought help from an authority figure on the playground. Rather than seek a resolution among the students, the playground duty teacher implicitly sided with the racist bullies, minimizing Clarke's lived experience by accusing her of being overly sensitive. Clarke comments on how an experience like this had the power to alter her, making her believe her racial difference—rather than the people who dehumanized her—was the problem.
"Your sister," he said, "she's going to be a champion, Clarkey. Runs like the wind. It's in the blood. You folks are built for it!"
Providing another example of everyday racism, Clarke writes of how she entered high school to discover that her sister's reputation as an excellent runner affected how the running coach saw her. In this passage, Mr. Spencer speaks in a way that he intends to be encouraging, but he is oblivious to the casually racist content of what he is saying. By suggesting that Clarke and her sister are biologically predisposed to being athletic because of their heritage, Spencer is evoking a racist trope. Rather than question this authority figure's assertion, Clarke trusts he could be right and tries hard to meet his unrealistic expectations.
"Various patois or creoles are spoken. These patois developed as a result of West African slaves mixing their native languages with English."
I thought of my grandparents, the lyrical poetic way they spoke English, their voices singing down the phone receiver at me as if each syllable was a pitch-perfect note, carefully selected from a scale they alone were attuned to. Surely such beautiful language could not be the result of such a horrible history. My grandparents had never spoken of this. They would surely have told us all.
In grade six, Clarke creates a poster-board project about Jamaica. While researching the country in the library, Clarke discovers that her Jamaican grandparents' unique way of speaking results from their ancestors having been plantation slaves. In this passage, Clarke comments on how her adolescent mind couldn't comprehend the irony of such a beautiful patois being the consequence of such an unpleasant history.
I always knew what answer to give.
I knew.
I knew exactly what I was.
I was Coon. I was Jungle Bunny. I was Monkey Girl. I was Gorilla. I was Lubra Lips. I was Nigger. I was Blackie, or Golliwog. I was Tar Baby. ... I was Sooty, Boong, Thick Lips.
Somewhere along the line we give up counting.
When commenting on her time in high school, Clarke relates the story of how a bully named Lachlan Jones developed a harassment tactic that involved making Clarke insult herself before she would be allowed to pass by him. In this passage, Clarke lists the many hurtful names bullies call her and force her to call herself, all of which are designed to dehumanize and exoticize her. Clarke says she gives up counting the names somewhere along the way. By this she implies the slurs are so ubiquitous that she eventually gives up resisting and lets them wash over her.
"Fuck off, you black bitch," the ute driver screams from the open window. "Go on, fuck off. You make me sick, you fucken black slut. Go drown your kid! You should go drown your fucken kid. Fuck off, will you!"
In the prologue, Clarke is an adult in the present day, out walking with her baby daughter in a stroller. Suddenly a man pulls up beside her in an SUV and shouts racist abuse at her. In this passage, Clarke reports the man's extremely violent language as he demands that she drown her own child. The startling incident shows how Clarke, as a Black woman in Australia, never knows when she is going to become the target of a racist stranger.
I'm also thankful the bloke in the ute couldn't see the baby: her beautiful caramel skin, her to-die-for medium brown eyes, the light brown ringlet curls starting to dance their way across her little fat head. I know that this, too, might add fuel to the fire.
Later in the prologue, when the racist stranger accelerates away and Clarke turns a corner, Clarke sits down on a low wall to calm herself. She reflects in this passage on her gratitude for the fact the racist driver couldn't see her mixed-race daughter. Knowing that white supremacists have issues with "race mixing," Clarke understands that the sight of a light-skinned baby could have made the unhinged stranger even more aggressive.
There are myriad ways of telling it. The young black wunderkind, the son of a cane-cutter with the god-knew-how-it-happened first-class degree in pure mathematics. Gough Whitlam, the sensible new Australian prime minister, dismantling the last vestiges of the White Australia Policy. That fool English politician Enoch Powell, and his rivers of blood anti-immigration nonsense.
Early in the memoir, Clarke introduces the major theme of storytelling by acknowledging that there are many ways to tell a story. In this passage, she gives a bird's-eye view of events that led to her being born in Australia. In her telling, Clarke will focus on the social mobility afforded to her father because of his mathematics Ph.D., how Australia looked progressive and welcoming because of Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam's political reforms, and how anti-Black rhetoric in the UK pushed her parents to seek somewhere safer to raise their children. However, Clarke acknowledges that this is merely one version of her story, and she is telling it because it aligns with her theory of how the world works.
Every second Saturday morning, my father picked us up and drove us out of Ryde, where he shared a place with the woman he'd been secretly seeing for several years. We would be invited just for the day; he would drop us back home in the afternoon. Dad's new partner was softly spoken and demure. She had shoulder-length blonde hair and vague green eyes, and wore long flowing skirts that brushed against her calves. Dad's new partner wasn't a patch on my mum.
In the last chapter of her memoir, Clarke caps off her high school years with the bitter memory of her father leaving her mother for another woman. In this passage, Clarke comments on how her and her siblings' relationship with their father was strained afterward, their occasional visits only lasting a day. Without overtly stating her race, Clarke also describes her father's new partner in a way that implies the woman is white—a complicated additional layer of Bordy's betrayal.
My children's early ancestors were part of the Atlantic slave trade. They were dragged screaming from their homes in West Africa and chained by their necks and ankles, deep in the moldy hulls of slave ships—destined to become free labor for the New World. If slaves were lucky, they died in transit to the Caribbean—bodies thrown overboard, washed clean of the blood, sweat and feces in which they'd slept most of the harrowing journey. If they survived, they found themselves mid-nightmare: put to work on the harshest plantations on earth, at the hands of some of the cruelest masters in the history of the Atlantic slave trade.
My children are the descendants of those unbroken.
In the epilogue, Clarke returns to her present-day life, detailing an anecdote in which a white petrol station attendant makes her feel uncomfortable by referring to her as "you people." Clarke concludes her memoir by asserting her and her children's heritage as descendants of West African slaves. In this passage, she repeats a paragraph from the prologue that details the injustices those ancestors endured as they fought for survival. Clarke references this legacy of being "unbroken" to suggest that her children, no matter what forms of racism they encounter while growing up, are strong enough to persevere because they are descended from people who lived through some of the worst treatment imaginable.
