in

by In In

Submission date: 09-Feb-2022 09:01AM (UTC-0500)

Submission ID: 1758475787
File name: Artide_on_MicheNeCliff.docx (32.82K)
Word count: 3464
Character count: 18594
1
2
3
 she would have lighter and lighter babies” (129) until whiteness was achieved and

darkness

obliterated. Kitty's awareness of and involvement in this process of self-marginalization and

self-denial characterizes her as deficient mother who is responsible for the rupture of the

Afro-Caribbean matrilineal line, and whose coldness and silence represents complicity with

the colonial culture.

In Abeng, Cliff revises the history of Jamaica to include these vernacular ways of

knowing that Kitty, and in a larger sense colonial power in Jamaica, bleached from our

minds. The recovery of black memory, underpinned by Clare’s search for mother, is

attempted through the reclamation of Nanny of the Maroons and the denunciation of the

indoctrination of the colonizer. Although Clare-the-child is unaware of her Maroon ancestry,

she recognizes her mother's blackness and resents her green eyes and light skin - features that

privilege her as “the Savage family’s crowning achievement... in a world where the worst

thing to be - especially if you were a girl - was to be dark” (77). This privilege, for Clare, is

restrictive as her father’s child, she feels separated from the black women of the Tabernacle

and forced to occupy a space of ideal white femininity. In addition to Clare's exclusion from

cultural spaces and traditions, she is made an outsider to her own history. As Cliff notes:

The twelve-year-old Christian mulatto girl, up to this point walking through

her life according to what she had been told not knowing very much about

herself or her past. For example, that her gTeat-gTeat grandfather had once set

fire to a hundred Africans; that her grandmother Miss Mattie was once a

canecutter with a cloth bag of salt in her skirt pocket, this child became

compelled by the life and death of Anne Frank. She was reaching, without

knowing it, for an explanation of her own life. (72)

Clare’s father tells her she is white, but he silences the damning history of her white

ancestors. She knows that her mother is black, but she does not know the legacy of slavery
1
0
1
1
i
ORIGINALITY

n
REPORT

94 %
SIMILARITY INDEX
94%
INTERNET SOURCES
1 4%
PUBLICATIONS
1 5%
STUDENT
PAPERS

PRIMARY
SOURCES

open.uct.ac.za
Internet Source 87%

Submitted to University of Cape Town

Student Paper 2%

hdl.handle.net
Internet Source 2%

Owww.doria.fi
Internet Source

files.eric.ed.gov
Internet Source

www.cambridge.org
Internet Source 1%

www.cambridgescholars.com
Internet Source 1%

n
worldhistoryconnected.press.u linois.edu
<1 %
Internet Source

www.motherteresawomenuniv.ac.in
9 Internet Source <1 %
Exclude quotes Off Exclude matches O
ff
Exclude bibliography On
in
GRADEMARK REPORT

FINAL GENERAL
GRADE COMMENTS

/0 Instructor

PAGE 1

PAGE 2

PAGE 3

PAGE 4

PAGE 5

PAGE 6

PAGE 7

PAGE 8

PAGE 9

PAGE 10

PAGE
12
PAGE 11