Corregidora essay with articles to use.

 

A five page single spaced
essay on the novel Corregidora.Paper is due Due Tuesday 4/30, so I WANT it done by 12am on the 30th, Tuesday morning. But sooner would be greatly appreciated.

 

The directions and an essay outline I’d like the paper to include
are in the doctument attachted.

   

Using the following Critics and their theories which can be found anywhere on the internet:Jacques Derrida – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derrida

 

Slavoj Zizek – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavoj_%C5%BDi%C5%BEek

  

Essay outline

Corregidora by Gayl Jones is an overall depressing novel that has many thought provoking things about it.

I want the paper to talk about feminism, abuse, domination, and oppression.

One good thing to make a good point about is: Ursa’s loss of her uterus is like a key to her being freed from the oppression of her having to have babies and tell them all about her family’s past and keeping up with the vicious circle of their history. However, her being abused and dominated by Mutt has made her lose any and all fight. She has been both oppressed and dominated over by literally her own people in order to carry on the history. Oppressions and Dominance in retrospect seem the same, but they are two different states of being.

Use these theorists:
Jacques Derrida

Slavoj Zizek

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Articles that you MUST incorporate, not all, just 4.

Was Your Mama Mulatto? Notes toward a Theory of Racialized Sexuality in Gayl Jones’s
“Corregidora” and Julie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust”
Author(s): Caroline A. Streeter
Source: Callaloo, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Summer, 2004), pp. 768-787
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3300843

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WAS YOUR MAMA MULATTO?
NOTES TOWARD A THEORY OF RACIALIZED

SEXUALITY IN GAYL JONES’S CORREGIDORA AND
JULIE DASH’S DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST

by Caroline A. Streeter

Gayl Jones’s novel Corregidora (1975) and Julie Dash’s feature film Daughters of the
Dust (1991) are singular texts that use historical frameworks to comment upon post
Civil-Rights- era race and gender relations and identity formations.1 Daughters of the
Dust, the first feature film written and directed by Dash, was also the first film by an
African-American woman to receive widespread theatrical distribution. Daughters is
an independent work that resists and contests many aspects of the Hollywood film.

Corregidora was the first novel by Gayl Jones, a reclusive figure with a small but

striking literary output. Both the novel and the film call attention to understudied
aspects of the African diaspora. In Corregidora, Jones creates an unusual migration
circuit that links mid-to-late twentieth-century African Americans living in Kentucky
to their slave ancestors in Brazil. In Daughters of the Dust, the plot concerns the

persistence of African traditions among black people at the turn of the century living
on the Sea Islands, located off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina. Both works
also highlight the crucial role of women in maintaining cultural memory for black
communities. This essay concerns the ways in which Corregidora and Daughters of the
Dust make compelling interventions that transform mulatta characters-“racially
mixed” women of African descent who bear the phenotypical (physical) markers of
“race mixing”-into figures that help us to understand new things about sexual and
racial normativity.2 Both texts effect a surprising deployment of a figure that has been
symbolic of repressed histories and regressive discourses.

Mulatta characters have long been controversial figures for scholars of African-
American literature. In novels such as Clotelle, or the Colored Heroine, A Tale of the
Southern States (William Wells Brown, 1867), lola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (Frances
Ellen Watkins Harper, 1892), Megda (Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins, 1891), and
Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (Pauline Hop-
kins, 1900), mulatta characters are symbolic of traumatic histories of enslavement. In
novels of the 1920s and 1930s, especially those associated with Harlem Renaissance
writers such as Nella Larsen (Quicksand [1928] and Passing [1929]) and Jessie Fauset
(There is Confusion [1924], Plum Bun [1928], The Chinaberry Tree [1931], and Comedy
American Style [1933]), mulatta characters represented access to class mobility and the
possibility of escaping the stigma of blackness altogether through “racial passing.” In
an essay entitled, “If The Present Looks Like the Past, What Does the Future Look

Callaloo 27.3 (2004) 768-

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CALLALOO

Like?” (1983), Alice Walker wrote that early African-American novels that represent-
ed black heroines as “virtually white” are signs of a “fatal social vision” and
ultimately undermine emancipatory struggles (297, 310). Some feminist literary
critics have offered analyses that attempt to challenge the reading of the mulatta as

simply a “negative image.” Barbara T. Christian (1980) has argued that early black
female fiction writers deployed what she calls the “proper mulatta” to claim access for
black women to the status of true womanhood that dominated public consciousness
in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And Hazel V. Carby (1987) has
analyzed “the figure of the mulatto in literature … as a narrative device of mediation,
representing both an exploration of the relationship between the races and an

expression of the relationship between the races” (89).
My contention here is that Dash and Jones re-imagine the mulatta by explicitly

engaging racially mixed women’s sexual agency and desire. Both Daughters of the Dust
and Corregidora render visible black female sexualities that call into play the phenom-
enon that Adrienne Rich (1978) has called “compulsory heterosexuality.”3 In her film,
Dash represents lesbian desire between mulatta prostitutes at the turn of the century,
historically resituating this possibility for erotic relations and thereby problematizing
racialized discourses of normative black identity in the post-civil rights era. In
Corregidora, lesbian desire is depicted as a rejection of the heterosexual imperative for
women’s sexual passivity, a passivity that feeds women’s subordination in gender
relations. This essay puts black feminist theories into conversation with theories of
sexuality to argue that normalizing racial discourses implicitly invoke a standard of
heterosexuality as a sign of authentic racial identity.

