Life Writing in the Long Run: A Smith & Watson Autobiography Studies Reader

1. Remembering

The autobiographical “I,” then, is a site of specific emplacements (to use Linda Warley’s term) and the vagaries of mobility simultaneously. As Chandra Talpade Mohanty emphasizes in her discussion of writing and resistance, “resistance is encoded in the practices of remembering against the grain of ‘public’ or hegemonic history, of locating the silences and the struggle to assert knowledge which is outside the parameters of the dominant.”[19] All of this is a way of saying that the “I” as an enunciatory site is a point of convergence of autobiographical politics and the politics of memory. There are, of course, different kinds of memory. Generic event memory (or habit memory or implicit memory) is the kind of memory that comes into play in the “things happen this way” sense. (How we negotiate a grocery store, for instance, or swim.) There is eidetic memory—the memory of images so prominent in childhood, the memory that seems to make of childhood recollection a different order from adult remembering. And there is episodic memory that involves, according to the psychologist Katherine Nelson, “conscious recollection of previous experiences” that are “remarkable.”[20] Episodic memories become narrativized through “mental constructs which people use to make sense out of experience.”[21]

Now I want to note three characteristics of narrative memory. First of all, narrative remembering functions as a medium of symbolic interaction. It is an occasion of exchange and an effect of social exchange. In her essay on the psychological and social origins of autobiographical memory, Nelson suggests that narrative memories “become valued in their own right–-not because they predict the future and guide present action, but because they are shareable with others and thus serve a social solidarity function.”[22]

Second, remembering is emplaced. Narrative memories are attached to places; and places become personally and communally meaningful through memories and the social context of remembering. Paul Connerton, in his study How Societies Remember, claims:

Thus remembering flows from and returns to material sites and practices. Objects, buildings, views, gestures, rituals, etc., stimulate the processes of remembering as if our memories lie expectantly within them, only awaiting our attention for retrieval.

Third, embodiedness is critical to the recovery of memory (of and through emotion), since embodiment, memory, and subjectivity join in an autobiographical system. There must be a body in the memory. That is, there must be a subject who knows and owns the images coming from the external world and the memories invoked in interaction with the world; there must be memories through which the subject continually reconstructs notions of identity produced in symbolic exchange with the world; and the subject must understand herself as located in a body continually present to itself through “background body states and emotional states,”[24] states that are also changing with exchanges in the world.

Memory is embodied in another cultural sense as well. Historical memory is embodied in the very subjects that are its sites of remembering. These rememberings emerge through bodily gestures and presentations, through bodily emplacement within spaces of memory. Connerton goes so far as to suggest that the past itself inheres in “habitual memory sedimented in the body.”[25]

These sedimentations of memory are effects of the cultural possibilities of remembering. For the cultural past produces “artificial memory,” a term I take from the neuroscientist Stephen Rose.[26] By “artificial” I mean to foreground the interpretive effects of past events carried into the future through various symbolic modes of remembering. In his study of “lieux de mémoire,” Pierre Nora differentiates what he calls the History with a capital H from “real memory.” By real memory he means “life, borne by living societies founded in its name.” Continually in process, “open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting,” “real memory” functions as “a bond tying us to the eternal present.” Memory surrounding the rememberer, memory in process, memory as a continually renegotiated ground of social interaction, this “real memory” is social and unviolated. History, on the other hand, is an artificial form of remembering composed of “sifted and sorted historical traces . . . of mediation, of distance”; it is “the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer.”[27] But I would argue with Nora’s schematization and suggest that what he calls real memory is artificial as well.

For Nora “lieux de mémoire” “originate with the sense that there is no spontaneous memory” and so, in order to keep the traces of memory, we must create sites of memory—such as museums, festivals, anniversaries, etc. He argues that “without commemorative vigilance, history would soon sweep them away.”[28] “Lieux de mémoire” are sites where memory “crystallizes and secretes itself” in ways that are fixed, stable, instrumental.[29] Such sites are “bastions” upon which “we buttress our identities”; but, according to Nora, “if what they defeated were not threatened, there would be no need to build them.”[30]

Personal remembering, then, unfolds in and enfolds itself within the context of competing and contradictory artificial rememberings, since as things happen to people they learn what memory narratives to share, what memories to forget. This is the embodied politics of remembering. Toni Morrison and bell hooks have invoked this politics in their phrase “rememory.” More recently Ian Hacking has articulated a theory of “memoropolitics” that has attended the emergence of the sciences of memory in the late nineteenth century and the predominance of the sciences of memory in the twentieth century. “Memoro-politics,” which he triangulates with Michel Foucault’s two poles of anatomo- and bio-politics—the politics of the human body and the politics of the human population—is “a politics of the secret, of the forgotten event that can be turned, if only by strange flashbacks, into something monumental.”[31] Hacking identifies this politics of the secret as the displacement in the late nineteenth century of the politics of the soul. “There could be no sciences of the soul. So there came to be a science of memory.”[32] Nora, addressing the politics of the buried past from a slightly different angle, suggests that “one of the costs of the historical metamorphosis of memory has been a wholesale preoccupation with the individual psychology of remembering.”[33]

