Revising a Torn Halves Body and an Excavated History through a Female Resistance and a Feminist Writer in Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven

Abstract

The Afro-Jamaican and American writer Michelle Cliff through No Telephone to Heaven becomes a historical revisionist par-excellence through narratives of resistance written with bold transcendence and intellectual maturity. Cliff links placement and displacement with identity and national culture. She through her protagonist Clare portrays the West-Indian body as a victim living an obligatory dislocation, forced fabricated history and the erasure of individual memory which itself leads to collective amnesia. Therefore, Cliff is dealing with lots of issues interconnected with silenced and forged histories under what is nameless and voiceless. Thus, this paper focuses on Cliff’s techniques to rename her own history through her protagonist and black women’s resistance. It focuses also on Cliff’s ways of destabilizing Western narratives of exclusion and marginalizing. This paper concludes that the process of rewriting history depends on memory, political self-discovery and stunning women’s resistance through reviving the excluded voices, stories, mythologies and oral traditions.