Michelle Cliff Research Articles

Borders, exiles, diasporas

Introduction Elazar Barkan and Marie-Denise Shelton Part I. Pleasures of Exile: 1. The dilemma of the 'but': writing Germanness after the Holocaust Angelika Bammer 2. Redressing the 'German-Jewish': a Jewish hermaphrodite and cross-dresser in Wilhelmine Germany David Brenner 3. Accenting L. A.: central Europeans in diasporan Hollywood in the 1940s Catherine Portuges 4. Scraps of culture: African style in the African American community of Los Angeles Leslie W. Rabine 5. Coming of age in Zambesis Jane Hotchkiss 6. Pleasure's exile: Reinaldo Arenas's last writing Ricardo L. Ortiz Part II. Modernist Transgressions: 7. Defiance and reconciliation in Paul Celan's Die Niemandrose Erin G. Carlston 8. Mimesis, mimicry, and critical theory in exile: Walter Benjamin's approach to the College de Sociologie Tyrus Miller 9. 'Sharing the unshareable': Jabes, deconstruction, and the thought of the 'Jews' Joan Brandt 10. On the exile of words in the American simulacrum: a free exercise in Wittgensteinian cultural critique Daniel Herwitz 11. Antonin Artaud's itinerary through exile and insanity Renee Riese Hubert Part III. Colonial and Postcolonial Encounters: 12. Immigration, poster art, and transgressive citizenship: France, 1968-1988 Francoise Lionnet 13. Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven: Diasporic displacement and the feminization of the landscape Wendy W. Walters 14. Monstrosity and representation in the postcolonial diaspora: The Satanic Verses, Ulysses, and Frankenstein Ronald Bush 15. Cultural Mettissage and the play of identity in Leia Sebbar's Sherazade trilogy Anne Donadey 16. Fatal nationality: Sulayman Fayyad's novel Voices Emily A. Haddad 17. Borders, exiles, minor literatures: the case of Palestinian-Israeli writing Rena N. Potok 18. The poetics and politics of space in J. M. G. Le Clezio's Etoile errante Walter Putnam Index.

The Caribbean‐American Connection: A Paradox of Success and Subversion

The Caribbean-American connection has many dimensions. The hegemonic Monroe doctrine defined the terms within which political relationships were conducted in the recent past, as for instance during the Missile Crisis in Cuba, or the Grenada excursion during the Maurice Bishop regime, or the liberation of Haiti. Our economic imperialism, or the so-called new colonialism, is visible in Club Med and other resort properties which have appropriated the best beaches in the islands for the use of tourists, often deliberately excluding the islanders from use of these beaches. But if the U.S. casts a long shadow over the Caribbean, the Caribbean, too, has shaped the U.S. in equally profound although more subtle ways. Immigrants from the Caribbean have achieved considerable influence at the level of both culture and politics. Their drive for economic success, their emphasis on education as the means of liberation and assimilation are not unique. But in literature and in other endeavors, and most especially for the people of African descent, the Caribbean experience becomes the symbol and source of values that challenge the prevailing norms of an individualistic, materialistic consumer society, even as these people embrace those norms in order to navigate the new world with success. At another level, their multiracial, polyglot Caribbean experience also makes them flexible, open to multiple perspectives, receptive to alternate ways of doing things, even selfconsciously celebratory of their hybridity, and thus more adaptive to the American experience. Their cherishing of the hybrid and the polyglot has, in fact, given a new meaning to the discredited notion of America as the melting pot. These formulations can be supported by the work of almost all the major writers of Caribbean origin: Derek Walcott, Earl Lovelace, Jamaica Kincaid, Audre Lorde, Michelle Cliff, and Paule Marshall. We have chosen Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow for our case history because it embodies these formulations in somewhat unusual and very dramatic ways. For our case histories of public and political figures, we go to Marcus Garvey and Colin Powell. They represent almost the opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of how they came to be viewed by the establishment and by American people in general. But both have had an abiding influence on the American psyche and both embody crucial elements of what we have termed the paradox of success and subversion. To turn to Marshall now, she (like Colin Powell) is not a first generation immigrant. In her recreation of the community in Carriacou, off the coast of Grenada, she is not drawing on her immedate past, as is true of the other writers. Her protagonist, Avey Johnson, has no Caribbean ancestry. Indeed, Avey arrives in the Caribbean as a typical American tourist, in one of those decadently opulent cruise ships that empty the tourists like locusts on ports of call to sample the native culture, and shop the duty free shops. However, despite the marginalization of the Caribbean as an extension of America's tourist resorts, the region continues to hold a special place in American culture because of historical and geographical connections. The proximity of the islands, the continual influx of immigrants, and a shared history of slavery for people of African descent ensure a continuing impact; the vitality of the Caribbean hybrid culture ensures its continuing relevance to America's anxieties about race and multiculturalism. Marshall's protagonist, Avey, is an affluent widow from North White Plains who must come to terms with the price paid by her and her husband in their drive for material success. It has led them to deny joy and all those small rituals of pleasure that came to be viewed as sinful and wasteful in the pursuit of progress. As her husband, Jay, declared: If it was left to me I'd close every dancehall in Harlem and burn every drum! That is the only way these Negroes out here'll begin making any progress (132). …

