(These comments on the protagonist of Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven [the continuation of Abeng] help explain the theoretical as well as the personal and aesthetic impulses driving Cliff's novels. I found Cliff's invocation of Ana Mendieta particularly interesting, and thus have included a Mendieta Portfolio so you can see a sample of Mendieta's art.)

1. The first piece of writing I produced, beyond a dissertation on intellectual game-playing in the Italian Renaissance, was entitled "Notes on Speechlessness." In these notes I talked about my identification with Victor, the wild boy/child of Aveyron who, after his "rescue" from the forest and wildness (and, presumably, the she-wolf who nourished him) by a well-meaning doctor of Enlightenment Europe, became tamed, "civilized," but never came to speech.

 

2. I felt with Victor when I first read his story. My wildness had been tamed, that which I had been taught was my wildness, which embraced imagination, emotion, spontaneity, history, memory, revolution, and flights of fancy. Flesh was replaced by air; Caliban by Ariel. But, as Roberto Fernandez-Retamar has observed,

There is no real Ariel-Caliban polarity; both are slaves in the hands of Prospero, the foreign magician. But Caliban is the rude and unconquerable master of the island, while Ariel, a creature of the air, although also a child of the isles, is the intellectual.

 

3. Victor's name, given to him by Dr. Itard, lives in odd juxtaposition to his fate. The victory is not his, really, it belongs to his civilizer, tamer, colonizer, he who would erase Victor's history before his indoctrination, assume the forest was merely brutish, and tell the tale entirely from his own point of view.

 

4. Then, too, Victor is speechless. Do we understand this speechlessness as an act of self-erasure or one of rebellion? Or both?

 

5. I use Victor here as a metaphor for the colonized child, who is chosen to represent the colonizer's world, to peddle the colonizer's values, ideas, and notions of what is real, alien, other, normal, supreme. There are, of course, different brands of colonization; some colonized children will turn a profit for the colonizer and perish in defense of his boundaries; some may one day slit his throat. But all are washed in the notion that life before discovery in the forest, the Middle Passage, civilization, represents only brutishness and therefore he or she must forget, deny, be silent about that part. The child is not allowed to become whole under such stringent taming.

 

6. These thoughts serve as an introduction, explaining that part of my purpose as a writer of Afro-Caribbean (Indian, African, and white) experience and heritage and Western experience and education (indoctrination) has been to reject speechlessness by inventing my own peculiar speech, one that attempts to draw together everything I am and have been, both Caliban and Ariel and a liberated and synthesized version of each.

 

7. Caliban speaks to Prospero, saying: "You taught me language, and my profit on't / Is, I know how to curse."

 

8. This line immediately brings to my mind the character of Bertha Rochester, wild and raving ragout, as Charlotte Bronte describes her, cursing and railing, more beast than human. It takes a West Indian writer, Jean Rhys, to describe Bertha from the inside rather than from the outside, keeping "Bertha's humanity, indeed her sanity as critic of imperialism, intact," as Gayatri Spivak has observed.

 

9. And what a fine phrase to describe the character we all encountered as girls as the madwoman in the attic.

 

10. Rhys said in an interview when speaking of Bertha and The Wide Sargasso Sea, "I though I'd try to writer her a life." It is a statement at once moving and sensible.

 

11. It makes one (at least, this one) wish another Caribbean writer would take on the character of Heathcliff and write him a life. [Note: evidently Maryse Conde has a new book out doing just that; it's not yet available in the U.S.]

 

12. The protagonist of my two novels is named Clare Savage. She is not exactly an autobiographical character, but she is an amalgam of myself and others, who eventually becomes herself alone. Bertha Rochester is her ancestor.

 

13. Her name, obviously, is significant and is intended to represent her as a crossroads character, with her feet (and head) in (at least) two worlds. Her first name means, signifies, light-skinned, which she is, and light-skinnedness in the world in which Clare originates, the island of Jamaica in the period of British hegemony, and to which she is transported, the United States in the 1960s, and to which she transports herself, Britain in the 1970s [note: Clare's migrations to the U.S. and Britain occur in No Telephone to Heaven] stands for privilege, civilization, erasure, forgetting. She is not meant to curse, or rave, or be a critic of imperialism. She is meant to speak softly and keep her place.

 

14. Her surname is self-explanatory. It is meant to evoke the wildness that has been bleached from her skin, understanding that my use of the word wildness is ironic, mocking the master's meaning, turning instead to a sense of non-Western values which are empowering and essential to survival, her survival, and wholeness, her wholeness. A knowledge of history, the past, has been bleached from her mind, just as the rapes of her grandmothers are bleached from her skin. And this bleached skin is the source of her privilege and her power too, she thinks, for she is a colonized child.