Daughters of the Dust takes place at the turn of the century and over the period of
one day. The Peazant family has a reunion on the eve of the migration of a large
portion of their family from the Sea Islands to the mainland. The gathering symbolizes
what will likely be the last time they will all be together. The film’s narrative focuses
on the women of the family, and among these women are Yellow Mary and Trula.
Yellow Mary previously relocated to the mainland and returns home to take part in
the family reunion. Trula, who accompanies Yellow Mary, is a stranger to the family.
As her name indicates, Yellow Mary is lighter in color than some members of her
family. Nevertheless, as her cousin Viola remarks, “Of course, compared to some
people, Yellow Mary isn’t all that light-skinned….” (79).4 Viola’s remark is a non-too-
subtle reference to Yellow Mary’s companion Trula, whose light skin, clear blue eyes,
and abundant blonde/brown hair mark her as a fetching example of “some people.”
Trula is also significantly younger than Yellow Mary is. As Harryette Mullen (1994)
has written, the liaison between the two women is ambiguous. However, in the book
about her film co-authored with bell hooks, Julie Dash has indicated that she scripted
the characters as lesbians and as prostitutes.

Like Daughters of the Dust, the novel Corregidora features a protagonist, Ursa
Corregidora, who is caught between the imperatives of family and her sexual desires.
Ursa is a blues singer descended from a line of women who trace their ancestry to an
African woman who was a slave in Brazil. The Portuguese slave owner Corregidora
raped Ursa’s great-grandmother, the African woman. As a result, Great Gram gave
birth to a daughter (“Grandmama”), whom Corregidora also raped. Eventually Great

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CALLALOO

Gram left the plantation, but returned years later for her daughter, by that time

pregnant with Corregidora’s child. They migrated to the United States, eventually
settling in Kentucky. There, Grandmama gave birth to a daughter, (“Mama”) who
became Ursa’s mother. Although Ursa’s own father was a brown-skinned African
American, Ursa resembles her mother and her grandmother. She has light skin and

long, red hair.
Ursa’s female relatives are committed to the oral repetition of the horrifying tales

of enslavement and sexual violence that Great Gram and Grandmama endured in
Brazil. They are determined to keep the story of their oppression alive because there
are no official narratives that acknowledge their history. This is why they keep
“Corregidora” as a family name. They are committed to “making generations”-
giving birth to children who will continue the obsessive repetition of the slave
master’s atrocities. The novel’s plot involves Ursa’s inability to have children, the
result of an accident caused by her first husband. Ursa’s barrenness precipitates a
multidimensional crisis. She feels sexually neutered, emotionally betrayed, and
above all can no longer fulfill the imperative to “make generations.” Ursa explores her
traumatized sexuality through a relationship with a second husband as well as two
lesbian characters, Catherine (Cat) and Jeffrene (Jeffy), who represent an alternative

sexuality that simultaneously attracts and repels Ursa.

The Color of (Hetero)Sexuality

Through their focus upon women with mixed blood, and their exploration of this
condition as both “taint” and “privilege,” along with lesbian desire, Jones and Dash

engage the relationship between color and sexuality. Colorism, the conferment of

privilege based upon shade, has been analyzed through historical studies (Joel
Williamson, 1980) as well as more topical contemporary investigations (Kathy Russell
with Midge Wilson and Ronald Hall, 1992) and films (Kathe Sandler, 1992). Although
skin is the somatic feature most frequently focused upon in discussions of colorism,
hair color and texture also figure significantly in the literary representation of this

hierarchy of physical features among African Americans. Alice Walker argues that
women and relationships between women bear a disproportionate burden of the
tension that manifests from the disparate privileges that are associated with color.
Black women’s bodies become the sites for the projection of the standards of beauty
that are shaped by colorism, and relationships between black women suffer when
black men appropriate these standards. Walker revises W.E.B. DuBois’s prediction
that the problem of the twentieth century would be the color line based on the way in
which power dynamics of gender intersect with color, making physical features a
contentious issue within African-American communities. Critiquing DuBois’s notion
as a “man’s vision … it sees clearer across seas than across the table or the street,”
Walker relocates the color line “between the darker and lighter skinned in the black
race” (310).

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CALLALOO

Jones and Dash engage colorism in their texts by referencing the complex ways in
which skin color accrues social meaning, with an emphasis on the under explored
dynamic of how color becomes infused with sexual meaning. Jones and Dash deploy
black vernacular language to chart this territory, focusing particularly on the words
red and yellow as signifiers of difference. In African-American communities, red and
redbone refer to skin and/or hair that are brown with a reddish cast, whereas yellow
and high yellow refer to skin that is light brown or a lighter shade (beige, cream colored,
ivory). Although yellow does not refer to a specific hair color, a yellow person is likely
to have hair that is lighter in color and less curly in texture. Descriptive color terms
such as red and yellow point to race mixture and have a multiethnic valence.5 Red and

yellow also have distinctly gendered meanings. When used to describe men, red can
confer an edginess or sense of danger. For example, Malcolm X’s nickname as a young
street gangster was “Detroit Red.” In The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964), the reader
learns that red referred both to Malcolm’s physical appearance and his personality. He

explains the reddish cast to his hair as the legacy of a white grandfather on his
mother’s side.

Of this father of hers, I know nothing except her shame about it.
I remember hearing her say she was glad that she had never seen
him. It was, of course, because of him that I got my reddish-
brown ‘mariny’ color of skin, and my hair of the same color. I was
the lightest child in our family. (2)

When used to describe women, red and redbone indicate an assertive female

sexuality which other women often object to or disapprove of. In a song entitled
“Redbone” (1993), Cassandra Wilson sings the refrain, “The women in church say,
Redbone girl got a problem … she drives men folks crazy.” In Corregidora, Ursa’s

physical appearance is read by other women as a threat, a fact the local women make
clear during one of Ursa’s infrequent visits to her hometown in Kentucky:

“You red-headed heifer.” That’s what that woman down in
Bracktown called me. I wasn’t even studying her man. He looked
at me, I didn’t look at him … the last time I was in Bracktown,
I went to the Baptist church with Mama. “Who’s that? Some new
bitch from out of town going be trying to take everybody’s
husband away from them?” . . . Then when I was just walking
down the street minding my own business, these two women in
a car. “You red-headed heifer.” I didn’t stay long back in Brack-
town. (72-3)