Searching for safe spaces: Afro-Caribbean women writers in exile

Prologue Natif-Natal Acknowledgments 1. Productive Contradictions: Afro-Caribbean Diasporic Feminism and the Question of Exile 2. Exiled in the Fatherland: Joan Riley and Beryl Gilroy Voice Afro-Caribbean Women in Britain 3. Enough to Work, Good Enough to Stay: M. Nourbese Philip, Dionne Brand, and Makeda Silvera and Women's Dignity in Canadian Exile 4. Remembering Ourselves: The Power of the Erotic in Works by Audre Lorde, Rosa Guy, and Michelle Cliff 5. Exile, Resistance, Home: Retelling History in the Writings of Michelle Cliff and Marie Chauvet Epilogue Return Notes Works Cited Index

In Search of a Mother Tongue: Locating Home in Diaspora

Place for me takes the form of memory and language. --Ilan Stavan, Other Voice The locus of truth is always extraterritorial; its diffusion is made clandestine by the barbed wire and watch-towers of national dogma. --George Steiner, Our Homeland, The Text Colonialism and the Holocaust have jointly conspired to create a legacy of global displacement, in which people are robbed of their homeland and the language in which their culture has been formed. Disparate diasporic communities are now faced with the shared struggle of articulating a cultural identity in which history and home reside in language, rather than nation, and in which language itself must be recreated so as to bespeak the specificity of cultural experience. The situations of Jewish and Caribbean writers seem a particularly useful source of comparison, in that the Jewish-originated term diaspora becomes a significant one for understanding Caribbean experiences, and the Caribbean idea of language as home becomes reciprocally edifying with respect to Jewish American writing. Both Caribbean and Jewish American communities strive to mold English into a language which can become a home within diaspora. For Caribbean women writers the task is doubly challenging: not only must they struggle to subvert aspects of the language which are culturally alien, but they are further left to grapple with the patriarchal assumptions in which English is rooted. Jewish American writers confront a different form of double alienation in the form of a double diaspora: first from the symbolic and biblical homeland of Palestine, and then again after the Holocaust and the death of both German-Jewish and Yiddish culture. The term diaspora was originally coined to describe the circumstances of the Jews who lived outside of Palestine after the Babylonian exile. Since then, its application has been enlarged to include any group who has been scattered far from its homeland, particularly with reference to the descendants of Africans who torn from their native continent and brought to the New World as slaves beginning in the seventeenth century. The linguistic yoking of diasporic Jews and Blacks is indicative of the common problems they face in trying to create a sense of identity and cultural continuity in diaspora. Writers from both groups themselves openly acknowledge the similarity of the problem that they face. Among Caribbean women writers, Michelle Cliff seems to feel particularly keenly the parallels between the plight of the Jews and that of Caribbean peoples. In The Land of Look Behind, she begins the poem A Visit to the Secret Annex with a comparison between the horrors of the Holocaust and those inflicted by colonialism in the Caribbean, which results in a particular sense of resonance between herself and Anne Frank: I was born later / not into this world. / The trees not the same / The horrors not exact--but similar (104). In Abeng as well, the narrator approaches her own Caribbean history through learning about the Holocaust. For her, Anne Frank becomes a symbol of both a voice which survived, in writing, the cultural annihilation of the Holocaust, and also of a female voice strong enough to contest the white, male version of history Cliff has been handed by her father. Jewish parallels resonate for Michelle Cliff not only in terms of the Holocaust but also in terms of the dilemmas posed by the ability to pass as white. In The Land of Look Behind, Cliff mentions the Maranos, the Jews in fifteenth century Spain who forced to pretend they had converted to Christianity. In the same text, she writes of light-skinned Jamaicans like herself who were able to pass into the white American world--saving their blackness for other Jamaicans or for trips home; in some cases, forgetting it altogether (60). The danger of succumbing to the pressure to pass, both culturally and physically, and as a result forgetting, is what gives the urgency to Cliff's project of writing herself back into her history and culture. …

