Michelle CliffIntroduction

1
Michelle Cliff--Introduction

• born in Jamaica, educated in the US and UK and
  now resides in the USA
• list of works
• Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise
  (1980)--poetry collection
• Abeng (1984)--novel
• The Land of Look Behind (1985)poetry
• No Telephone to Heaven (1987)novel
• Bodies of Water (1990)short stories
• Free Enterprise (1993)novel
• The Store of a Million Items (1998)short stories

2
Cliff on Her Writing Career

• In my family it was really considered almost
  taboo to be a writer. It was too revelatory.
  There were too many secrets to be kept,
  especially as a girl or female.--at 13, her
  diary was been read out loud--did not write
  anything until her dissertation--started writing
  again around 30 (61)
• Most of my work has to do with revising
  revising the written record, what passes as the
  official version of history, and inserting those
  lives that have been left out. (71)--The Art of
  History --an interview with Judith Raiskin

3
Michelle Cliff--Major Themes

• gender, sexual, class, racial identities
• the issue of language
• the importance of history and oral culture
• colourism or color prejudice in Jamaica
• the issue of passing (129)
• Passing demands a desire to become invisible. A
  ghost-life. An ignorance of connections.
  Passing demands quiet. And from that
  quiet--silence. --Passing

4
Cliff on WWS

• Caliban speaks to Prospero, saying You taught
  me language, and my profit ont/ Is, I know how
  to curse.
• This line immediately brings to my mind the
  character of Bertha Rochester, wild and raving
  ragout, as Charlotte Brontë describes her,
  cursing and railing, more beast than human. It
  takes a West Indian writer, Jean Rhys, to
  describe Bertha from the inside rather than from
  the outside, keeping Berthas humanity, indeed
  her sanity as critic of imperialism, intact, as
  Gayatri Spivak has observed. (264)
  Clare Savage

5
The Meaning of Abeng

• Abeng is an African word meaning
  conch shell. The
  blowing of the conch
  called the slaves to the canefields
  in the West
  Indies. The abeng has another use
  it was the instrument
  used by the Maroon
  armies to pass their messages and reach
  one
  another. --Abeng

6
Characters in Abeng

• Samuel Judith Judge Savage
  (colonist) Albert Mattie
  (landed, red)
  Kitty Freeman Boy Savage
  Jennie Savage Clare
  Savage
• Miss Ruthie (squatter, black) Zoe
• Ben and Joshua
• the cane-cutter
• Mass Cudjoe
• Old Joe

7
The Hunting Episode

• the origin of the pig--the native of the island
• the Maroon ritual and gender differences
• the mongoose--legacy of colonial history
  (112)--the true survivor (113)--symbolic
  meaningabout hunting and survival how the
  natural habitat has been changed by colonial
  practices
• Does Clare enjoy killing wild animals? What is
  the symbolic meaning of this hunt for Clare?

8
Class and Gender Identities in Abeng

• Spivak on Antoinette and Tia--part of the
  thematics of Narcissus--Tia as the Other that
  could not be selfed because of the fracture of
  imperialism. (243)
• Zoe calls Clare town gal and is afraid of being
  thought of as Guinea warrior, not gal pickney.
  What kind of person is Zoe? What exactly is the
  point of her speech (117-118)? What is Clares
  reaction to Zoes speech?
• Clare as limited (119)
• the concept of property and ownership
  (121)Clares alienation from the native code
  unconscious of her own class privilege

9
Sexual Identity in Abeng

• What is the significance of the bathing scene
  (119-120, 124) in the episode? Why does Cliff
  follows it with a narration of battyman in Ch.
  16?
• How does the family describe the battyman
  Robert (125-126)? What has happened to him?
  What is the connection of Roberts story with the
  relationship between Clare and Zoe?

10
Clare and Zoe--Lesbianism?

• Kamau Brathwaite--"No matter what J Rhys might
  have made Antoinette think, Tia was historically
  separated from her by the ideological barriers
  embedded in the colonialist discourses of white
  supremacy."
• Like Antoinette and Tia, there is a clear class
  difference between Clare and Zoe. How will you
  characterize the relationship between Clare and
  Zoe? What is the significance of this class
  difference between them?

