Ruins of Empire: Decolonial Queer Ecologies in Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven

This paper examines the ways in which Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven (1987) uses postcolonial Gothic conventions to articulate a convergence of gender, race, sexuality, capitalism, colonialism, and environment. I argue that the novel diverges from colonial values in its production of conflicting identity politics, and that these can be best understood through decolonial queer ecologies. The paper begins by situating the work of Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley and Edouard Glissant to lay a foundation for the decolonial queer ecocritical analysis that follows. Both Tinsley and Glissant stress the importance of the land to Caribbean culture and people, but Tinsley further establishes a framework for queer Caribbean studies that can help one better understand my critique of Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven. From this framework, I show how both raced and classed queer and trans characters transgress colonial boundaries through the ways that they reappropriate spaces and bodies in Jamaica’s ruinate. I further examine how the Afro-Carib people who assemble in the ruinate challenge imperialism by forming a coalition that embraces trans leadership. In order to renegotiate human agency in the ruins of empire, Cliff’s novel utilizes coalition building as a form of decolonization to explore non-hierarchical relationships between queer/non-queer characters and their relationship with the land. No Telephone to Heaven repurposes the Gothic as a means for characters to discover new, more productive relationships with one other and their environment.

Post-Transsexual Pastoral

This chapter offers a definitive example of ecological thinking in contemporary queer fictions. It reads American author Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues (1992) alongside two narratives set in the Caribbean: Jamaican American Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven (1987) and Trinidadian Canadian Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night (1998). These novels depict what an “organic transgenderism:” a spontaneous, noncommodified, and self-directed process likened to the life-cycle changes of plants and animals. The chapter claims that they thereby challenge the common view of gender transitioning as an “unnatural” medical intervention. Moreover, through their depictions of organic transgenderism, these novels stage, and thus help facilitate, a shift in the 1990s from the older sexological model of “transsexuality” to the current community-derived umbrella term of “transgenderism.” Finally, this chapter demonstrates how a queer ecocritical lens can help us trace the transnational circulation of queer ecological thinking.

Postcolonial Nation and Matrilineal Myth: Social Construction of Maternity in Michelle Cliff’s “Clare Savage” Novels

The aim of my essay is to show how the Afro-American writer Michelle Cliff uses the concept of matriliny in the process of the feminist recovery of the history of Jamaica. I will argue that Michelle Cliff is a writer that honors the anachronistic tradition of essentialism that is based on the notion that cultures and identities have certain innate qualities immutable irrespective of time and place. I will contend that this essentialist worldview, skews the fictive world of Cliff’s much celebrated “Clare Savage novels”: Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven by reducing it to facile, Manichean oppositions between the colonizer and the colonized, white and black culture. My essay will particularly focus on how Cliff’s project of the affirmation of matriliny is undermined by her deep ambivalence about the institution of motherhood, which in times of slavery and decolonization was implicated in various discourses inimical to the well-being of black women.