Foreign Soil

by

Maxine Beneba Clarke

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Foreign Soil: Foreign Soil Summary & Analysis

Summary
Analysis
While Ange’s boyfriend Mukasa speaks in Luganda to the woman at the customs desk, Ange walks off to find a bathroom. A man wearing an Entebbe International Airport uniform approaches her. The man orders her to pay him. Ange doesn’t know what she’s paying for, and she only has Australian currency on her, but she takes a five-dollar note from her purse and gives it to the man. Then he leaves.
Luganda is a Bantu language native to Uganda, and Entebbe International Airport is located in central Uganda. It’s fishy that the man in the uniform is ordering Ange to pay him, and it seems that he’s trying to scam her. That Ange has only Australian currency on her suggests that she’s Australian—and thus, that she’s a foreigner in a strange land. She further demonstrates her unfamiliarity and unease with her surroundings when she fails to recognize the man’s scam for what it is and gives in to his demands readily. 
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Ange finds a bathroom. When she exits, a second uniformed man approaches her. He heard that Ange gave his friend money, and now he wants some too. Just then, the driver sees what’s going on and calls for Ange, claiming that Ange’s “husband” wants her. When she corrects him—Mukasa is her boyfriend—he gives her a judgmental look. Ange begs the driver not to tell Mukasa that she gave the men money.
The second man’s approach makes it clear that he and his associate have identified Ange as a clueless and scared foreigner who will be easy to scam and manipulate. Ange further betrays her unfamiliarity with her current surroundings when she reveals that Mukasa is her boyfriend, not her husband—based on the driver’s judgmental look, it’s probable that traveling with a man who isn’t one’s family or husband is unacceptable in this culture.
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The narrative flashes back to the day Ange met Mukasa, when Mukasa he came into her hair salon. Penelope, Ange’s coworker, doesn’t want to cut Mukasa’s hair, since she’s never worked on Black hair before, so Dean, another coworker, makes Ange do it. Ange is nervous as she leads the large, six-foot man into a seat. He laughs and tells her to just use a three blade all around. He speaks in perfect English but has a mild accent. Normally Ange doesn’t like to chat with customers, but with Mukasa, she does: she longs to hear his melodic, beautiful voice.
Not only are Ange and Mukasa from different places, but they’re also of different racial backgrounds: Mukasa is Black, and Ange seems to be white. And already, Ange seems to be hyper-aware of their differences, fixating on Mukasa’s accent, physical evidence of the “foreign soil” from which he hails. 
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Ange asks Mukasa where he’s from—then immediately feels like an idiot for calling attention to his Blackness. Mukasa seems lightly annoyed, and Ange hurriedly apologizes and says he doesn’t need to answer. After a few beats, he laughs and tells her to ask him something else. Ange giggles and asks Mukasa why he chose this salon, and Mukasa explains that it’s the first place that would even agree to cut his Black hair. After Ange finishes Mukasa’s buzzcut, which was actually quite an easy job, he asks her to have dinner with him that night. Ange is elated; she’s always felt out of place her in her boring life, and now, she has “a chance at something remarkable.” 
The narrative portrays Ange as a well-meaning but ignorant character. On the one hand, her embarrassment at rudely calling attention to Mukasa’s Blackness shows that she understands how alienated and othered Mukasa must feel as a Ugandan Black man living in Australia—and that she doesn’t want to contribute to those negative feelings. At the same time, though, her thought that Mukasa can give her “a chance at something remarkable” exoticizes and objectifies Mukasa. In effect, she is once more reducing Mukasa to his race and culture, failing to see the person who exists separate of these things. 
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Back in the present, it’s miserably hot and humid at the airport, and Ange’s trendy haircut, a “farewell present” from her coworkers at the salon, has fallen flat. Ange and Mukasa are waiting in line at the customs desk. Mukasa is annoyed—he doesn’t like to wait—not “for anything.”
Symbolically, the flattened “farewell” haircut represents Ange’s deflated power and agency. In Australia, her home country, her familiarity with the local culture and her network of supportive friends empowered her. Here, she’s out of the loop, deflated, and vulnerable. Ange’s cryptic remark about Mukasa not liking to wait “for anything” hints that there’s perhaps more tension in their relationship than she’s yet to let on.
