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Charles W. Johnson
WRI130 First Year Seminar: The Empire Writes Back
Revised paper
7 October 1999
If … there is no perception without immediate categorization, then the photograph is verbalized
the very moment it is perceived; better, it is only perceived verbalized (if there is a delay in
verbalization, there is disorder in perception, questioning, anguish for the subject, traumatism
…)
– Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message”
Formula of my happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal …
– Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
The Ruination of Meaning
Ambiguity, Trauma, and Signification in No Telephone to Heaven
“[C]onnotation drawn from knowledge,” writes Roland Barthes, “is always a reassuring
force – man likes signs and he likes them clear” (“Photographic” 28). The drama of Michelle
Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven can largely be read as a play with this primal urge for
significance: throughout the text there is a war, continually fought and left unresolved, between
the power of meaning and the trauma of meaninglessness. In the text’s quests for “meaning,”
“identity,” “The Real Truth,” – in Harry/Harriet, in the deconstruction of tourist Jamaica, and
most of all in Clare Savage – No Telephone explores the complex interactions between externally
imposed meanings, the angst of ambiguity, and the quest for personal meanings. The text itself is
profoundly ambiguous, and any final reading may be premature; indeed, the text often seems a
subversion of attempts at fixed meanings. However, perhaps something can be extricated from
the wild and overgrown ruinate of meanings: to live an authentic life, imposed meanings must be
torn down through confronting ambiguities, through relentless questioning of meanings, even of
meaning itself. But destruction of inauthentic meaning is not enough: one must also reclaim
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meaning in all its power; or, as Harry/Harriet says: “we will have to make the choice. Cast our
lot. Cyaan live split. Not in this world” (131).
The image I draw for my title is one of the wonderfully ambiguous images of the novel.
Many farms in Jamaica, abandoned by their owners, have lapsed into this condition of brush, a
phenomenon dubbed ruination and lamented by the white farming class, the people whose
“ancestors owned sugar plantations” (57). But for those excluded from the backra circle, whose
“grandmothers and grandfathers … had swung their own blades once in the canefields” (10), the
so-called “ruination” of colonial-commercial order is profoundly ambiguous. The ruination
consumes land and makes it unusable to the poor, who need land to cultivate; but it also
overthrows the order of the backra/bunga regime in new, wild, and beautiful ways: “The garden
the grandmother had planted was gone. Her carefully planned flowers … chosen for color and
texture and how each would set off the next, revealing … her order, her choices, … had been
haphazardly supplanted by wilder and brighter ones, exploding disorder into her scheme” (8).
Jamaican agriculture—with the plantation owner’s aesthetic of “order,” that is, subjugation—is,
like signification and connotation, profoundly integrated into the hegemony of the colonialist
powers. But revolutionaries must eat too; so after “ruination” has undone the oppressive “order”
of the plantation owners, the land must be reclaimed. The soldiers “took rakes and hoes to it. As
the land cleared, it turned black—blackness filled with the richness of the river and the bones of
people in unmarked graves” (11). Similarly, to recast her life on her own terms, each protagonist
must first confront and explode disorder into her hegemonically imposed stock of meanings, and
then take rakes and hoes to the land, creating their own new identifications and significations.
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Clare Savage’s quest for identity throughout the novel illustrates, more than any other
example, this economy of imposed-destroyed-reclaimed. She begins, as all the “sufferahs” of
Jamaica must, under the domination of a hegemonic social formation which to maintain its
power depends upon a “great tacit pool overflowing with the riches of stereotype” (Dorfman and
Mattelart 55). Harry/Harriet describes this sinister dependence upon the master’s stock of
meaning: “We name hotels Plantation Inn and Sans Souci …. A peculiar past. For we have taken
the master’s past as our own. That is the danger” (127). This “master’s past,” more than
anything, demands and instills clear race-class boundaries. Clare’s father remembers “A lesson
from the third form on Jamaican history … mulatto, offspring of African and white; sambo,
offspring of African and mulatto; quadroon, offspring of mulatto and white … These Aristotelian
categories taught by a Jesuit determined they should know where they were” (56). Clare, “A
light-skinned woman, daughter of land-owners, native-born, slaves, emigrés, Carib, Ashanti,
English” (5), is constantly confronted by and wedged into such “Aristotelian categories” of race,
none of which properly fits her. Her dual heritage, both “whip” and “back-raw” (208), terrorizes
the dominant ideology with its ambiguity; “Polysemy poses a question of meaning and this
question always comes through as a dysfunction” (Barthes, “Rhetoric” 39). The principal of her
school in Brooklyn recognizes Clare’s mixed past and relieves her unease through crude racism,
declaring Clare “white chocolate,” saying, “we have no room for lies in our system. No place for
in-betweens” (99).