Michelle Cliff and the Paradox of Privilege

Michelle Cliff and the Paradox of Privilege

Michelle Cliff and the Paradox of Privilege

Discusses pedagogical strategies that encourage keener and more sensitive student reactions to the postcolonial problematics represented in two essays by Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff, essays which often provoke hostility in mainstream, White, middle-class undergraduates. Discusses ways to create a context in the literature or writing classroom that discourages a facile dismissal of Cliff.

Contesting Representations

Autobiographical and `life-writing' genres provide textual sites for representing aspects of experience and the articulation of relational selves. This paper investigates contemporary, postmodern feminist assays of identity that both question and challenge the limits of modernist representations of subjectivity. In life-writings by Helene Cixous, Michelle Cliff, Audre Lorde and Maya Angelou contestations over representation, agency and resistance. to fixed identity categories are made explicit. Postmodern textual and interpretative practices, including autobiographical `metissage' and non-synchronous analyses of raced, gendered and classed subject positions, replace essentialist representations of subjects in a politics of hybridity and difference. These texts offer pedagogic expressions of resistance to the enduring legacy of modernist authorship as an act deriving from a coherent self-present writing self. The practice of metissage and the disruption of temporality in these contemporary writings is regarded as an alternative representational poetics and politics founded on a non-foundational feminist and materialist ontology.

Evidence-cum-witness: Subaltern History, Violence, and the (De)Formation of Nation in Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven

