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| Abeng |
| 作者Author / Michelle Cliff 蜜雪兒•克里夫 |
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 The Meaning of Abeng
The intertexual Relationship Between Abeng and Wide Sargasso Sea
Cliff on the Protagonist Clare Savage
Sexual Identity
Clare's Divided Racial Identities
Grandmother Figure
Fragmented Narrative Form in the Novel
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| The Meaning of Abeng |
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"Abeng is an African word meaning conch shell. The blowing of the conch called the slaves to the canefields in the West Indies. The abeng has another use: it was the instrument used by the Maroon armies to pass their messages and reach one another."
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| The Intertexual Relationship Between Abeng and Wide Sargasso Sea |
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1. Cliff on Wide Sargasso Sea:
"Caliban speaks to Prospero, saying: 'You taught me language, and my profit on’t/ Is, I know how to curse.'
This line immediately brings to my mind the character of Bertha Rochester, wild and raving ragout, as Charlotte Bronte describes her, cursing and railing, more beast than human. It takes a West Indian writer, Jean Rhys, to describe Bertha from the inside rather than from the outside, keeping Bertha's humanity, indeed her sanity as critic of imperialism, intact,’ as Gayatri Spivak has observed." ("Clare Savage as a Crossroads Character" 264)
2. Antoinette and Tia // Clare and Zoe
Spivak on Antoinette and Tia--part of the "thematics of Narcissus"--Tia as "the Other that could not be selfed because of the fracture of imperialism" (243)
class and racial gaps between Clare and Zoe--Zoe is award of Clare's privileges as someone with fair skin and from the landed class--Zoe calls Clare a "town gal" and is afraid of being thought of as "Guinea warrior, not gal pickney."--Clare is ignorant of the law of property and ownership in the rural community (121)
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| Cliff on the Protagonist Clare Savage |
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Clare Savage "is an amalgam of myself and others, who eventually becomes herself alone. Bertha Rochester is her ancestor.
Her name, obviously, is significant and is intended to represent her as a crossroads character, with her feet (and head) in (at least) two worlds. Her first name means, signifies, light-skinned, which she is, and light-skinnedness in the world in which Clare originates, the island of Jamaica in the period of British hegemony, and to which she is transported, the United States in the 1960s, and to which she transports herself, Britain in the 1970s, stands for privilege, civilization, erasure, forgetting. She is not meant to curse, or rave, or be a critic of imperialism. She is meant to speak softly and keep her place. A knowledge of history, the past, has been bleached from her mind, just as the rapes of her grandmothers are bleached from her skin. And this bleached skin is the source of her privilege and her power, too, she thinks, for she is a colonized child. She is a light-skinned female who has been removed from her homeland in a variety of ways and whose life is a movement back, ragged, interrupted, uncertain, to that homeland. She is fragmented, damaged, incomplete."
Her surname is self-explanatory. It meant to evoke the wilderness that has been bleached from her skin, understanding that my use of the word wilderness is ironic, mocking the master’s meaning, turning instead to a sense of non-Western values which are empowering and essential to survival, her survival, and wholeness. ("Clare Savage as a Crossroads Character" 264-5)
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| Sexual Identity |
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1.Cliff on lesbainism in an interview with Judith Raiskin
MC:But for Caribbean women to love each other is different. It's not Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf, it's not Djuna Barnes or Natalie Barney, and it's not Sappho.
JR: You wanted Clare and Zoe. But then there’s the class difference between them.
MC: Yes.... But it would be taking lesbianism away from those who want to stigmatize it as simply a sexual behavior between women that is seen as slightly decadent and upper class, or uppermiddle class, or male imitating, or mannish (which was a word that was used in my childhood). Putting it into a Caribbean setting as part of a woman's self-definition, and as a way to value the female, which we've been taught so much to devalue, really makes it different. ("The Art of History" 69-70)
2. the intimacy between Calre and Zoe in the bathing scene (119-120, 124)--interrrupted by Clare's memory of the "battyman" Uncle Robert (125-126)-- Robert's suicide and homophobia in Jamaica
3. Cliff on Clare's sexual identity--"...Clare can’t claim her sexuality. She's not in a place where she can. It's a very interesting thing, because the lesbian subtext in Abeng was unconscious, at least I think it was." (601)
4. Cliff's internalization of homophobia and her self-censorship--"it's having grown up in a society that is enormously homophobic and the fact that my mother disowned me for being gay." (604)--an interview with Meryl F. Schwartz
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| Clare's Divided Racial Identities |
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presented through the oppsition between Boy Savage and Kitty Freeman Savage
1. Boy--Anglophile--represents coloniial heritage
2. Kitty
A. cherishes darkness (127-128)--Kitty's dream of setting up a local school (129-130)--her distrust of British education and love of black culture-- "Daffodils" vs the Maroon Girl (129)
B. Kitty's preference for the darker daughter Jennie (129) and Clare's sense of alienation from the mother (128)--Clare’s love for Zoe (131) is realted to this sense of alineation
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| Grandmother Figure |
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In Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven Cliff tries "to show the power, particularly the spiritual authority, of the grandmother as well as her victimization. Hers is a power directly related to landscape, gardens…. This powerful aspect of the grandmother originates in Nanny, the African warrior and Maroon leader. At her most powerful, the grandmother is the source of knowledge, magic, ancestors, stories, healing practices, and food…. She is an inheritor of African belief systems, African languages. She may be informed with ashe, the power to make things happen, the responsibility to mete justice." ("Clare Savage as a Crossroads Character" 266-7)
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| Fragmented Narrative Form in the Novel |
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1. relfecting multiple perspectives”
2. Lionnet Francoise--"small plot" vs huge plantations--"She has recourse to a textual economy of 'small plots' that seems to correspond to the economy of 'small plot farming' that maroon slaves used to engage in." (335)
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