As she travels from culture to culture, Clare thus experiences multiple shifts in social
role, as the categories into which she is wedged change with the cultural milieu. She moves from
her aristocratic backra background in Jamaica to a blue-collar, black-identified existence in New
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York, to the supposedly de-racialized student life in England1, and back to Jamaica in a new
range of roles. This sliding through multiple racial-social identities forces her to confront her
hybrid history, a history “composed of fragments” (87), ruinating her identity and producing the
angst of a self uncontained by a sense of meaning. Despite Bobby’s profound oppression as a
black man in mid-20th century Alabama (150), Clare can still truthfully tell him, “You are lucky,
Bobby. So lucky … to be one and not both” (153).
In Jamaica again, Clare moves through a series of attempts to redefine the “the ‘creature
in man’” (Nietzsche sec. 225), the “material, fragment, excess, clay, dirt, nonsense, chaos”
(Ibid.) of her identity. As she re-identifies herself with her black-identified mother, through
exploring her grandmother’s now-forested property (172-174), through entering a “mother” role
herself in the teaching of children (192), and as she comes to realize the urgent need for action in
Jamaica (187-188), she realizes herself as black, as Jamaican, as revolutionary. She realizes “she
must give herself to the struggle. She belongs in these hills. And she knows this choice is
irrevocable and she will never be the same” (91). She answers Harry/Harriet’s challenge to “cast
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The “de-racialization” is, ultimately, a form of pseudo-tolerance and racial marginalization, in which Englishness
is merely spread to all individuals. Marginal groups are ignored, or when not ignored, treated as problems which are
solved to the degree which they become English. The exchange between Liz and Clare reveals this marginalization
and its implicit ethnic paternalism:
“Oh … I’m sorry. But you needn’t take [the National Front march] personally, you know.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I mean, you’re hardly the sort they were ranting on about.”
“That doesn’t make it at all better …. Besides, I can never be sure about that … and I’m not sure I should
want … ah, exclusion.”
“But you are who you are …. Look, Hogg-Hunter’s words weren’t directed at you …. Surely you didn’t
think they were?”
“Liz, you are missing my point.”
“Which is?”
“Which is that I am … by blood … the sort they, and she, were ranting on about.”
“But your blood has thinned, or thickened, or whatever it does when … you know what I mean.”
“You mean that I’m presentable. That I’m somehow lower down the tree, higher up the scale, whatever.”
Clare was having a hard time keeping the bitterness from her voice. (139)
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her lot,” and shapes for herself “a coolness that nurtures” (91), a comfort in her multifaceted self
that moves beyond the superstructure’s visions and revisions of her identity.
All such attempts at fixing meaning, however, even new and anti-colonial meanings,
necessarily deaden the trauma of the ambiguities and the oppression of Jamaica. Jamaica’s
wounds are tears in the fabric of the hegemony; through signification it is possible, as Nietzsche
writes, that “What happened … in the case of the French Revolution—… that the text finally
disappeared under the interpretation—could happen once more as noble posterity might
misunderstand the whole past and in that way alone make it tolerable to look at” (sec. 38,
underlining added). Any attempt to cope, “to fix the floating chain of signifieds in such a way as
to counter the terror of uncertain signs” (Barthes, “Rhetoric” 39), is a double-edged sword,
perhaps another ambiguity. It is necessary if one is to “give herself to the struggle” (91), yet may
also reduce one to a “sleepyhead” through the facile affirmation of the other side of the
hegemonist’s dichotomies. To assert bunga over backra is only to accept the same paradigm of
domination, preventing truly radical movement outside of the socially constructed space of stock
roles. Indeed, through the use of ambiguity, the lack of resolution in plot arcs2, and the constant
rewriting of characters through non-sequential shifts of scene into the past, the text’s very
structure incessantly questions and subverts all such attempts at signification and meta-narrative.