We might, then, speak of the de/colonization of memory as an effect of memoro-politics. The de/colonizing subject is a subject of an overwriting and overdetermining official history (artificial memory). The politics of the secret is the politics of the psychic trauma of de/colonization, of the disavowal of difference. The secret is the secret of the virtual subjection of the post/colonial subject as the embodiment of the past of colonialism. As Harry/Harriet says to Clare Savage in Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven: “But we are the past here. . . . A peculiar past. For we have taken the master’s past as our own. That is the danger.”[34]

Harry/Harriet’s attention to the embodiment of memory provides an entree to my discussion of autobiographical remembering in Cliff’s Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven, paired texts entwining autobiographical and fictive features in a coming-of-age story linked to untold, and oral, narratives of Jamaican colonization and resistance. In an effort to tease out the implications of Cliff’s politics of memory, I want to look at two sites of autobiographical remembering in each of the novels.

2. Plantation Genealogy

In an early scene in Abeng, the third-person narrator places the protagonist “Clare Savage”—a version of the author’s younger self—in a scene in which Clare’s father, Boy Savage, takes his daughter to visit the remains of his ancestral plantation. The narrator emphasizes the father’s pride in his family genealogy, a mode of autobiographical emplacement. This genealogy secures Boy’s paternal pedigree, his descent through the father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. I use the term “pedigree” here purposefully since genealogical guides, as Julia Watson remarks, refer to “pedigree” as “the validated evidence documenting ancestral identity, transactions, and events.”[35] Proud of his pedigree, Boy would make Clare his own daughter (a daughter not of woman born, in effect) by inserting her psychically in that pedigree. He would make her his own, the embodiment of his past carried into the future, by attaching her to the space sacralized in his memory museum, the old Savage plantation.[36]

For Boy, autobiographical memory is “embodied” in this site that serves as a “lieu de mémoire.” Walking through the dilapidated remains of Judge Savage’s once grand plantation, through the rooms in ruins, rooms fading with the faded wallpaper, Boy works to keep his pedigree intact by populating this imaginative diorama with shades of ancestors from the past. Even if the building is in ruins, its ruins become a romanticized trace, reaffirming “the old values of hierarchy and origin”[37] and with them the certainties of border cleavages. This scene of historical reenactment is necessary to Boy’s certitude of identity since it provides him with a story of origins. This pedigree fixes an individual in a family tree and roots the family tree in a specific sociocultural location. That is, “it installs particular families in the privileged world of those who can trace their origins and attest to the coherence of their stock.”[38]

As Boy guides Clare through certain spaces on the plantation, he reproduces an imaginative homestead for his memories. But his homestead is the great house of the plantation. Thus the return to the plantation most precisely is an embodied mnemonic device for remembering himself as “white.” For the pedigree that Boy claims as his means of self-locating functions to erase the other histories embodied in the ruins of the plantation, the histories of the middle passage, the slave quarters, the politics and economics of slavery, the rape of slave women, the violent passage from slavery to emancipation, and the continuing legacies of colonialism. Pedigree can only be sustained through the forgetting of trauma and the traumatic forgetting of the maternal line. Boy would forget the name of the mother, write her out of history, render her invisible, as the traumatic events in the slave quarters are rendered invisible on the old plantation. The matronym is subsumed under the patronym, its genealogical traces erased through the privileges of pedigree. Boy’s genealogical device, a product of modernity, tries to keep the secrets of the past at bay, and the biggest secret is that the dispossessed have no genealogical claims to make.[39]

Boy’s act of claiming genealogical pedigree, which “values origin, stock, race, blood, in an increasingly heterogeneous world,” serves to “establish ‘descent’ where it is most in question.”[40] In owning a pedigree, Boy believes in his own self-possession. Tracing his genealogical origins thus becomes a means to suture the multiple origins in his past, to suture his fragmented subjectivity through the apparent seamlessness of identification. But the need to secure pedigree signals self-losing. For pedigree can only be sustained through the forgetting of the otherness within and the refusal of the incomplete, the absent, the ungraspable, the spectral. The ruined foundation upon which Boy would erect his identity “disturbs what was previously considered immobile; it fragments what was thought unified; it shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined as consistent with itself.”[41]

The narrator of Abeng refuses pedigree as a productive mode of autobiographical emplacement. As one who knows, the narrator puts the plantation under a new description, revealing the indeterminacy of the past.[42] She makes only too clear that pedigree is a means of reproducing class privilege, racism, patriarchal and heterosexual norms. She exposes the ironies in the Savage genealogy, which is literally a narrative of patrilineal degeneration and profligacy rather than progress, and of genealogical mixing rather than purity. She also fills the narrative space with her research into the history of the slave trade and the history of emancipation. That is, she contains Boy’s remembering in her counter-memory. And she populates the plantation with those figures erased in Boy’s genealogy and imagines their various forms of resistance. Thus she assigns vitality and agency to the slaves.

