SOURCE: An interview with Michelle Cliff, in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 34, No. 4, Winter, 1993, pp. 595-619.

In the following interview, originally conducted on April 2, 1992, Cliff discusses her multicultural self-identity, her political stance on gender, class, and race issues, the autobiographical origins of her writings, and the popularity of books by people of color.

Novelist, poet, and essayist, Michelle Cliff has spent the past decade and a half creating a body of resistance literature that describes and formally enacts the struggle for cultural decolonization. Originally from Jamaica, Cliff was educated in Jamaica, the United States, and England. She has written repeatedly of her struggle to claim her own voice, noting that "part of my purpose as a writer of Afro-Caribbean—Indian, African, European—experience and heritage and Western experience and education has been to reject speechlessness, a process which has taken years, and to invent my own peculiar speech, with which...