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By Regina V. Jones |
Jan 1, 2008
(b. 2
November
1946), novelist, poet, and essayist.
Michelle Cliff is concerned with the consciousness of people in Jamaica and the United States. In her work she confronts issues of gender, sexuality, class, race, and identity as well as the distinctions between colonizer and colonized. Although Cliff is known primarily as a novelist, she also writes poetry and short stories.Michelle Cliff was born in Kingston, Jamaica, at a time when that country was still a British colony. Her family moved to the United States when she was three years old, and she began grade school in New York City. However, she moved to and from Jamaica frequently and attended school there when her family returned to her birth country when she was ten. In Jamaica, she was a child of privilege—of the upper class—because her family owned land. She describes herself as “a light skinned colonial girlchild, both in Jamaica and in the Jamaican milieu of my family abroad.” Cliff attended Wagner College in New York, where she earned a BA in European History in 1969. She earned an MA in Philosophy in 1974, completing her dissertation on the Italian Renaissance at the Warburg Institute at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study.Returning to New York after graduating from the University of London, Cliff worked as an editor. Her first step into writing was an attempt to correct a misleading article about Jamaica that had appeared in Ms.>magazine. She soon realized that she had a great deal to say about the place she had come from and the world that had shaped her. Her first book was a collection of prose poetry that began the process in earnest. Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise (1980) explores prejudice as experienced by a woman who was light enough to pass and was encouraged to do so, even by family members. The horns of the dilemma are the advantages of living as white versus a sense of passive, and sometimes active, collaboration with white oppressors. Although Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise is often classified as poetry, as is her book The Land of Look Behind (1985), Cliff categorizes the style in her preface of the latter as “halfway between poetry and prose, as I am halfway between African and England, patriot and expatriate, white and Black.”In a 2002 interview with Jim
Clawson, Cliff explained, “As far as writing about the Caribbean I think that I am trying to revise a colonized history, a history that’s been interpreted from a European perspective only, and I’m trying to revision it as a history that is more complex.” Her first novel, Abeng (1984), is a coming-of-age story set in Jamaica in which Cliff takes on complex issues of identity, race, class, and sexuality. The main character, Clare Savage, is the light-skinned daughter of a dark mother and a light father whose attitudes toward color are diametrically opposed. Kitty Savage is the proud descendant of escaped slaves called maroons, who resisted white oppression. Boy Savage’s pride, on the other hand, comes from his white ancestor, a brutal slaveholder. As Clare tries to find her way in this color-driven family and society, Cliff brings in the legend of Nanny, a maroon enchantress, to connect Clare’s search with the larger saga of Jamaica’s history.Cliff’s interest in Jamaica’s colonial history and its aftermath is also seen in Abeng’s sequel, No Telephone to Heaven (1987). In this novel, Clare Savage’s development continues as she becomes involved in revolutionary politics. One can also witness Cliff’s commitment to recovering forgotten historical women in her novel Free Enterprise (1993). The heroine in Free Enterprise, Annie Christmas, is based on an American woman who actually existed during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; many of the other characters in the book are taken from history as well.Because Cliff’s protagonists Clare
Savage and Annie
Christmas are women of color with white complexions, they address issues of passing for white. Annie Christmas also deals with the question of passing for a man. This issue of passing lies at the heart of Cliff’s exploration of race and identity. In this, she has been influenced by such writers as Ama
Ata
Aidoo (Ghana); Toni
Morrison, James
Baldwin, and William
Faulkner (United States); and Nadine
Gordimer (South Africa). One of the most important influences in Cliff’s life and work is Audre
Lorde, whom she thanked in the acknowledgments of Abeng. As lesbians and as Caribbean women, both these writers have dealt with the complexities of sexuality along with, and in the context of, race and class.Though Cliff gained international fame from her three novels and two books of prose poetry and from editing other books, she has also published a book of short stories, Bodies of Water (1990). In addition to writing essays and articles, Cliff has lectured and taught language and literature at several universities and colleges in the United States and Germany. She has also contributed to and edited a number of periodicals.
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© Oxford University Press 2005
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