Finally, the narrator refuses the postcolonial suture, exploring the neo-imperial practices of real estate developers who continue to exploit the natural and human resources of Jamaica. The plantation has become “Paradise Plantation,” seducing tourists to relocate in this tropical Eden, siting their homes of wealth upon the grasses of the slave quarters without having found an archeological dig necessary. The history of slavery has become evacuated of its palpable materiality as it serves as a romantic backdrop to the expansion of First-World wealth into the “islands” of desire and the nostalgia of the exotic. The old plantation is now a commodified tourist attraction, a site of staged authenticity.[43] Pedigreed remembering has degenerated into a prop for touristic pleasure. As such it provides only a distorting and disempowering relationship to the past, as Dean MacCannell says of tourist attractions in historical locations: “[T]hey are reminders of our break with the past and with tradition, even our own tradition.”[44]

Autobiographical pedigree cannot serve emancipatory purposes. The Savages, writes the narrator, “relinquish[ed] responsibility for their lives” (A 29). When Boy returns in No Telephone to Heaven he has left Jamaica behind for the United States, where he camouflages himself as “white,” practicing the arts of passing and the homely arts of painting plates with his “family crest” and other reproductions of the old plantation. In America he reproduces an imaginary homeland that gives him a pedigree through which he camouflages his heterogeneous inheritance.

3. Diary

Clare Savage drifts between her father’s fierce allegiance to genealogical pedigree and her mother’s haunting remoteness, her palpable autobiographical silence. While her Afro-Saxon[46] father extols the history and virtues of the English and participates in the denigration of the African cultural heritage and the people who are dark of body, her mother, even as she identifies emotionally with the poor and dark of body, represents them as victims, powerless ones who require feeding and sympathy, the helping hands of the privileged class. The narrator of Abeng recognizes Clare’s struggle with pedigree and mournful benevolence as a struggle with her own fragmentation.

That Clare becomes a diary writer is critical to her negotiation of this confounded fragmentation.[47] And the way she comes to diary writing is critical to the narrator’s engagement with the politics of autobiographical memory. Clare reads The Diary of Anne Frank at the same time that a schoolmate dies suddenly. Because of the conspiracy of silence surrounding that death (at the school, in her family, in the community), Claudia Lewis ceases to exist, cannot be remembered. By contrast, Anne Frank and her death at an early age remain unforgettable in the world: “But Anne most certainly had been there. She had left behind evidence of her life” (A 69).

Reading the diary and establishing intimacy with Anne, Clare is transported elsewhere, to another time and space, and in that elsewhere she is imaginatively released to articulate questions about oppression, suffering, victimization, ethics, heroism, and God’s beneficence. The evidence of the diary is the trace or countermemory of the past that prompts Clare to direct urgent questions to her father. It is through her undutiful persistence that she glimpses the inadequacies of Boy’s explanations, as well as those of the teachers at her school. She glimpses, that is, the inadequacy of official history. In reaching to understand how Anne, a young girl much like herself, could have been incarcerated and then exterminated, Clare “reaches,” the narrator tells us, “without knowing it, for an explanation of her own life” (A 72). Thus the tracings of this other space and time get read back into Clare’s autobiographical memory; and in that remembering she seeks to rescue herself in the refractions of another’s experience and subjectivity.

Clare purchases her first diary after viewing the film version of The Diary of Anne Frank. With its lock and key, this diary becomes Clare’s eccentric hiding place, a repository in which she records her secret thoughts, experiences, feelings, those traces of misidentification. The lock and key keep the secrets, and the secret self struggling with identity, desire, and the differences within, “safe” from betrayal (LLB 107). Thus, within the safety of this eccentric space, the young girl begins the process of self-authoring by “rewriting the stories that already exist about her since by seeking to publicize herself she is violating an important cultural construction of her femininity as passive or hidden.”[48]

Interestingly, Clare cannot address her diary, as Anne Frank addressed hers, to “Kitty.” “Kitty” was Anne Frank’s imaginary friend, a friend she adapted from a Dutch series for young girls, Joop ter Heul (by Cissy van Marxveldt), as she compensated for her loss of everyday friendships. “Kitty” became for the incarcerated teenager an ideal reader: “the friend for whom I have waited so long.”[49] To “Kitty” Anne could disgorge “all kinds of things that lie buried deep in my heart.”[50] Clare, like Anne, desires a relationship with a perfect friend, an interlocutor of the secret heart, but it cannot be with “Kitty,” which is the name of her mother, because her relationship with her mother is so troubled and unsatisfying. Thus, the narrator tells us, Clare “did not know what to call it” (A 80).

