[Yale-readings] Nov.3: Michelle Cliff Reading

[Kuhl, Nancy]

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Michelle Cliff
If I Could Write This in Fire
Monday, November 3rd @ 5.30PM, Labyrinth NH


Labyrinth Books and Yale's Afro-American Cultural Center invite you to a reading with Michelle Cliff. She will be reading from her new novel, a deeply personal meditation on history and memory, place and displacement by a major writer.

Born in a Jamaica still under British rule, the acclaimed and influential writer Michelle Cliff embraced her many identities, shaped by her experiences with the forces of colonialism and oppression: a light-skinned Creole, a lesbian, an immigrant in both England and the United States. In her celebrated novels and short stories, she has probed the intersection of prejudice and oppression with a rare and striking lyricism.

In her first book-length collection of nonfiction, Cliff displays the same poetic intensity, interweaving reflections on her life in Jamaica, England, and the United States with a powerful and sustained critique of racism, homophobia, and social injusticeIf I Could Write This in Fire begins by tracing the transatlantic journey from Jamaica to England, coalescing around a graceful, elliptical account of a childhood friendship with Zoe, who is dark-skinned and from an impoverished, rural background; the divergent life courses that each is forced to take; and the class and color tensions that shape their lives as adults. The personal is interspersed with fragments of Jamaica's history and the plight of people of color living both under imperial rule and in contemporary Britain.

"Here is a line from the start of the book: 'revolutionaries are made, not born.' This book could make them. Be prepared." -Rebecca Brown

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Michelle Cliff has lectured at several universities and was Allan K. Smith Professor of English Language and Literature at Trinity College in Hartford. She is the author of the acclaimed novels Abeng, No Telephone to Heaven, and Free Enterprise, as well as two collections of short fiction, Bodies of Water and The Store of a Million Items.

















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