Migration To The North Identity

Stuck Between Two Worlds Everyone has an identity and culture unique to him or her. The development of your identity is the result of the displacements and struggles you experience in your life. In the texts “No Telephone to Heaven” and “Seasons of Migration to the North,” both protagonists experience living in two different cultures where they thrive and struggle and that ultimately helps them develop or discover their true self-identity. To understand the underlying tendencies and characteristics of each character we need to look into the different experiences each individual experienced. The most compelling evidence in, “Seasons of Migration,” is the displacement and change of identity that occurs. In “Seasons of Migration,” the reader …show more content…
The novel follows Clare’s family’s emigration into the US. Her dark skin mother and sister move back to Jamaica, while light-skin Clare and her light-skinned father remain in the US. The move back to their hometown is motivated by their experiences of racism. The negative attitudes of whites towards blacks are instilled and internalized by blacks, resulting in Clare’s dark skin mom and sister fleeing back to the country they once fled due to social and economic troubles. They quickly discover that America, the land of the free, has many more problems that they could ever imagine. Racism is alive and well here in …show more content…
Some implicate that Clare Savage is an autobiographical character. Cliff is a light skinned, Jamaican upper-class, lesbian feminist. Many of these traits are visible in Clare Savage. However, Cliff clarifies this in a her journal article she wrote called, “Caliban’s Daughter.” Cliff says, “The protagonist of my two novels is named Clare Savage. She is not an autobiographical character, but an amalgam of myself and others.” Michelle Cliff writes about how “we, the colonized, are also subject to ruination.” The reference to “Caliban” is rooted from an earlier time when Caribbean intellectuals struggled with issues of identity due to the process of cultural and racial admixture that shaped Caribbean societies. The “Caliban” is the island’s original inhabitant- “more beast than human… more savagery originates in the forest, on the island, transfused through the bloodiness of her savage mother… the witch-wild woman.” To twentieth-century Caribbean writers, “Caliban” epitomized the history of colonial oppression and regional culture of resistance. This oppression and resistance negatively affected Caribbean writers. Though Michelle explicitly says that Clare is not an autobiographical character, Clare represents the many Caliban’s daughters and their struggle to find ones