Writing Under the Sign of Anne Frank: Creolized Holocaust Memory in Michelle Cliff and Caryl Phillips

Abstract

This article investigates the global circulation of Holocaust memory by considering intertextual references to Anne Frank in the Caribbean diaspora fiction of Michelle Cliff and Caryl Phillips. I argue that Cliff’s and Phillips’s invocations of Frank’s Diary participate in a larger Caribbean intellectual tradition of crosscultural engagement with the Holocaust. I further suggest that their articulations of Holocaust memory need to be read against an additional frame of reference: the deep historical presence of Sephardic Jews in the Caribbean. This historical consciousness at once supports and complicates the identification with Frank in Cliff’s Abeng and Phillips’s The Nature of Blood .