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.
Second, Clare's social development is further complicated by her growing up in a colonized country. Since Jamaica was colonized by the British, sometimes its people exhibit a split loyalty divided among their Caribbean, African and British heritage. As the narrator tells the story of Clare emerging into girlhood, she seems to parallel it artfully with Jamaica's own identity crisis, its struggling to weave a tapestry between its composition of variant and occasionally warring cultures.
Third, Clare's p...