Evidence-cum-Witness: Subaltern History, Violence, and the (De)formation of Nation in Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven Ramchandran Sethuraman (bio) “I know that even as I look and even as I see I am changing what is there.” —Colette Lafonte’s final words in Sally Potter’s feminist film The Gold Diggers (1983) The history of subaltern social groups is necessarily fragmented and episodic. There undoubtedly does exist a tendency to (at least provisional stages of) unification in the historical activity of these groups, but this tendency is continually interrupted by the activity of the ruling groups; it can therefore only be demonstrated when an historical cycle is completed and this cycle culminates in a success. —Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks I do not think that we can live as human subjects without in some sense taking on a history; for us, it is mainly the history of being [End Page 249] men or women under bourgeois capitalism. In deconstructing that history, we can only construct other histories. What are we in the process of becoming? —Juliet Mitchell, Women: The Longest Revolution “At a time when the grands récits of the West have been told and retold ad infinitum, when a certain postmodernism (Lyotard’s) speaks of an ‘end’ to metanarratives and when Fukayama talks of an ‘end of history,’ we must ask: precisely whose narrative and whose history is being declared at an ‘end’? Dominant Europe may clearly have begun to deplete its strategic repertoire of stories, but Third World people, First World ‘minorities’—women and gays and lesbians—have only begun to tell, and deconstruct, theirs” (Shohat and Stam 248). Ella Shohat and Robert Stam’s pointed question disrupting the diegetic hold of Western master narratives opens up a liminal space for Third World stories to be told whose possibilities we have barely begun to explore. But the massive project of an anticolonialist retelling and remapping, of enacting historical agency in the “slenderness of narrative” (Foucault’s phrase), or as Homi Bhabha poignantly puts it, of “encounter[ing] a past that is your own country reterritorialized, even terrorized, by another” is bound to founder if we do not in our engagements with and resistance to Western hegemonic theories also unmask colonialism’s demonic Other, namely, imperialism and its incestuous relationship with psychoanalysis (Bhabha, “In a Spirit” 329). In this respect, the distressing problem is not so much the relation of postcolonial culture to psychoanalysis, since both are implicated in a long durée in and as history. 1 What has not been adequately addressed, however, are the fundamental and constitutive elements of psychoanalysis itself, whose brutal colonial history is deeply grounded in and inseparable from its virulent racism. 2 My interest lies in exploring the weighted valences on either side of the “and” between psychoanalysis and postcolonialism, whose pairing stages both a problematic link between the two disciplines that is yet to be theorized and also a temporal cut whereby one discourse undermines the totalizing tendency of the other. 3 In tracing psychoanalysis’s discursive formation in relation to imperialism elsewhere, I argue that through the primacy of an elaborate machinery of visual relations, in particular the colonial gaze, psychoanalysis objectified, scripted, and racialized the exotic non-Western [End Page 250] “people without history” for the prurient fascination of the masses in the West while masking and remaining obstinately silent about the racialized assumptions of its own ideological formations. 4 By a perverse paradox, the transplantation of psychoanalysis onto alien soils also hybridized and fissured its praxis, producing the same ambivalence and destabilization of authority that occurred at the level of the state apparatus’s interactions with indigenous peoples. If we are to rewrite history/narrative through the peculiar lens of the dispossessed/colonized, “not univocally but contrapuntally,” in Said’s sense of the term, “with a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominant discourse acts” (“Secular Interpretation” 29), then we must enact a seismological shift in perspective, one that encompasses the painful disruption/eruption of history as trauma and trauma as history. 5 To rephrase Spivak, no writer...

Postcolonial Representations: Women, Literature, Identity

Passionate allegiances to competing theoretical camps have stifled dialogue among today's literary critics, asserts Francoise Lionnet. Discussing a number of postcolonial narratives by women from a variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds, she offers a comparative feminist approach that can provide common ground for debates on such issues as multiculturalism, universalism, and relativism. Lionnet uses the concept of metissage, or cultural mixing, in her readings of a rich array of Francophone and Anglophone texts-by Michelle Cliff from Jamaica, Suzanne Dracius-Pinalie from Martinique, Ananda Devi from Mauritius, Maryse Conde and Myriam Warner-Vieyra from Guadeloupe, Gayl Jones from the United States, Bessie Head from Botswana, Nawal El Saadawi from Egypt, and Leila Sebbar from Algeria and France. Focusing on themes of exile and displacement and on narrative treatments of culturally sanctioned excision, polygamy, and murder, Lionnet examines the psychological and social mechanisms that allow individuals to negotiate conflicting cultural influences. In her view, these writers reject the opposition between self and other and base their self-portrayals on a metissage of forms and influences. Lionnet's perspective has much to offer critics and theorists, whether they are interested in First or Third World contexts, American or French critical perspectives, essentialist or poststructuralist epistemologies.

