Dismantling the Prison-House of Colonial History in a Selection of Michelle Cliff’s Texts

Abid Larbi Labidi

doi:10.7575/aiac.alls.v.7n.5p.64

Abstract

Most, if not all, writings by Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff are connected by a subterranean desire to re-write Afro-Caribbean history from new untold perspectives in reaction to the immense loss and/or distortions that marked the region’s history for entire centuries. In this paper, I meticulously read four of Cliff’s texts-- Abeng (1984), its sequel No Telephone to Heaven (1987), Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise (1980) and The Land of Look Behind (1985)-- to look at how Cliff retrieves her black ancestors’ submerged history and erased past. I particularly explore the methods Cliff deploys to re-center a history deliberately erased/or distorted by what she ironically calls “the official version” ( Free Enterprise, 1994, p. 138) in allusion to the Eurocentric narratives about the twin imperial projects of slavery and colonialism. Finally, I investigate the wealth of possibilities offered by fiction, unrecorded memory, oral story-telling and imagination to out-tell Eurocentric historiography and re-write Afro-Caribbean history from the victims’ perspective: slaves, colonial subjects, marginalized female figures, black Diasporic characters, etc. Keywords: Michelle Cliff, “official” history, history re-writing, memory, fiction

Highlights

It would not be tricky at all to bear out that history deeply permeates almost every single work by Jamaican female writer Michelle Cliff
The major ‘sites’ of Cliff’s history excavation relate to the following: the loss of the African homeland, the inflictions of the Middle Passage and plantation life, colonial encounters, the African tradition and African-Caribbean cultural bonds. Another recurring aspect of Cliff’s narratives is her characters’ constant search for roots, self-definition and identity reclaiming. They often seek to reclaim ‘shards’ of their ancestral memory to “untangle” the “filaments of [their] history,” as one of Cliff’s characters admits in her essay collection Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise (1980, p. 8)
This above-mentioned need for history reclamation takes the form of responsibility and duty for Cliff and is central to her project of history re-writing and memory regaining as she straightforwardly tells her readers in her book The Land of Look Behind (1985): To write as a complete Caribbean woman, or man for that matter, demands of us retracing the African part 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

Summary

Introduction

The major ‘sites’ of Cliff’s history excavation relate to the following: the loss of the African homeland, the inflictions of the Middle Passage and plantation life, colonial encounters, the African tradition and African-Caribbean cultural bonds. Another recurring aspect of Cliff’s narratives is her characters’ constant search for roots, self-definition and identity reclaiming. They often seek to reclaim ‘shards’ of their ancestral memory to “untangle” the “filaments of [their] history,” as one of Cliff’s characters admits in her essay collection Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise The word “attraction” tells about the speaker’s attachment to what has been lost but not forgotten, while “buried” and “burying” articulate the extent of concealment and/or loss ‘inflicted’ on the speaker’s history, the need ( duty) for reclamation and repossession

Cliff: History Retrieval as Duty

When Literature Out-Tells History

Clare Savage

Conclusion