The diary as an autobiographical mode is both productive and limited in terms of a politics of decolonization. On the one hand, the diary leaves a testamentary trace of the everyday lives of the silenced, the dispossessed, the overwritten and overdetermined. In this way it registers the claim of the authority of experience by providing Clare with an alternative space for self-exploration in the midst of the family and the culture that constricts her self-imagining. Diary keeping, on the other hand, grounds the writing subject in the continuous present of the quotidian, a particularly efficacious temporal milieu for a young girl subject to her father’s investments in the past and in the long genealogical narrative. And in fact, the final scene of the novel finds Clare recording in her diary the secrets of her first menstruation, her coming to embodied femininity. She sits alone in her exile, policed by the racist Miss Beatrice, separated by her parents from her only friend Zoe, her body aching from the onslaught of menses; but she writes, bringing into words the secrets that others would cover with their conspiracy of silence. Her diary provides her an alternative forum for remembering what must be forgotten within the regimes of truth surrounding her.

Moreover, in the diary she becomes a subject being brought into being through a surfeit of “I”s. As Valerie Raoul notes in her discussion of the journal intime, “the ‘intimiste’ performs a triple self-projection, performing more-or-less simultaneously all three functions: author, character and reader of the text. . . . The specular and speculative narcissistic nature of the act of diary-writing enables the Self to be simultaneously desiring and desired, watching and watched, inside and outside, judging and judged.”[51] The surfeit constitutes a stay against the forces of annihilation, an accumulation in the memory museum of consciousness.[52]

Yet, significantly, the narrator of Abeng never gives the reader a glimpse of the diary. It remains an unspoken text within the text. And the last line of the novel refuses the authority of experience by rendering it as “not knowing”: “She was not ready to understand her dream. She had no idea that everyone we dream about we are” (A 166). Thus the narrator, at the same time that she emphasizes the necessity of diary writing as a medium of self-authorization, resists the authority of the self-referential “I” of diary. For the recourse to an unqualified authority of experience is itself problematic. It certainly functions as a point of departure for self-understanding and cultural critique; but it must remain a point of departure rather than a fixed site. For “experience,” as Joan W. Scott cautions, “is at once always already an interpretation and is in need of interpretation.”[53]

Diary is itself a self-referential practice with a history and certain effects. As a ledger of deposits in a memory bank, diary-keeping can function to reinforce the commodification of identity through consumer capitalism.[54] “Experience” then becomes so much capital to be accumulated, stored, packaged, and the self so accumulated rendered other to itself. Further, diary-keeping can function as a medium of self-regulation, for even as it encourages the unsilencing of the secret it maintains the necessity of secrecy. It keeps the secret in its certain space. In his consideration of Foucault’s cartographic metaphors, Rob Shields suggests that “spatial control is an essential constituent of modem technologies of discipline and power. Discipline . . . requires a specific enclosure of space.”[55] The diary becomes a cultural space where young girls survey themselves on the way to adulthood. Finally, diary-keeping promotes the privatization of experience, and with privatization that belief in a unique self that even as it is uncovered must be kept under lock and key. Promoting an individualist practice of identity, it may forestall more complex and contextualized notions of identity and agency.

The narrator leaves us at the end of Abeng with a diary-writing Clare who doesn’t know. The figure here is a figure of qualified promise. On the one hand, Clare has unconsciously learned to question if not to resist her father’s fierce autobiographical pedigree through her own autobiographical project. On the other hand, she has only limited self-knowledge and as yet no politics of remembering. Clare may dream of healing herself—through her healing of the otherness (Zoe) within—by suturing the “wound” with cool and damp moss. But she doesn’t yet know that she is dreaming about her own desire for self-suturing. She hasn’t yet formulated a politics of the secret through which to resist the memoro-politics of the secret that is implicated in colonialism’s legacies.

4. Autobiographical Bildungsroman

In the second of the two Clare Savage novels, Cliff continues her investigations of the politics of personal remembering, exploring Clare Savage’s life after she leaves Jamaica. I look next at two sites of remembering in No Telephone to Heaven, the first of which is Clare’s reading of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, a female Bildungsroman written as retrospective autobiography.

