Part I (Short Answer)
In 200 words or more (each), respond to three the following. Be sure to fully address each
question and provide support from the text (10 points each).
1) What difficulties do the women in Abeng face? To what extent do women exert agency? In
particular, consider how Nanny of the Maroons, Mma Alli or Mrs. Stevens function within the
novel.
2) What does this text have to say about colonialism and imperialism? In what ways does the
legacy of exploitation become personal? To what extent can we consider Abeng to be a historical
novel?
3) How does Cliff depict race and race relations in this work? What role does racial identity play
in Clare’s identity crisis? In what ways does alienation enter the text?
4) How does Cliff treat sexuality in Abeng? How are female bodies described? What truths does
Clare’s relationship with Zoe relationship reveal? In what ways is Clare’s menstruation
symbolic?
Part II (Analysis)
Provide textual analysis for two of the passages below (200 words or more each). Discuss the
significance of the quotation (both in itself AND to the work as a whole). Remember,
significance is not a paraphrase of the quotation nor a summary of the text (10 points each).
1) “‘Look here, you have a chance someday to leave Jamaica behind you…But to get there you
have to learn the rules. That girls like you don’t fire guns. Girls like you have a better chance at
life than other girls. I know what I am talking about. What I would have given to have the
chances you are going to have. Mrs. Phillips can teach you to take advantage of who you are. I
can’t do that for you.’
‘I don’t understand. You’re my mother.’
‘Jamaica is just a tiny little place. There are no opportunities for someone like you here. I don’t
want to leave Jamaica because my place is here. But you don’t have to be confined by this sad
little island. Just take your medicine. Go stay with the old lady and learn what you can from
her’” (Cliff 150).
2) “The people in the Tabernacle could trace their bloodlines back to a past of slavery. But this
was not something they talked about much, or knew much about. In school they were told that
their ancestors had been pagan. That there had been slaves in Africa, where Black people had put
each other in chains…The congregation did not know that African slaves in Africa had been
primarily household servants. They were not seasoned. They were not worked in canefields. The
system of labor was not industrialized. There was in fact no comparison between the two states
of servitude: that practiced by the tribal societies of West Africa and that organized by the Royal
African Company of London, chartered by the Crown” (Cliff 18).
3) “The definition of what a Savage was like was fixed by color, class, and religion, and over the
years a carefully contrived mythology was constructed, which they used to protect their
identities. When they were poor, and not all of them white, the mythology persisted…They were
emphatic in their statement that James Edward Constable Savage, the puisne justice and advisor
to the Crown, who had studied law at the Inns of Court, had been one of the only Jamaican
landowners never to impregnate a female slave or servant–that is not to say, of course, that he
never raped one” (Cliff 29).
4) “On Angel’s Hill, across the river and up the slope, was a wild pig who had lived in the
underbrush for what people said was at least twenty years, but no one really knew. No one had
ever been able to kill him, although once someone caught him sidewise with a bullet, so he could
be recognized by a small scar on his snout, in the shape of a teardrop. The pig was named Massa
Cudjoe and was the descendent of what had been the predominant form of animal life on the
island before the conquerors came, outnumbering even the Arawaks, who would not kill them.
There had been thousands and thousands of wild pigs, until the planters began to shoot them, and
the Maroons stalked them for food. The Maroons turned the hunting of the wild pig into a ritual,
searching for the animal only at certain times of the year and arming themselves with nothing but
machetes and spears. It was a man’s ritual–the women took part when the pig was brought back
to the settlement” (Cliff 112).