Abstract
The aim of my essay is to show how the Afro-American writer Michelle Cliff uses the concept of matriliny in the process of the feminist recovery of the history of Jamaica. I will argue that Michelle Cliff is a writer that honors the anachronistic tradition of essentialism that is based on the notion that cultures and identities have certain innate qualities immutable irrespective of time and place. I will contend that this essentialist worldview, skews the fictive world of Cliff’s much celebrated “Clare Savage novels”: Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven by reducing it to facile, Manichean oppositions between the colonizer and the colonized, white and black culture. My essay will particularly focus on how Cliff’s project of the affirmation of matriliny is undermined by her deep ambivalence about the institution of motherhood, which in times of slavery and decolonization was implicated in various discourses inimical to the well-being of black women.
Highlights
Matriliny has been one of the most contentious issues in feminist discourse
I will focus on the literary output of Michelle Cliff, the African American writer of Caribbean pedigree, who has received significant critical attention for her efforts to establish a female plot of national genesis and recover matrilineal histories of Jamaica
Smith is one of very few critics to notice that reading Cliff through the lenses of time-honored discursive moves such as postcolonial feminist revisionism does not Postcolonial Nation and Matrilineal Myth: “Clare Savage” Novels always resolve some inherent contradictions of the novels’ plot and characterization
Summary
Matriliny has been one of the most contentious issues in feminist discourse. The second wave of feminism with its celebration of literary foremothers gave the concept of matriliny a positive valence and a wide currency. Clare’s project of feminist recovery of history is a failed one, argues Smith, because Cliff wanted to show the reader that identification of the colonized land with the female body and treating maternity as a site of resistance and empowerment for Black women is no longer a viable strategy.
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