Though the characters of Foreign Soil come from different countries, class backgrounds, and time periods, they all experience conflicts that arise from a failure to communicate effectively with others—and the misunderstandings that result from these lapses in communication. People misunderstand people for many reasons. Sometimes, it’s a language barrier: a character literally can’t understand what the other person is trying to tell them. Other times, characters choose to make assumptions about others instead of communicating with them and trying to understand where they’re coming from. In the collection’s opening story, “David,” a young Sudanese woman thinks an older Sudanese woman (Asha) is judging her for riding a bicycle and for putting her young son in daycare, insinuating that being born in Melbourne (as opposed to Sudan) has degraded the younger woman’s morals and sense of responsibility. In reality, the older woman is more interested in the younger woman’s bike: in flashbacks to the woman’s past in war-torn Sudan, the story reveals that the woman’s son David, who used to love riding his bike, was shot down while trying to flee his village during the Sudanese civil war. In making assumptions about the older woman, the younger one fails to understand the grief and unresolved trauma that is actually motivating the older woman to ask so many questions about the younger woman’s bike and child. But when the younger woman takes a step back and lets the older woman ride her bike, they experience a moment of unspoken understanding that allows them both to alleviate some of their hardship, if only for that moment. Foreign Soil thus frames misunderstanding as a “universal” conflict that is part of the fundamental human experience. The collection suggests that no matter where a person is from or what kind of cultural background they grew up with, everyone has a history and inner life that others might not necessarily know about. And this, in turn, means that rather than making snap judgments and perpetuating stereotypes, people should practice empathy and understanding to engage in effective communication.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Communication and Misunderstanding ThemeTracker
Communication and Misunderstanding Quotes in Foreign Soil
These children, born in this country, do you think they feed their babies the aseeda for breakfast? Do they drop it on the little one’s tongue to show them where is it they come from? Do you think they have learned to cook shorba soup? I tell you: no! They feeding them all kinds of rubbish. McDonald’s, even. They spit on their grandmothers’ ways. They spit in our bowls, in our kitchens.
I felt awkward, had no idea what she was talking about, but felt like I was somehow supposed to. Auntie took up her grocery bag from the ground, smoothed some dirt from her skirt, walked away slowly, down toward West Footscray Station.
I stood there for a minute, staring after her. The rain had stopped. A small puddle of water had settled in the baby seat. Nile would be getting testy. It was half an hour past when I usually collected him. I threw my leg over the bike, started pedaling down the street. The Barkly Star was a dream to maneuver—smooth gliding, killer suspension, sharp brakes. Felt like I was hovering above the wet tar, flying. Like there was nothing else in the world except me and my wheels. David. I slowly rolled her brand-new name around in my mouth.
Harlem can’t look at her. She makes him too fuckin’ irate. She always dumps on his dad whenever Harlem does anything wrong. Ten years since the man pissed off, and she still can’t stop slagging on him. Harlem flexes his trembling fingers. He wants to fuckin’ strangle her, his own mother, who gave birth to him. Really strangle the woman. He wants to wrap his fingers firmly around that fat neck and squeeze until her face goes purple.
Harlem flicks the lighter on with his thumb, holds the flame up in front of his face. “My name,” he says, “is not son. My name, my fuckin’ name, is Harlem fuckin’ Jones.” Holding the neck of the Molotov, he touches the flame to it and quickly pulls back his arm.
Millie had heard stories about the root of Aunt Willemina’s wealth. About the wealthy Haitian man with a wife and children who had set her up on the strip with her own sewing shop in her own name when she had been feisty and beautiful. She took the older woman’s speech for half a lifetime of regret.
All her life, Ange had felt she didn’t belong to the drudgery around her, to her ordinary world. But here, right in front of her, was a chance at something remarkable.
She began to wonder if the real Mukasa Kiteki was another country entirely, whether what happened between them had always been carried out with the choreographed care and watchfulness brought on by foreign soil.
The other girl had offered him a lift home in the car her father had bought her, the leather seats cold under his furious hands as she batted those long brown eyelashes at him. They’d parked behind the Tech. He’d gone at her gentle, not like the other one, but it soon became clear it was all an experiment. Egyptian eyes, she’d called them, Medusan hair. Until Solomon had felt dissected, scalpel-carved on the ethnographer’s table and no more than the sum of his African-originated parts. He had been a foreign country she was apprehensive about visiting but itching to explore. He’d felt her filing the fuck away to reminisce about when times were dull, postcard snippets of the exotic.
When Carter wriggle into the top, his whole body get to singin’. He stand up straight, look in the mirror. His mind unfog itself.
Delores put a hand on Ella’s shoulder, pull her back into the living room. “Quiet, chile. You gon scare him away! That pickney don’t know us from Adam.” But even as Delores say it, she know it ain’t true. Minute that chile an her lay eyes on each other, they gon know they kin. It’s gon feel like they finally home.
In this country, you look at a person and you know them. It is the inside-out way the people of this country wear their soul. In their eyes you can find civilizations of honesty or sweeping fields of lies. It’s taken some getting used to but now Asanka likes it—this casual unguardedness that comes from never really knowing fear.
The kid’s bottom lip is quivering. He raises his hand to the front rim of the faded blue Knicks cap, slowly removes it from his head, and rests it in his lap. His face is cherubic: cheeks rounder than Mirabel’s ever seen on a child his age. Wound tightly over his head is a piece of black, stretchy material. The material conceals the boy’s hair and twists around at the top to form a kind of covered-up bun.
Mirabel takes a sharp breath in, fear rising in her throat.
Sunni used to climb over from their apartment’s balcony to the balcony of Bill and Susie’s place. It was a cheeky thing he did: surprising them with a visit, sneaking in through the sliding balcony door to leave a drawing he’d done of them, or some cookies he and his maa had baked. After the bad men in planes, Bill and Susie had stopped looking after him, stopped looking at him with kindness in their old-person eyes. […]
The next week, old Bill and Susie had put plants up against the concrete divide where their balconies joined Sunni’s place. Sunni pointed the beautiful pink flowers out to his mother.
“You can’t climb over and visit anymore,” she’d said, her voice shaking. “They’re poisonous flowers. That’s oleander.”
Markie’s prep class performed the song for their school assembly item last year. The teacher taught them to sing it jovially, with an upbeat tempo, swaying with joy. “Sukiyaki,” his teacher had called it, the easier name the song was given when it reached Western shores. Even after we did the research on the history of the song and Markie presented it for Tuesday Show and Tell, the teacher still insisted on having the kids smile through it, as if they were singing “Happy Birthday”: a song about a man overwhelmed with despair.
