“My name is not son. My name, my fuckin’ name, is Harlem fuckin’ Jones.”
Everything in the story named after its protagonist leads inexorably and perhaps inevitably to this final declaration of declaration of not just independence, but purpose of the angry young man who has seen enough and had enough and is fed up. It is not the final line of the story. There is one more which follows; something about a Molotov cocktail, an arm and a flame. The story ends just before things literally become incendiary, but the conflagration has been metaphorically burning inside young Mr. Jones throughout. For the first—but not the last—there is an almost direct connection between the stories in this collection and the music of the Clash. London’s burning here and later on it will become evident why one had to fear the guns of Brixton. This connection may be entirely coincidental, but like the punk band’s epic album London Calling, Foreign Soil and Other Stories is packed with fascinating characters like Harlem Jones caught in the glare of a flashbulb going off at a transformative moment in their lives.
This country was crouched deep in the Nile Basin, sloping its way down into the wet marshes of Lake Kyoga. On the other side, it curved back up to the green giant, Mount Rwenzori. Uganda was locked by land. South Sudan, Rwanda, or Tanzania were the farthest she could run. Every escape would be ever more foreign soil.
This actually is the last line of the title story. Just as this story is an appropriate choice to unify the collections’ myriad narratives, so is the final line an exclamation point to the wisdom of this decision. The stories here literally cover the globe: the Sudan, Jamaica, Australia, Brixton and New Orleans is quite a bit of territory to cover. Or, as it might also be called, quite a bit of foreign soil. The final paragraph of the title story finds the female protagonist who gave up everything in Australia to be with the love of her life as he headed back to Africa reveals the loneliness and isolation that occurs when love goes south. Geography plays a huge role in these stories and that includes the topographical layout of the human heart.
Same everytin but yet, somehow, it nyah de same anymore at all. It big-big change.
The Jamaican patois represented by the use of dialect in the narration of this story is an outlier. One need not fear addressing the book thinking this is the way all the stories are composed. The choice is specific; it is a story about communication and the realization that communication leads to knowledge. Knowledge, of course, leads to change. For the protagonist of the story, the illiterate Nathanial Robinson whose wife is teaching her husband the alphabet one letter at a time, one week per letter, this revelation is truly a big change; it is a complete revelation. And the revelation comes in an unexpected way via the sport of cricket. Even here the route to knowledge is circuitous enough to take a byway through South African via that country’s own representations in the Commonwealth’s other sport obsession.
Carter was dressed up in a lacy white blouse an pearls, balanced on a pair-a his gram’s old dress heels. His bangs were brushed down over his eyes an his lipstick was put on better than Jeanie could do—blotted even, it looked like.
The geographical landscape of this collection extends beyond setting to the story’s themes and subject matter. This particular story is also something of an outlier; it is the longest tale in the book, is set in the deep south of America and deals with the issue of sexuality. The conventions, expectations and dangers inherent of behaving apart from the norm are explored in the character of Carter. The ostensible focus of the story is on an older woman named Delores who is mourning following the recent passing of her old friend, Izzy. Carter is not just Izzy’s young surviving grandson, but he is a black boy living in Mississippi who has a fondness and a bravery for defying long-standing societal traditions which are especially expected to be upheld by those in the racial minority of such a place. Carter is in some ways very reminiscent of Harlem Jones. And in other ways, not at all reminiscent.
