Mixed Race Studies

No Telephone to Heaven

Plume
March 1996 (Originally published in 1987)
224 Pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780452275690

Michelle Cliff (1946-2016)

A brilliant Jamaican-American writer takes on the themes of colonialism, race, myth, and political awakening through the experiences of a light-skinned woman named Clare Savage. The story is one of discovery as Clare moves through a variety of settings – Jamaica, England, America – and encounters people who affect her search for place and self.

The structure of No Telephone to Heaven combines naturalism and lyricism, and traverses space and time, dream and reality, myth and history, reflecting the fragmentation of the protagonist, who nonetheless seeks wholeness and connection. In this deeply poetic novel there exist several levels: the world Clare encounters, and a world of which she only gradually becomes aware – a world of extreme poverty, the real Jamaica, not the Jamaica of the middle class, not the Jamaica of the tourist. And Jamaica – almost a character in the book – is described in terms of extraordinary beauty, coexisting with deep human tragedy.

The violence that rises out of extreme oppression, the divided loyalties of a colonized person, sexual dividedness, and the dividedness of a person neither white nor black – all of these are truths that Clare must face. Overarching all the themes in this exceptionally fine novel is the need to become whole, and the decisions and the courage demanded to achieve that wholeness.

Journey into Speech-A Writer between Two Worlds: An Interview with Michelle Cliff

African American Review
Volume 28, Number 2, Black Women’s Culture Issue (Summer, 1994)
pages 273-281
DOI: 10.2307/3041999

Opal Palmer Adisa, Professor of Creative Writing
California College of the Arts

Among the subjects Jamaican born writer Michelle Cliff explores in her writings are ancestry, the impact of colonization on the Caribbean, the relationships among and interconnection of African people in the diaspora, racism, and the often erroneous way in which the history of black people is recorded. In her latest novel, Free Enterprise (1993), Cliff attempt: to rewrite the story of Mary Ellen Pleasant, the African American woman who supplied money with which John Brown bought arms for the raid at Harper’s Ferry. Her other two novels, No Telephone to Heaven (1987) and Abeng (1984), are semi-autobiographical and explore the life of Clare Savage, fair-skinned girl raised between Jamaica and North America, who must reconcile her mixed heritage in a changing society. Other works by Cliff include Bodies of Water (1990), The Land of Look Behind (1985), and Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise (1980).

The following text is based on two separate interviews: one done in person in Albany, California, in December 1989, and the other conducted over the telephone in September 1993.

Adlsa: When did you find your voice, when did you decide that you wanted to be a writer?

Cliff: I always wanted to write. Actually there was a terrible incident. I don’t know if I should tell you, but I will. When I was at Saint Andrews I was keeping a diary. I had been very influenced by The Diary of Anne Frank, and as a result of seeing the movie and reading her diary, I got a diary of my own. I wasn’t living with my mother and father at this time; I was living with my aunt in Kingston [Jamaica] and going to Saint Andrews. This aunt also had a house in Saint Ann, where we used to stay on the weekends. Anyway, my parents broke into my bedroom in Kingston when we were not at the house. They went into my room, broke open my drawer, took out and broke the lock on my diary, and read it. Then they arrived at the other house. My father and mother had my diary in their hands and sat down and read it out loud in front of me, my aunt, and everybody else. My sister was there. There were very intimate details; there were a lot of things about leaving school and not going to class and playing hookey, but there was also the experience of the first time I menstruated, and I remember just being shattered. My father read it, and my mother was in total collaboration. (Pause.) Anyway I remember just crying and being sad and whatnot. I spoke to my sister about it once, and she remembered, even though she was seven at the time. And she said, “Don’t you remember screaming and saying, ‘Don’t I have any rights?'”…

Large Abroad | London poet laureate Raymond Antrobus staying true to Jamaican roots

The Gleaner
Kingston, Jamaica
2016-06-13

Andre Poyser

Raymond Antrobus

Raymond Antrobus continues to be in strong contention to be named Young Poet Laureate for London – a position awarded annually to a poet age 21-30 living in the United Kingdom capital.

Antrobus, a second-generation Jamaican born and bred in East London, has been redefining what it means to be a poet in the 21st century through monologues, which Calabash co-founder Kwame Dawes describes as stunning studies of voice and substance.

While he only visits Jamaica occasionally, the young poet says he owes his graceful and finely crafted lyric poems, another characterisation penned by Dawes, to his Jamaican heritage…

Read the entire article here.

