“To reject speechlessness, a process which has taken years, and to invent my own peculiar speech with which to describe my own peculiar self, to draw together everything I am and have been.”
— Michelle Cliff
Michelle Cliff died in 2016 at the age of 69. Much of her legacy is still fresh within the global consciousness, so to look at her, there is a unique opportunity to gain help from her posthumously. As a writer, she left behind a lot of work, much of which is described as semi-autobiographical. When discussing her work, she often pointed out how many of the stories she told, while different in specific details, were mirror images of her life. One of the characters she relied most heavily on to work through her life story was Clare Savage, a character who appeared in two of Cliff’s novels, Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven.
With this character, she explores racism, internalized prejudice, light-skinned and class privilege, and how all of these elements interact with one another, something with which she had a close personal relationship.
Born in 1946 in Kingston, Jamaica, Cliff was raised in an upper-class family that highly valued her light skin and encouraged her to “pass” as white whenever she could. Her first fascination with the injustice that surrounded her and, at times, protected her, would come from The Diary of Anne Frank. She later skipped school to go see the movie. This book, in fact, inspired Cliff to begin writing her own diary, she said:
“I then read her diary and started to keep my own … which was based on Anne Frank's diary. I would never have thought to keep a diary without having read her. She gave me permission to write, and to use writing as a way of survival”
This permission though would soon be cut off, when her parents searched through her things, broke the lock on her diary, and read it aloud in front of her friends and family. She remembered this incident much later in life, and the trauma of it often affected her. So much so that she blocked much of it out, only to rediscover it when writing about it later in her life.
When the memories did come back to her, she realized where a part of that trauma and shame came from, beyond the public humiliation. Within the diary was one of her first mentions of having a crush on a girl, who would later be removed from school and never seen again.
Through her character, Clare, she explores the surface of her sexuality but never delves deep. She thought the character could not reach that completion of identity in the narrative she was writing. It was impossible for Clare to fully realize and embrace her love for women without becoming a complete person herself, which she could never do within the books.
“Clare can't claim her sexuality. She's not in a place where she can. It's a very interesting thing because the lesbian subtext in Abeng was unconscious, at least I think it was. The poet Dionne Brande raises the issue of the difference between being a lesbian in Europe and a lesbian in the Caribbean, and in the essay "Caliban's Daughter" I talk about this. Clare's access to lesbianism in Europe would be similar to the access Nadine Gordimer's character Rosa Burger has, and also the character Merle Kinbona in Paule Marshall's The Chosen Place, the Timeless People-where lesbianism is seen as a Eurocentric, eccentric, upper-class behavior, for the most part. Decadent and exploitative of Third World women. Whereas for Clare to claim her lesbianism in the Caribbean would be to become a complete woman. That's the way I read it. If Clare had had an affair in Britain with Liz, which is suggested very strongly in the novel, it wouldn't have led her back to herself. It would have made her more foreign to the place she came from. But her love for Harry/Harriet is a step towards herself. And if she wasn't killed she probably would have gone the whole way”
Cliff saw the development of Clare from book to book reflected in her own life. When asked about some of the stances from the first book, she pointed out that they came from a less mature version of herself. She even commented that she had reread her book and came back noticing how much had changed from the time she wrote it to the present.
But she points out, in the end, that Clare died before Cliff would have come out, and thus stays an incomplete character. Within the character, she recognized much of what she has had to untangle, including recognizing her light-skinned privilege in the world of Jamaica and America.
She struggled with it for much of her life, often feeling like an outsider within any group she identified because of her identity's intersections. A mixed race, Jamaican, immigrant, lesbian, woman was not always the most understood identity, and certainly not the most represented one. But she worked much of her life to fix that, writing not only fiction with a diverse set of characters but also non-fiction discussing her life and untangling her identity for the world to see. It was not an easy task to face, but she tried her hardest to do justice to her heritage, saying:
“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 cane fields, or gone to bush, or trapped in a class system notable for its rigidity and absolute dependence on colour stratification. Or a past bleached from our minds. It means finding the art forms 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.”
