Michelle Cliff’s first book, Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise, is a collection of what can best be described as “proems” in both the intuitive and the official meanings of the word. The pieces combine prose and poetry and also serve as a preface to Cliff’s later longer works.

The title poem signifies on Creole Caribbean women with whom Cliff identifies in claiming her Black and Jamaican heritage, and incorporates many of the concerns of Cliff’s collection and later works: mixed racial identity, stifling gender roles, early immigration, and female sexuality.

It has eight verses, and six of the eight begin with quotations from other works, three of which are from Wide Sargasso Sea and two from Jane Eyre. Cliff is clearly calling on Charlotte Brontë’s Bertha Mason and Jean Rhys’s Antoinette Cosway as inspirations.

In Section I, she blends both characters through the idea of confinement, interweaving phrases from both novels as she imagines Bertha’s entrapment and escape. Despite acknowledging Wide Sargasso Sea as a separate text, Cliff soon begins to treat Bertha and Antoinette as one continuous character, envisioning sisterhood with the resulting fusion.

In Section II, Cliff imagines a similar kinship with another Creole woman—Annie Palmer, the legendary “White Witch” of Rosehall. Cliff provides a short “history” of Annie Palmer, but only through the words of others. She peppers her description with attributives, “they told me” or “they indicated,” which serve, like the quotation marks around “White Witch,” to question the history she has been handed of this woman who could run a plantation on her own in the 19th century, when white women rarely even visited Caribbean plantations.

Through Cliff’s continuous invocations of Annie Palmer and Bertha Rochester in this poem, these fictional characters become for Cliff’s poetic persona both historical and familial. The speaker begins the poem with her mother, claims sisterhood with Annie Palmer and Bertha Rochester, and ends with her father. Her sister also makes an appearance at the table of a “white-haired” woman who belongs to a branch of the family. Family is not only emphasized but also extended.

Cliff’s poetic persona wishes to claim the part of her family—the Black part of herself—that has been denigrated. But she is also claiming her white father and the white-haired woman. Just as she weaves the words of Wide Sargasso Sea with the words from Jane Eyre to create a picture of a single character, so Cliff is attempting to weave together the different sides of her identity to create a whole that encompasses a larger Caribbean authenticity.

Categories: British Literature, Caribbean Literature, Literature

Tags: Annie Palmer symbolism, Antoinette Cosway themes, Bertha Mason analysis, Caribbean literature, Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise analysis, Creole identity, diasporic identity, feminist Caribbean writing, gender and race, hybrid identity, identity formation in literature, Jane Eyre intertextuality, Michelle Cliff biography, Michelle Cliff character study, Michelle Cliff criticism, Michelle Cliff interpretation, Michelle Cliff literary criticism, Michelle Cliff literary style, Michelle Cliff plot overview, Michelle Cliff summary, Michelle Cliff themes, poetic persona, postcolonial poetry, race and gender in poetry, Wide Sargasso Sea influence