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By Linda Wagner-Martin |
Jan 1, 2008
(b. 1946), poet and prose writer.
An American citizen who was born in Kingston, Jamaica, Cliff was educated at Wagner College (A.B., 1969) and the Warburg Institute in London (M. Phil., 1974). The international flavor of her work stems from her identification as a light-skinned Jamaican woman, a product of the pressures of both British colonialism and American racism. In her writing, Cliff questions the roles of both the privileged and the victimized within the anglocentric patriarchy. In 1969 Cliff worked as a researcher and journalist in New York City; in 1970 she became production supervisor of the Norton Library Series, and by 1979 was a manuscript and production editor of the series, specializing in history, politics, and women's studies. In 1980 Cliff published her first collection of poems, Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise. From 1981 -- 1983, she was copublisher and editor of Sinister Wisdom, a lesbian feminist journal. With fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the National Endowment for the Arts in 1982, and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation and the Yaddo Writers Colony in 1984, she wrote both poetry and fiction. Abend: A Novel appeared in 1984, followed three years later by its sequel, No Telephone to Heaven. This project, a kind of emotional autobiography, traces the life of Clare Savage and her darker-skinned friend Zoe as they come to maturity in Jamaica. In the second book, Clare, now in her thirties, rejects the privileged colonialist role and experiments with choices to find the sense of wholeness missing from her life. In 1985, Cliff's The Land of Look Behind: Prose and Poetry explored many of these questions about place, class, language, and sexuality in prose poems that marked her as an important postmodernist. Poems from this work, such as “Passing,” “Obsolete Geography,” “Love in the Third World,” and “If I Could Write This in Fire, I Would Write This in Fire” are evocative prolegomena for the questing woman in today's world. In 1993, her novel Free Enterprise was published; a fictionalized biography of an abolitionist who spirited escaping slaves along the Underground Railroad through use of her family's hotels, the book forces readers to question generic borders. Cliff has interwoven teaching experience throughout her professional life, giving courses at the New School for Social Research, Hampshire College, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Vista College, Norwich University, the Martin
Luther
King, Jr., Public Library in Oakland, California, the University of California at Santa Cruz, and Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. She has combined a politically active life with high achievement in her own writing, and continues to voice her awareness of the similarities among women's roles in West African, Jamaican, and United States cultures.
© Oxford University Press 1995, 2005
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