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Ange recalls how upset Mukasa was when they stopped by her parents’ (Ange’s mum and Ange’s dad) house the night they left Australia. He stayed in the car while Ange said goodbye. Afterward, he complained about having to wait 35 minutes. When Ange said he could’ve just come inside with her, he replied, “What for? So I could listen to your parents weep about me abducting you to the end of civilization?” Ange was dumfounded; Mukasa was usually so gentle and nice. She told herself he was just stressed out: he hadn’t been home for four years, he’d been working nonstop to ensure that the hospital opened on time, and his parents died in a car crash when he was a teenager. 
Note that it’s important to remember that she’s an unreliable narrator—readers only get her perspective, unlike in other stories with multiple narrators (like “David”). Based on the details that Ange has provided, Mukasa’s anger at having to wait for Ange to say goodbye to her parents—and his refusal to see them in the first place—seems totally blown out of proportion. But Mukasa’s defensive remark suggests he has real reasons for being upset—reasons that Ange doesn’t quite seem to grasp. He’s implying that Ange’s parents see his country—and by extension him—as uncivilized and unsuitable for their daughter.  
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At the airport, Ange and Mukasa have finally reached the customs desk. Mukasa snaps at Ange to check her suitcase. Ange removes the contents of her suitcase and finds that her jewelry and the souvenirs she got for Mukasa’s family are missing. Mukasa angrily removes his wallet and hands the officer a wad of cash. The officer takes the suitcase to a backroom. Mukasa grumbles about the country “going to the dogs.” Ange feels guilty about it, but she’s happy to hear Mukasa talk this way; she’s been worried that he’ll want to stay in his country forever. Though she loves Mukasa and wants to be with him, she doesn’t want to give up her old life to live in a strange place. The customs officer returns just then with Ange’s fully packed suitcase.
Ange is delighted to hear Mukasa’s disparaging remarks about having to bribe the customs workers to return Ange’s valuables because it suggests that he, like Ange, would prefer to return to Australia. Ange’s anxieties about not wanting to live in a strange place are understandable, of course, but note that she never even considers that Mukasa might feel the same way about Australia. This passage not only reveals more of Ange’s subtle prejudices (she takes for granted that a person would rather engage with her native culture than Mukasa’s), and it also gives yet another hint that Ange doesn’t know Mukasa as well as she thinks she does.
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Once Ange’s parents (Ange’s mum and Ange’s dad) learned Mukasa was African, they didn’t want anything to do with him. Ange doesn’t think they’re racist—it’s just that they expected their only daughter to end up with someone different. She remembers how, after she and Mukasa had been dating for two years, Ange’s dad randomly called her to invite her and Mukasa to dinner. At dinner, Ange’s parents put on a show of being nice. But then her father got drunk and made a comment about families wanting to have children “that look like them.”
Ange’s experiences bar her from empathizing with Mukasa. In rejecting Mukasa on the basis of his being African, Ange’s parents are being racist. And her father’s comment about wanting grandchildren “that look like them” is further evidence of this. Ange’s refusal to admit that her parents are prejudiced is troubling. Perhaps her familiarity with them—her experiences of them being loving and kind with her—blind her to the ugly realities of their prejudices.  
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Ange apologized to Mukasa as she walked him out to his car, but he told her things went about as well as he expected. When Ange went back inside, Ange’s mum asked how Mukasa could afford such a nice car. When Ange snapped back that Mukasa is a doctor, her parents couldn’t believe it. 
It's telling that Ange’s parents’ behavior seems to have shocked Ange—meanwhile Mukasa expected the scene to go the way it did. Living as an outsider has taught Mukasa to expect ostracization and prejudice from others.  
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Back in the present, it’s been about a month since Ange first arrived in Uganda, and she still struggles to find her way around and is afraid of getting lost. All the beggars and hawkers that roam the city streets disgust her—and then she feels bad about feeling bad. Mukasa scoffs at Ange, stating that this is what real poverty looks like. Ange doesn’t know why Mukasa acts as though she’s the privileged one when in fact he’s the one who grew up rich: even now, he has many servants in Makerere, though it’s just the two of them living there. Ange thinks it’s silly to hire help, but Mukasa says that people will judge him for not hiring enough servants. He tells her she’ll understand how life works here one day. 
