Quote by Michelle Cliff: “We were colonized by silence as much as by anything else.”

The suppression of stories, languages, and histories under colonialism was as damaging as direct physical violence. When entire ways of knowing are erased and replaced with the colonizer's version of reality, a deep psychological injury is inflicted that outlasts formal political control.

Cliff published Abeng in 1984 during the height of Reagan-era politics and amid ongoing struggles over Caribbean sovereignty and cultural identity. She wrote from the experience of light-skinned Jamaican mixed heritage, exploring how colonial hierarchies operated through skin color, silence, and the systematic forgetting of African and indigenous heritage.

Jamaican-American novelist and poet whose work explored colonialism, racial identity, and sexuality through an experimental mixing of forms and languages. Her 1984 novel Abeng is a landmark of Caribbean feminist fiction, and she was a close collaborator of Adrienne Rich.