"Foreign Soil" and Other Stories Literary Elements

Short Stories/World Literature

Australia, Sudan, England, Jamaica, and Mississippi. The multiple settings are all connected through the context of being stories about the global disenfranchised.

The narrative voice varies from third-person to first-person perspective viewpoint throughout. In some case, the author plays around with mechanics of perspective. “Harlem Jones” for instance is narrated in the third-person present tense whereas “Big Islan” is conveyed by a third-person narrator speaking in heavily Jamaican dialect as if it were being in the first-person. The final story in the collection is commingling of narrative perspectives.

The tone of these stories is paradoxically upbeat against the backdrop of a pessimistic mood.

Protagonist: The disenfranchised outsider. Antagonist: The forces of power acting against the interest of those powerless outsiders.

The primary conflict is implicated in the title. The protagonists of the stories find themselves either literally or metaphorically situated into a place where they are a foreign outsider struggling to navigate the corridors of power and understanding.

The stories are each designed to the statis in which outsiders continually find themselves and the stories reflect that persistence movement at the expense of forward progression with endings that are purposely anti-climactic.

The title foreshadows the entire collection. The stories take place on the soil that is foreign to the author the Sudan to Jamaica and from Mississippi to Brixton. Foreign soil is also used metaphorically as the foundation for the storylines.

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The entire story of “Harlem Jones” revolves around an allusion to the real-life incident in 2011 when British police shot and killed a young black man named Mark Duggan.

The outsider looking in theme that permeates throughout the collection is powerfully illustrated in the imagery which opens the story “Shu Yi.” “It was typical everyone-knows-everyone-else’s-business-and-can-I-borrow-a-cup-of-milk-for-the-kids’-breakfast-please suburban blond-brick Australia. The white-picket-fence dream was alive, kicking its calloused toes determinedly against apathy in rubber Franklin thongs.

The character of Harlem Jones is presented paradoxically. In the story that bears his name as the title, he is a fictional character situated into a realistic story with a historical background intent on lending him a sense of actual existence. In the collection’s final story, “The Sukiyaki Book Club” Harlem Jones pop up again but specifically as a fictional creator of the writer who is the protagonist of that story.

The narrator of the story “David” uses the power of repetition in parallel construction to cement the recurring theme implicated in the title by drawing attention to foundation aspect of outsiders coming into conflict with natives while on foreign soil. Throughout the story, the narrator makes a sardonic observation that always includes a variation of a certain phrase: “These children, born in this country, do you think they feed their babies the aseeda for breakfast?... These children that born here in this country, they so disrespectful… These children, born in this country, they doing the sex and having babies and then not even wanting get marry.”

The phrase “We are all Mark Duggan” which is repeated as a call to arms in “Harlem Jones” is transformed into a metonym standing for all the victims of excessive police force and racism.

The narrator of “Shu Yi” uses personification to implicate her skin pigment as the epicenter of her social conflicts: “My blackness was the hulking beast crouched in the corner of every room, and absolutely nothing was going to make it seem cool.”