Cirrus@Austlit

'Maxine Beneba Clarke is an African-Caribbean Australian writer, the award-winning author of many books across a range of genres and a distinguished slam poet. In her long poetic memoir “demerara sugar”, she addresses the trauma, politics, genres and sites of intergenerational memory of plantation slavery and its legacies. With the prefix “after” in afterlives of slavery, the essay draws out aspects of Clarke’s project: representing the wake of slavery; going in search of memory of the lived experience of enslavement; finding new routes of memory work. Her routes take her from Melbourne to London, Liverpool and Birmingham, through slavery museums, archives, family interview, city streets and air and train journeys. This essay addresses the dynamics of haunting, rememory, and (un)belonging in the poem by exploring the chronotopes of the museum/archive and the city street.' (Publication abstract)