Cliff, Michelle 1946–

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Michelle Cliff 1946–

Poet, novelist

Jamaican-born writer Michelle Cliff has earned considerable critical acclaim for her novels and short stories based on her experiences growing up in the Caribbean and in the United States and Europe. “Her three novels all address issues of racism and sexism in different countries at different times,” declared a contributor to Feminist Writers, “moving among the United States, Jamaica, and England, and back and forth through history.” “In her works to date,” stated Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Jacqueline Brice-Finch, “Michelle Cliff transcends culture, class, and sex to celebrate the individual’s place in history by embracing the stories of kith and kin.”

Reviewers have acknowledged that Cliff’s work deals with the consequences of living in liminal areas (like the former British colonies in the Caribbean) where identities are fragmented and difficult to define. In her works the “fragmentation, silence and repression that mark the life of the Caribbean subject under colonialism,” stated Simon Gikandi in Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature, “must be confronted not only as a problem to be overcome but also as a condition of possibility … in which an identity is created out of the chaotic colonial and postcolonial history.” “Thus her career as a writer,” Meryl Schwartz stated in her Contemporary Literature interview with the author, “began as a process of trying to reclaim the self through memory, dreams, and history.”

Cliff’s problems of identity fragmentation that emerge in her fiction have their origins in her own life. Born into a mulatto family in Kingston, Jamaica, on November 2, 1946, she was the lightest-skinned member of her generation and was urged by her color-conscious family to pass for white whenever possible. “As a light-skinned daughter of colonialism,” Schwartz explained, “Cliff was raised to reject her ‘colored’ heritage, but after completing a dissertation on the Italian Renaissance at the University of London, she began a sustained examination of the Anglocentric education she had received. Partly as a result of her involvement in the women’s movement, she had begun trying to use language to represent herself, and she discovered that in internalizing colonialist ideology, she had lost access to crucial parts of her identity.” “When Cliff acknowledges her agreement with W. E. B. Du Bois’ frequently-quoted assertion that the color-line is the problem of the twentieth century,” declared a contributor to Notable

At a Glance…

Born on November 2, 1946, in Kingston, Jamaica; naturalized United States citizen. Education: Wagner College, AB, 1969; Warburg Institute, London, MPhil, 1974.

Career: Life, New York City, reporter and researcher, 1969-70; W. W. Norton & Co., Inc. (publisher), New York City, production supervisor of Norton Library, 1970-71, copy editor, 1974-75, manuscript and production editor specializing in history, politics, and women’s studies, 1975-79; poet, 1980-; Sinister Wisdom, Amherst, MA, co-publisher and editor, 1981-83; Norwich University, Vermont College Campus, Mont-pelier, member of cycle faculty for adult degree program, 1983-84; Martin Luther King, Jr., Public Library, Oakland, CA, teacher of creative writing and history, 1984-; novelist, 1984-.

Awards: MacDowell Fellow at MacDowell College, 1982; National Endowment for the Arts fellow, 1982; Massachusetts Artists Foundation fellow, 1984; Eli Kantor fellow at Yaddo, 1984; Fulbright Fellowship, New Zealand, 1988; National Endowment for the Arts fellow in fiction, 1989.

Addresses: Agent— Faith Chi Ids Literary Agency, 275 West 96th St., No. 31B, New York, NY 10025.

Black American Women, “she is speaking from her experiences with parents who wanted her to pass as white during her youth and during her professional career.”

Another shock that separated Cliff from her own identity came fairly early in her childhood. She was sent to an all-girls’ boarding school in Jamaica where she encountered another girl, fell in love, and began to discover her own sexuality, writing about it in her personal diary. “One weekend,” Cliff told Schwartz, “my parents came from Montego Bay to Kingston,” where Cliff was visiting with an aunt. “My parents,” she continued, “…went through my bureau, found my diary, literally broke it open. They read it, then drove with it to the country house. They sat me on the verandah and read the diary out loud to me in front of my relatives and my sister.” “I remember just crying and being sad and whatnot,” she explained to Opal Palmer Adisa in an interview published in the African American Review. “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?’” “That incident really shut me down as a writer,” she stated to Adisa. “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.”

