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Michelle Cliff--Introduction

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

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Michelle Cliff--Introduction

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  1. 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

  2. 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

  3. Michelle Cliff--Major Themes • 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”

  4. 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”

  5. 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

  6. 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

  7. 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?

  8. 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

  9. 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?

  10. 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?

  11. 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

  12. 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?

  13. 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

  14. 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 (129-130)--her distrust of British education and love of black culture--“Daffodils” vs the Maroon Girl (129)

  15. “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

  16. “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 non-Western values which are empowering and essential to survival, her survival, and wholeness.

  17. “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)

  18. 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?

  19. 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)

  20. 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

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