As Thomas Cartelli notes, Clare succumbs to the call of Brontë’s autobiographical narrator at the very moment she is most seduced by the call of the metropolitan center (NTH 90), when she is living in London in camouflage, passing as normatively “white.”[56] Jane’s personalism, her intimate address to her reader, seduces Clare into identification with the romance of (female) individualism. “The fiction had tricked her. Drawn her in so that she became Jane” (NTH 116). This “becoming Jane” forces a particular kind of remembering in Clare Savage, a remembering through which she conforms her experiential history to the individualist tropes of the “mother” country and sutures the differences.

Jane’s autobiographical project becomes the cultural mode through which she (Jane/her reader Clare) constitutes herself as a free, unified, rational, self-regulating subject, the bourgeois individual. As I have argued elsewhere, autobiographical storytelling emerged as one compelling means of constituting bourgeois subjects and thereby regulating both bodies and minds.[57] It also situated that subject in “historical time”—“natural, homogeneous, secular calendrical time,” the time underwriting the master narrative of development and progress.[58] Becoming Jane would keep Clare a “modern” young woman.

Identification with Jane, however, is only the first response to Clare’s reading of female Bildung:

The identification with Brontë’s protagonist is an unconscious process, the product of the suturing capacities of the autobiographical mode. But Clare “comes to” and, in coming to, she resists the self-suturing of “English” autobiographical paradigms. For this bourgeois “I” who speaks so earnestly in Jane Eyre is an “I” not only with attitude but with a politics, a politics that rests upon the “unquestioned ideology of imperialist axiomatics.”[59] Jane becomes a female individualist who, as Gayatri Spivak argues, moves from a position of marginality, of a family outside the Law, to a position of centrality, a family in the Law. She does so through the mediation of Bertha Mason, the figure who “render[s] indeterminate the boundary between human and animal,” thus simultaneously diminishing “her entitlement under the spirit if not the letter of the Law”[60] and justifying Jane’s assumption of active agency as a civilizing agent for Rochester. The liminal figure of Bertha is integral to the self-regulatory pressure of Jane’s Bildung. Jane moves inside the Law as Bertha is excised from the Law.

The figure of Bertha functions as a mnemonic device for remembering “the axiomatics of imperialism,”[61] most precisely the axiomatics of the civilizing mission. The novel form itself is implicated in what Mary Louise Pratt describes as the “mother country’s” “obsessive need to present and represent its peripheries and its others continually to itself.”[62] Through the figure of Bertha, the reader mis/remembers the Caribbean woman as the lure of wealth and the corruption of unchecked desire and mis/remembers the white woman as the civilized subject of modernity and progress.

Clare’s identification with Jane signals the mis/recognition of herself as a universal “white” woman. Her shift in identification to Bertha exposes the cultural construction of whiteness as universal norm. That shift also signals her attentiveness to traces within herself of the excluded other, and inarticulate difference. For Bertha has no narrative voice. She speaks only through animal sounds, laughter, fire, and the disorderliness of her body and her clothes. She is rupture, the tear in order and the self-disciplining effects of traditional autobiography. Clare’s shift in identification from Jane to the exotic, crazy woman from Jamaica undoes her mnemonic strategies of remembering—her obsessive recitation of the succession of kings and queens of England to maintain stability in her life through recourse to History. “Bertha” functions as a site of remembering with a difference, remembering as difference. In “coming to,” then, Clare reroutes her reading against the grain of the personalism of autobiographical narrative (female Bildung). In the memoro-politics of de/colonizing autobiographical practices, she becomes the secret within.

5. The Grandmother’s Homestead

“Coming to,” Clare Savage returns to the place from which she has fled. Her journey, the journey that forms the narrative spine of No Telephone to Heaven, takes her to an adopted land (the United States); then to the imperial motherland (England); then to Europe where she drifts with Robby, the African American Vietnam vet suffering the literal and figurative wounds of multiple traumas. Fragmented, drifting, passing but psychically emptied by her own camouflage, Clare returns to Jamaica and to her grandmother’s homestead. But despite this description of narrative movement, the structure of time in No Telephone to Heaven is not the autobiographical time of modernity and canonical Bildungsroman—not linear, unfolding, progressive, and sutured. This novel enfolds time as remembering itself does. The present wraps itself around the past as the past unwraps and rewraps itself around the present, its future. In the present (of time and of narration) the past constantly materializes in and as memory. And the remembering subject is herself the embodiment of the past.

This remembering is a kind of living memory, the living memory that Clare must wrest from the remains of her grandmother’s homestead. But the homestead is an inheritance in ruins, for the site of living memories has surrendered to the ruination of neglect in service to “progress” and “modernity,” to patriarchal and imperial histories that erase the spatial memory of an unofficial and forgotten past. This is the past her father would have her forget: her mixed racial heritage, her maternal genealogy, the subjugated knowledges of women—the knowledge of resistance to oppression and economic exploitation, women’s empowerment and agency. In claiming her grandmother’s legacy, she remembers what has been forgotten and dedicates the land to the community of resistors. Its disorder becomes camouflage, covering another order, to resist.

