Re-visioning Our History: An Interview with Michelle Cliff -- Part 3
Jim Clawson
Did your creative writing begin when you received
your Masters of Philosophy, or were you always a creative writer?
No,
in fact I didn't start until much later. When I got out of the University of
London, I came back to New York, and I worked in publishing as an editor and
then I was also teaching at the New School. In New York, I started talking
to the authors I was working with and I
got involved tangentially with the Women's Movement. It was an exciting time,
and people were writing and publishing, and talking about writing, and I just
fell into it. It was quite accidental. The first thing I ever wrote was after
I'd read an article in Ms. magazine,
which was about Jamaica which was such nonsense it made me very, very angry. And
I wrote a letter to the editor of
Ms.,
which was edited in such a way that it made me praise the article, and they
never passed it by me and so I started writing about Jamaica.
You say that came out of the Women’s Movement. Do
you see yourself as a feminist writer? No.
I didn't see myself as a feminist writer then. I was given permission through
things in the feminist movement to be a writer. Your
first book, Claiming an Identity they
Taught Me to Despise, reminds me, in many ways, of collage. Yeah,
it is like collage. I wrote that book when I had a 9-5 job and I didn't have
time to sit down and write a sustained narrative, so I wrote it in sketches in
my office. I think the form reflects the conditions under which it was written. And also video art. But
a lot of my work has to do with movies, I mean that comes out of having been
just, I don't know, drowned in film since I was a little kid. When we lived in
Jamaica, there was no television, and we read books obviously, but we went to
the movies several times a week. My
father adored the movies, we'd go to triple features, which is three movies in
one night, sometimes outdoors under the stars. It's really quite an experience:
watching Spartacus in Jamaica under
the stars. You write both poetry and prose. Well,
I haven't written poetry in an awful long time. I don't consider myself a poet
at all. What
compels you to choose certain forms. Is it unconscious? Well,
I live with a poet, so I think its natural to choose prose. No, I'm kidding. I
really don't know. I know the Caribbean books, Abeng and No
Telephone to Heaven. They couldn't be contained in a book of poetry. I had
just so much to say, so much to get in there. I'm not saying that poetry
couldn't do that, but I couldn't do that in poetry. And then Free
Enterprise, which is a novel very close to my heart, and which is out of
print, was a really concerted effort to rewrite history with regards to the raid
on Harpers Ferry, and so that was a conscious decision to write a historical
novel. I
guess the prose work that is most poetic are my short stories, and those are
quite poetic and quite brief, if you talk about the use of language. Copyright 2002, Jim Clawson nidus is an online publication
supported by the Writing
Program
at the University of Pittsburgh's English
Department.
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