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
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
Michelle Cliff--Major Themes
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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 on WWS
• “Caliban speaks to Prospero, saying: ‘You taught
me language, and my profit on’t/ 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 ‘Bertha’s humanity, indeed her sanity as
critic of imperialism, intact,’ as Gayatri Spivak
has observed.” (264)
“Clare Savage”
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
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
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
meaning—about 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?
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 Clare’s
reaction to Zoe’s speech?
• Clare as “limited” (119)
• the concept of property and ownership (121)—
Clare’s alienation from the native code;
unconscious of her own class privilege
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 Robert’s story with the
relationship between Clare and Zoe?
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?
Lesbianism in the Caribbean Society
• MC--“But for Caribbean women to love each other
is different. It’s not Vita Sackville-West and
Virginia Woolf, it’s not Djuna Barnes or Natalie
Barney, and it’s not Sappho.
• JR--You wanted Clare and Zoe. But then there’s
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
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 woman’s self-definition, and as a
way to value the female, which we’ve 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?
Clare’s and Cliff’s Sexual Identity
• “...Clare can’t claim her sexuality. She’s not
in a place where she can. It’s a very
interesting thing, because the lesbian subtext
in Abeng was unconscious, at least I think it
was.” (601)
• Cliff’s internalization of homophobia and her
self-censorship--“it’s 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
Clare’s Split Racial Identities
• Boy’s teaching of “race and color and lightening”
(127)
• passing (129)
• Kitty’s cherish of darkness (127-128)—”keep
darkness locked inside” (129)—melancholic
• Kitty’s preference for the darker daughter Jennie
(129) and Clare’s sense of alienation from the
mother (128)
Clare’s love for Zoe (131)
• Kitty’s dream of setting up a local school (129130)--her distrust of British education and love of
black culture--“Daffodils” vs the Maroon Girl
(129)
“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
“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 master’s
meaning, turning instead to a sense of nonWestern values which are empowering and
essential to survival, her survival, and wholeness.
“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)
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?
• 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)
Narrative Form and Economy
• Is there anything special about the
narrative form in the novel?
• fragmented narrative form–“She 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