Michelle Cliff
American novelist
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Michelle Carla Cliff (2 November 1946 – 12 June 2016) was a Jamaican-American author whose notable works included Abeng (1985), No Telephone to Heaven (1987), and Free Enterprise (1993).
(aged 69)Michelle Cliff | |
|---|---|
Cliff in the 1980s | |
| Born | 2 November 1946 |
| Died | 12 June 2016 (aged 69) |
| Alma mater | |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Works | Abeng (1985); No Telephone to Heaven (1987); Free Enterprise (2004) |
In addition to novels, Cliff also wrote short stories, prose poems, and literary criticism. Her works explore the identity problems that stem from postcolonialism, race and gender constructs. A historical revisionist, many of Cliff's works seek to advance an alternative view of history against established mainstream narratives.[1] Cliff identified as biracial and bisexual, and had both Jamaican and American citizenship. Her writings focused often on Caribbean identity.[1]
Life and education
Cliff was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1946 and moved with her family to New York City three years later.[2] Cliff has described her family as "Jamaica white", Jamaicans of mostly European ancestry, but later began to identify as a light-skinned Black woman. Responding to a description of her in the anthology Her True-True Name which called her light-skinned enough to be functionally white, Cliff rejected the notion that she has "a white outlook just because [she] look[s] white."[3] She moved back to Jamaica in 1956 and attended St Andrew High School, where she began writing, before returning to New York City in 1960.[4] She was educated at Wagner College where she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in European history, then at the Warburg Institute of the University of London where she did postgraduate work in Renaissance studies, focusing on the Italian Renaissance.[1]
Cliff later lived in Santa Cruz, California, with her partner, the poet Adrienne Rich.[5] The two had been together since 1976; Rich died in 2012.[6]
Career
Cliff's first published work was the book Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise, which covered the ways she experienced racism and prejudice.[4] In 1981, Cliff became an associate of the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press.[citation needed]
She was a contributor to the 1983 Black feminist anthology Home Girls.[8]
In 1984, Cliff published Abeng, a semi-autobiographical novel that explores topics of female sexual subjectivity and Jamaican identity.[9] Next was The Land of Look Behind: Prose and Poetry (1985), which uses the Jamaican folk world, its landscape and culture to examine identity.[10]
Cliff's second novel, No Telephone to Heaven, was published in 1987. It continues the story of Clare Savage from Abeng, exploring the need to reclaim a suppressed African past.[11]
Her works were also in a collection edited by Gloria Anzaldúa called Making Face, Making Soul: Creative and Critical Writing by Feminists of Color (1990).[12]
From 1990 on, Cliff's work took a more global focus, especially with her first collection of short stories, Bodies of Water.[13] In 1993 she published her third novel, Free Enterprise,[14] and in 1998 she published another collection of short stories, The Store of a Million Items.[15] Both works continue her pursuit of readdressing historical injustices.
She continued to work throughout the 2000s, releasing several collections of essays and short stories including If I Could Write This in Fire (2008)[16] and Everything Is Now: New and Collected Short Stories (2009). Her final novel, Into The Interior, was published in 2010.[17]
Cliff translated into English the works of several writers, poets and creatives such as Argentinean poet Alfonsina Storni; Spanish poet Federico García Lorca and Italian poet Pier Paolo Pasolini.[18]
She held academic positions at several colleges including Trinity College and Emory University.[19][20]
Works
Fiction
- 2010: Into the Interior (University of Minnesota Press). Novel
- 2009: Everything is Now: New and Collected Stories (University of Minnesota Press). Short stories
- 1998: The Store of a Million Items (Houghton Mifflin Company). Short stories
- 1993: Free Enterprise: A Novel of Mary Ellen Pleasant (E. P. Dutton). Novel
- 1990: Bodies of Water (Dutton). Short stories
- 1987: No Telephone to Heaven (Dutton). Novel (sequel to Abeng)
- 1984: Abeng (Penguin Books). Novel
Prose poetry
- 1985: The Land of Look Behind and Claiming (Firebrand Books).
- 1980: Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise (Persephone Press).
Editor
- 1982: Lillian Smith, The Winner Names the Age: A Collection of Writings (W. W. Norton & Company).
Other
- 2008: If I Could Write This in Fire (University of Minnesota Press). Non-fiction collection
- 1982: "If I Could Write This in Fire I Would Write This in Fire", in Barbara Smith (ed.), Home Girls (Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press).
- 1994: "History as Fiction, Fiction as History", Ploughshares, Fall 1994; 20(2–3): 196–202.[21]
- 1990: "Object into Subject: Some Thoughts on the Work of Black Women's Artists," in Gloria Anzaldúa (ed.), Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color (Aunt Lute Books).
