Speaking the Unspeakable through Counter-Memory and Historical Knowledge of Struggle to Lend Meaning to Silenced Histories and Identities

This article reveals how Eurocentric knowledge constructs cohesive narratives that legitimize irreversible losses at all levels and lend meaning to unacceptable acts in diverse areas worldwide. These narratives are inherently political and ideological, defining communities through forged epistemologies. It is through history that these narratives have been maintained. Michelle Cliff, in her novels Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven, stands as a historical revisionist against the accumulated domination of Western hegemony through nuanced narratives of resistance, engraved with audacious transcendence and maturity. She makes her protagonist, Clare, a nexus of her resistant narratives to reveal unjust discourses that lead to the erasure of individual memory and a sense of history lessness. Therefore, through focusing on counter-memory as a site for reconstructing histories and identities, a return to the past is an essential element for acknowledging the silenced versions of representation. This paper focuses on Cliff’s strategies to reclaim her history through the resistance of Black women and the techniques of destabilizing Grand narratives of suppression and exclusion. This paper concludes that the process of rewriting history is influenced by memory, political self-discovery, and the remarkable resistance of women, as evidenced by the revival of previously excluded voices, stories, and oral traditions.