The Land of Look Behind

by Michelle Cliff

Book by Cliff, Michelle

Genres: Poetry, Short Stories

119 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Michelle Cliff (born 2 November 1946) is a Jamaican-American author whose notable works include No Telephone to Heaven, Abeng and Free Enterprise.

Cliff also has written short stories, prose poems and works of literary criticism. Her works explore the various, complex identity problems that stem from post-colonialism, as well as the difficulty of establishing an authentic, individual identity despite race and gender constructs. Cliff is a lesbian who grew up in Jamaica.

Cliff was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1946 and moved with her family to New York City three years later. She was educated at Wagner College and the Warburg Institute at the University of London. She has held academic positions at several colleges including Trinity College and Emory University.

Cliff was a contributor to the Black feminist anthology Home Girls.

As of 1999, Cliff was living in Santa Cruz, California, with her partner, poet Adrienne Rich. The two were partners from 1976; Rich died in 2012.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Looking back: To try and see when the background changed place with the foreground. To try and locate the vanishing point: where the lines of perspective converge and disappear. Lines of color and class. Lines of history and social context. Lines of denial and rejection.

4.5/5

You're not going to look at Michelle Cliff's Goodreads' profile picture and think, oh. Woman of color. That's the point of passing. With her, Creole is less Rhys and more Chamoiseau, a Jamaican Pushkin or Toomer where color is an infinity of worlds in a word depending on your particular melanin, your luck of the genetic draw. The phrase woman of color was invented to deconstruct this exact political hierarchy of blood and rape and incest, so if you come crying to me about how white's a color too, where were you during slavery. Where were you during concentration camps. Where are you now in a world where feminism has its imperialism and women's rights has its genocide. Two decades ago Cliff spoke of lesbianism classism and race, and today's brave new world is one of eugenics, antisemitism, TERFs, SWERFs, and so many other ways in which those of these who call me sister are ones whom I will not trust farther than I can throw.

We are not exotic—or aromatic—or poignant.
We are not aberrations. We are ordinary.
All this has happened before.

Once again, there is the concise scalpel that the demographics of power have made by way of War and Peace on the one hand and a mother writing poetry midway between the dishes and the laundry on the other. I liked the nonfiction best because of its salient mix of literati and uprisings wrapped in a rhythm of prose much to my liking, more of a commentary of my own personal style than any kind of objectivity, but this is not work for which I am paid. Cliff's gonna glut you with some Wide Sargasso Sea and all that jazz, then plunge you in the abject that is the European purge, where the only thing that evolves faster and deadlier than supergerms via antiseptic dispensers is the white supremacy. If you haven't had to become learned in the art of any sort of code switching previous to this, you're either going to adapt or throw up your hands in an entitled huff.

We the other women unable to touch this girl because of her darkness? I think that now. Her darkness and her scholarship. She lived on Windward Road with her grandmother; her mother was a maid. But darkness is usually enough for women like those to hold back. Then, we usually excused that kind of behavior by saying they were "ladies."

The inherent problem, of course, with works such as these that seek the marrow of the weeding that manufactures our "normalcy" is how much more disappointing are the misguided metaphors. Rromani? The insane? Like all areas, you get a say in the word when you have a stakes in the matter, else you're just another assimilated shock trooper.

If we say Third World Revolution
The white folks say World War III
If we say Third World Revolution, baby
The white folks say World War III
Seems they imagine Armageddon
Is prettier than if we be free.

Still. Eight ratings, including mine. Even without Cliff having been the partner of the oft quoted Adrienne Rich for more than three decades up until the latter's decease, that's fucking sad.

[Julie Ehlers · Rating 4 out of 5]

They want us in their factories
And they want us in their homes.
I say, they want us in their factories
and they want us in their homes
They’ll take some for their armed forces
And some more for their astrodomes.

Published in 1985, The Land of Look Behind takes as its main subject life in a colonized nation, in this case Jamaica. Its insights about the push and pull of identifying with and resisting your colonizers, identifying with and resisting your ancestors, and the classism and racism that can result both within and without, were groundbreaking at the time, but this book (currently out of print) could have been published yesterday. Its themes are, depressingly, still timely and urgent, and its evocative mix of poetry and prose has been taken up by many writers in the years since this was released—Maggie Nelson and Claudia Rankine come to mind. It feels a bit futile to recommend this book when you can’t get it anywhere, but recommend it I do. The Land of Look Behind was huge when I was in college (at least among my professors) and it’s strange to have lived long enough to see it already fall into oblivion. Maybe some publisher will remedy this situation someday soon.

[Phạm N.]

- Within the Veil
- A visit from Mr. Botha
- Europe Becomes Blacker
"Europe becomes Blacker
but it was always dark, you know."