(Re)vision as (re)existence in Michelle Cliff’s Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven

Abstract

The act of rescuing stories silenced by the colonialist discourse is at the core of the literature of postcolonial context, especially in women’s writing, since the silencing is reinfoced by gender oppression. From this standpoint, Michelle Cliff claims in her fictional texts and essays the importance of rescuing stories of women of color in order to dismantle identities forged by the colonialist and patriarchal discourse. Her first two novels, Abeng and No telephone to heaven, recreate this process of deconstruction by portraying Clare Savage’s path of political growth. Thus, this article seeks to analyze the character’s process of re-existence of articulating it to theory and criticism about gender, postcolonialism, and decolonialism.