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resistant aphasia, which she sees as the ultimate discursive location for one who would
wholly resist the colonizing forces within language.
102
Cliff’s political inflection of silence is manifested in her No Telephone to Heaven
when her character, Kitty Savage, is described as breaking her silence when she discovers a
shop with Jamaican foods in New York.
103
Ultimately, although Cliff’s “attempt to bound
off a space of silence via the symptom of aphasia”
104
is never consummated - Cliff
continues to write - it reflects her suspicion that however hybrid and resistant her
cacophony of voices and assemblage of narrative fragments in her novels are to the
dominant idioms and historical memories of the Euro-dominant state, she can never be
wholly present to herself as a resisting body in her writing. Nevertheless, her struggle with
the ambiguous achievement of an intelligibility that bridges thought worlds is exemplary. It
plays a role in articulating a subjunctive America that the familiar Euro-American
narratives (e.g. the melting pot story) overcode.
Sherman Alexie
Like Michelle Cliff, Sherman Alexie, embodies the split consciousness of one with
his feet in two different life worlds. And, he shares Cliff’s expressed ambivalence toward
writing. In his short story, “Indian Country,” Alexie treats the geographic and
ethnographic ambiguity of his Indianness through his character, Low Man Smith, a writer
and doubtless his alter ego. Low Man describes himself in one of the story’s conversations
as one who is “not supposed to be anywhere.”
105
His Indianness, along with that of other
Native American characters, is highly diluted; a “Spokane,” he speaks and understands no
Convention