“This Thing of Darkness I / Acknowledge Mine”: Heathcliff as Fetish in Wuthering Heights

THIS THING OF DARKNESS I / ACKNOWLEDGE MINE” : HEATHCLIFF AS FETISH IN WUTHERING HEIGHTS DANA MEDORO Queen’s University IN a brief article that links the heroine of her own novels to Jean Rhys’s Antoinette Cosway/Bertha Rochester, Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff states, “It makes one (at least, this one) wish another Caribbean writer would take on the character of Heathcliff and write him a life” (264). Although Heathcliff ’s (denied) life is one of the central preoccupations of Wuthering Heights, it is buried under the last century and a half of criticism on the text, which accepts, or barely deviates from, Charlotte Bronte’s prefatory interpretation of Heathcliff as “a man’s shape animated by demon life” (23). Cliff’s sympa­ thy for the dark-skinned Heathcliff strikes through the repeated failures on the part of critics to examine the stereotypical language in which Heathcliff is constructed by the notoriously misleading narrators, Lockwood and Nelly Dean. The critical collusions with the narrators’ shocked and fascinated re­ actions to Heathcliff unconsciously invoke and reproduce the colonialist or racist discourse that Cliff recognizes in Wuthering Heights: Heathcliff is a “wicked, diabolical male character” (Peterson, “History” 293), the personi­ fication of “human and animal traits” (Gilbert and Gubar 293), and “both lowly and natural” (Eagleton 403). Such descriptions of Heathcliff, the only non-white or “gypsy” figure in Wuthering Heights, as animal, natural, or diabolical sustains the nineteenth-century mentality about the monstrous, primitive “other”-the native African, Indian, or American in Britain’s impe­ rialist imagination. For instance, when Thomas Moser positions his reading of Wuthering Heights in a tradition that describes Heathcliff as “essentially anthropomorphized primitive energy” and the “embodiment of sexual en­ ergy” (4, 9), he perpetuates the association between dark skin and lascivious sexuality. According to Patrick Brantlinger, the British justified their col­ onizing and missionary invasions of new territories through reports “about cannibalism, witchcraft, and apparently shameless sexual customs” (198). It is this imperialist discourse that subtly enters into both Lockwood’s and Nelly Dean’s representations of Heathcliff and into the tradition of criticism on Wuthering Heights, a tradition that divorces the text from its position within and against a larger ideological framework. The aim of this paper is not to argue that Heathcliff is a colonial subject from a specific place, but to English Stu d ies in Ca n a d a , 22, 3, September 1996 investigate his racial alterity in relation to the other characters of Wuthering Heights. I will argue that Heathcliif is repetitively debased in the layers of narration as a stereotype — as the “stereotype-as-fetish,” a term articu­ lated by Homi K. Bhabha and derived from Frantz Fanon. Heathcliff is, to borrow a phrase from Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, “sealed into crush­ ing objecthood” (Fanon 109) while the story of his “life” is suppressed and (mis)represented under the colonizing gaze of the two narrators. In his essay, “The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism,” Bhabha explains that colonialist discourse is predicated upon an ambivalent construction of racial and cultural differ­ ence; according to colonialist ideology, the conquered native is both natu­ rally subservient and undeniably menacing. This ambivalence underlies the creation of the stereotype, which is meant to fix and contain threatening contradictions. Like the fetish object, the image of the stereotype accords power/pleasure to the aggressor and simultaneously resists this power. Both fetish and stereotype function as appropriated objects in aggressive schemes of self-sufficiency or fulfilment. Admittedly indebted to Lacanian psycho­ analysis, Bhabha argues that the stereotype should be read in terms of fetishism because the stereotype’s skin colour or physical appearance is the site upon which the colonizer projects the desire for this elusive selfsufficiency . Racial difference, in colonialist discourse, simultaneously invokes and disrupts the colonizer’s desire for sameness, for an “unbroken and un­ differentiated line of vision and origin” (85). As the fetish object of the colonizer, the stereotype is discursively seized to mask the separation be­ tween cultures and to signify the colonizer’s mastery of the external world. Throughout his essay, Bhabha compares racial difference with the differ­ ence between the sexes. In psychoanalytic...

