“Harlem Jones” by Maxine Beneba Clarke

 Maxine Beneba Clarke

Maxine Beneba Clarke is an Australian author and slam poet of Afro- Caribbean descent. Her short fiction collection Foreign Soil won the 2015 ABIA Award for Best Literary Fiction and the 2015 Indie Award for Best Debut Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize. 

"Harlem Jones" (link)

https://overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue-212/fiction-maxine-clarke/

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Harlem Jones

“Harlem Jones” is a short story named after the main character, published in 2013 and written by the Afro-American writer Maxine Beneba Clarke. It takes place in Harlem and deals with the problems derived from racism that black people have to go through every day.

Early in the text, we read how the police go to Harlem’s house because he has been accused of having death-threatened a co-worker. We need to bear in mind that the story it is set during the riots in Tottenham in 2011; therefore, when the narrator says “ He’s not Duggan,” she refers to Mark Duggan, the man who was shot by the police and whose death triggered the riots against police brutality, one of the main issues within the story. Of course, together with brutality we have institutional racism, something we all know about these days and which appears in many literary works from Afro-American writers because they have suffered it in their flesh.

An important feature which helps us create a mental image of the events is the language. The language is a powerful builder of realities and, thus, it has a huge transforming tool. The author chose to use informal language with many traces of slang in the black people’s vocabulary. Plus, there is a moment when a cop calls Harlem “son”, something which our main character disliked and answered saying “My name is not son. My name, my fucken name, is Harlem fucken Jones.” These words reflect the anger with which Harlem defens his identity, as a person, as a black person. It's also the anger and hatred towards the police that many black citizens feel, both in reality and in the story. This kind of language also represents the power relations, with the policeman talking to Harlem as though he were a 4-year-old kid in a patronizing and paternalistic way., which he angrily rejects.

By reading “Harlem Jones”, we draw several conclusions of what is like to be suffering racism on a daily basis in all its forms. What is even worse  is that this racism is coming many times from the institutions, which instead of eradicating it,  end up reinforcing it. This issue is currently more alive than ever with movements like Black Lives Matter, which are devoting to raising awareness about black people issues these days.