Michelle Cliff

Michelle Carla Cliff (2 November 1946 – 12 June 2016) was a Jamaican-American writer.

• The house almost slid off the land to the south of Carville, hanging on to a spit for dear life. Secluded, as she liked it. Rundown, which didn't faze her; in fact, spoke in its favor.
  "You'd have to be crazy to live there," her friends at Carville said when she described the place. She hadn't had the heart to say at least she could come and go. Didn't wear a number for a name.
  To their minds, she didn't have very far to go crazy. Weren't her faithful visits evidence of an unbalanced soul?
  "Who in their right mind?" they asked each other.
  • beginning of Free Enterprise (1993), section titled Gens Inconnu

• A blond, blue-eyed child, about three years old - no one will know her exact age, ever - is sitting in the clay of a country road, as if she and the clay are one, as if she is the first human, but she is not. (beginning of "transactions")

• In her room she saw what she thought was the apparition of a knight dressed in silver, with a plumed helmet. The plume appeared black in the black and white of mid-night but could have been crimson or indigo. The figure did not vanish when she opened and shut her eyes and she reckoned - however much reckoning anyone can do in the dead of night, suddenly woken - he could not be inside her mind. He must be in her room. (beginning of "a public woman")

• I pick up the New York Times sometime in 1992 and find your name. My heart catches. We are twenty years from a summer filled with each other, and now I hear you laugh, and I sound foolishly romantic, now death is around us.
  The first winnowing, a doctor said, cold. And if she is right, who will be left standing? This feels like a rout.
  • beginning of "art history"

• Neptune. Long Branch. Navesink. Sea Girt. Manasquan. Atlantic Highlands.
  Pinball. Boardwalks. Salt-water taffy.
  "Don't dwell on the past so."
  • beginning of "down the shore"

• My grandmother's house. Small. In the middle of nowhere. The heart of the country, as she is the heart of the country. Mountainous, dark, fertile.
  One starting point.
  • beginning of "monster"

• "Don't you think the sound of men's voices raised in harmony is a holy sound? You know, like the Beach Boys."
  I was lying on the grass in the July sunlight, reading. The voice was coming from somewhere above my head.
  • beginning of "stan's speed shop"

• As children we had our seasons, apart from grown-up, growing seasons. Our own ways of dividing time, managing the elliptical motion of the Earth, life on a spinning planet. Our ways were grounded, uncelestial. Light years were beyond us; black holes not yet imagined. Our idea of a matter-destroying entity was the sewer under the city, stygian, dripping, where Floridian Godzillas survived on Norwegian rats.
  No, our seasons were set by the appearance of something in The Store of a Million Items, on Victory Boulevard, between the Mercury Cleaners and the Mill End Shop. The store was a postwar phenomenon, promising a bounty only available in America. Everything we loved was there; there we flocked. As close to infinity as we dared.
  • beginning of "the store of a million items"

collection of short stories

• As the leaves thinned the days shortened and the winter light cast everything cold. As the cold advanced quiet became the village - all sound was muffled. But for the fingers of ice cracking like gunshots in the night when the tree branches could no longer bear the weight of frozen water. (beginning of "American Time, American Light")

• The sound of a jumprope came around in her head, softly, steadily marking time. Steadily slapping ground packed hard by the feet of girls.
  Franklin's in the White House. Jump/Slap. Talking to the ladies. Jump/Slap. Eleanor's in the outhouse. Jump/Slap. Eating chocolate babies. Jump/Slap.
  Noises of a long drawn-out summer's evening years ago. But painted in such rich tones she could touch it.
  • beginning of "Screen Memory"

• A woman. A black woman. A black woman musician. A black woman musician who plays trumpet. A bitch who blows. A lady trumpet-player. A woman with chops. (beginning of "A Woman Who Plays Trumpet is Deported")

• The island rose and sank. Twice. During periods in which history was recorded by indentations on rock and shell.
  This is a book about the time which followed on that time. As the island became a place where people lived. Indians. Africans. Europeans. (beginning of Chapter One)

• In the beginning there had been two sisters-Nanny and Sekesu. Nanny fled slavery. Sekesu remained a slave. Some said this was the difference between the sisters.
  It was believed that all island children were descended from one or the other. All island people were first cousins.
  • Chapter Two

• [He] was caught somewhere between the future and the past-both equal in his imagination. (Chapter Four)

• I really don’t think about my writing in relationship to traditional genres. I have involved myself in finding my voice, unique to me, and that I see as a journey into my imagination without regard to the boundaries of genre. (2010)

• The landscapes that are important to me are those that I have internalized. Those I carry within myself. Certainly my homeland of Jamaica, the photographic impressions of childhood, the witnessing of great natural beauty and great human tragedy. I always wanted to know why these two things coexisted—naive perhaps but then I was a child. (2010)

• (What work do you find yourself returning to repeatedly that still has meaning or that the meaning deepens over time) MC: Anything by Virginia Woolf. But especially Mrs. Dalloway and Jacob’s Room. (2010)

• 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.