Michelle Cliff and the Authority of Identity

Michelle Cliff and the Authority of Identity

Walt Whitman's Presence in Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book

In this essay, I will attempt to examine and evaluate of Walt Whitman in Maxine Hong Kingston's 1989 novel, Tripmaster Monkey: Fake Book. The Whitmanian presence is discernible via a character analysis of protagonist (Wittman Sing), a study of allusive chapter titles, and an examination of overall thematic thrust of book. Such an investigation will reveal remarkable cultural interaction between Walt Whitman, nineteenth century idealist-democrat-humanist, and Maxine Hong Kingston, twentieth century Asian American-modernist. A tangential benefit of this exploration will be a partial understanding of continuing influence of Whitman's Leaves of Grass as a primary text/guide for American democratic experiment, with special reference to Asian American community. The plot of Tripmaster Monkey is clearly subordinate to Wittman Sing's song of himself. I quote below Tom Wilhelmus's concise plot summary: Wittman does what we suppose he would do. He cruises around San Francisco, reads Rilke aloud to passengers on a Bay Area bus, yearns after beautiful women, loses job in a department store after conferring with ex-Yale Younger Poet holed up in stock room, gets stoned in Berkeley, gets married on Coit Tower by a man who may or may not be a bona fide minister, visits parents and aunties in Sacramento, makes a side trip to Reno looking for a woman who may or may not be grandmother, and winds up fulfilling principal ambition which is to stage a play based upon epic Chinese Romance of Three Kingdoms at a theater in Chinatown. (149) All this supposed plot exists to give Wittman sufficient expanse for solitary musings, an interior monologue strongly reminiscent of Walt Whitman's Song of Myself. The Whitmanian content of Tripmaster Monkey is evident, to begin with, in fact that its protagonist, Wittman Sing, is named after quintessential American poet, Walt Whitman. The narrator reports of Wittman that His is America, America, province (41). Michelle Cliff observes: underline Americanness of Wittman, Hong Kingston has named him for most American of American poets. To play with name is irresistible. Whitman body electric. Wittman, hear America Singing (11). And many other word plays are certainly possible; for example, Of Thee Sing and One's-Self Sing and Ah Hear It Was Charged Against Me.(1) One might observe in passing that many of personalities invoked in this novel of 1960s are intellectual and artistic disciples of Walt Whitman, monkey spirits attempting to change American society through elaborate costuming and posturing--Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, William Burroughs, Abbie Hoffman,(2) William Carlos Williams,(3) Jack Spicer,(4) James Baldwin, William Saroyan, John Steinbeck, and many others. It is, therefore, Whitmanian tradition in American literature, and not merely Walt Whitman himself or Leaves of Grass alone, that predominates in this novel. But it is Walt Whitman of Leaves of Grass who wrote Facing West From California's Shores (Whitman 110-11) that Wittman recites from top of Coit Tower, where he can see Alcatraz and Angel Island (places he longs to turn into theatres). The mantra is appropriate for place, and thematically it is fitting, since an awakening and discovery of a new world is announced; Wittman's car is parked next to statue of Christopher Columbus, who stands with his nose toward Golden Gate and Pacific beyond (Tripmaster Monkey 161). Thus Whitman Sing, like the poet father tried to name him after, looks toward Orient in meditation, house of maternity, where Columbus's circle would be circled; where East and West would, in fact, achieve reconciliation; where American society would achieve a spiritual unity (all this reminiscent of Whitman's Crossing Brooklyn Ferry). …

Journey into Speech-A Writer between Two Worlds: An Interview with Michelle Cliff

