Background
Cliff was born to an upper-middle-class family in Kingston, Jamaica, on November 2, 1946. In 1949 her family immigrated to New York City but traveled frequently to Jamaica.
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Cliff was born to an upper-middle-class family in Kingston, Jamaica, on November 2, 1946. In 1949 her family immigrated to New York City but traveled frequently to Jamaica.
Cliff attended public schools and, according to her own reports, did not associate much with Americans but lived mostly in a West Indies environment. Cliff has recounted how while in high school she contemplated being a writer and began to keep a journal after reading The Diary of Anne Frank: "She gave me permission to write and to use writing as a way of survival". However, her family did not consider it appropriate for a girl to keep a diary, and after searching for and finding the diary, her parents proceeded to read it aloud on the porch to the rest of the family. She stopped writing and did not write again until graduate school, when she wrote her thesis.
In 1969 she graduated from Wagner College in New York with a degree in European history and got her first job working for the publisher W.W. Norton, where she worked until 1971. She spent the following three years completing graduate studies in London's Warburg Institute, concentrating on languages and comparative historical studies of the Italian Renaissance.
On her return to New York in 1974, she continued to pursue a career in publishing. She rejoined Norton, where she worked for the next four years, first as a copyeditor and later as a production editor. When she left Norton in 1979, she began concentrating on forging a career as a writer. At the same time, from 1981 to 1983, she collaborated with the feminist poet Adrienne Rich on the editing and publishing of Sinister Wisdom, a feminist journal.
Her work has been concerned with social issues and the way people's lives are affected by politics, particularly by the subjugation of colonialism, sexism, and racism. Her first book, a compilation of prose poems titled Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise (1980), explores the issue of interracial discrimination and delves into the mind set of its Jamaican protagonist and her feelings of perplexity and bewilderment over the preferential treatment accorded light-skinned Creoles such as herself, in stark contrast to the treatment of her darker family members and friends.
Her first novel, the critically acclaimed Abeng (1984), a coming-of-age story about a biracial adolescent girl in Jamaica who must face questions of race, class, sexuality, dominant ideology, and identity, is to some extent autobiographical. In this novel, abeng is a significant term that is tied to Jamaican history and the struggle for the self-determination of its slaves. Literally, abeng is a conch shell; figuratively, the abeng was the symbol of black resistance against the British during the War of the Maroons, led by Jamaican national hero Nanny of the Maroons accounts that Cliff relates in the novel. No Telephone to Heaven (1987), also autobiographical fiction, continues the themes presented in Abeng.
Among Cliff's other works are Bodies of Water (1990) and Free Enterprise (1994). Her most recent book of short stories, The Story of a Million Items (1998), narrates a childhood spent on two islands Jamaica and Manhattan. Cliff explores the gaps between cultures, genders, and generations while comparing the prosperity and racism of America during the 1950s and 1960s with life in Jamaica during the same period.
Twice a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts award (1982,1989), she was a Massachusetts Artists foundation Fellow in 1984, an Eli Kantor Fellow in 1984, and traveled to New Zealand on a Fulbright Fellowship in 1988. Cliff has also been visiting professor at major universities, most recently as the Allan K. Smith Professor of English Language and Literature at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and at the University of Mainz in Germany. She also speaks at workshops and symposia in the United States and abroad.
Cliff identifies herself as a Creole Jamaican whose writing has been greatly influenced by the colonial experience and by the works of novelists James Baldwin, Bessie Head, Virginia Woolf, and most important, Toni Morrison. Her work is often cited for the linguistic skills it exhibits. Cliff's ability to move from standard English to Jamaican Creole has been noted by one critic, who commented that even though the purpose of this code-switching is to draw attention to class and race differences in the stories' characters, it also "makes manifest the double consciousness of the postcolonial, bilingual, and bicultural writer who lives and writes across the margins of different traditions and universes".
