Social Development in Abeng
Social Development in Abeng (Michelle Cliff)
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Everyone is born into a social environment which dramatically helps to shape the personalities which they develop, the status which they achieve and the cultural influences which they reflect within their daily behavior. In Abeng (1984) Michelle Cliff presents a compelling portrait of Clare Savage who is seen as a twelve-year old, light-skinned Jamaican girl. Cliff wrote Abeng after she composed No Telephone to Heaven as a kind of literary prequel to show how it was that Clare developed into the kind of woman she is revealed to be in No Telephone to Heaven. Using Abeng as a focal point of reference, the social formation of Clare Savage will be analzyed against a grid of recent social development theories inclusive of systems theory, life-span development, and Mahler's Separation-Individuation Process. Cliff's portrait of Clare Savage offers fertile ground for an analysis of an individual's social development. Clare appears as a fictional character who reflects the diversity of her complex cultural and social background. First, Cliff presents her as a child of mixed race. Clare identifies herself as one of the Jamaican blacks. Yet she also knows that she is exceptionally fair-skinned and that her great-great-grand father, Judge Savage, was a white slaver owner who chose to burn his 100 slaves rather than liberate them. This mixed background affords Clare some confusion about her own racial identity and class status.
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that of her family's. Kitty could manipulate the powers of "Madame Fate, a weed that could kill and could cure" (Cliff, 1988, p. 53). Cliff seems to suggest that Kitty's frustrations with the world could be overcome when she used her magical powers with flowers and roots. Yet what is more important is Cliff's observation that Kitty was emotionally rather distant from her children, lavishing her affection upon stray cats instead, and was not sufficiently strong in communicating her love for them with physical expressions such as stroking, hugging and kissing (Cliff, 1988, p. 52).
In Mahler's classic study, "The Separation-Individuation Process and Identity Formation" Mahler stresses the importance of the separation-individuation process for the normal developmental process. Research indicates that the roots of infantile psychosis as well as later emotional disturbances can be found in the second part of the first year and in the second year of life during the autistic, symbiotic and separation-individuation phases (Mahler, 1980, p. 114). Further research has ascertained that the separation-individuation phase consists of four separate subphases. During the normal autistic phase which lasts from birth to one month the infan
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 3198
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)
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