The body as a palimpsest. Stor(y)ing Memories in Michelle Cliff “Clare Savage novels” and Gayle Jones’s Corregidora - Paper presented at

Abstract

Palimpsest, as a paradigm for stor(y)ing cultural memories, seems to be particularly suitable to explore cultural identity of mixed-blood African American women. My essay will particularly focus on three samples of postcolonial and African American historical fiction, which I will call, after Paul Gilroy, Black Atlantic mnemonic writing. These are Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven by the Jamaican author Michelle Cliff, often called “Clare Savage novels” (they form a sequel), and Corregidora by the African American author Gayle Jones. These novels deal with the theme of a search for identity of two mulatto women: Clare Savage and Ursa Corregidora, who grapple with their heritage of racial and gendered oppression. All three novels are feminist texts that speak of that heritage in the language of the body, with the mulatto body becoming a kind of palimpsestic trope. In all three narratives, the protagonists’ color inadvertently reveals the silenced history of racial and sexual exploitation of slave women or the colonial desire to “whiten the race,” to quote Frantz Fanon out of context. Finally all three texts take the metaphor of the womb as a central signifier for cultural memories and collective identities.