Among the subjects Jamaican born writer Michelle Cliff explores in her writings are ancestry, the impact of colonization on the Caribbean, the relationships among and interconnection of African people in the diaspora, racism, and the often erroneous way in which the history of black people is recoreded. In her latest novel, Free Enterprise (1993), Cliff attempts to rewrite the story of Mary Ellen Pleasant, the African American woman who supplied money with which John Brown bought arms for the raid at Harper's Ferry. Her other two novels, No Telephone to Heaven (1987) and Abeng (1984), are semi-autobiographical and explore the life of Clare Savage, a fair-skinned girl raised between Jamaica and North America, who must reconcile her mixed heritage in a changing society. Other works by Cliff include Bodies of Water (1990), The Land of Look Behind (1985), and Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise (1980). The following text is based on two separate interviews: one done in person in Albany, California, in December 1989, and the other conducted over the telephone in September 1993. Adisa: When did you find your voice, when did you decide that you wanted to be a writer? Cliff: I always wanted to write. Actually there was a terrible incident. I don't know if I should tell you, but I will. When I was at Saint Andres,(1) I was keeping a diary. I had been very influenced by The Diary of Anne Frank, and as a result of seeing the movie and reading her diary, I got a diary of my own. I wasn't living with my mother and father at this time; I was living with my aunt in Kingston [Jamaica] and going to Saint Andrews. This aunt also had a house in Saint Ann, where we used to stay on the weekends. Anyway, my parents broke into my bedroom in Kingston when we were not at the house. They went into my room, broke open my drawer, took out and broke the lock on my diary, and read it. Then they arrived at the other house. My father and mother had my diary in their hands and sat down and read it out loud in front of me, my aunt, and everybody else. My sister was there. There were very intimate details; there were a lot of things about leaving school and not going to class and playing hookey, but there was also the experience of the first time I menstruated, and I remember just being shattered. My father read it, and my mother was in total collaboration. (Pause.) Anyway I remember just crying and being sad and whatnot. I spoke to my sister about it once, and she remembered, even though she was seven at the time. And she said, Don't you remember screaming and saying, 'Don't I have any rights?' (Pause.) That incident really shut me down as a writer. I had wanted to be a writer from a very early age; I always wanted to write. The subject I liked most in school was English, and I read an enormous amount as a kid. But that really shut me down until quite late. Adisa: How late? Cliff: Until the mid-seventies. The only thing I wrote after the diary was my dissertation. Then I wrote Notes on Speechlessness. the reason I wrote Speechlessness was ... I guess it was all working inside of me for a while. I was involved with a group of women in New York who got together and discussed their works. We met once a month, and each person had to present something--and it was my turn. I was terrified, and I had a hell of a time just speaking. I was shy and tongued-tied a lot of the time. I didn't know what to do, so I thought I'd write something and just read it, because that would be easier than speaking. So I wrote this thing about feeling speechless. I wrote that in 1977. Adisa: So that is your first piece towards being a writer. Cliff: That was the first piece, and that led me to Obsolete Geography.(2) For a long time I hadn't thought about what it meant to be a Jamaican, even though I was going back there a lot. I was sort of creating myself but not really dealing with a lot of different things. …

An Interview with Michelle Cliff

An Interview with Michelle Cliff

Race, Privilege, and the Politics of (Re)Writing History: An Analysis of the Novels of Michelle Cliff

The white creole occupies an ambiguous space in West Indian society. On the one hand she is the descendant of the colonizer: by virtue of her colour she is virtually guaranteed a position of relative power and privilege if she so chooses. Even if she does not choose, the creole is bound to her birthright by her race, since, as Albert Memmi observes, the colonial who does not accept the ideologies and privileges of the colonizer does not-cannot-effectively exist.' Still, the white creole is in many ways culturally black, or Afro-Caribbean: the Afrocentric dynamic permeates all classes and races of Anglophone Caribbean society regardless of its particular configurations within those groups.2 The creole is, in this sense, representative of both colonizer and colonized. The question then, of where the white creole writer locates herself in the West Indian intellectual community becomes of critical importance in evaluating whether her literature is to be read as an English novel of the tropics, or a Third World narrative (and therefore backward, an anthropological document not destined to join the ranks of real literature). Whereas the novels of the first generation of white West Indian writers in the 19th and early 20th century, such as H. G. De Lisser, can for the most part be read as no more than extensions of European colonial ideology placed in exotic