And she more than followed that advice. She was educated at Wagner College and the Warburg Institute at the University of London. She also held academic positions at several colleges, including Trinity College and Emory University, and she gathered all this information and institutional backing to write what she felt needed to be said. In fact, she once noted the reason she wrote:
“Because I had something to say about the place I come out of”
Beyond all this writing and academic success, Michelle Cliff was a person with a rich inner life. She was friends with and interacted with many of the greats in writing at the time, such as Audre Lorde and James Baldwin, and was an activist for most of her life. This, of course, didn’t come without conflict.
An interview with her revealed that there was animosity within her community regarding her light skin with one example:
“I was reading an anthology of West Indian women writers, a prose anthology called Her True True Name. There's a nasty swipe at me in the introduction. They say something to the effect that I am light enough that I might as well be white, which is not true. It's one thing to look x and to feel y, rather than to look x and feel x, and that's part of the difficulty being light-skinned: some people assume you have a white outlook just because you look white. You're met immediately on that level. But it varies a great deal. I felt I was included in that anthology because they couldn't exclude me, but to put me in they had to make a crack about me. The introduction ends with something like "not many of us are called Clare Savage," words to that effect. It was just plain bitchy if you want my reading of that remark. And it goes back to very old and very painful stuff.”
She felt alienated from her home country of Jamaica for another reason: her sexuality. Having been disowned by her mother for it, she did not return home in her later years. In fact, her last visit to her country was in 1975, the same year she started a relationship with the poet Adrienne Rich. There was a lifelong relationship that was only drawn to a close by Rich’s death in 2012 at the age of 82, four years before Cliff’s death. Rich died of complications due to arthritis, and Cliff of liver failure. The two loved each other deeply and had a long, active life together.
In her own words:
“I choose to define myself the way I define myself, and if people can't deal with it, then that's tough. Really.”
It is difficult to pin down someone who is so resolutely self-defined, and this was also a trouble in her friendships. Though she had many queer friends, she relied heavily on herself and her self-reflection to get through the messy journey of self-discovery, and it wasn’t always easy, she admitted in an interview:
“Internalized homophobia is a problem I have had. I have to be perfectly honest about that. It comes from where I came from. I didn't know a lesbian in my childhood, that I was aware of.”
This is not a rare narrative to hear from a queer person, but she worked hard to keep much of her processing internal instead of external, making her a deeply self-aware person who always strived for improvement. And she turned this desire for growth to herself and the world around her. With a deep interest in history, she worked to raise the voices of people in history who had been silenced, saying:
“Most of my work has to do with revising: revising the written record, what passes as the official version of history, and inserting those lives that have been left out.”
Her focus was steadily set on uplifting people of colour and their histories, uncovering stories not only from Jamaica but America as well, and within her work, she worked to highlight the failed rebellions within communities. Though much of what she wrote about was technically a failure, she found the beauty in it, using it as a reminder that people of colour were not passive victims in history but full real people who never stopped fighting even if they knew they might lose. They were people who fought because they knew someone had to because they could not just go quietly into the night, even if it meant losing everything. They screamed even though they may have known no one was listening, but the sound waves traveled through the years and through Cliff’s pen, and she raised up the voices of those who had been silenced.
“Even if you didn't succeed, just to resist is important.” — Michelle Cliff
[Disclaimer: Some of the sources may contain triggering material.]
Barnes, Erin M, and Lily L Miles. “Michelle Cliff.” Voices from the Gaps, 17 Oct. 2004, pp. 1–5., conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/166124/Cliff%2C%20Michelle.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y.
Grimes, William. “Michelle Cliff, Who Wrote of Colonialism and Racism, Dies at 69.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 18 June 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/books/michele-cliff-who-wrote-of-colonialism-and-racism-dies-at-69.html.
Judith Raiskin, and Michelle Cliff. "The Art of History: An Interview with Michelle Cliff." The Kenyon Review 15, no. 1 (1993): 57-71. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4336802.
“Michelle Cliff.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/michelle-cliff.
Schwartz, Meryl F., and Michelle Cliff. "An Interview with Michelle Cliff." Contemporary Literature 34, no. 4 (1993): 595-619. doi:10.2307/1208803.
