Dismantling the Prison-House of Colonial History in a Selection of Michelle Cliff's Texts

Most, if not all, writings by Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff are connected by a subterranean desire to re-write Afro-Caribbean history from new untold perspectives in reaction to the immense loss and/or distortions that marked the region's history for entire centuries. In this paper, I meticulously read four of Cliff's texts--"Abeng" (1984), its sequel "No Telephone to Heaven" (1987), "Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise" (1980) and "The Land of Look Behind" (1985)--to look at how Cliff retrieves her black ancestors' submerged history and erased past. I particularly explore the methods Cliff deploys to re-center a history deliberately erased/or distorted by what she ironically calls "the official version" ("Free Enterprise," 1994, p. 138) in allusion to the Eurocentric narratives about the twin imperial projects of slavery and colonialism. Finally, I investigate the wealth of possibilities offered by fiction, unrecorded memory, oral story-telling and imagination to out-tell Eurocentric historiography and re-write Afro-Caribbean history from the victims' perspective: slaves, colonial subjects, marginalized female figures, black Diasporic characters, etc.