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Blending Bildungsroman, autobiographical fiction, and the historical novel in her Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven, Afro- Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff nuances the racial and gender identity crises of her protagonist Clare Savage, most vividly in relation to passing narratives, and further complicates the story of Clare’s Bildung with her implicit lesbianism. Clare Savage’s unfulfilled lesbian desire comments on the imposition of heteronormality in her native land and the ways in which race, class, and coloniality are entrenched in this practice of sexual normalization. By inserting sexual minorities into her novelistic discourse, Cliff is queering the national imagination of Jamaica and questioning the homophobic Caribbean society, even though she is practicing a kind of narrative passing by tacitly avoiding directly presenting Clare’s lesbian sexuality. Together, Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven represent Michelle Cliff’s critical project to rethink and reexamine unspeakable sexualities and their entanglement with racial issues that continue to structure and define every aspect of Jamaican public and private spheres.
