{"id":47850,"date":"2016-06-20T20:33:01","date_gmt":"2016-06-20T20:33:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=47850"},"modified":"2016-06-24T19:54:44","modified_gmt":"2016-06-24T19:54:44","slug":"michelle-cliff-who-wrote-of-colonialism-and-racism-dies-at-69","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=47850","title":{"rendered":"Michelle Cliff, Who Wrote of Colonialism and Racism, Dies at 69"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michelle Cliff, Who Wrote of Colonialism and Racism, Dies at 69<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2016-06-18<\/p>\n

William Grimes<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\nMichelle Cliff sometime in the 1980s. In 1975, she met the poet Adrienne Rich<\/a>, who became her partner and died in 2012.<\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Michelle Cliff<\/a>, a Jamaican-American writer whose novels, stories and nonfiction essays drew on her multicultural identity to probe the psychic disruptions and historical distortions wrought by colonialism and racism, died on June 12 at her home in Santa Cruz, Calif<\/a>. She was 69.<\/p>\n

The cause was liver failure, according to the Adrienne Rich Literary Trust. Ms. Cliff and Ms. Rich, the poet, were longtime partners.<\/p>\n

Ms. Cliff\u2019s entire creative life was a quest to give voice to suppressed histories, starting with her own. Her first essay, \u201cNotes on Speechlessness,\u201d written for a women\u2019s writing group in 1978, can be read as the keynote for her subsequent work, which navigated the complexities of her life situation \u2014 she was a light-skinned black lesbian raised partly in Jamaica<\/a> and partly in New York<\/a>, and educated in Britain<\/a> \u2014 against the broader background of the Caribbean experience…<\/p>\n

…In her first novel, \u201cAbeng<\/a>\u201d (1984), she introduced Clare Savage, a light-skinned 12-year-old Jamaican girl who befriends the dark-skinned Zoe, whose family squats on Clare\u2019s grandmother\u2019s farm. It is an idyllic relationship that cannot survive the harsh realities of race and class.<\/p>\n

\u201cEmotionally, the book is an autobiography,\u201d Ms. Cliff told the reference work Contemporary Authors in 1986. \u201cI was a girl similar to Clare and have spent most of my life and most of my work exploring my identity as a light-skinned Jamaican, the privilege and the damage that comes from that identity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clare returns to Jamaica as an adult in the novel \u201cNo Telephone to Heaven<\/a>\u201d (1987), which, in a series of flashbacks, tells of her life in New York and London<\/a> and her struggles to come to terms with who she is…<\/p>\n

Read the entire obituary here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michelle Cliff, Who Wrote of Colonialism and Racism, Dies at 69 The New York Times 2016-06-18 William Grimes Michelle Cliff sometime in the 1980s. In 1975, she met the poet Adrienne Rich, who became her partner and died in 2012. Michelle Cliff, a Jamaican-American writer whose novels, stories and nonfiction essays drew on her multicultural […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1245,21,666,8,20,25],"tags":[6178,24248,24247,2755,2327,22670],"class_list":["post-47850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-biography","category-latincarib","category-gaylesbian","category-media-archive","category-usa","category-women","tag-adrienne-rich","tag-michelle-c-cliff","tag-michelle-carla-cliff","tag-michelle-cliff","tag-the-new-york-times","tag-william-grimes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47850"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47850\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47937,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47850\/revisions\/47937"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}