(1946- ) novelist, poet,short-story writer, teacher, critic, editor
Michelle Cliff was born in Kingston, Jamaica. As a young child, she moved to New York City with her family. After attending public schools and graduating from Wagner College in 1969 with a B.A. in European History, she worked for the New York publisher W. W. Norton from 1970 to 1971. Then she studied at the Warburg Institute in London, earning a master of philosophy degree in 1974. She returned to W. W. Norton as a copy editor and then as a manuscript and production editor. She resigned in 1979 to focus on writing, and in 1980, she published her first book, the prose poem Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise.
Themes of race, gender, and power run through Cliff’s internationally known poetry, novels, essays, articles, lectures, and workshops. In “Clare Savage as a Crossroads Character” (1990), Cliff acknowledges the autobiographical strands present in her prose poem and earliest novels, Abeng(1984) and No Telephone to Heaven (1987). Abeng, the African word for “conch shell,” alludes to Caribbean, United States, and world history. The novel narrates how two runaway slaves, Nanny and Cuffee, lead raids to liberate other slaves. Both Abeng and its sequel, No Telephone to Heaven, were critically acclaimed for their dexterous linguistic shifts from Jamaican creole to standard English.
Critics name Free Enterprise (1993) her strongest novel. In it, female protagonists Annie Christmas and Ellen Pleasant work with freedom fighters to liberate slaves. To quote Booklist, “In tall tales and legends, cherished memories, and regrettable misunderstandings, Free Enterprise explores the multiple meanings of freedom and enterprise and of a society that enshrines selected meanings of both.”
In Writing in Limbo Simon Gikandi claims, “The uniqueness of Cliff’s aesthetics lies in her realization that the fragmentation, silence and repression that mark the life of the Caribbean subject under colonialism must be confronted not only as a problem to be overcome but also as a condition of possibility—as a license to dissimulate and to affirm difference—in which an identity is created out of the chaotic colonial and postcolo-nial history.”
Other Works by Michelle Cliff
Bodies of Water. New York: Dutton, 1990.
The Land of Look Behind: Prose and Poetry. Ithaca, N.Y.: Firebrand Books, 1985.
The Store of a Million Items: Stories. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.
Works about Michelle Cliff
Berrian, Brenda F. “Claiming an Identity: Caribbean Women Writers in English.” Journal ofBlack Studies 25 (December 1994): 200-16. Edmonson, Belinda. “Race, Privilege, and the Politics of (Re)Writing History: An Analysis of the Novels of Michelle Cliff.” Callaloo 16, no. 1 (1993): 180-91.
Gikandi, Simon. Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992.
Schwartz, Meryl F. “An Interview with Michelle Cliff.” Contemporary Literature 34, no. 4 (Winter 1993): 595-619.