In the film Daughters of the Dust, the women of the Peazant family express similarly
harsh appraisals of the characters Yellow Mary and Trula. The scene of the two
women’s arrival depicts them walking toward the family gathered on the beach,
accompanied by young women of the family, Myown and Iona, who carry their

luggage, skipping with excitement. The camera moves in for a close up on a Peazant

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CALLALOO

female relative, who comments, “Ain’t that Gussie’s daughter? She got ruint, you
know. Yellow Mary went off and got ruint.” (In the Gullah vernacular pronunciation
used by the characters in Daughters of the Dust, a woman who is the object of a sexual
transgression such as a rape becomes ruined, or ruint.) Haagar, Iona’s mother, calls
her daughter to her side-“Iona! Go warn Nana Peazant! It’ll most likely kill her to see
this heifer done returned!” Subsequently the film cuts to a close-up of Viola, the

family member who came in on the boat with Yellow Mary and Trula. Viola, having
joined her family in watching the two women approach, murmurs “All that yellow
wasted.” As Harryette Mullen has written, this cryptic phrase speaks to the Peazant
women’s ambivalence about the constellation of traumatic associations invoked by
Yellow Mary and Trula-including rape, incest, miscegenation, racial passing, homo-

sexuality, and prostitution-“when these experiences are perceived to be threats to
collective identities as well as to the constructed continuity of tradition itself” (12).

A densely paradoxical designation, yellow is most commonly associated with the
mulatto in literature. Historically, there is no doubt that possessing light skin color
has been advantageous. The artist and philosopher Adrian Piper (1996) noted that

lighter-skinned, “white-looking” people tend to inhabit the upper classes because of
the disparate privileges that came with looking like, and being related to, white
people since the time of slavery. Despite the fact that the skin color hierarchy
privileges lighter-skinned people in mainstream society, in African-American com-
munities “yellow” people are frequently associated with unflattering images. Histo-
rian Joel Williamson argues that African Americans in the early twentieth century
came to a general consensus that “brown” was a shade superior to black or yellow,
being neither too dark nor too light. A rhyme quoted in John Langston Gwaltney
(1980) sums up the hierarchy of shade among African Americans: “Black is evil, yallah
so low down, look here honey, ain’t you glad you brown?” (81). Stereotypes about
yellow people focus on their unsavoriness; they are “contaminated” by their obvious
connection to white people. In Daughters of the Dust, the Peazant women project just
such a stereotype onto Yellow Mary when they express reluctance to eat her cooking.
A woman comments upon the biscuits that Yellow Mary offers to Haagar upon her
arrival at Ibo Landing: “I wouldn’t eat them anyhow, if she touched them.” Another
echoes, “That’s right! You never know where her hands could have been. I can just
smell the heifer” (112).6 Needless to say, such a comment also refers strongly to Yellow

Mary’s scandalous sexuality. Because she is a lesbian and a prostitute “you never
know where those hands could have been.” Dash problematizes the Peazant women’s
vilification of Yellow Mary and Trula by interrogating the impulse to make them
moral scapegoats. In a pivotal scene near the end of the film, the pregnant character
Eula challenges such distinctions between women by reminding her family members
that making the mulatta the abject symbol of painful histories cannot protect them
from the impact of the past. She says:

As far as this place is concerned, we never enjoyed our woman-
hood … Deep inside we believed that they ruined our mothers,
and their mothers before them …. Even though you are going up
North, you all think about being ruined too. You think you can

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CALLALOO

cross over to the mainland and run away from it? You’re going
to be sorry, sorry, if you don’t change your way of thinking
before you leave this place. (156)

Although being “yellow” is often conflated with the ability to pass as white,
depending upon how whiteness is defined “red” people may also pass. In Corregidora,
Ursa’s “red-headed” body triggers precisely that memory for the character Sal
Cooper:

“You know every since I first laid eyes on you I thought you was
one of my long-lost relatives … my mother came out the darkest,
and so they wouldn’t claim her. I don’t know who they are. I
don’t even know what they look like. Mama probably wouldn’t
even know them now. She think they up in New York somewhere
now though, passing. I don’t know, but when I first saw you, I
had that feeling.”

“I couldn’t pass,” I said. I had to say something. I felt resentful,
and a little angry because she was saying those things to me.

“I don’t mean passing white. I mean passing for Spanish or
something, you know. Like Cole Bean getting in the front door
down at the Strand that time.”

I started to say I didn’t know, but I nodded. (70)7

The imperative to “lighten the race” through marriage is a consistent theme in
African-American novels, as is the realization that efforts to control the color of
offspring through marriage are easily thwarted.8 As the conversation in Corregidora
continues, Sal explains to Ursa:

“My mother married a light man so that her children could have
light skin and good hair. But look what happened.”

I frowned. We sat there saying nothing again. (72)

Black Female Sexuality and “Compulsory Heterosexuality”

In “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Adrienne Rich asserts
that the institution of heterosexuality achieves its dominance through the way in
which heterosexual sexuality masquerades as a choice made by women, rather than
the primary mode of subservience to male domination.9 Because the compulsory
heterosexuality that Rich describes is theorized in the context of white American
society, it has limited theoretical use for other ethnic communities. In fact, Rich’s
description of the way in which men constrain women’s rights and mobility to achieve
sexual/gender domination over them is strikingly analogous to the way in which
white supremacy was secured during and in the aftermath of slavery in the United
States. In a list adapted from Kathleen Gough’s “The Origin of the Family” (1975),

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CALLALOO

Rich enumerates eight characteristics of male power. For clarity, I have paraphrased
the list as follows:

