Biography Essay

The chronicle of personal development amid familial dysfunction and the political, social, and economic history of community, particularly in Jamaica, are interlaced in the fiction of Michelle Cliff. In Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature (1992), Simon Gikandi asserts that "The uniqueness of Cliffs aesthetics lies in her realization that the fragmentation, silence and repression that mark the life of the Caribbean subject under colonialism must be confronted not only as a problem to be overcome but also as a condition of possibility—as a license to dissimulate and to affirm difference—in which an identity is created out of the chaotic colonial and postcolonial history." Cliffs interest in analyzing how history, racism, and sexism shape identity has been evident from her earliest writings, including a book she edited, The Winner Names the Age: A Collection of Writings by Lillian Smith. Published in 1978, this...