These issues lie behind a large part of the conflict in Cliff’s prose poem, Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise, as well as her first two novels, Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven. The poem addresses issues such as the problems of barriers of color, family relations, and the racism that is part of the colonial legacy. The protagonist Clare Savage, the light-skinned daughter of creole parents, explained Brice-Finch, “recalls childhood struggles to understand and accept the urging by some family members and others to pass as white, to deny her black ancestry.” The novels share the character of Clare with the poem and show her caught in a post-colonial (as well as a sexual) crisis of identity. “I was a girl similar to Clare and have spent most of my life and most of my work exploring my identity as a light-skinned Jamaican, the privilege and the damage that comes from that identity,” Cliff told Contemporary Authors. “For while identification with the status of oppressor can be seen as privilege, and brings with it opportunities denied oppressed people, it also inflicts damage on the privileged person.” “Clare Savage is presented as the self-determining agent of her own education,” explained Thomas Cartelli in Contemporary Literature, “who refuses to use the advantages of pale skin and privileged class-standing either to ‘pass’ or to deny the Caliban within.”

Cliff spent much of her childhood divided between homes in New York and Jamaica. Her parents left Jamaica seeking better economic opportunities in the United States. Cliff stayed behind with relatives, joining her parents later. The family returned to the island in 1956 and remained there for several years before relocating once again to New York. After that point the family stayed in the United States, returning to Jamaica several times a year to visit relatives. Dividing her time between the two countries had a profound effect on Cliff, and the issues raised during these times underlie her fiction. Cliff “considers herself a ‘political novelist,’ rather than a Caribbean writer,” explained the Feminist Writers contributor, “and she finds that she cannot limit her writing to ‘just one place,’ but also needs to claim a multicultural identity.”

If her experiences with colonialism and racism in Jamaica underlie her first two novels, her third novel, Free Enterprise, examines racism and the legacy of slavery in the United States. Free Enterprise tells the story of two women—Annie Christmas, a Jamaican from the “privileged” classes, and Mary Ellen Pleasant, a nineteenth-century abolitionist from San Francisco—and how their lives intersect. “Building on historical records of Mary Ellen Pleasant, who funded and helped plan the enterprise that came to be known as John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry,” wrote Schwartz, “Free Enterprise imaginatively recovers stories of the centuries-long resistance to the slave trade, centering on women who devoted their lives to ‘the cause.’”

Yet in Free Enterprise Cliff also deals with the legacy of colonization and the stresses it engenders between those who were colonized and those who did the colonizing—even if members of the two groups are working toward a common goal. The conflict in this case is between Pleasant and Alice Hooper. Hooper is a relative of Robert Shaw, the (white) abolitionist commander of the 54th Massachusetts, the first all-black combat regiment that saw action in the Civil War. After Shaw’s death in battle, Hooper assumes responsibility for raising money for a statue commemorating the 54th action and Shaw’s role in it. Pleasant and Hooper meet in 1874, years later, at a party celebrating Hooper’s purchase of a Turner painting depicting a scene taken from an incident in the slave trade. The subject matter of the painting and the distress it causes Pleasant are largely ignored by Hooper and her guests. “The motif of remembering the sacrifices of the fore-fathers is most effectively rendered in this scene,” stated Brice-Finch, “which presents the offspring of the colonizer and colonized, both groups still struggling with their polarized pasts.”

Free Enterprise emphasizes an important point made in much of Cliff’s writings: that history, whether personal, racial, political, or otherwise, must be reclaimed by the masses whose stories have been ignored. “Her imaginative recovery of the past” in the novel, explained the Feminist Writers contributor, “gives voice to the resistances that have been erased from history.” And throughout the body of her work, the contributor concluded, “Michelle Cliff continues to write important stories, stories that reveal the multifaceted nature of what any one culture may hold up as ‘history.’”

Selected writings

(Editor) The Winner Names the Age: A Collection of Writing by Lillian Smith, Norton, 1978.

Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise (poem), Persephone Press, 1980.

Abeng (novel), Crossing Press, 1984.

The Land of Look Behind: Prose and Poetry, Firebrand Books, 1985.

No Telephone to Heaven (novel), Dutton, 1987.

Bodies of Water (short stories), Dutton, 1990.

Free Enterprise (novel), Dutton, 1993.

The Store of a Million Items: Stories, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1998.

Sources

Books

Davies, Carole Boyce, and Elaine Savory Fido, editors, Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, Third World Press, 1990, pp. 111-142.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 157: Twentieth-Century Caribbean and Black African Writers, Third Series, Gale, 1996, pp. 49-58.

Feminist Writers, St. James Press, 1996.

Gay and Lesbian Literature, Volume 2, St. James Press, 1998, pp. 91-92.

Gikani, Simon, Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature, Cornell University Press, 1992, pp. 231-51.

Notable Black American Women, Book 3, Gale, 2002.

Smith, Sidonie, editor, De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography, University of Minnesota Press, 1992, pp. 139-168; pp. 321-345.