1. The power of men to deny women their own sexuality
2. (The power of men) to force sexuality upon (women)
3. (The power of men) to command or exploit (women’s) labor to control their

produce
4. (The power of men) to control or rob (women) of their children
5. (The power of men) to confine (women) physically and prevent their movement
6. (The power of men) to use (women) as objects in male transactions
7. (The power of men) to cramp (women’s) creativeness
8. (The power of men) to withhold from (women) large areas of society’s knowl-

edge and cultural attainments
The substitution of the terms black Americans for women and white Americans for men

in Rich’s elaboration of characteristics of male power results in a strikingly accurate

description of the effects of enslavement and institutionalized racism experienced by
African Americans in the United States, particularly with regard to sexuality. For

example,
1. The power of white Americans to deny black Americans their own sexuality
2. (The power of whites) to force sexuality upon (blacks)
3. (The power of whites) to command or exploit (black) labor to control their

produce
Angela Y. Davis (1998) writes that under the conditions of enslavement, consensu-

al sexual relations between black men and women were a privilege rather than the
status quo:

(F)ollowing the abolition of slavery … For the first time in the
history of the African presence in North America, masses of
black women and men were in a position to make autonomous
decisions regarding the sexual partnerships into which they
entered … Sexuality thus was one of the most tangible domains
in which emancipation was acted upon and through which its
meanings were expressed. Sovereignty in sexual matters marked
an important divide between life during slavery and life after
emancipation. (4)

Davis’s analysis clarifies how crucial it is to interrogate whether and how African-
American men and women have experienced “normative” heterosexual relations in
the United States. In an afterword to her essay (1986), Adrienne Rich acknowledged
that through her reading of African-American women’s fiction, she came to recognize
“a different set of valences. … a different quest for the woman hero, a different

relationship both to sexuality with men and to female loyalty and bonding” (74). As
black feminist theorists such as Kimberle Crenshaw (1992) and Patricia Hill Collins
(1991) maintain, neither gender-based nor race-based models are adequate in ac-

counting for black women’s experience. Compulsory heterosexuality may enable
black men to dominate black women, but the fact that white supremacy impedes black

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men’s access to patriarchal power necessitates an investigation into how compulsory
heterosexuality articulates with white supremacy. Corregidora and Daughters of the
Dust attest to the ways that racial inequality prevented black men from assuming
many of the privileges of normative heterosexual manhood. Both texts delineate black
men’s inability to protect black women from the sexual violence they experience at the
hands of white men. The novel and the film also highlight the fact that black women,
both during and in the aftermath of slavery, who defended themselves against sexual
violence, risked their own lives as well as the lives of husbands and lovers. In

Corregidora, Ursa remembers a story Great Gram told about the brutal torture and
death suffered by an enslaved black woman and her husband on a plantation in Brazil
in retaliation for the woman’s murder of her owner, an act committed in self-defense
as the owner attempted to rape her. In Daughters of the Dust, Eula (who is the matriarch
Nana’s granddaughter and the mother of the unborn child, who provides the film’s
voice-over narration) keeps silent about the identity of her rapist to prevent her
husband Eli from attempting to avenge the attack.

By the same token, both texts engage the tensions that manifest between black men
and women precisely because women resist men’s attempts to enact patriarchal
prerogatives. Corregidora opens with Ursa’s description of the ongoing argument she
had with her husband Mutt throughout their brief marriage because she would not

give up her singing and allow him to “support her” (3). Mutt resents Ursa’s indepen-
dence and, as their relationship deteriorates, becomes increasingly possessive to the
point of “joking” that he will offer her up for sale to the highest bidder before the
primarily male audience that listens to her sing nightly in Happy’s Cafe. In Daughters
of the Dust, Nana cautions Eli about his possessiveness toward Eula. When Eli claims
that he cannot accept the rape of his wife because “she don’t feel like mine no more,”
Nana challenges him, saying, “Eula never belonged to you. She married you” (95). The
novel and the film represent the subjectivity that develops in women who survive in
racist and sexist social worlds without the protection of “their” men-a condition that
increases their vulnerability yet also affords them possibilities for agency.

Mulatta characters in both Corregidora and Daughters of the Dust express ambiva-
lence about investing in the patriarchal power that potentially accrues to them
through their relationships with men, or through their adherence to traditional
gender roles. In Jones’s novel, Ursa resists her husband Mutt’s insistence that she stop
singing after their marriage, “I said I didn’t just sing to be supported. I said I sang
because it was something I had to do, but he never would understand that” (3). On the
other hand, she enters ambivalently into a relationship with her second husband,
Tadpole, appearing to marry him out of a need for stability. In response to his
declaration of love, and immediately prior to his proposal of marriage, she reflects, “I
said nothing. I was thinking I’d only wanted him to love me without saying anything
about it … I was grateful he didn’t ask me the same question” (55). In Dash’s film,
Yellow Mary is acknowledged by family members to be a wealthy woman of indepen-
dent means. Yet, she also engages in a fantasy of heteronormativity: “I wish I could
find a good man, Eula. Somebody I could depend on. Not that I’d want to depend on
him. Just to know that I could if I had to” (121). The two texts move beyond depicting
mulattas as troubling objects of desire in African-American communities, symbolic of

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CALLALOO

the traumatic history of slavery and the racist standards of colorism through their

exploration of mulatta agency. Daughters of the Dust raises an alternative scenario: as
lesbians and prostitutes, Yellow Mary and Trula elect to practice a taboo profession
and engage in a taboo relationship.?1 Becoming “ruined” thus has the potential to
transcend victimization when such a label is indicative of sexual agency. In Corregi-
dora, Jones suggests a similar link between prostitution and agency by implying that

prostitution can be a viable source of income for black women. In a conversation
between Ursa and Cat about their limited employment opportunities, they banter,

(T)here’s always something you can do to keep your own hours.
Now we ain’t talking about that … Hush. (32)