 

15. She is a light-skinned female who has been removed from her homeland in a variety of ways and whose life is a movement back, ragged, interrupted, uncertain, to that homeland. She is fragmented, damaged, incomplete. The novels Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven describe her fragmentation as well as her movement toward homeland and wholeness.

 

16. At the end of No Telephone to Heaven, Clare Savage has cast her lot, quietly and somewhat tentatively, but definitely. [I'm going to omit a few sentences here, as I don't want to give away the plot of No Telephone . . . I hope many of you will read the novel when {ha!} you have time.] This ending and the sense it conveys is reminiscent of the work of the Cuban artist Ana Mendieta. I was inspired by the work of Mendieta, who died in 1985 at the absurd age of thirty-six. Like Clare Savage, like me, Ana Mendieta was a child-exile. She had been sent from Cuba by her parents, in cahoots with the Catholic church and the U.S. State Department, which devised a plan to rescue children from growing up under the auspices of a Marxist government. Under this plan, fourteen thousand children were shipped out. Ana and her elder sister Raquel ended up in Dubuque, Iowa, when Ana was about twelve. The children spoke no English at all.

 

17. The critic Elizabeth Hess commended on Mendieta's work:

Mendieta's art took shape in performance, earthworks, sculptures, and photographs. Again and again, she carved a haunting iconic figure into the ground, onto the side of a cave, or even into a stream of water by defining the form with ripples and rocks. On occasion the figure was born in flames, literally exploding into existence, then burning up. All that was left of these pieces, called the Silueta Series, was a scar . . . a shadow-image. The earth owns these works, which eventually will disappear over time.

 

18. Her work, like mine, has been a movement back to homeland, to identity. She represents this homeland, this landscape of her identity, as female, as womb, the contours of a woman's body, at times filling the contours with blood, other times fixing the silhouette to the earth by gunpowder. In other work besides the Silueta Series, Mendieta uses this landscape of her identity, as in her series of drawings on tropical leaves, for example. [. . . ]

 

19. Both Mendieta and I understand the landscape of our islands as female. For me, the land is redolent of my grandmother and mother, it is a deeply personal connection. The same could be said of Clare Savage, who seeks out the landscape of her grandmother's farm as she would seek out her grandmother and mother. There is nothing left at that point but the land, and it is infused with the spirit and passion of these two women.

 

20. Looking back over Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven I find the theme of the grandmother repeated. I try in both of these novels to show the power, particularly the spiritual authority, of the grandmother as well as her victimization. Hers is a power directly related to landscape, gardens, planting when the heavenly signs are right, burying the placenta and umbilical cord, preparing the dead for burial. This powerful aspect of the grandmother originates in Nanny, the African warrior and Maroon leader.

 

21. At her most powerful, the grandmother is the source of knowledge, magic, ancestors, stories, healing practices, and food. She assists at rites of passage, protects, and teaches. She is an inheritor of African belief systems, African languages. She may be informed with ashe [Yoruban word for divine force, energy], the power to make things happen, the responsibility to mete justice.

 

22. She appears in several places in my work. Most prominently she is Miss Mattie, the grandmother of Clare Savage. With her brown arms furiously, sensuously working as she pounds the beans from her coffee-piece into dust in her carved mortar with her smoothed pestle, she embodies power, the life force she represent. [. . . ]

 

23. There is one grandmother who stands apart from the others. [ . . .] She is the woman Hart Crane envisioned as the flesh of America, Powhatan's daughter Pocahontas. She becomes grandmother in death, whereas in life she was daughter and mother. Pocahontas is buried in Gravesend [England], having died on the Thames at the start of her return home in 1616, in her twentieth year. On board also were her infant son and English husband, who returned to Virginia.

 

24. Pocahontas's name has often been considered synonymous with collaborator, traitor, consort of the enemy. The truth is more complicated. The daughter of Powhatan, she was kidnapped by colonists and held against her will. She was forced to abandon the belief system of her people and to memorize the Apostle's Creed, Lord's Prayer, and Ten Commandments. She was taken to England in 1616 and there displayed - a tame Indian, the forest behind her, cleansed by civilization. She became known as the "friend of the earliest struggling English colonists whom she nobly rescued, protected, and helped," as is written on her memorial tablet in St. George's Church [in Gravesend]. She is memorialized as Rebecca Rolfe; her real name, translating as Bright Stream between Two Hills, erased.

 

25. She, like Victor, has been rescued from wildness, a colonized child who exists in history, speechless.

 

26. When Clare Savage recognizes Pocahontas in that graveyard in Gravesend [in No Telephone] she makes a choice, begins a series of choices, which will take her from the mother country back to the country of her grandmother, her own.