Green cane and juicy flotsam: short stories by Caribbean women

Unique ...a wonderful collection that will receive much attention. --Barbara Christian, University of California at Berkeley panorama of insights and visions is vast ...the context of women's writings is a broadening link, connecting these writers with their contemporaries in other cultures around the world. --Gregory Rabassa Provides wonderful insights into writing by women from the --J. Michael Dash, The University of the West Indies This collection of short stories features moving tales from the rich Caribbean oral tradition, stories that question women's traditional roles, present women's perspectives on the history of Caribbean slavery and colonialism, and convey the beautiful cadences of the language of Caribbean women. It offers the general reader a broad selection of the themes, styles, and techniques characteristic of contemporary women's fiction in the Caribbean. There are twenty-seven enjoyable and vibrant tales in this anthology, some of them originally written in English, others in French, Dutch, and Spanish. There are writers from Guadeloupe, Dominica, Jamaica, Trinidad, Puerto Rico, Martinique, Antigua, Haiti, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Surinam. Along with stories by well-known writers such as Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid, Michelle Cliff, Maryse Conde, and Rosario Ferre, the anthology also includes first-rate stories by lesser-known but equally talented writers. The collection also contains a critical introduction, biographical notes, and a bibliography. Carmen C. Esteves is assistant professor in the department of Romance languages at Lehman College-CUNY. She has translated into English works by Latin American women such as Magali Garcia Ramis and Elena Poniatowska. Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert is associate professor of Puerto Rican studies at Lehman College-CUNY. She has published many articles on Caribbean writers, and has translated many works into English, including Love (Amour) by the Haitian writer Marie Chauvet.

Resisting Cultural Cannibalism: Oppositional Narratives in Michelle Cliff's "No Telephone to Heaven"

Resisting Cultural Cannibalism: Oppositional Narratives in Michelle Cliff's "No Telephone to Heaven"

Review: The Land of Look Behind by Michelle Cliff

Review: <i>The Land of Look Behind</i> by Michelle Cliff

Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology.

classic collection of Black feminist writings returns to print-with a new preface Barbara Smith was voted one of the most influential Black women in the U.S. by Essence Magazine! Praise for Home Girls: survival of these women and their joy makes Home Girls very satisfying.-Essence A provocative and important new collection.-Ms. Pungent and varied, full of questions, convictions, and insights.-The Nation It is fitting that Home Girls also reflects and celebrates the difference, among the [thirty-three] Black feminist writers, critics, and theorists assembled from the United States and the Caribbean, among Black women of all colors, classes, and cultures. More importantly, it reflects and celebrates our connections.-The Women's Review of Books The pioneering anthology Home Girls features writings by Black feminist and lesbian activists on topics both provocative and profound. Since its initial publication in 1983, it has become an essential text on Black women's lives and writings. This edition features an updated list of contributor biographies and an all-new preface that provides a fresh assessment of how Black women's lives have changed-or not-since the book was first published. Contributors are Tania Abdulahad, Donna Allegra, Barbara A. Banks, Becky Birtha, Julie Carter, Cenen, Cheryl Clarke, Michelle Cliff, Michelle T. Clinton, Willie M. Coleman, Toi Derricotte, Alexis De Veaux, Jewelle L. Gomez, Akasha (Gloria) Hull, Patricia Jones, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Raymina Y. Mays, Deidre McCalla, Chirlane McCray, Pat Parker, Linda C. Powell, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Spring Redd, Gwendolyn Rogers, Kate Rushin, Ann Allen Shockley, Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, Shirley O. Steele, Luisah Teish, Jameelah Waheed, Alice Walker, and Renita Weems. Barbara Smith is an independent scholar and was co-founder and publisher of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. She has been writer in residence and taught at numerous colleges and universities for over twenty-five years. The author of many books, articles, and essays, her most recent is The Truth That Never Hurts (also by Rutgers University Press).