Ambiguous Relationships: Color, Sexuality, and Mother-Daughter Bonds

In “Compulsory Heterosexuality,” Rich makes a convincing case for the idea that
the sensual/sexual impulse that females develop toward other females through the
bond between mothers and their infants is forcibly ruptured when girls and women
are compelled, as they mature, to turn away from female bodies as a source of erotic

pleasure. My initial impetus for linking Corregidora and Daughters of the Dust was

inspired by an aspect of the intertextual relationship between the novel and the film,
which Rich’s essay helps to illuminate. As a pair of women, Yellow Mary and Trula
are depicted as lovers, but also resemble what we might imagine the mothers and

daughters in the novel would look like, in large measure because of the visible age
difference between the actresses. This mother-daughter effect in the film is height-
ened by the skin color difference between Trula and Yellow Mary-the younger
woman being lighter-skinned than the older one. The mulattas in Dash’s film consti-
tute what I call a “visual echo” of the mulattas in Jones’s novel-their color and age
difference can be read as representing the legacy of white men’s sexual domination
over black women that is documented in Corregidora. Visually, Yellow Mary and Trula
could be seen as representing what I call the “bleaching of the race” that is embodied
in Ursa’s mother and her grandmother as well as in Ursa herself. In Jacqueline Bobo’s

study of black women’s reception of Daughters of the Dust, as well as in my own

experience, screening the film for multiethnic student audiences, some viewers-

especially upon initial viewing-assume Yellow Mary and Trula are mother and

daughter. This reading comes as no surprise-both because of the subtle way that the
eroticism of their relationship is conveyed and because of the way in which compul-
sory heterosexuality renders lesbian relations invisible.

In the film, the “blurring” of erotic relationships between women and relationships
between mothers and daughters is very present in the scene of Yellow Mary and
Trula’s arrival at Ibo Landing. Dash constructs an ambiguous alliance between the
two mulattas that is rife with mixed messages. The first family member to recognize
Yellow Mary remarks, “Ain’t that Gussie’s daughter? Old man Peazant’s Grand-

daughter done come home!” Subsequently, Yellow Mary spies the pregnant Eula

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among the family members and cries out, “Is that the little girl I used to rock in
Gussie’s yard?” Eula runs to embrace Yellow Mary, who introduces her to Trula. At
this point, it is plausible that Trula is Yellow Mary’s daughter, particularly because it
has been established that Yellow Mary is considerably older than Eula, and Eula and
Trula look much closer in age than Yellow Mary and Trula. There is also the issue of
the names-Eula and Trula sound alike. It is conceivable that Yellow Mary, who has
moved away from home, would give her daughter a name that sounds as if it could
be from the Sea Islands. Moreover, as viewers will learn, Yellow Mary initially left the
island to work in Cuba as a domestic servant, and was raped by her employer. Thus,
Trula could be a child of rape.

However, Julie Dash deploys camera angles and a form of indirect address among
the women that effectively communicates Trula’s outsider status. The same woman
who first recognizes Yellow Mary, upon spotting Trula, murmurs, “What dat she got
wit’ her?”ll In a subsequent shot sequence in the same scene, Yellow Mary approaches
her cousin Haagar (who sent her daughter Iona to warn Nana, their grandmother, that
“this heifer done come home”) to offer her a tin of biscuits. Eyeing them suspiciously,
Haagar looks from the box to Trula asking, “What dis is?” Following a beat during
which Yellow Mary and Trula exchange exasperated looks, Yellow Mary replies,
“Store-bought biscuits.” Haagar responds incredulously “Bread from a store??”

Haagar’s scornful glances and mocking tone, followed by her comment that “a
woman who don’t cook must be mighty pretty,” convey that Haagar is drawing a link
between the mulattas and the store-bought biscuits. In effect, she implies that Yellow

Mary and Trula can, like the biscuits, be acquired for a price; they are “store-bought
women.”12

In Jones’s novel, in which subsequent generations of women obsessively recount
their sexual abuse at the hands of the slave owner Corregidora, mixed blood becomes
a mute witness through the vehicle of what is visible-the skin. Mulatto skin is the
visible scar of slavery and rape. Ursa’s female relatives teach her:

.. .They burned all the documents, Ursa, but they didn’t burn out
what they put in their minds. We got to burn out what they put
in our minds, like you burn out a wound. Except we got to keep
what we need to bear witness. That scar that’s left to bear witness.
We got to keep it as visible as our blood. (72, reviewer’s emphasis)

Through the “white-looking” Trula, Dash plays on the theme of mixed blood as
mute witness and visible scar. In the film, Trula’s ambiguous presence is a critical

aspect of the way in which Yellow Mary simultaneously attracts and repels her family
members.l3 In addition to being racially and/or ethnically ambiguous, Trula is a

physical embodiment of the literary trope of the “golden child” the light-skinned (and
often golden-haired and light-eyed) child born to a dark-skinned woman of African
descent. The golden child may be, but is not necessarily, biracial. Giving birth to such
a child was at one time considered a mark of good fortune-the child was more
attractive according to dominant standards of beauty, and colorism would function
to privilege him or her. Alice Walker mentions the golden child in her essay, and Toni

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Morrison has made scathing critiques of this figure in the novels The Bluest Eye (1972,
with the character Maureen Peale) and Jazz (1992, with the character Golden Gray).
The paradox between the brutal history that the mulatta represents and Trula’s
unmistakable physical beauty is ambivalently addressed by Dash. During a pivotal
scene that establishes that Yellow Mary will remain on the island when the family
members who are migrating depart, Dash positions Trula at the periphery of the
narrative. As she stands alone watching the family, Trula becomes visibly agitated
when she realizes that Yellow Mary will not return to the mainland.