Mukasa seems to take pleasure in pointing out Ange’s ignorance about Uganda. Increasingly, it seems that their different ethnic, racial, and national backgrounds have made their relationship fundamentally unequal. And because they’ve spent most of their time together living in Ange’s home country, she’s only now experiencing what it’s like to be the partner whose outsider status makes them feel perpetually disoriented, alienated, and alone.
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Mukasa leaves for work first thing in the morning and doesn’t return until eight at night. He tells Ange that things will get better once the hospital is open, but it’s been three months now, and nothing has changed. When Ange calls Ange’s mum, Penelope, and Dean, she lies and says she’s having a great time. Alone with her thoughts all day, she realizes that she and Mukasa haven’t ever spent long periods of time together. Even when they were living together in Australia, he was always busy with work. Now, she’s wondering if she really knows him—“if the real Mukasa Kiteki was another country entirely,” and if their relationship has simply “been carried out with the choreographed care and watchfulness brought on by foreign soil.”
When Ange wonders “if the real Mukasa Kiteki [is] another country entirely,” she’s consciously meditating on how geography has shaped Mukasa’s character and their relationship. She’s suggesting that the person he was in Australia wasn’t his natural self but rather a person he constructed “with the choreographed care and watchfulness brought on by foreign soil.” Put differently, she’s suggesting that Mukasa, in wanting to experience as little discrimination as possible, created an alter ego to assimilate into Australian culture—and this ego bled into his relationship with Ange, too. She’s wondering if not knowing Mukasa in his home country means she’s never even known him at all. 
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Ange looks at a Bukedde newspaper. She struggles to learn Luganda, but it’s practically all Mukasa has spoken since returning to Uganda. Whenever Mukasa has long, drawn-out conversations with her in Luganda, Lucinda, the housekeeper, sometimes shoots Ange timid, apologetic looks. Now, Ange gets out of bed and walks into the kitchen; Lucinda is there cutting meat. Ange, speaking English, asks Lucinda if she needs any help. Lucinda says no, explaining, “The Doctor would not like it.” Angie shrugs and retorts that “the Doctor” can be “a pompous arsehole sometimes.” Lucinda freezes. But then her eyes meet Ange’s, and the two of them laugh. Ange invites Lucinda to drink waragi with her later. Lucinda looks afraid, but Ange tells her Mukasa has a late meeting.
Ange’s struggle is understandable—a tonal language, Luganda is especially difficult for speakers unfamiliar with tonal languages to learn. At the same time, though, she still fails to relate her present alienation to the alienation Mukasa must have experienced while they were living in Australia. Also, while this friendly interaction with Lucinda seems like a positive turning point in Ange’s story, Lucinda’s intense fear at the thought of Mukasa catching her for doing something wrong is concerning—it further suggests that Ange’s reading of Mukasa as kind and gentle is far from the truth.
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Later, Lucinda and Ange chat and drink waragi. Lucinda has removed her headscarf and looks much younger. Lucinda, loosened by the alcohol, admits that she’s surprised that Ange has stayed: she doesn’t seem happy here, and she’s not married to Mukasa, so nothing is keeping her here. Lucinda explains that her family has worked for Mukasa’s family for a long time, and she knows from experience how “very persuasive” the Doctor can be.
Waragi refers to a type of distilled beverage. Lucinda’s remark about Mukasa being “very persuasive” is troubling—it implies that he is manipulative and perhaps even abusive. Meanwhile, Lucinda’s surprise at Ange having stayed implicitly ties Ange’s racial and national background with opportunity: as a white, Australian woman of some means, she’s afforded the freedom to make decisions about her life that perhaps Lucinda is not.
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Just then, Mukasa walks through the front door. In English, he berates Lucinda for not doing the work he’s paying her to do. Lucinda’s fear seems to please him. Ange realizes Mukasa yelled in English so that she could understand what he was saying. Lucinda hurries out to finish cooking dinner, and Mukasa quietly tells Ange not to interact with the servants. Ange feels sick to her stomach. 
