Michelle Cliff


Michelle Carla Cliff was a Jamaican-American author whose notable works included Abeng , No Telephone to Heaven, and .
In addition to novels, Cliff also wrote short stories, prose poems and works of literary criticism. Her works explore the various complex identity problems that stem from the experience of post-colonialism, as well as the difficulty of establishing an authentic individual identity in the face of race and gender constructs. A historical revisionist, many of Cliff's works seek to advance an alternative view of history against established mainstream narratives. She often referenced her writing as an act of defiance—a way to reclaim a voice and build a narrative in order to speak out against the unspeakable by tackling issues of sex and race.
Identifying as biracial and bisexual, Cliff, who had both Jamaican and American citizenship used her voice to create a body of work filled with prose poetry, novels and short stories. Her writings were enriched by the power, privilege and pain of her multi-locatedness to creatively reimagine Caribbean identity.

Biography

Cliff was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1946 and moved with her family to New York City three years later. She moved back to Jamaica in 1956 and attended , where she kept a diary and began writing, before returning to New York City in 1960. She was educated at Wagner College where she graduated with a B.A. in European History and the Warburg Institute at the University of London where she did post graduate work in Renaissance studies. Her post graduate work focused on the Italian Renaissance. She has held academic positions at several colleges including Trinity College and Emory University.
From 1999, Cliff lived in Santa Cruz, California, with her partner, the American poet Adrienne Rich. The two had been partners since 1976; Rich died in 2012.
Cliff died of liver failure on 12 June 2016.

Career and Works

Her first published work came in the form of and covered the many ways Cliff herself experienced racism and prejudice.
Having found fellowship and community with African American and Latina feminists, Cliff's work thrived and contributed to enabling other's voices to be heard. Cliff was a contributor to the 1983 Black feminist anthology Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology.
In 1984, Cliff published , a semi autobiographical novel that explores topics of female sexual subjectivity and Jamaican identity. Next came , which uses the Jamaican folk world, its landscape and culture to examine identity.
Cliff's second novel, , was published in 1987. At the heart of this novel, which continues the story of Clare Savage from her first novel, , she explores the need to reclaim a suppressed African past.
Her works were also anthologized in a collection edited by Barbara Smith and Gloria Anzaldúa for by Feminists of Color.
From 1990 on, Cliff's work is seen as having taken a more global focus, especially with her first collection of short stories, . In 1993 she published her third novel, , and in 1998 she published another collection of short stories, . Both works continue her pursuit of readdressing historical wrongings.
She continued to work throughout the early aughts, releasing several collections of essays and short stories including and and her final novel, .
By 2015, Cliff took part in many literary projects, including translating into English the works of several writers, poets and creatives such as Argentinean poet Alfonsina Stonri; Spanish poet and dramatist, Federico García Lorca and Italian poet, film director and philosopher Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Fiction

In 1981, Cliff became an associate of the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press.