A narrative strategy of ambivalence also marks Jones’s engagement with her
mulatta characters in Corregidora.14 At different points in the novel Ursa reflects on
how color overdetermines her resemblance to her mother and grandmother, both
children of rape:

I got so embarrassed because it was me I was looking at, not us…
Because I realized for the first time I had what all those women
had. I’d always thought I was different. Their daughter, but
somehow different. Maybe less Corregidora. I don’t know. But
when I saw that picture, I knew I had it. What my mother and my
mother’s mother before her had. The mulatto women. Great
Gram was the coffee-bean woman, but the rest of us…. (60)

She (Mama) was still beautiful in their way of still being
beautiful, and the way I knew I would still be beautiful when I
got to be their age. (110)

The overwhelming infiltration of the past into the present-represented by the lack
of temporal boundaries in the narrative, especially from a psychological standpoint-
makes it difficult for Ursa to know if substantive boundaries exist between the
different women’s stories, and even between their bodies. As Bruce Simon (1998) has
noted (citing Madhu Dubey, 1995), “the narrative structure of Corregidora. . .fore-
grounds the way (Ursa’s) memories and dreams ‘repeatedly erupt into her narrative”‘
(95). Ultimately, Ursa resists the notion that her physical features mark her as one of
“Corregidora’s women.” Jones signals Ursa’s rejection of her foremothers’ internal-
ization of the status conferred upon them because they possess light skin color and/
or because they have the potential to give birth to light-colored children. When her
first husband Mutt asks Ursa, “Was your Mama mulatto?” she curtly replies, “I’m
darker than her” (59). In the continuation of the passage, Ursa reflects:

But I am different now, I was thinking. I have everything they
had, except generations. I can’t make generations. And even if I
still had my womb, even if the first baby had come-what would
I have done then? Would I have kept it up? Would I have been
like her (Great Gram), or them (Grandmama and Mama)? (60)

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Mulattas and Lesbian Desire

Many African-American texts pose challenges to analyses that seek to center what
Adrienne Rich would call “lesbian existence.”15 In Corregidora, Jeffy and Cat’s homo-

sexuality is marked in black vernacular terms that are subtle and allusive-other
characters refer to their lesbian sexual practices by describing Jeffy and Cat as “that

way” and “like that” (39, 43, 48, 49). Although Julie Dash has stated that Yellow Mary
and Trula were scripted as lesbians, in Daughters of the Dust the women’s relationship
is conveyed almost entirely through gaze and gesture.

Contemporary feminist discourse by writers such as Adrienne Rich (1979) has
often characterized silence as representing women’s victimization. Some feminist
theorists of color writing from perspectives not solely located within Western episte-
mological and cultural traditions have questioned that generalization. Trinh T. Minh-
ha (1990) has reflected:

Silence is so commonly set in opposition with speech. Silence as
a will not to say or a will to unsay and as a language of its own
has barely been explored. (373)

The notions of a “will not to say” and silence as “a language of its own” aptly
describes how Dash cinematically conveys the erotics of lesbian desire between
Yellow Mary and Trula. Julia Erhart (1996) observes that the two women enjoy a

privileged relationship to the visual apparatus because they are the only female
characters in Daughters who handle the instruments of visual technology. The scene
that demonstrates this occurs early in the film, when the women are on their way to
Ibo Landing. In the boat, they experiment with a kaleidoscope belonging to Mr. Snead,
who accompanies Yellow Mary’s cousin Viola to the family reunion to photograph the
Peazants. Although Erhart cautions against placing too much emphasis on this brief
scene, it is notable for the flirtatious rapport that is evident between the women as

they play with the kaleidoscope. In the film, only heterosexual couples express the
kind of giddy joy in each other’s presence that is evident in several scenes between
Yellow Mary and Trula. At one point the women are depicted walking together on the
beach at sunset-the classic romantic image of the couple. Although Eula is walking
with them, Dash does not place all three of them in the frame at the same time. At one
moment, as the volume of the film’s lush theme music rises, Trula and Yellow Mary
throw their arms around one another and rock in an embrace. Their gesture brings to
mind a description written by Angela Carter (1967): “It was a lover’s embrace,
annihilating the world” (193-4). Several of the scenes of Yellow Mary and Trula

together, or of the two women with Eula, are notable for their lack of activity, apart
from talking and aimless walking. The women simply enjoy their own company,
basking in each other’s beauty and the beauty of the island.

There is a dramatic difference in the type of space inhabited by the women of the
Peazant family and the space that is created around Trula and Yellow Mary. Over the
course of the film, the adult Peazant women spend a significant amount of time

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preparing the feast that the family will eat and taking care of young children.
Although there is fellowship among the women, the tone of their collectivity is
altogether different from the palpable erotic energy that radiates from Yellow Mary
and Trula when they are together. In fact, one would think that at such a family
gathering every available adult woman would be recruited to help with cooking and
childcare. Yet, Yellow Mary and Trula lounge in a tree smoking and teaching Eula
how to say water in Spanish. Of course, the Peazant women intentionally exclude the
mulattas from their domestic sphere. As noted, unflattering comments have been
made indicating that one would not want Yellow Mary’s help with food preparation..
By the same token, Yellow Mary expresses disdain for domestic labor. As she
comments to Haagar, “You know I don’t like messing around in no kitchen… ” (112).

One of the most telling indications of the nature of the relationship between Yellow
Mary and Trula is rarely mentioned in criticism about Daughters of the Dust. The scene
occurs during the film’s conclusion, when the family members who are migrating
depart from Ibo Landing. Yellow Mary has decided to stay on the island, and Trula is
leaving with the others. In a moment that has no correspondence in Dash’s published
screenplay, Yellow Mary weeps uncontrollably as she watches the boat carry Trula
away.

Although the representation of lesbian desire in Corregidora is more explicit than
in Daughters of the Dust, lesbian desire in the novel, as in the film, is peripheral to the
plot. However, the fact that Jones and Dash make light-skinned women the object of
female desire is a key aspect of the rearticulation of the mulatta paradigm that can be
read in these works. In Corregidora, the full potential of the blurring of the boundaries
between lesbian relationships and mother-daughter relationships can be explored by
looking beyond the biological mother-daughter dyads of the novel to Ursa’s interac-
tions with her older female friend Cat and the teenage girl Jeffy. The relationships
among Cat, Ursa and Jeffy mimic relationships between mothers and daughters even
as they include both realized sexuality and unrequited desire. Cat acts as a surrogate
mother toward both Jeffy and Ursa, an effect that is reinforced by the age difference
between the characters; when the novel begins Ursa is twenty-five years old, Cat near
sixty, and Jeffy is fourteen.

