Biography
Michelle Cliff was born in Jamaica and grew up there and in the United States. She was educated in New York City and at the Warburg Institute at the University of London, where she completed a Ph.D. on the Italian Renaissance. She is the author of novels (Abeng, No Telephone To Heaven, and Free Enterprise), short stories (Bodies of Water), 'prose poetry' (The Land of Look Behind and Claiming and Identity They Taught Me to Despise), as well as numerous works of criticism. Her essays have appeared frequently in publications such as Ms. and The Village Voice. She is also the editor of a collection of the writings of the southern American social reformer Lillian Smith entitled The Winner Names the Age. Cliff now lives in Santa Cruz, California.
To write a complete Caribbean woman, or man for that matter, demands of us retracing the African past of ourselves, reclaiming as our own, and as our subject, a history sunk under the sea, or scattered as potash in the canefields, or gone to bush, or trapped in a class system notable for its rigidity and absolute dependence on color stratification. Or a past bleached from our minds. It means finding the artforms of those of our ancestors and speaking in the patois forbidden us. It means realizing our knowledge will always be wanting. It means also, I think, mixing in the forms taught us by the oppressor, undermining his language and co-opting his style, and turning it to our purpose. (Cliff, 1985: 14)
Like
Toni Morrison, Michelle Cliff attempts a kind of 'literary archaeology'
in her writing; she is concerned, in other words, with dis-covering if
not 'what really happened', then, at least, what might have happened. Admitting
she is 'attracted to places where things are buried,' Cliff pays heed to
not only the historically visible and vocal, but to the absences and silences
of history as well (1985: 95). Discarded and buried shards are recovered
from the 'midden' of official history, and, through imagination, are pieced
together into narrative.
Though her first two novels (Abeng and No Telephone To Heaven)
are to some extent autobiographical, Cliff not only tells her own personal
history, but she also imaginatively retells the collective history of her
people. Francoise Lionnet has called Cliff an 'autoethnographer' because
her narratives belong in a new genre of contemporary autobiographical texts by writers whose interest and focus are not so much the retrieval of a repressed dimension of the private self, but the rewriting of their ethnic history, the re-creation of a collective identity through the performance of language (1992: 334).
While Cliff does attempt to rewrite an ethnic history or collective identity, she does not, however, homogenize either ethnicity or identity as inherently obvious and unchanging categories.
(My family was called red. A term which signified a degree of whiteness. 'We's just a flock of red people,' a couse of mine said once.) In the hieararchy of shades I was considered among the lightest. The countrywomen who visited my grandmother commented on my 'tall' hair - meaning long. Wavy, not curly (Cliff, 1985: 59).
As a 'white Creole', Cliff understands the hybrid nature of identity. Her
characters -- from No Telephone to Heaven's Clare Savage, a light-skinned
Jamaican educated in Britain, and Harry/Harriet, a male-to-female transsexual,
to Free Enterprise's Annie Christmas, another light-skinned Jamaican
living in the United States who sometimes, as the need arises, passes not
for white but as a man -- cross boundaries of race, class, gender, and
sexuality; and, therefore, disrupt and denaturalize identity categories
established to maintain constructed, but nonetheless crucial, distinctions
between colonizer and colonized.
(Artwork by Eloise H. Lindsay)
Enterprises for Freedom
Cliff is committed not only to the rewriting of history and the recovery of unknown stories of the colonized to stand with and against the well-known stories of the colonizer, she is also committed to creating 'a body of resistance literature that describes and formally enacts the struggle for cultural decolonization' (Schwartz, 1993: 595). Cliff's work describes the 'varieties of agency', in the words of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, that have characterized anti-colonial struggles and carry on to this day. At the center of Cliff's most recent work, Free Enterprise, is the international slave trade; while she does not ignore the dehumanization and violence manifested in and through the trade, Cliff focuses most acutely on the resistance rather than submission that the trade engendered. In this sense Cliff's title is meant to be paradoxical. The phrase 'free enterprise' has obvious capitalist connotations, and the capitalist ideology is compatible, if not coterminous, with slavery. But 'free enterprise' in Cliff's usage is also meant to imply enterprises -- bold and courageous acts, be they personal, political, and/or revolutionary -- for freedom.
Selected References
Works
by Michelle Cliff:
(1994) "History as Fiction, Fiction as History," Ploughshares
20(2-3): 196-202.
(1993) Free Enterprise. New York: Dutton.
(1990a) Bodies of Water. New York: Dutton.
(1990b) "Object into Subject: Some Thoughts on the Work of Black Women's
Artists," in Gloria Anzaldua, ed. Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo
Caras: Creative and CriticalPerspectives by Women of Color. San Francisco:
Aunt Lute, pp. 271-290.
(1987) No Telephone to Heaven. New York: Dutton.
(1985) Abeng. New York: Penguin.
Edited by Michelle Cliff:
Smith, Lillian (1982) The Winner Names the Age: A Collection of Writings. New York: Norton.
Works
about and Interviews with Michelle Cliff:
Cartelli, Thomas (1995) "After the Tempest: Shakespeare, Postcoloniality,
and Michelle Cliff's New, New World Miranda," Contemporary Literature
36(1): 82-102.
Edmondson, Belinda (1993) "Race, Writing, and the Politics of (Re)Writing
History: An Analysis of the Novels of Michelle Cliff," Callaloo
16(1): 180-191.
Lima, Maria Helena (1993) "Revolutionary Developments: Michelle Cliff's
No Telephone to Heaven and Merle Collins's Angel,"
Ariel 24(1): 35-56.
Lionnet, Francoise (1992) "Of Mangoes and Maroons: Language, History,
and the Multicultural Subject of Michelle Cliff's Abeng," in
Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, eds. De/Colonizing the Subject: The
Politics of Gender in Women's Autobiography. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, pp. 321-345.
Raiskin, Judith (1994) "Inverts and Hybrids: Lesbian Rewritings of
Sexual and Racial Identities," in Laura Doan, ed. The Lesbian Postmodern.
New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 156-172.
Raiskin, Judith (1993) "The Art of History: An Interview with Michelle
Cliff," Kenyon Review 15(1): 57-71.
Schwartz, Meryl F. (1993) "An Interview with Michelle Cliff,"
Contemporary Literature 34(4): 595-619.
Related Site
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Consciousness and the Philosophy of Education
Author: Lisa Diedrich, Fall 1996
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& Issues(Image of an "Homme Carrefour" from Donald J. Cosentino's Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou [Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1995].)