The story David from Foreign Soil by Maxine Beneba Clarke is a short story looking into the lives of a little boy's life in Sudan, the life of his mother now living in Melbourne, Australia, and a young single mother of Sudanese descent. The story displays the theme of how our personal stories are interwoven and that we are better because of this. Clarke explores the idea of our stories being interwoven and connected in many ways. Maxine Beneba Clarke weaves the story together purposefully; an example of this is "the shiny cherry red pedal bike," which is significant to two of the main characters for different reasons. The reason for the younger woman is that it’s been a childhood dream of hers to own a bike like that, and for Auntie, the significance of the bike is that it reminds her of her son David, who also owned a bike. The bike appears to be the reason the Auntie introduces herself to the younger woman, and they end up bonding over it. Auntie says how her bike reminds her of her son David, and she even ends up having a ride on it. This influences the younger woman to name the bike after her son David. Maxine Beneba Clarke's use of …show more content…
The author has used a technique called "intertextuality," This technique adds depth and an extra layer of progression to characters, and reinforces the theme that our stories are interwoven. An obvious example is how the bike came to be named David. In Auntie’s story, she recalls someone telling her son that "one day you will be so famous because of bike riding that they will name a beautiful bike after you." The story ends with the young girl naming her beautiful bike David after the aunt’s son. These quotes are taken from the two different story settings in the book and are connected as they support one another since a bike did end up being named after