That Lucinda’s fear pleases Mukasa is further evidence of his abusive, manipulative nature. It’s also striking that he scolds her in English, which he’s never done before, so that Ange can understand him—he seems to want Ange to feel bad about the pain and trouble she’s caused Lucinda by encouraging Lucinda to break Mukasa’s rules for servants.
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When Mukasa, drunk, joins Ange in bed later that night, Ange pretends to be asleep; she’s been crying for hours. He gets close and touches her under the sheets. When Ange tells him she’s not in the mood and tries to push him away, he rapes her. Ange realizes it’s not Mukasa before her—it’s “a masked man, nothing behind his face but urge.”
Ange continues to be in denial about Mukasa’s abusive tendencies. She thinks the Mukasa who rapes her is “a masked man,” as in, a false Mukasa. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that this abusive, violent man is who Mukasa really is—and Ange was too at-home in her native Australia, and Mukasa, too disempowered, to make this clear.     
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Ange remembers the first time she saw Mukasa naked. They’d been dating for six months and still hadn’t had sex. Penelope had been teasing Ange with stereotypes about Black men having large penises. Though Penelope’s joking had once amused Ange, she eventually grew tired of it. Mukasa was always polite with her, never trying to initiate sex, but she worried that the real reason was that he wasn’t attracted to her thin, white body—the African women she’d met through Mukasa, by contrast, were “bult like real women.” Then one day, Ange got tipsy and found the courage to initiate sex herself. They had sex, and it was so good, it rendered Ange speechless.
Racial stereotypes and differences have dominated Mukasa and Ange’s relationship from the start. Mukasa, perhaps wary of playing into Penelope’s suggested stereotype of Black men being more satisfying sexual partners, has held off on initiating sex. Meanwhile, Ange’s sexualization of Black women’s bodies renders her too insecure to initiate sex either. When they finally do have sex and it apparently renders Ange speechless, it’s a metaphor for the way the couple leave unspoken the racial differences that harm their relationship.
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Back in the present, the morning after Mukasa forced himself on Ange, Mukasa tells Ange that he fired Lucinda—now, it’s Ange’s job to do the cooking and cleaning. Then he kisses her on the cheek and leaves. Ange is horrified and fantasizes about taking a cab to the airport and jumping on the first plane home. But she can’t leave: she loves Mukasa and is determined to make things work. She feels sick to her stomach when she remembers what Mukasa did to her last night, but she tells herself that man wasn’t Mukasa. She just needs to dig beneath the surface and find the kind man she fell in love with.  
Mukasa is being undeniably abusive at this point. Not only has he sexually assaulted Ange, but in firing Lucinda and ordering Ange to do domestic labor, he’s further alienating Ange from the outside world and taking advantage of her. As a victim of abuse, Ange is obviously a sympathetic character. And while her deluded belief this abusive Mukasa isn’t the real Mukasa may be viewed as a response to trauma, metaphorically, it underscores how Ange has objectified and dehumanized Mukasa for the entirety of their relationship: in Australia, he was a docile, subdued foreign man she could use as an accessory to make her life more exotic and interesting. Here, now that Ange is the one who is on “foreign soil” and Mukasa is the empowered one, Ange’s deluded view of Mukasa starts to crumble. 
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Ange gets dressed in an outfit that Mukasa loves, and then she trims her hair; she’d asked Mukasa to find a salon that does Western cuts, but he says they’re hard to come by. She realizes that she hasn’t made herself up like this in a long time—she never leaves the house these days—and reasons that this must be why Mukasa has started to take her for granted.
In the story, hair represents the intersection between race, nationality, and power. In Australia, Mukasa, as a Black man, struggled to find a hair salon that would cut his Black hair, just one example of the ways in which his outsider status subjected him to prejudice and alienation. Now, in Uganda, it’s Ange who can’t find a place that caters to Western (white) cuts, and it’s also Ange who feels alienated, alone, and disempowered.
