PSAT Writing and Language Practice Test 46: Abeng

Questions 1-11 refer to the following information.

Abeng

[1] In contemporary critical work examining female subjectivities in 1 womens' fiction, there is a tendency to privilege the overt insurgent over more 2 direct instances of insubordination. [2] For most, it seems that the better story lies with psychically fragmented protagonists deviating from the world in which they live. [3] Michelle Cliff's 1984 Abeng tells the story of Clare Savage, a light-skinned Jamaican girl whose mixed racial heritage—in a world of strict oppositional binaries—incapacitates her chances for wholeness. [4] While Clare's complex subjectivity under the constraints of colonialist White supremacy certainly 3 calls for examination as well as acclaim, other female characters' counter hegemonic personalities and actions, often less conspicuous, go predominantly 4 unseen and unnoticed. [5] Thus, there is a presumption that these female characters are less courageous, less risky, less intellectual, less something. 5

The novel, in some ways, magnifies the difference between insurgent and pacifist women in its juxtaposition of Nanny and Sekesu—the former a legendary leader of the Windward Maroons, and 6 the later her sister who remained a slave. Accordingly, the islanders descend from either one or the other—rebel or conformist—implying a congenital difference in the people of Jamaica. A closer reading of several of the characters, however, suggests an identity more complex than mere compliance with White patriarchal ideologies, a subjectivity amid the mire of institutionalized oppression that resists and survives in more nuanced ways. 7 Rather than relying on colonialist binaries, the female characters in Abeng demarcate a complex gradation of resistance from varying marginal spaces that ultimately works to dismantle the conceptual order of Western metaphysics. By interrogating the subjectivities of characters like Kitty, Mad Hannah, and Miss Winifred, readers can begin to understand various degrees of female resistance. 8 Moreover, they will understand the roots of the motivations that empowered them to stand up for themselves.

Cliff's novel is within the tradition of Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John 9 (1985) Merle Hodge's Crick Crack Monkey (1981), Oonya Kempadoo's Buxton Spice (1999), and Edwidge Danticat's Clare of the Sea Light (2013), in which young Caribbean girls' gender awakenings coincide with their political awakenings while they struggle to construct a Black female self without coherent mother-daughter relationships and without a clear sense of history. Clare typifies the 10 double consciousness, her White external self attempts to reconcile internal feelings of Blackness. In essence, the quest for Black female subjectivity coexists with the struggle against patriarchy, concurring with the feminist perspective that loving Blackness is itself political resistance. 11 Hence, actions taken by women like Kitty, Mad Hannah, and Miss Winifred that may seem inconsequential actually serve socially and politically to challenge notions of patriarchal discourse by creating spaces of agency that refute, undermine, or opt out of systemic oppression.