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Examples of plot arcs that break or subvert the exposition-rising-climax-denouement-conclusion paradigm of the
traditional Book are many. Bobby’s fails in his attempt to cope with his wartime trauma and merely disappears
without either tragic or just progression, locked in the flashbacks of Vietnam. The rebels similarly fail in their
attempt to reclaim Jamaica. Christopher/De Watchman seems to progress through the standard arc, as he moves
from murderer to prophet; but his “progress” is in fact a sham. After killing Paul H.’s family, he simply stumbles,
half-mad, through the rest of his life, and those around him construct him as prophet, as De Watchman, without any
actual development or refinement of his own.
Such unresolved, undeveloped pseudo-arcs thus manifest not as chronologically developed character-plots,
but rather, simply gaping wounds in the text, outside of the logico-temporal axis of plot, hovering behind the text
and wrapping around it and between it, like the all-invading Agent Orange or Sasabonsam-Christopher’s howls at
the close of the book.
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Harry/Harriet, again an excellent spokesperson, refuses to trivialize the profound trauma of
his/her rape by coercing it into such structures: “Not symbol, not allegory, not something in a
story or a dialogue by Plato. No man, I am merely a person who felt the overgrown cock of a big
whiteman pierce the asshole of a lickle Black bwai—there it is. That’s all there is to it” (130).
Such play suggests that the narratives we use to write history and experience within ourselves are
“might be, in spite of their regulative importance for us, nevertheless mere foreground estimates,
a certain kind of niaiserie” (Nietzsche sec. 3).
Does No Telephone, then, in the words of Barthes, “ceaselessly [posit] meaning
ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning” (“Death” 147)? Is it
nothing more than an extended trauma, an open wound refusing to be healed through
hermeneutics? Or must we return to our starting point, that meaning is not only deconstructed but
also reclaimed? The answer, perhaps, lies in a cautious reclamation: one must turn meaning to
her own ends, but always stay awake while doing so, always realize the stereotyping possibilities
of casting the lot, always ready to tear down the new rhetoric that one has built up if the need
arise. The rebels knew the dangers but accepted them: “the gold and green and black knitted caps
some wore … made them feel like real freedom-fighters, like their comrades in the ANC—a
cliché, almost screenplayed to death, Viva Zapata! and all that—but that is what they were, what
they felt they were, what they were in fact. Their reason emblazoned in the colors of their skulls.
Burn!” (7).
Let this be offered not as the final reading of the text—No Telephone steadfastly denies
that possibility. Rather, let us accept the wildly beautiful, profound ambiguity of ambiguity in the
text; but also, cautiously, cast our lot for the imposed-destroyed-reclaimed economy of meaning
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and resolution of trauma. From the wild forest of No Telephone’s possible readings, the reader
can, perhaps, reclaim this spot of land to nourish her.
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Works Cited
Unless otherwise specified, all references are to No Telephone to Heaven by Michelle Cliff. New
York: Plume/Penguin, 1996.
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Barthes, Roland. “The Photographic Message.” Image – Music – Text. Trans. Setephen
Heath. USA: Noonday, 1997. 15-31.
Barthes, Roland. “Rhetoric of the Image.” Image – Music – Text. Trans. Setephen Heath.
USA: Noonday, 1997. 32-51.
Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Image – Music – Text. Trans. Stephen Heath.
USA: Noonday, 1997. 142-148.
Dorfman, Ariel and Armand Mattelart. How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in
the Disney Comic. Trans. David Kunzle. New York: International General, 1984.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage
Books, 1989.