The novel opens with Ursa’s accident, a fall down a flight of stairs precipitated by
a fight with her husband Mutt that necessitates a hysterectomy. It is striking that
neither Mama nor Grandmama visit Ursa in the hospital or help during her recuper-
ation. Instead, Ursa goes home with Tadpole, the owner of Happy’s Caf6, where she
sings. When Ursa returns from the hospital, Cat visits her in Tadpole’s apartment and
offers Ursa a place to stay in her own house. It is during this passage that Jones makes
Cat the medium for a cautionary-one might say maternal-message about sexuality.
Cat is skeptical about Ursa’s rush to be with Tadpole; she comments that Ursa seems
to be moving into the relationship because he is “the first man that has looked at her”
(25). Ursa reacts with anger at Cat’s insinuations, but later in the narrative we learn
that she herself realizes that she is rushing things with Tadpole out of insecurity-
afraid that the hysterectomy has compromised her femininity and sexuality. During
the same passage in which Cat gives Ursa advice, she also flirts with her, joking when
Ursa tells her to go to hell that she will go, as long as Ursa “is coming with her” (26).

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Jones highlights the different nature of female desire by portraying the qualitative-
ly different gendered looks that are trained on the mulatta. Throughout Corregidora,
there is tension about how men look at Ursa, especially the men who patronize
Happy’s Cafe. In the exchange between Ursa and Mutt that precedes her fall, they
argue about the way the men look at her. Mutt says, “I don’t like those mens messing
with you.” Ursa protests, “Don’t nobody mess with me,” to which Mutt replies, “Mess
with they eyes” (3). This exchange illuminates the importance of the look, and the way
that looking alone may constitute an act of aggression. In Ursa’s reflection about her

struggle with Mutt over her decision to continue singing at the club after their

marriage, Mutt continually equates the men’s looking at Ursa with sexual provoca-
tion-“He’s all eyes too, and probably all dick” (157). By contrast, the act of apprecia-
tive looking by a woman doesn’t cause the same kind of conflict. Cat’s admiring gaze
upon Ursa is not considered threatening, although it does not go unnoticed: Sal
remarks to Ursa, “Cat thinks you’re beautiful” (72).

In the novel Jeffy is a teenaged neighbor who, when her mother is working the
night shift, stays the night with Cat. Although Ursa moves briefly into Cat’s house
after her accident, she returns to Tadpole’s after she overhears Cat and Jeffy having
a sexual conversation (and what seems to be sexual activity). Although Jeffy has
previously made a sexual advance upon Ursa, it is Ursa’s discovery of Cat’s relation-

ship with Jeffy that precipitates her move out of Cat’s house. The novel suggests that
Ursa’s phobic reaction to lesbian desire can be understood in the context of the
insecurity that being barren causes her to feel vis-a-vis her own sexuality. As Simon
notes, homosexuality in the novel is pathologized through its association with a range
of negative metaphors: whiteness, insanity, abusiveness, and death (110).

And yet, homosexuality in the novel is no more pathological than heterosexuality.
Ultimately, Ursa rejects lesbianism as a viable alternative to heterosexuality and the
relationship between Cat and Jeffy is not represented in a utopian way. But Jones also
deploys lesbianism in the text to highlight the constraints of normative heterosexual-
ity for women, providing a strong critique of their enforced passivity in intimate
relationships with men. To Ursa, Cat explains her sexual affair with Jeffy as a function
of “being tired of feeling like a fool in bed” (with men) (64). She intimates that Ursa
cannot empathize, implying that mulattas receive better treatment in heterosexual
relationships. Although Ursa refuses to engage Cat in the moment, in fact she
interprets Cat’s behavior through the prism of her own frustration about a woman’s
proscribed role in heteronormative sex. Eventually Ursa reflects,

Yes I know what it feels like … I remembered that night I was
exhausted with wanting and I waited but he didn’t turn toward
me and I kept waiting and wanting him and I got close to him up
against his back but he still wouldn’t turn to me and then I lay on
my back and tried hard to sleep and I finally slept and in the
morning I waited and still he didn’t and I thought in the morning
he would but he didn’t and I waited but the clock got him up and
he went off to work and I lay there still waiting. I was no longer
even angry with waiting. I just lay there saying don’t make me
use my fingers, and then I got up too. Yes, I could tell her what
it feels like. (64-5)

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Later in the novel, Ursa revisits this problematic: “a man always has to say I want
to fuck, and a woman always has to say I want to get fucked” (89). In this way Jones
critiques the imperative for women to be sexually passive. In the novel lesbian
sexuality is represented as providing liberating options for women, even as the abject
status of women who engage in such relations is acknowledged. In the third section
of the novel, Jones details Ursa’s childhood friendship with May Alice, a girl who gave
Ursa information about sexuality that focused on pleasure-a striking contrast to the
litany of rape and abuse that Ursa’s “mothers” taught to her. When May Alice
becomes pregnant by her boyfriend she laments to Ursa “if it’d been you nothing
would have happened” (141). The implication that Ursa and May Alice had some type
of erotic connection is intriguing. Thus, what Simon has termed “Ursa’s phobic
response to Cat and Jeffy” (110) might also stem from the repression of an earlier
unrequited desire.

It is revealing that in Julie Dash’s novel, also entitled Daughters of the Dust (1997),
Trula is the only main character that does not reappear. Dash’s novel substantially
fleshes out the details of Yellow Mary’s story, including the information that she ran
houses of prostitution in Savannah and Atlanta that served an exclusively white male
clientele (116-21). Although two new lesbian characters are included in the novel,
Dash omits any reflection on the relationship between Yellow Mary and Trula. The
omission is odd given that Dash clearly intends that the film and novel be read
together. Film stills printed in gray half tones are placed at intervals throughout the
book, at the beginning of the text, and at the start of each chapter. The images are not
strictly illustrative; they do not correspond directly with the novel’s text. However,
they have a strongly evocative function, giving the reader a visual suggestion for what
is usually the imaginative function of “the mind’s eye.” The images are also incorpo-
rated into the material surface of the book’s pages because they are translucent, like
a scrim-printed words are superimposed upon the half-tone renderings of the film
stills, resulting in a palimpsest effect. In terms of content, the novel simultaneously
acts as both “prequel” and sequel to the film. Although the novel’s plot revolves
around the young adult Amelia, the daughter of Myown, who was a teenager in the
film, the book also provides the reader with background information about main
characters in years preceding the time depicted in the film.