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Ange’s breasts have swollen and become rounder, and her stomach is starting to show, too. She estimates that she’s about four months pregnant now—which means she can’t put off telling Mukasa for much longer. She plans to tell him in two weeks, once they’ve booked their tickets for their first trip back to Australia. Ange likes having this secret—it makes her feel empowered, which is rare these days. Mukasa is at work all day. She’s been in Kampala for eight months and hasn’t met anyone besides Mukasa’s colleagues and family. When she mentions this to Mukasa, he regards her “suspiciously.”
That Ange is waiting to tell Mukasa about the pregnancy until they return to Australia symbolizes their shifting power dynamics. Australia empowers her: she’s not a racial minority, and she’s surrounded by supportive friends and family and a familiar culture that comforts her there. In Uganda, though, she has none of this; here, Mukasa holds all the power, and Ange has no means to defend or protect herself if he reacts to the news negatively—which is likely, given his “suspicious[]” response to her simple request to socialize.
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Ange’s passport went missing from the bedside drawer three weeks ago. She reasoned that Mukasa must have taken it to his safe at work and told herself there was nothing to worry about. She hasn’t mentioned the passport to Mukasa because she doesn’t want to argue. Plus, she’s sure that Mukasa didn’t take it for nefarious reasons—he loves her. And besides, not asking about it will prove to Mukasa that she’s happy where she is and doesn’t want to go anywhere.
Not only has Mukasa cut off Ange socially, but in stealing her passport, he’s also ensured that she has no way to leave Uganda. Still, Ange continues to delude herself, reasoning that there must be a benign, non-abusive explanation for Mukasa taking her passport. But in a way, Ange’s powerlessness leaves her with no choice but to make excuses for Mukasa: he might be abusive, but he’s the most familiar face in a foreign land full of unfamiliar (and thus, threatening) people and social practices. Just as being on “foreign soil” made Mukasa submissive to Ange in Australia, being an outsider in Uganda makes Ange beholden to Mukasa. 
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Mukasa returns home for dinner at seven—early, for him. After multiple failures, Ange has successfully baked millet bread from an old African cookbook she found in the back of the pantry. Ange never cooked much before, but now she spends all day cooking special meals for Mukasa. 
Once more, being in Mukasa’s home country have inverted the power dynamic of Ange and Mukasa’s relationship. Now, it’s Ange who takes on a gentle, subservient role and must assimilate to an unfamiliar culture, as evidenced by Ange’s desperate attempts to cook African meals.  
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Mukasa and Ange are seated at the table. Mukasa eats the stew, and Ange “wait[s] for his nod of approval.” But instead, he asks if she’s been keeping the pregnancy from him—or if she’s so stupid that she hasn’t even realized it herself. “That’s what I get for marrying a fucking hairdresser,” he snaps. Ange loses it; she tells him they aren’t married—and even if they were, he still wouldn’t have a right to treat her this way.
In Australia, Ange’s power relative to Mukasa had nothing to do with her profession: though she was a hairdresser and he, a doctor, her status as an Australian citizen and white woman was enough to grant her special privileges. Mukasa’s slip about he and Ange being married is striking but vague in its implications. It could be that his new power over Ange makes him feel that he owns her, in a way—that she’s his wife. 
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Mukasa stands, his face a contorted, angry mess. Before Ange has time to react, he throws his bowl of stew across the room, then he throws her to the floor and grabs her by her hair. Ange is frozen with terror, and she struggles to breathe. Mukasa moves close to her face and growls at her to know her place. After he gets up, Ange remains on the floor, terrified that he’ll attack her again. She hears the door slam shut, followed by the car starting up.
Hair, in this scene, returns as a symbol of power. In Australia, Mukasa’s Black hair—which nobody else would work on—placed him under Ange’s control. Now, cut off from the people, culture, and land that are familiar to her, Ange is under Mukasa’s thumb, and he reminds her of this when he grips her hair and demands that she remember her place.
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Ange closes her eyes and sees the African continent. She imagines the borders of landlocked Uganda. She realizes that there’s nowhere to run to: “Every escape would be ever more foreign soil.”
Visualizing landlocked Uganda underscores Ange’s powerlessness—no matter which direction she runs, she’ll be an outsider, unable to turn to the familiar for comfort or security.
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