 | If I Could Write This in Fire Subjects: Cliff Michelle; Authors Jamaican -- 20th century -- Biography; Authors American -- 20th century -- Biography; Jamaican Americans -- Biography; Lesbian authors -- Biography; Born in a Jamaica still under British rule, the acclaimed and influential writer Michelle Cliff embraced her many identities, shaped by her experiences with the forces of colonialism and oppression: a light-skinned Creole, a lesbian, an immigrant in both England and the United States. In her celebrated novels and short stories, she has probed the intersection of prejudice and oppression with a rare and striking lyricism. In her first book-length collection of nonfiction, Cliff displays the same poetic intensity, interweaving reflections on her life in Jamaica, England, and the United States with a powerful and sustained critique of racism, homophobia, and social injustice. If I Could Write This in Fire begins by tracing her transatlantic journey from Jamaica to England, coalescing around a graceful, elliptical account of her childhood friendship with Zoe, who is dark-skinned and from an impoverished, rural background; the divergent life courses that each is forced to take; and the class and color tensions that shape their lives as adults. The personal is interspersed with fragments of JamaicaOCOs history and the plight of people of color living both under imperial rule and in contemporary Britain. In other essays and poems, Cliff writes about the discovery of her distinctive, diasporic literary voice, recalls her wild colonial girlhood and sexual awakening, and recounts traveling through an American landscape of racism, colonialism, and genocideOCoa history of violence embodied in seemingly innocuous souvenirs and tourist sites. A profound meditation on place and displacement, If I Could Write This in Fire explores the complexities of identity as they meet with race, gender, sexuality, nationality, and the legacies of the Middle Passage and European imperialism." Michelle Carla Cliff was born in Kingston, Jamaica on November 2, 1946. She received a bachelor's degree in European history from Wagner College in 1969. She briefly worked as a researcher at Time-Life Books and as a production editor at W. W. Norton. At the University of London, she studied art at the Warburg Institute and received a master of philosophy degree in 1974 after writing a thesis on the Italian Renaissance. She returned to Norton and worked as a production editor for books on history, women's studies, and politics. Her first book, Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise, was published in 1980. Her other books included The Land of Look Behind: Prose and Poetry, The Store of a Million Items, and If I Could Write This in Fire. Her first novel, Abeng, was published in 1984. Her other novels include No Telephone to Heaven, Free Enterprise: A Novel of Mary Ellen Pleasant, and Into the Interior. She died from liver failure on June 12, 2016 at the age of 69. (Bowker Author Biography) |
