Many of Foreign Soil’s stories feature displaced characters coming to grips with past and present traumas. The opening story, “David,” tells the story of a Sudanese woman (Asha) who watched soldiers shoot down her young son during a period of civil conflict. “The Stilt Fishermen of Kathaluwa” tells the story of Asanka, a young Sri Lankan boy forced to join the Liberation Tigers, a paramilitary group that made him commit unspeakable acts of violence. Asanka suffers doubly when Australian government officials intercept his boat as he tries to flee the Tigers and holds him in an immigration center indefinitely. But Asanka doesn’t get a happy ending: he’s repeatedly let down by systems meant to help him, and he continues to suffer from hallucinations and unresolved trauma from his time as a child soldier. Foreign Soil underscores the lasting impact of trauma while also celebrating the strength and vigor of people who have maintained a hope for the future in the face of unspeakable trauma and hardship. It examines immigrant characters’ ability to push forward in the face of hardship, as well as the endless hurdles that marginalized people, and in particular immigrants and refugees, endure to do so. Foreign Soil thus presents an account of the immigrant story, conveying not only the hope and optimism that propels people into the scary unknown, but also the immense suffering and struggle involved in that quest for a better life. The collection doesn’t suggest that having a positive attitude will fix larger scale issues like institutionalized racism, class disparity, and other roadblocks that make it hard for immigrants to succeed in their new homes. Instead, it underscores the foundation of hope that lies at the base of all immigrant stories while also examining its limitations. While hope can compel characters to abandon everything they’ve known for the chance to improve their life, the collection suggests that it’s not enough to mitigate the hardship immigrants, minorities, and other people living at the margins of society endure due to underlying, issues like systemic racism, unjust immigration policies, and prejudice.
Related Themes from Other Texts
The Limitations of Hope ThemeTracker
The Limitations of Hope 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.
Mr. Lucas, crooning to his daughter’s future-crop with a deep, velvety calypso as he tended the plot after the rains, noticed the disease when, starting at the outer edges, the jade-green leaves started to yellow. Within two weeks the tiny Panama freckles expanded to dark pockmarks, and the man knew his daughter’s dreams were in trouble.
As Willemina’s health deteriorated, it became clear that the young girl was being groomed to take over the sewing shop. Staffing the shop by day and working on alterations in the early evenings, baby Eddison slung tightly around her chest, Millie never had time to stop and think about whether the shop was the good fortune she had wanted for herself. At least, not until the day Winston turned up again.
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.
My blackness was the hulking beast crouched in the corner of every room, and absolutely nothing was going to make it seem cool.
Wondrous as she seemed, Shu Yi wasn’t a problem I wanted to take on. Besides, with her arrival my own life had become easier: Melinda and the others hadn’t come looking for me in months. At home, my thankful mother had finally taken the plastic undersheet off my bed.
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.
Solomon hated her, and he hated himself. He wanted that key in his pocket. De Frankie was right about him. Much as the thirst kept rising in him, it lulled and peaked, dipped and climbed. And when Solomon’s commitment wavered, Babylon came a-calling.
Denver ain’t her no more. He jus the man her best friend Izzy married then split from. He jus somebody she used-a know, long time ago. The real her was born when she came to Orleans. Real her is Delores.
Same everytin but yet, somehow, it nyah de same anymore at all. It big-big change. Since J fe Jamaica, everytin aroun Nathanial seem like it nyah quite de same. Since J fe Jamaica, de ocean bin callin’, nyah calmin’, de young man.
It a usual Saturday mornin’. Nuttin’ odd or outta place. De city below fidgetin’ no more an no less dan usual. But dis mornin’, somehow, someway, fe some reason, wen Nathanial Robinson gaze ovah de city im grow te love so-so dear, Kingston feel insignificant small. R. R is fe restlessness.
The head doctor said there was no blood, that he would never be locked in a chest or a fish hold again. But then the head doctor had walked out of here, left him behind, in the chest.
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.
Tears stream down her face as she watches the cameras flashing and microphones jostling at the other end of the parking lot, where the razor-wire fence adjoins the visiting area. The Mazda windows are closed, but she can still get the gist of the press conference spin. Hopelessness burrows into her chest again, its fingernails digging into her lungs, slowly squeezing the air out.
Fuck Sam, fuck having a baby, fuck her new job, and fuck this stupid fucking car. Loretta doesn’t even know who her husband is anymore. She’s even more uncertain of why she’s sitting here, crying about her husband, in this of all places.
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.
This story is not going to be sent out, in any case. Most likely never even completed. Certainly not published and read. Because Avery is hanging upside down, and it will all end in tragedy. The only way down is for a scared little girl to hurt herself. I do not know how to rescue Avery gently.