In fact, it is the old women with their alternative knowledges who bear the brunt of the forces of violence—physical and epistemological in the novel. The latter part of the narrative and the imagination of Christopher and Clare (linked as they are) are haunted by the old women from the nursing home consumed by fire. The old women of Jamaica are literally consumed in an oven of obliteration. They are consigned to the fires of figurative obliteration as well. Clare’s mother remembers from her childhood how the schoolteacher, educating his pupils for the modern nation state of Jamaica, “warned them about false knowledge. That which was held in the minds and memories of old women” (NTH 69). The narrator, however, associates old women with the everyday materialization of living memory in practices, behaviors, languages, healings.

Actively remembering, Clare begins to undo pedigree and Bildung in resistance to the imperatives of forgetting upon which identity is grounded. In her final moments she crawls under her grandmother’s house to find there her mother’s childhood toys and books. It is as if she has come upon sacred relics, physical manifestations of an excluded otherness[64] through which she re/members herself as the buried past. This is the kind of remembering Nora would describe as memory “affective and magical.”[65] Here is memory emplaced, embodied, transformative. But these relics are guarded by the scorpion she has to squash in order to touch this past. The retrieval of the hidden past is dangerous. Remembering otherwise is dangerous. This is, after all, Clare’s last act of remembering.

Conclusion: The Narrator

Kaplan reminds us that it is part of the imperializing effects of western academic scholarship to define autobiography, as Georges Gusdorf does, as a western genre and to identify its western modes and characteristics as generically determinative. To loosen this hold on modernist autobiographies, Kaplan calls for reading strategies resistant to the privileging of the twins of modernity, individualism and nationalism, in order to see beyond the limits, or to see within the limits other practices and their possibilities.[68]

There is a sense in which Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven can be read as veiled autobiography. Cliff herself has noted the autobiographical content of her first two novels. But what does it mean for Cliff to write autobiographically, but not as autobiography? In resisting the autobiographical “I” Cliff resists one of the most consequential trace marks of Europeanization on the colonial subject. Yet hers is not a wholesale refusal of autobiographical remembering since she creates narrators deeply invested in assessing the effects of various modes of self-narrating. Imagining a younger version of herself requires her to cross over to the other in herself via a politics of memory. And she does so through what George Lipsitz defines as counter-memory, remembering that “combin[es] linear history and orally transmitted popular memory” in order to subject linear history to “the standard of collective memory and desire.”[69]

The narrators’ voices in these novels are intensely autobiographical. They call attention to themselves as narrators, refusing to suture the edges of their representations. And they call attention to the process of narrating, breaking the memories reproduced in conventional tropes and topoi through various rhetorical strategies. The narrator of No Telephone to Heaven, for instance, challenges angrily certain narrative norms in several ways:

1. She disrupts the desire for continuous history and with it the myth of “progress” by resisting linear, teleological time. Shifting from one narrative time to another, without offering comfortable segues to the reader, she makes of time and thus of remembering a universe of folds. In such a universe acts of remembering are unsuturings as well as suturings, unmakings and remakings of the past.
2. She shifts linguistic registers, familiar as she is with standard English and with patois—what Edward Kamau Brathwaite terms “submerged” or “nation language.” Thus linguistic continuity is frayed by the heteroglossia of Creolité.
3. She routes her politics of remembering England’s master narratives (for instance, Jane Eyre and The Tempest) through the readings of other West Indian writers, most prominently Jean Rhys. In this way she attests to her own “mastery” of the canon (the genres of official memory, autobiography among them) and claims her affiliation with a community of mis/rememberers.

Through this politics of remembering, the narrator of No Telephone to Heaven, like the “historians” described in the epigraph to this section, clips the sutures of official memories that function to seal the frayed edges of the traumatic past; for these sutures bind infected and infecting representations.

Through her narrators, then, Cliff dismembers the universal subject of bourgeois individualism, the traditional autobiographical “I.” And she strains against the psychologization of memory implicit in certain modes of autobiography because remembering the past is not merely personal but consequentially social and political. Cliff refuses as well any recourse to an “authentic” and “essential” subject outside the legacy of colonial history. Thus she rejects what Aijaz Ahmad describes as “the ideational logic of this cultural differentialism” which “privilege[s] self-representation over all other kinds of representation and . . . treat[s] self-representation as a moment of absolute authenticity, as if between the self and its representation there could be no moment of bad faith or false consciousness.”[70]

With her politics of remembering Cliff achieves an alternative notion of the past than the past of “progress” or the nostalgic past of identity essentialists. In this sense she shares with Ella Shohat a notion of the subjugated past “not as a static fetishized phase to be literally reproduced, but as fragmented sets of narrated memories and experiences on the basis of which to mobilize contemporary communities.”[71] Further, she complicates the utility of recourse to a fixed identity, to any “true” self beneath the history of rememberings, as she poses identity, according to Judith Raiskin, as “at once shifting and strategic and psychically ‘real.’”[72] Through her narrators Cliff disrupts the autobiographical imperative at the same time that she affirms autobiographical memory as the grounds for a critique of experience.