• I think that when you come from a culture that is not mainstream, when you're not expected to be a mainstream cultural person, you really can use that in a way to admit that you don't have that much loyalty to [the tradition] and that you can play with forms more. You can be much more experimental, you can mix styles up, you don't have to be linear, you don't have to be dichotomous, and believe it's either poetry or prose or whatever. You can really mix the media.

• what's good about this new book, I think, is that it's not just about the atrocities. It's about the history that's been lost to us of people who resisted, that there was a movement in this country of armed resistance. John Brown was financed by a black woman-she gave him thirty thousand dollars in gold to buy fifteen thousand rifles, which he did. At the Chatham convention where Harper's Ferry was being planned, the majority of people there were black and they came up with a constitution which demanded a black state within the United States. There was a really complicated revolutionary movement prior to the Civil War. What has come down to us is this notion of John Brown, this flaming, crazy, white man who was patriarchal and patronizing-and that's not the historical case at all. When he was leading the raid on Harper's Ferry, Mary Ellen Pleasant was down south dressed as a man trying to organize slaves to tell them there was going to be an insurrection and they were supposed to rise up.

• The Caribbean is a place where set categories don't really work well. There are too many permutations. People's personal experiences are very different.

• ...it's like child abuse. You can't just cover it up and think it won't affect you. Even if you're not the person who's been abused, if it's your sister or your brother, it's going to come back to haunt you. It's going to have changed the environment that you grow up in and which you grow up into. You really have to contend with the history of this country, and the history of the world. (JR: And how do students of color respond to it?) MC: Some of them get very emotional and very upset, which, you know, is perfectly understandable. Some of them don't want to know about it. Some of them think it's shameful. One of the really important things is teaching that there was resistance. That is equally as important to me as the atrocity part. It's like the Holocaust: people did fight back. Yet we're never told that in school. It was something that was done to Jews or done to blacks and they collaborated in their own oppression. That's really not the case.

• Toni Morrison said, "The past is infinite." And it's true, especially if you are a writer of color. It is infinite, because so much of it that's been written in both fiction and nonfiction is a lie. It's almost like it behooves you to take that as your subject.

• ...what would it mean for a woman to love another woman in the Caribbean? Not in the Mediterranean, not in a Paris bar, not on an estate in England. These are the representations of lesbians we have in much literature. But for Caribbean women to love each other is different. It's not Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf, it's not Djuna Barnes or Natalie Barney, and it's not Sappho.

published in African American Review (Summer 1994)

• I think that liberation has to begin with oneself.

• It's like amputating a piece of yourself to hate another human being for no reason.

• I think that the problem with America is the dissonance between the myth of this country and the reality. To have to contend all the time with unraveling the myth of America is very difficult.

• (What does Jamaica mean to you? You say you feel close through the writing.) Cliff: It is an incredibly provincial and oppressive place. There are things about it like the landscape, and some of the people, that I really love, but I hate the classism that I grew up with. I hate the system of oppressing other people of color. I hate pettiness, obsession with appearance, what things look like, how you appear to the outside world. It's such a waste of time. I hate the sexism, the extraordinary double standards. It's unbelievable! See, I experienced a lot of it as a negative place, but also it breaks my heart when I think what might have been.

• when I was growing up in Jamaica it was still a colony, and the teachers I had at Saint Andrews were, for the most part, white women or light-skinned Jamaican women who believed in white supremacy and English supremacy-the Empire. The Jamaicans were somehow to feel ashamed of Jamaica, and the English were horrendously superior. You felt inadequate. I don't know how else to put it. You were taught to worship something you could never really be a part of, and you were taught to be grateful to these people. But I always hated this. It was hard not to hate them.

• (Adisa: What changes have you witnessed since the 1960s? We're almost into another century. Is the conflict between blacks and whites, is racism still intense?) Cliff: I think it will never change until people realize where it comes from, and how deep it goes. You cannot eliminate it by changing a couple of laws which then are changed back, anyway. It's an existential thing. Racism goes very, very deep in people, and it's historically complex. I mean, it's a huge subject. I was teaching a course, the main theme of which was racism, how it is supported by the same thing that supports anti-semitism, that supports oppression of any group of people. People have simply got to, first of all, want to change, then take the steps to do so.

• My writing is very visual. And I find movies coming into it a lot, using movies as an idea, and the effects of movies. Growing up in Jamaica movies were one of the only contacts with the outside world for many people.

• The feminist movement allowed me certain things, like choosing to live alone, which was frowned on in the world in which I lived. Feminism for me was a way of looking in a mirror and seeing possibilities. It gave me support for my choices. One of these choices ultimately was to become a writer, which was something not at all encouraged in the world in which I grew up.

• (In the late 1960s, when you were coming of age, the feminist movement was beginning to gain momentum. What contact, if any, did you have with this movement, and how did you feel about a women's movement?) Cliff: The main contact I had was through reading. I was disillusioned by what had happened in the 1960s - for example, the crackdown on the Panthers and other progressive groups-so I went to England and tried to lose myself. My first real contact was through Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970) and The Female Eunuch (1971) by Germaine Greer. But I've always been interested in women as historical figures. In my family I bucked against what was expected of me: marriage and children. So I found the feminist movement liberating, to discover that there were other women who thought like me. It meant I was not a freak.

• Goodreads page