Novel
Abeng
Michelle Cliff · 1984
Synopsis
In the summer of 1958, in Jamaica, Clare Savage, twelve years old, a light-skinned girl, learns to live between the two heritages of her parents, a father who claims descent from an English earl and a mother from a poor family of mixed blood. On her grandmother's farm, she befriends Zoe, a dark-skinned girl whose family occupies a plot of the estate, and discovers what colour and class keep apart. The story also brings back to life the hidden history of the island, that of the Maroons and of slavery.
Context
The novel appeared in 1984 with The Crossing Press, in New York State, then in 1985 with Penguin. Partly autobiographical, it sets out to reclaim the history of Jamaica, and its title refers to the horn that called the slaves to work and that the Maroons used to communicate. Clare Savage returns in No Telephone to Heaven, in 1987. The book has not been translated into French.
Who it is for
To read a Jamaican coming-of-age novel that gives voice to the erased history of the Maroons.
Prizes and reception
Postcolonial studies at Emory University see in it a literary archaeology, which rebuilds history from the silences of official accounts.