Ultimately, Cliff turns away from the freedom to choose an identity (a politics of individualism) to a power to choose an identity by remembering differently (a resistance politics).[73] Self-locating, whatever its limitations, is necessary to this memoro-politics. To resist autobiographical practices tout court would mean to be possessed by an oppositional logic that is one of the most disabling legacies of post/colonialism. To fold autobiographical practices into an imaginative engagement with the politics of experience, to do and undo autobiographies through the mobius strip of history and collective myth, is to “open up,” as Jennifer Drake observes for art activisms generally, “routes to action beyond reaction.”[74]

Notes

1. Michelle Cliff, The Land of Look Behind (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1985) 105. All further references are to this edition and will be given in the text preceded by LLB.

2. Opal Palmer Adisa, “Journey into Speech—A Writer between Two Worlds: An Interview with Michelle Cliff,” African American Review 28.2 (Summer 1994): 273–81; 280.

3. Caren Kaplan, “Resisting Autobiography: Out-Law Genres and Transnational Feminist Studies.” De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992) 115–38; 116.

4. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989) 114.

5. Aijaz Ahmad, “The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality,” Race & Class 36.3 (1995): 1-20; 7.

6. There are a variety of terms used to designate subjects struggling with the legacies of imperialist ideologies and their construction of difference in subordination: “marginalized,” “minoritized,” “postcolonial.” I have invoked the term “de/colonizing subject” to signal the condition of mobility, the ongoing process of crossing back and forth along that slash that both sutures and divides the experience of subjection and the claims of agency and resistance.

7. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994) 236.

8. Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” (1979), Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press Feminist Series, 1984) 110–13; 112.

9. Iain Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity (London: Routledge, 1994) 79.

10. The Empire Writes Back, 84.

11. Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Men: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” October 28 (1984): 125–33.

12. Joan Borsa, “Towards a Politics of Location: Rethinking Marginality,” Canadian Women Studies 11 (1990): 36–39; 39.

13. Chantal Mouffe, “Feminism, Citizenship, and Radical Democratic Politics,” Feminists Theorize the Political, eds. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992) 369–84; 376.

14. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993) 15.

15. Judith V. Emberley, Thresholds of Difference: Feminist Critique, Native Women’s Writings, Postcolonial Theory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993) 141. Emberley is drawing upon the work of Paul Tennant, “Native Indian Political Organization in British Columbia, 1900–1969: A Response to Internal Colonialism,” BC Studies 55 (Autumn 1982): 3–49, who in turn is invoking a phrase of Fredric Barth’s (qtd. in Tennant 7).

16. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Marx after Marxism: History, Subalternity and Difference,” Meanjean 3 (Spring 1993): 421–34; 433. Chakrabarty describes history as “this gift of modernity to many peoples” (433).

17. Mouffe 382. The phrase is from Mouffe’s discussion of the project of feminism: “Feminism, for me, is the struggle for the equality of women. But this should not be understood as a struggle for realizing the equality of a definable empirical group with a common essence and identity, women, but rather as a struggle against the multiple forms in which the category ‘woman’ is constructed in subordination” (382).

18. Michelle Cliff, Abeng (1984; New York: Dutton, 1990). All further references are to this edition and will be given in the text preceded by A.

19. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism,” Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991) l-47; 38–39.

20. Katherine Nelson, “The Psychological and Social Origins of Autobiographical Memory,” Psychological Science 4.1 (Jan. 1993): 7–14; 7.

21. Bessel A. Van der Kolk and Onno Van der Hart, “The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma,” Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995) 158–82; 160.

22. Nelson, 12. Nelson proposes that this ability to understand narrative memory structures, which are part of cultural and familial narrative practices, occurs in the late pre-school years. Children learn how to remember and what to remember and how to tell about their memories.

23. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) 37. I am indebted to Linda Warley for pointing me to the Connerton discussion of memory. Linda Warley, “Locating Subjects: Contemporary Canadian and Australian Autobiography,” Diss. University of Alberta, Fall 1994.

24. Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1994) 239.

25. Connerton 102.

26. Stephen Rose, The Making of Memory: From Molecules to Mind (New York: Doubleday, 1992) 326.

27. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” History and Memory in African-American History (New York: Oxford UP, 1994) 284–300; 285.

