{"id":225,"date":"2014-06-10T00:42:47","date_gmt":"2014-06-10T00:42:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/postcolonialstudies\/?p=225"},"modified":"2017-05-22T18:00:48","modified_gmt":"2017-05-22T18:00:48","slug":"cliff-michelle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/postcolonialstudies\/2014\/06\/10\/cliff-michelle\/","title":{"rendered":"Cliff, Michelle"},"content":{"rendered":"

Biography<\/h3>\n
\"notelephone\"<\/a>
No Telephone to Heaven, 1996<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Michelle Cliff was born in Jamaica and grew up there and in the United States. She was educated in New York City and at the Warburg Institute at the University of London, where she completed a PhD on the Italian Renaissance. She is the author of novels (<\/span>Abeng<\/em>,\u00a0<\/span>No Telephone To Heaven<\/em>, and<\/span>\u00a0Free Enterprise<\/em>), short stories (<\/span>Bodies of Water<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0<\/span>The Store of a Million Items<\/em>), prose poetry (<\/span>The Land of Look Behind<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0<\/span>Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise<\/em>), and numerous works of criticism. Her essays appeared frequently in publications such as\u00a0<\/span>Ms.\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0<\/span>The Village Voice<\/em>. She was also editor of a collection of the writings of the southern American social reformer Lillian Smith entitled\u00a0<\/span>The Winner Names the Age<\/em>. Cliff spent her later years in Santa Cruz, California, where she lived with her partner, poet Adrienne Rich, until Rich’s death in 2012; Cliff herself died in June of 2016.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Imaginative Retellings<\/h3>\n

To write a complete Caribbean woman, or man for that matter, demands of us retracing the African past of ourselves, reclaiming as our own, and as our subject, a history sunk under the sea, or scattered as potash in the cane fields, or gone to bush, or trapped in a class system notable for its rigidity and absolute dependence on color stratification. Or a past bleached from our minds. It means finding the art forms of those of our ancestors and speaking in the patois forbidden us. It means realizing our knowledge will always be wanting. It means also, I think, mixing in the forms taught us by the oppressor, undermining his language and co-opting his style, and turning it to our purpose. (Cliff,\u00a0The Land<\/em>\u00a014)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Like Toni Morrison, Michelle Cliff attempts a kind of \u201cliterary archaeology\u201d in her writing; she is concerned, in other words, with discovering if not \u201cwhat really happened,\u201d then, at least, what might have happened (see Paul Gilroy: The Black Atlantic<\/a>). Admitting she is \u201cattracted to places where things are buried,\u201d Cliff pays heed to not only the historically visible and vocal, but to the absences and silences of history as well (The Land\u00a0<\/em>95). Discarded and buried shards are recovered from the \u201cmidden\u201d of official history, and, through imagination, are pieced together into narrative.<\/p>\n

Though her first two novels (Abeng<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0No Telephone To Heaven<\/em>) are to some extent autobiographical, Cliff not only tells her own personal history, but she also imaginatively retells the collective history of her people. Francoise Lionnet has called Cliff an \u201cautoethnographer\u201d because:<\/p>\n

Her narratives belong in a new genre of contemporary autobiographical texts by writers whose interest and focus are not so much the retrieval of a repressed dimension of the private self, but the rewriting of their ethnic history, the re-creation of a collective identity through the performance of language. (334)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

While Cliff does attempt to rewrite an ethnic history or collective identity, she does not, however, homogenize either ethnicity or identity as inherently obvious and unchanging categories:<\/p>\n

(My family was called red. A term which signified a degree of whiteness. \u201cWe\u2019s just a flock of red people,\u201d a couse of mine said once.) In the hierarchy shades I was considered among the lightest. The country women who visited my grandmother commented on my \u201ctall\u201d hair \u2013 meaning long. Wavy, not curly. (The Land<\/em>\u00a059)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As a \u201cwhite Creole,\u201d Cliff understands the hybrid nature of identity<\/a>. Her characters \u2013 from\u00a0No Telephone to Heaven<\/em>\u2018s Clare Savage, a light-skinned Jamaican educated in Britain, and Harry\/Harriet, a male-to-female transsexual, to\u00a0Free Enterprise<\/em>\u2018s Annie Christmas, another light-skinned Jamaican living in the United States who sometimes, as the need arises, passes not for white but as a man \u2013 cross boundaries of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Therefore, they disrupt and denaturalize identity categories established to maintain constructed, but nonetheless crucial, distinctions between colonizer and colonized (see Orientalism<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Enterprises for Freedom<\/h3>\n

Cliff is committed not only to the rewriting of history and the recovery of unknown stories of the colonized to stand with and against the well-known stories of the colonizer, she is also committed to creating \u201ca body of resistance literature that describes and formally enacts the struggle for cultural decolonization\u201d (Schwartz 595). Cliff\u2019s work describes the \u201cvarieties of agency,\u201d in the words of\u00a0Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak<\/a>, that have characterized anti-colonial struggles and carry on to this day. At the center of Cliff\u2019s\u00a0novel,\u00a0Free Enterprise<\/em>, is the international slave trade; while she does not ignore the dehumanization and violence manifested in and through the trade, Cliff focuses most acutely on the resistance rather than submission that the trade engendered. In this sense Cliff\u2019s title is meant to be paradoxical. The phrase \u201cfree enterprise\u201d has obvious capitalist connotations, and the capitalist ideology is compatible, if not coterminous, with slavery. But \u201cfree enterprise\u201d in Cliff\u2019s usage is also meant to imply enterprises \u2013 bold and courageous acts, be they personal, political, and revolutionary \u2013 for freedom.<\/p>\n

Selected References<\/h3>\n

Works by Michelle Cliff<\/h4>\n