Stories of Growth: Caribbean Women Writers (1)

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Stories of Growth Caribbean Women Writers (1)

• Michelle Cliff

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Outline

• Caribbean Women Writers Major Themes
• Michelle Cliff Introd.
• Abeng Chap 15-17
• hunting scene and its reasons
• bathing scene and what it reveals gender and
  race
• the issue of languages

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Caribbean Women Writers Major Themes

• female Bildungsroman
• stories of growth and development // the process
  of socialization as well as alienation
• racial and class issues (black, white and
  mulatto)
• gender stereotypes and inequality
• Mother Country vs mother land (relations to the
  Caribbean landscape)
• education and mother-daughter relationship --
  usually alienation
• the grandmother as the positive figure

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Working Miracles Womens Lives

• absent father (mother)
• child-shifting (adoptions Bright Thursdays
  adopting to fill in an empty space for the
  grandparents 210)
• Single mothers as breadwinners (1/2 of the
  Caribbean households are headed by women)
• Outside children -- children born out of a
  fathers stable residential union legitimacy is
  not an issue
• Olive Senior, Working Miracles Womens Lives in
  the English-Speaking Caribbean (Chapter 1)

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Michelle Cliff--Introduction

• born in Jamaica (1946), educated in the US and UK
  and now resides in the USA
• works
• Abeng (1984) our excerpt
• No Telephone to Heaven (1987)
• White Creole Identity
• My family was called red. A term which signified
  a degree of whiteness. . . . In the hierarchy of
  shades I was considered among the lightest. The
  countrywomen who visited my grandmother commented
  on my 'tall' hair - meaning long. Wavy, not curly
  (Cliff, 1985 59).

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Michelle Cliff--Introduction

• asked to pass as white
• Sent to an all-girl boarding school and fell in
  love with a girl there.
• The diary in which she wrote about it was read by
  her parents. They read it out loud to the other
  family members. (source)

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Michelle Cliff--Major Themes

• Interaction of 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 (Cliff Claiming
  an Identity, 21)

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Passing Examples

• The Human Stain (film 2003) Novel by Philip Roth
• Abeng
• Kitty (black) --
• Boy (white) ?
• p. 129

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The Meaning of Abeng

• Abeng -- an African word meaning conch shell.
• Two meanings
• 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
  about both colonial control and resistance to
  colonialism

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Characters in Abeng

• (colonists planters) Samuel Judith
• Judge Savage

• (landed, red) Albert Mattie Freeman

Boy Savage

• Kitty Freeman p. 128

• Clare Savage Jennie Savage
• Ben (Cs cousin) Joshua (half cousin)

• Miss Ruthie (squatter, black) Zoe
• the cane-cutter
• Mass Cudjoe (the pig)
• Old Joe (the bull)

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The Savages

• Judge -- burned his slaves alive on the eve of
  emancipation
• His mind was on a 'higher' plane--he was
  concerned about the survival of his race. He was
  fearful of the mixing that was sure to follow
  freedom--in which the white seed would be diluted
  and the race impoverished(38).
• He was not to blame. These people were slaves
  and would not know how to behave in freedom. They
  would have been miserable....... At that moment
  these people were his property, and they were
  therefore his to burn (39-40)

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The Savagesnot all whites

• The Savages defined themselves according to
  "color, class, and religion, and over the years a
  carefully contrived mythology was constructed,
  which they used to protect their identities. When
  they were poor, and not all of them white, the
  mythology persisted" (Abeng 29).

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Kitty Freeman

• "Kitty's mother was both Black and white, and her
  father's origins were unknownbut both had brown
  skin and a wave to their hair.
• .... Her people were called 'red' and they knew
  that this was what they were. .. . The Freemans
  did not question this structure
• cause ... a settling of blood as some lighter
  skins crossed over one or other of the darker
  ones--keeping guard, though, over a base of
  darkness. And a trickle of white people made
  the island whiter than it actually was" (54).