28. Nora 289.

29. Nora 284.

30. Nora 289.

31. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Sherry Simon, ed. Donald Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980) 214.

32. Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995) 214.

33. Nora 292.

34. Michelle Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven (New York: Dutton, 1987) 127. All further references are to this edition and will be given in the text preceded by NTH.

35. Julia Watson, “Ordering the Family: Genealogy as Autobiographical Pedigree,” Getting a life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) 297–323; 297.

36. As Judith Raiskin observes, Cliff’s choice of the last name “Savage” to mark Boy’s patronym ironically undermines his belief in his privilege and his “whiteness.” “Inverts and Hybrids: Lesbian Rewritings of Sexual and Racial Identities,” The Lesbian Postmodern, ed. Laura Doan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) 156–72; 164.

37. Watson 298.

38. Watson 299.

39. “Ambivalent when not silent about the historically dispossessed . . . and invisible (women, rootless adventurers, orphans, the adopted), genealogical narrative, in graphing the history of some, defaces many others” (Watson 299).

40. Watson 298–99.

41. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984) 82.

42. “The indeterminacy of the past” and “the past under a new description” are phrases I take from Hacking’s discussion of the ways in which the remembering subject creates an altered history of the past.

43. See Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989) 91–108.

44. MacCannell 83.

45. Michelle Cliff, in Judith Raiskin, “The Art of History: An Interview with Michelle Cliff,” The Kenyon Review 15.1 (Winter 1993): 57–71; 68.

46. This is the phrase Cliff uses in The Land of Look Behind.

47. In interviews Cliff recalls a painful childhood memory in which her parents seek out her diary, break its lock, and humiliate her by reading it aloud in front of her. “That incident really shut me down as a writer” (“Journey into Speech” 274).

48. Linda Anderson, “At the Threshold of the Self: Women and Autobiography,” Women’s Writing: A Challenge to Theory, ed. Moira Monteith (Brighton: Harvester, 1986) 54–71; 59.

49. Anne Frank, The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition, ed. David Barnouw and Gerrold van der Stroorn, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans and B. M. Mooyaart-Doubleday (New York: Doubleday, 1989) text-b, 6/20/42, 181.

50. The Diary of Anne Frank 6/20/42, 180.

51. Valerie Raoul, “Women and Diaries: Gender and Genre,” Mosaic 22.3 (1989): 57–65; 60.

52. See Raoul for a discussion of the diary as “inventory, a sort of memory bank in which one makes deposits, ensuring that nothing is lost, and creating a reserve which may be drawn on later, with interest” (61).

53. Joan W. Scott, “Experience,” Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992) 22–40; 39.

54. Raou1 61.

55. Rob Shields, Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 1991) 39. I am indebted to Christine Bucher for bringing this passage to my attention. Cf. Chris Prentice, “The Interplay of Place and Placelessness in the Subject of Post-Colonial Fiction,” SPAN: Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies 31 (January 1991): 63–84.

56. Thomas Cartelli, “After The Tempest: Shakespeare, Postcoloniality, and Michelle Cliff’s New, New World Miranda,” Contemporary Literature 36 (Spring 1995): 82–102.

57. Sidonie Smith, “Performativity, Autobiographical Practice, Resistance,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 10.1 (Spring 1995): 17–33; 19.

58. Chakrabarty 431.

59. Gayatri Spivak, “‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press; 1991) 798–814; 802.

60. Spivak 803.

61. Spivak 801.

62. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992) 6.

63. Michelle Cliff, Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise (Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1980) 30–31.

64. I am indebted to Rhonda Knight for suggesting to me this connection between sacred relic and excluded otherness.

65. Nora 285.

66. Scott, “Experience” 25–26.

67. George Lipsitz, “Myth, History, and Counter-Memory,” Politics and the Muse: Studies in the Politics of Recent American Fiction, ed. Adam J. Sorkin (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Press, 1989) 161–78;162.

68. Kaplan, “Resisting Autobiography” 115–38.

69. Lipsitz 174. Lipsitz differentiates his concept of counter-memory from that of Foucault, for whom counter-memory “must record the singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality” (139). For Lipsitz Foucault’s take on counter-memory of details and accidents is too pessimistic to sustain an emancipatory rhetoric of memory.

70. Ahmad 16.

71. Ella Shohat, “Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial,” Social Text 31–32 (Spring 1992): 99–114; 109.

72. Raiskin, “Inverts and Hybrids” 167.

73. I am indebted to Jennifer Drake for refining this distinction between the freedom to choose and the power to choose (205).

74. Jennifer Drake, “Art Activism America: Cultural Hybridity and Representation,” (Dissertation, Binghamton University, June 1996) 32.