Teaching Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven in a Postcolonial Context

I most recently taught the Jamaican-born Michelle Cliff's critically acclaimed novel No Telephone to Heaven in a special topics course on Caribbean-American literature at Fayetteville State University, a regional comprehensive university in the University of North Carolina system. Many of my students had completed a variety of American and English literature survey courses before they enrolled in my senior seminar course, and they were planning to enter graduate school or teach English. Perhaps due to my students' reverence for more canonical American and English literature, they originally appeared to question the value and purpose of the assigned Caribbean literature in the English classroom and program. Teaching No Telephone to Heaven within a postcolonial context bridged the gaps between my students' past literary experiences and their exploration of Caribbean literature.

In No Telephone to Heaven, the novel's protagonist, Clare Savage, migrates from Jamaica to America as a teenager in 1960. Clare's father represents their family's American migration as "a new start in a new world" (54); however, Clare leaves America after she finishes college to enter a graduate Renaissance studies program in England, "the mother-country" (109). After Clare travels through Europe, she returns to Jamaica, now in her thirties, and works as a secondary school teacher; she focuses on teaching "[t]he history of their . . . our homeland" (193). Near the novel's conclusion, Clare describes her "experience of teaching, learning" as "the best thing I have done" (194). Throughout the novel, Clare's story of transnational migration is narrated alongside others' diverse and sometimes violent experiences of and responses to disparity and bias.

For my students, the assigned Caribbean literature initially seemed to originate and operate too far outside the textual, linguistic, and cultural boundaries of the more canonical American and English literature courses that they had taken to fulfill English program requirements. The textual apparatus of the Caribbean novels differed from that of the literary anthologies assigned in more canonical American and English literature survey courses; my students especially seemed to miss the headnotes and footnotes explaining the broader literary significance of authors, texts, and literary devices. The language used in the assigned novels differed from standard American and British English, as exemplified by Cliff's inclusion of "[a] glossary of Jamaican terms" in No Telephone to Heaven.

My students did not seem to recognize the broader literary significance of the novel, and by extension, Caribbean literature, until they reconsidered the assigned literature within the postcolonial context of writing back to the Western literary center (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin). At the beginning of class discussions, I presented brief introductions to relevant postcolonial texts, such as Caliban and Other Essays, by Roberto Fernández Retamar, and Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, by Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Then I used more contemporary postcolonial scholarship to frame and facilitate class discussions. My students were especially receptive to arguments presented in Thomas Cartelli's "After The Tempest: Shakespeare, Postcoloniality, and Michelle Cliff's New, New World Miranda." Cartelli introduces No Telephone to Heaven as "perhaps the most ambitious recent attempt by a contemporary West Indian to work through and master the impulse to write back to the center" (89). Over the course of the semester, students shifted from focusing on the differences between discrete national identities and literary traditions to the meaningful connections among Caribbean, American, and European people and literary traditions.

After my students became better acquainted with Caribbean literature and postcolonial theory, they seemed to genuinely express their appreciation of the ways in which narratives of Caribbean-American migration represent identity politics and transnational themes. In this sense, teaching No Telephone to Heaven and other Caribbean novels in English classrooms and programs encourages students to reconsider their ideological location(s) within the discipline of English and also to cross and remap the boundaries of various literary traditions.