Abeng - Paperback

by Michelle Cliff (Author)

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.

Author Biography

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.