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Cliff on Clare Savage

• 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.
• Clare 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. (e.g. her
  missing her mother)

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Cliff on Clare Savage

• Savage 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. ("Clare Savage as a Crossroads
  Character" 264-5)

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Abeng our excerpt

• Chap 15 hunting episode
• The natural world outside the plantation
• Clare and hunting pp. 114 (Clares memory 115)
  
• Zoes persuasion against hunting. pp. 116
• Bathing pp. 119 (Clares reflection)
• Cane-cutters interruption

• Chap 16 implication and causes of Clares acts
• Why shoot?
• Robert
• Clare
• Boy vs. Kitty
• Chap 17 consequences
• Zoes thinking
• Clares facing the grandmother

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Abeng Starting Questions

• Why do you think Clare wants to go hunting?
• Why is the cane-cutters sudden presence so
  embarrassing?

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The Hunting Episode in Context

• The history of natural lives//colonialism pp. 112
  
• the origin of the pig--the native of the island
• the Maroon ritual and gender differences
• the mongoose
• from India (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 hunting for Clare?
  pp. 114, 115,

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Clares motivation

• She does not enjoy hunting (e.g. experience of
  eating goat and roasted birds)
• Wanting to eat the pigs testicles and penis?
• Her mother Kitty, Kitty Hart, Anne Frank, Doreen
  Paxton
• Joshua and Bens shooting birds and hunting for a
  pig.

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Clare and Zoe

• What are the differences between Zoe and Clare?
  (? WSS -- Antoinette and Tia)?
• Zoe
• calls Clare town gal? class difference
• is afraid of being thought of as Guinea warrior,
  not gal pickney. (117-118) ? gender limitation
• Clare
• split limited (119)
• recognize her selfishness her lack of
  understanding of property and ownership
  (121)Clares alienation from the native code
  unconscious of her own class privilege

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Zoe Clare (2)bathing scene

• What is the significance of the bathing scene
  (119-120, 124) in the episode? Is the relation
  between the two girls lesbian?
• Why is Clare so afraid of being seen by the
  cane-cutter?
• 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?
• What divides Clare and Zoe?

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Zoe Clare (2)bathing scene

• Self-definition Communication p. 120 124 (not
  be selfish again) respecting class boundaries,
  but crossing gender-race ones.
• Robert and the American negro (124-26)//
• Clare and Zoe ? transgression of racial
  boundaries p. 127

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Clares Split Racial Identities

• Boys teaching of race and color and lightening
  (127)
• Kittys influences
• Kittys cherish of darkness (127-128)keep
  darkness locked inside (129)melancholic
• 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)
• Kittys preference for the darker daughter Jennie
  (129) and Clares sense of alienation from the
  mother (128) Clares love for Zoe
  (131)
• Thinks Clare likes passing (129)

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Languages--English and Patois

• What kind of language does Zoe use? What is the
  significance of different languages in the novel?
  (e.g. Clare to Zoe, to the cane-cutter, and to
  Ms. Mattie) (122, 134).

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Note Pig Cudjoe

• In Jamaica, the growing strength and frequency of
  attacks by these Maroon groups between the 1650s
  and 1680s erupted into a full-blown war--known as
  Cudjoe's War, after its Akan leader--by 1690. In
  1739, the British empire sued for peace and
  signed a historic treaty--Cudjoe s Treaty--giving
  the once-enslaved Africans autonomy and
  recognition as free people.

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Note 2 Resisting Women in Jamaican history

• (p. 128)
• Nanny -- the legendary Maroon leader, famed both
  for her strategic prowess and for her ability
  catch a bullet between her buttocks and thereby
  return it whence it came (the novel p. 14)
• Inez-- the descendant of Maroon and Miskito
  Indian parents
• imprisoned and raped by Clare's
  great-grandfather the judge and turned into his
  concubine, she capitalizes on his absence to
  escape, and in doing so takes pains to aid a
  group of rebellious slaves acquire a piece of
  land where they can live undisturbed
• She aborts the fetus she carries with the help of
  Mma Alli, the sorceress

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References

• Cliff, Michelle. "Clare Savage as a Corssroads
  Character." Caribbean Women Writers Essays from
  the First International Conference. Ed. Selwyn R.
  Cudjoe. Wellesley, MA Calaloux, 1990. 263-68.
• Michelle Cliff http//www.answers.com/topic/michel
  le-cliff