Re-visioning Our History: An Interview

with Michelle Cliff

Jim Clawson

Michelle Cliff was born in Jamaica and grew up there and in the United
States. She holds a Masters of Philosophy degree from the Warburg
Institute at the University of London. Cliff is the author of three novels:
Abeng, No Telephone, Free Enterprise, the short story collection
Bodies of Water, and her essays have appeared in such publications as
Ms. and The Village Voice.

Jim Clawson is an MFA Candidate at the University of Pittsburgh and

a former student of Michelle Cliff’s.

Your work has been described as an attempt to revise "Monolithic

History?"

Who said that? Monolithic? As far as writing about the Caribbean I

think that I am trying to revise a colonized history, a history that's been
interpreted from a European perspective only, and I'm trying to
revision it as a history that is more complex. I don't like the word
"Monolithic;" it sounds so heavy handed, but that's a critical thing,
so....

I had trouble with the term revised. So much of your work seems to
be about revealing.

I would say "re-vision" In the sense of re-visioning something, not in

the sense of revising as in correcting it, or editing it, but in trying to see
something from a different point of view.

In an article you wrote for Ploughshares you’re discussing two

prisons, most specifically the Fishkill Correctional Facility near
San Francisco, and you write that: "One of these places reminds
me of another."

It's about places of captivity.

Writing about Fishkill Prison allows you to write about other

prisons as well?

I think so, yeah. It's like a concrete representation of a landscape of

captivity and that leads you to see other places of captivity. I think
that's how it goes. And captivity being the physical act of holding
people in one place, like in South Africa, which I refer to in that piece
also. But also the metaphor of holding people captive, their
imaginations captive...

In Claiming an Identity they Taught Me to Despise, I was struck by

the two juxtaposed definitions of "pinion." As the wing and the
section of the wing, as well as the severing of the wing.

The elimination of flight.

That seems to suggest a meeting place for two contradictory ideas

-- in language.

So much of what a writer does is unconscious, it could well be.

Absolutely. I like to play with language a lot, find alternative meanings
for the same words, like I do with "pinion". I like to use it to liberate
myself and to, I guess, use the English language in a way where I own
it, that it becomes mine, and it’s not something imposed on me. So I
don't use just the King's English that's imposed on me, I use all the
different versions of English that I've experienced, including Caribbean
English, American English, Literary English, whatever . . . but there's a
sense of liberation in being able to reconstruct one's own language,
that's connected up certainly to reconstructing history, and also
reconstructing experience.

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Copyright 2002, Jim Clawson

nidus is an online publication supported by the Writing Program at

the University of Pittsburgh's English Department.

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