A Furious Voice, Forged In The 'Fire' Of Prejudice : NPR: While on a tour of the University of Virginia, Jamaican-American novelist and short-story writer Michelle Cliff is informed by a doctoral student that Thomas Jefferson never owned slaves. ''Villagers,' as they're affectionately known,' says the student, 'built [this] university, Monticello, every rotunda, column and finial the great man dreamed of. They liked him so much they just pitched in, after their own chores are done.'
It's one of many unsettling moments in If I Could Write This in Fire, a collection of essays that is Cliff's first nonfiction book. Everywhere Cliff goes, she sees people treating history as if it were a story they could rewrite at will: women at cocktail parties uttering, 'Pinochet was not so bad'; guests at a dinner party disbelieving that the blacks in Birth of a Nation were white actors in blackface.
Cliff, 61, has always been an outsider — a lesbian born on a homophobic Caribbean island, an immigrant in the U.K. (where she studied) and the U.S. (where she settled), a mixed-race intellectual trying to make sense of a black and white world.
