Abeng

Description

A lyrical coming-of-age story and an essential retelling of the colonial history of Jamaica.

Originally published in 1984, this critically acclaimed novel is the story of Clare Savage, a light-skinned, middle-class twelve-year-old growing up in Jamaica in the 1950s.
 
As Clare tries to find her own identity and place in her culture, she carries the burden of her mixed heritage. There are the Maroons, who used the conch shell—the abeng—to pass messages as they fought against their English enslavers. And there is her white great-great-grandfather, Judge Savage, who committed a terrible act of violence on the eve of emancipation.
 
In Clare’s struggle to reconcile the conflicting legacies of her own personal lineage, esteemed Caribbean author Michelle Cliff dramatically confronts the cultural and psychological brutality inflicted upon the island and its people by colonialism.

“The beauty and authority of her writing are coupled with profound insight.”
—Toni Morrison

“Her keen eye for detail and pithy anecdotal descriptions bring Jamaica’s present and past to life.”
—New York Times Book Review

“Powerful and often lyric … an important work.”
—Library Journal

“Jamaican history, lore, and lanscape are evocatively re-created in this multilayered novel. … Through its richness and diversity of detail, Abeng achieves a timeless universality.”
—Publisher’s Weekly

“Abeng is a solid achievement, a book that offers a wealth of history and culture. … [Cliff’s] perception of character, her receptivity to sensuous detail, her rendering of the language, make our journey … a richly textured experience.”
—Plexus

Michelle Cliff (1946-2016) was a Jamaican-American author whose writing explored colonialism and racism. Her body of work includes novels, Abeng, its sequel, No Telephone to Heaven, Free Enterprise, and Into the Interior; short story collections, The Store of a Million Items and Bodies of Water; and poetry collections, The Land of Look Behind and Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise.US

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