Pao: A Novel

Bloomsbury Publishing
2011-07-12
288 pages
5 1/2″ x 8 1/4″
Paperback ISBN: 9781608195077
EPUB eBook ISBN: 9781608196845

Kerry Young

As a young boy, Pao comes to Jamaica in the wake of the Chinese civil war and rises to become the Godfather of Kingston’s bustling Chinatown. Pao needs to take care of some dirty business, but he is no Don Corleone. The rackets he runs are small time and the protection he provides necessary, given the minority status of the Chinese in Jamaica. Pao, in fact, is a sensitive guy in a wise guy role that doesn’t quite fit. Often mystified by all that he must take care of, Pao invariably turns to Sun Tsu’s Art of War. The juxtaposition of the weighty, aphoristic words of the ancient Chinese sage, and the tricky criminal and romantic predicaments Pao must negotiate goes far toward explaining the novel’s great charm.

A tale of post-colonial Jamaica from a unique and politically potent perspective, Pao moves from the last days of British rule through periods of unrest at social and economic inequality, though tides of change that will bring Rastafarianism and the Back to Africa Movement. Jamaica is transforming: And what is the place of a Chinese man in this new order? Pao is an utterly beguiling, unforgettable novel of race, class and creed, love and ambition, and a country in the throes of tumultuous change.

Understanding and Hearing the Afro-Asian Atlantic

Princeton University African American Studies
2016-03-21

Presenters: Tao Leigh Goffe, Kerry Young, Hannah Lowe, Randy Chin, and John Kuo Wei Tchen

A panel exploring the intersections of literature, reggae, and the relationships between the minority Chinese community in the Caribbean and the majority Afro-Caribbean community

This panel will be moderated by Tao Leigh Goffe (Princeton University) and John Kuo Wei Tchen (NYU)

In this dialogue, panelists Randy Chin, Kerry Young, and Hannah Lowe will discuss the African and Asian cultural heritage of the Caribbean in music and writing. Exploring the legacy of enslaved African labor and Chinese indentured labor in the Caribbean, Young and Lowe craft narratives that reconstruct and trouble colonial history. The region’s history cannot be fully understood without listening to its rich musical tradition. Chin will talk about the role of Jamaican Chinese businessmen in the production of reggae music and mobile soundsystems. He will also talk about his storied career in the reggae music industry, which began when his parents Vincent and Patricia Chin founded VP Records in Jamaica in 1979. The currents of the Black Atlantic and the overseas Chinese converge in Caribbean music but also in Young and Lowe’s novels and poetry that tackle themes such as intimacies out of wedlock, masculinities, abandonment, and criminality set in Kingston, Jamaica’s Chinatown and gambling dens in London’s East End. In these cultural texts, Jamaican patois and southern Chinese dialects are sometimes woven together to construct new narrative forms of the Afro-Asian experience in the Americas.

Together with historian John Kuo Wei Tchen and literary scholar Tao Leigh Goffe, panelists will discuss the tensions and intimacies between the minority Chinese community in the Caribbean and the majority Afro-Caribbean community. Other themes to be explored include representations of blackness and Chineseness in Caribbean diasporic literature and music.

This event is part of the Campus Conversations on Identities and is co-sponsored by the Department of African American Studies, the Program in American Studies, the Lewis Center for the Arts, the Department of Comparative Literature, the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, the Asian American Students’ Association, and the Princeton Caribbean Connection (PCC).

Black Death: Gore, Geographies and the Gallows in Jamaica

African American Intellectual History Society
2015-10-12

Jessica Marie Johnson, Assistant Professor of History
Michigan State University

Pierre Eugène du Simitière, ca. 1757-1774

One evening, on a road in Jamaica, a soldier belonging to the “Mulatto Company” made his evening rounds. He came upon a black man in the woods. The soldier called for his attention. Receiving no answer, he killed him.

Upon closer inspection, the man was identified as a “new negro” gathering wood to sell in town. Death was not the end for the “negre nouveau.” Once he was dead, his body was placed in a cage hung from a gallows planted at a busy intersection in town. His body remained “for all to see” at that crossroads–somewhere between Montgomery’s Corner, near a road named Rockport, and close to One Mile Stone. After two years, he/it was called ‘Fortune,” and the black men, women, and children who passed treated the body as a relic, an item with spiritual powers or import…

Read the entire article here.

The enduring function of caste: colonial and modern Haiti, Jamaica, and Brazil The economy of race, the social organization of caste, and the formulation of racial societies

Comparative American Studies
Volume 2, Issue 1 (01 March 2004)
pages 61-73
DOI: 10.1177/1477570004041288

Tekla Ali Johnson, Professional Public Historian
Southern Preservation Center in Charlotte, North Carolina

Modern day social hierarchies in Jamaica, Brazil and, to a degree, Haiti find their roots in the colonial context, where planters stratified laborers in order to maximize control. During slavery planters found artificial ways of influencing African identity, dividing enslaved Africans by their occupations and by skin color. These distinctions created divisions among workers and color proved a singularly powerful and enduring symbol of social and economic mobility. The American propensity for creating racial classifications for Africans and further divisions for ‘mixed-race’ offspring traditionally served economic interests. Their perpetuation into the present may signal the continued utility of dividing Africans into subgroups as a means of maintaining control of racial politics in the Americas.