11
Lesbianism in the Caribbean Society

• MC--But for Caribbean women to love each other
  is different. Its not Vita Sackville-West and
  Virginia Woolf, its not Djuna Barnes or Natalie
  Barney, and its not Sappho.
• JR--You wanted Clare and Zoe. But then theres
  the class difference between them.
• MC--Yes. But it would be taking lesbianism
  away from those who want to stigmatize it as
  simply a sexual behavior between women that is
  seen as slightly decadent and upper class, or
  upper

12
Interview--on Lesbianism

• middle class, or male imitating, or mannish
  (which was a word that was used in my childhood).
  Putting it into a Caribbean setting as part of a
  womans self-definition, and as a way to value
  the female, which weve been taught so much to
  devalue, really makes it different. (69-70)
  --The Art of History
• Do you think Cliff is successful in changing the
  class-bound definition of lesbian relationship in
  Abeng?

13
Clares and Cliffs Sexual Identity

• ...Clare cant claim her sexuality. Shes not
  in a place where she can. Its a very
  interesting thing, because the lesbian subtext in
  Abeng was unconscious, at least I think it was.
  (601)
• Cliffs internalization of homophobia and her
  self-censorship--its having grown up in a
  society that is enormously homophobic and the
  fact that my mother disowned me for being gay.
  (604) --an interview with Meryl F. Schwartz

14
Clares Split Racial Identities

• Boys teaching of race and color and lightening
  (127)
• passing (129)
• Kittys cherish of darkness (127-128)keep
  darkness locked inside (129)melancholic
• Kittys preference for the darker daughter Jennie
  (129) and Clares sense of alienation from the
  mother (128) Clares love for Zoe
  (131)
• Kittys dream of setting up a local school
  (129-130)--her distrust of British education and
  love of black culture--Daffodils vs the Maroon
  Girl (129)

15
Clare Savage as a Crossroads Character

• Clare Savage is an amalgam of myself and others,
  who eventually becomes herself alone. Bertha
  Rochester is her ancestor.
• Her name, obviously, is significant and is
  intended to represent her as a crossroads
  character, with her feet (and head) in (at least)
  two worlds. Her first name means, signifies,
  light-skinned, which she is, and
  light-skinnedness in the world in which Clare
  originates, the island of Jamaica in the period
  of British hegemony, and to which she is
  transported, the United States in the 1960s, and

16
Clare Savage--2

• to which she transports herself, Britain in the
  1970s, stands for privilege, civilization,
  erasure, forgetting. She is not meant to curse,
  or rave, or be a critic of imperialism. She is
  meant to speak softly and keep her place.
• Her surname is self-explanatory. It meant to
  evoke the wilderness that has been bleached from
  her skin, understanding that my use of the word
  wilderness is ironic, mocking the masters
  meaning, turning instead to a sense of
  non-Western values which are empowering and
  essential to survival, her survival, and
  wholeness.

17
Clare Savage 3

• A knowledge of history, the past, has been
  bleached from her mind, just as the rapes of her
  grandmothers are bleached from her skin. And
  this bleached skin is the source of her privilege
  and her power, too, she thinks, for she is a
  colonized child.
• She is a light-skinned female who has been
  removed from her homeland in a variety of ways
  and whose life is a movement back, ragged,
  interrupted, uncertain, to that homeland. She is
  fragmented, damaged, incomplete. (264-5)

18
Languages--English and Patois

• What kind of language is Zoe using? What is the
  significance of different languages in the novel?
• On several occasions in the hunting episode,
  Clare has dropped her patois and switch to
  standard English (122, 134). What is the
  significance of this switch of linguistic codes?

19

• Grandmother Figure--In Abeng and No Telephone to
  Heaven Cliff tries to show the power,
  particularly the spiritual authority, of the
  grandmother as well as her victimization. Hers
  is a power directly related to landscape,
  gardens. This powerful aspect of the
  grandmother originates in Nanny, the African
  warrior and Maroon leader.
• At her most powerful, the grandmother is the
  source of knowledge, magic, ancestors, stories,
  healing practices, and food. She is an
  inheritor of African belief systems, African
  languages. She may be informed with àshe, the
  power to make things happen, the responsibility
  to mete justice. (266-7)

20
Narrative Form and Economy

• Is there anything special about the narrative
  form in the novel?
• fragmented narrative formShe has recourse to a
  textual economy of small plots that seems to
  correspond to the economy of small plot farming
  that maroon slaves used to engage in. (335)
  Lionnet Françoise--small plots vs plantations