Writing History Against the Grain: Counter-memory as a site of Reconstructing Postcolonial Identity in Michelle Cliff's No elephone to Heaven

The Marginal seek to resist the omission and distortions of official histories by returning to the lost voices and forgotten experiences. Official histories are produced by the dominant who produce knowledge and practice with respect to a shared past in order to marginalize other groups. Thus official histories create and maintain the unity of the dominant ideology by imposing an interpretation of the past, and silencing and excluding alternative interpretation of the same historical experiences. In this sense, the act of memory introduces a counter-perspective that resists and disputes the dominant ideology. Therefore, recovery of the past is an essential element in constructing as well as representing collective and individual identities. In No Telephone to Heaven (1987), Michelle Cliff attempts to establish a counter-hegemonic account of the Jamaican history through remembering the lost history of oppressed black people. By introducing a counter-perspective to the Jamaican history, Cliff attempts to reconstruct a consciousness and rebuild a shattered identity of her protagonist. Thus, in No Telephone to Heaven, Cliff is concerned with the recovery of lost histories as well as the rehabilitation of resistance to slavery and racism in Jamaica and the United States.