No Telephone To Heaven, By Michelle Cliff

In her novel, No Telephone to Heaven, Michelle Cliff employs a writing style that makes the readers stop and take notice of what she is conveying. There are many nuances and themes that she alludes to, in exceptional ways, repeatedly throughout the book to express the nature of her characters and the complicated issues that they go through in their life. One specific passage from her book that shows her unique, poignant writing is in the chapter “Magnanimous Warrior” (161). Within this short chapter she uses a description of this “warrior” to evince and symbolize the complexity of the identity crises that her characters are going through and also the importance of motherhood throughout the novel. The complexity of this brief chapter starts immediately within the title. The two dissimilar connotations of the words “magnanimous” and “warrior” convey a contradicting nature that is also noticeable in many of Cliff’s characters’ identities. The intricacy of the passage continues to be expressed through the two contrasting tones used in the
Motherhood plays a large role within this novel, from Christopher’s grandmother who embodies a completely nurturing character and is inadvertently the relationship that motivates him to murder, to Kitty who left her daughter Clare behind in America with her father and through this action caused her daughter to question why she was left behind and who that made her. Motherhood also intertwines in Clare’s life again because of her desire to be a mother herself, and then her discovery that she could no longer conceive after a miscarriage. But the passage does not specifically speak about a mother that the reader has read about in depth, and in its ambiguity it prompts the readers to think of another mother read about in passing with similar