Read or purchase the article here.

A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia, by Richard Dunn

The English Historical Review
Volume 130, Issue 547, December 2015
pages 1575-1577
DOI: 10.1093/ehr/cev299

Trevor Burnard, Professor of History
University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria, Australia

A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia, by Richard Dunn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U.P., 2014; pp. 540. £29.95).

When Richard Dunn wrote a preliminary essay, published in a major journal, comparing the lives of enslaved people working on a large sugar plantation called Mesopotamia in western Jamaica between 1762 and 1834 with the lives of slaves on a large tidewater grain-producing estate in Virginia between 1808 and 1865, he concluded that the experience of slaves in Virginia was better than that of slaves in Jamaica. To his chagrin, a local newspaper summarised his article as if the competition somehow validated Virginian slavery as being not that bad, considering how it was in Jamaica.

That was nearly forty years ago. Since then Dunn has moderated those early opinions so that he now has a much more nuanced view of slave life in the English-speaking Americas. As he says, with characteristic dry humour, taking forty years to write a book is ‘not a recommended modus operandi for historians’ (p. 1). The result, however, is a magnificent and deeply humane evocation of two deeply disturbing worlds of slavery, neither of which exceeded the other in dreadfulness, and in both of which man’s inhumanity to man is ever present. One great advantage of the length of time taken..

Read or purchase the review here.

Finding Samuel Lowe: China, Jamaica, Harlem

HarperCollins
2015-04-14
288 pages
Trimsize: 6 in (w) x 9 in (h) x 1.004 in (d)
Hardcover ISBN: 9780062331632; ISBN 10: 0062331639
eBook ISBN: 9780062331656; ISBN 10: 0062331655

Paula Williams Madison

Spanning four generations and moving between New York, Jamaica, and China, a powerful memoir that is a universal story of one woman’s search for her maternal grandfather and the key to her self-identity.

Thanks to her spiteful, jealous Jamaican mother, Nell Vera Lowe was cut off from her Chinese father, Samuel, when she was just a baby, after he announced he was taking a Chinese bride. By the time Nell was old enough to travel to her father’s shop in St. Anne’s Bay, he’d taken his family back to China, never learning what became of his eldest daughter. Bereft, Nell left Jamaica for New York to start a new life. But her Asian features set her apart from her Harlem neighbors and even her own children—a difference that contributed to her feeling of loneliness and loss which she instilled in her only daughter, Paula.

Years later, with a successful corporate career behind her and the arrival of her only grandchild raising questions about family and legacy, Paula decided to search for Samuel Lowe’s descendants in China. With the support of her brothers and the help of encouraging strangers, Paula eventually pieced together the full story of her grandfather’s life, following his story from China to Jamaica and back, and connecting with 300 surprised relatives who were overjoyed to meet her.

Finding Samuel Lowe is a remarkable journey about one woman’s path to self-discovery. It is a story about love and devotion that transcends time and race, and a beautiful reflection of the power of family and the interconnectedness of our world.

Finding Samuel Lowe includes a 16-page black-and-white photo insert and photos in the text.

The Other Side of Paradise: A Memoir

Scribner (in imprint of Simon & Schuster)
2009
304 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780743292917
eBook ISBN: 9781439159378

Staceyann Chin

No one knew Staceyann’s mother was pregnant until a dangerously small baby was born on the floor of her grandmother’s house in Lottery, Jamaica, on Christmas Day. Staceyann’s mother did not want her, and her father was not present. No one, except her grandmother, thought Staceyann would survive.

It was her grandmother who nurtured and protected and provided for Staceyann and her older brother in the early years. But when the three were separated, Staceyann was thrust, alone, into an unfamiliar and dysfunctional home in Paradise, Jamaica. There, she faced far greater troubles than absent parents. So, armed with a fierce determination and uncommon intelligence, she discovered a way to break out of this harshly unforgiving world.

Staceyann Chin, acclaimed and iconic performance artist, now brings her extraordinary talents to the page in a brave, lyrical, and fiercely candid memoir about growing up in Jamaica. She plumbs tender and unsettling memories as she writes about drifting from one home to the next, coming out as a lesbian, and finding the man she believes to be her father and ultimately her voice. Hers is an unforgettable story told with grace, humor, and courage.