The erasure of Trula in the novel is both disjunctive and puzzling, especially given
that Dash has maintained that Yellow Mary and Trula were scripted as lovers, in spite
of conflicting statements made by Barbara-O, the actress who played Yellow Mary
(66). It is commendable that Dash refuses to censure her original conception of the
sexual relationship between the characters. However, if we are to read the film and the
novel Daughters of the Dust as part of the same story, then Dash’s decision to exclude
the enigmatic Trula from the novel also significantly undermines the theme of the
rearticulated mulatta. Thus, the complex nexus of racial and sexual ambiguity and
taboo that Yellow Mary and Trula represent is, at best, muted in the novel.

In the book Daughters of the Dust, the new lesbian couple Carrie Mae and Toady
clearly inhabit the roles of “femme” and “butch.” It is interesting that Dash turns to
this familiar trope-the butch-femme couple-which has been critiqued as a stereo-
type of lesbian relationships. The novel’s depiction of Toady and Carrie Mae, who run

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an after-hours speak easy at Ibo Landing, contrasts strongly with the romantic
cinematic images Dash used to communicate the connection between Yellow Mary
and Trula (the flirtation with the kaleidoscope, the sharing of a cigarette, the embrace
on the beach at sunset). In her film Dash stages lesbian desire that occurs between two
women who look “feminine,” yet convincingly inhabit conventional romantic scenar-
ios, thus undermining those scenarios’ heteronormativity. In her novel Dash de-
scribes lesbian desire that occurs in a framework that observes gendered roles. Carrie
Mae is a voluptuous woman of easy virtue, and the androgynous Toady is her

protector. At their speak-easy, Carrie Mae plays the role of hostess and Toady is the
enforcer, pulling out her gun when drunken male clients become unruly. Although
some readers may welcome the explicit nature of the lesbian relationship between the
characters in the novel, I would argue that the novel’s lesbian relationship seems a
simplistic nod to diversity that fails to substantively challenge heteronormative and
racist modes of representation. I am not suggesting that representations of butch-
femme relationships do not have radical potential. However, the novel’s relationship
between Carrie Mae and Toady is not substantive enough to constitute a critique of
that kind. By contrast, the film’s portrayal of the love between Trula and Yellow Mary
has radical potential and retains a stubborn mystery that resists being dispelled.

Conclusion

Although some literary theorists regard the mulatta as an anachronistic figure, this

essay takes the perspective that political and social developments of the post-Civil
Rights period-including the end of anti-miscegenation law; emancipatory social
movements based on racial, gender and sexual identities; and the recent politicized
emergence of mixed-race identities-warrant new assessments of the mulatta’s rele-
vance to contemporary culture. Through their engagement with such figures, Jones
and Dash offer a critique of “race pride” that relies upon stable categories and
normative behaviors. Jones’s character Ursa ultimately pursues her creative potential
as a blues singer-an artistic profession that places her at the margins of what is
considered appropriate behavior for a black woman. Like Ursa, Yellow Mary does not
undertake traditional women’s work but becomes a prostitute-also a marginalized
profession. These characters represent significant departures from the idea of accept-
able or representative black womanhood. In this sense Corregidora and Daughters of the
Dust contribute to a dialogue in black cultural studies that Stuart Hall (1988) has
termed a politics of representation, foregrounding fragmentation and multiplicity in
black identities and communities rather than representing the resolved identities and
harmonious communities that constitute “positive images.”

In a memorable sequence in the film Daughters of the Dust, new possibilities for
female subjectivity capture the imagination of the teenage girls of the Peazant family.
The action shifts between a scene that depicts Yellow Mary and Trula relaxing in a tree
by the beach, having a conversation with Eula, and a scene depicting several girls in
the family eavesdropping on the adult women from a vantage point at the water’s

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edge. Myown, one of the teenagers who welcomed Yellow Mary and Trula as they
arrived at Ibo Landing, plays with Yellow Mary’s discarded veil as they discuss the
scandalous newcomer.

A girl declares: “What kind a ‘oman she is? Yellow Mary ain’t no
family ‘oman. She a scary ‘oman.”

Myown replies: “She a new kind of ‘oman.”

The Gullah pronunciation of woman, ‘oman constitutes a linguistic play (oman/
omen) that corresponds well with the type of intervention that both Jones and Dash
offer in their revisions of the mulatta.16 By deploying representations of lesbian desire
in tandem with representations of miscegenation, Corregidora and Daughters of the
Dust anticipate a different role for mulattas. Through narrative strategies that high-
light the interrelatedness of race, color, and sexuality, Dash and Jones foreground
what black feminists like Kimberle Crenshaw and Patricia Hill Collins theorize as
“intersectional” and “interlocking” modalities to express how African-American
women are positioned in social relations. Corregidora and Daughters of the Dust offer
“a new kind of oman/omen”-characters in stories that gesture toward what Adri-
enne Rich has called “a different set of valences”-radical narrative revisions of the
black female hero in American literature and film.

NOTES

1. In their concept of racial formation, Michael Omi and Howard Winant (1994) theorize race as
a historically specific category that is an effect of ideological formations. Although Omi and
Winant inform my use of race, I am also concerned with the ways that anachronistic interpre-
tations of race (as heritage, for example, or as physical type) leave their residue in representa-
tion.

2. Although phrases such as “race mixing” and “racially mixed” are problematic when “race” is
not assumed to have scientific (biological or genetic) validity, they are nevertheless accurately
descriptive of relations and subjectivities that develop under historical circumstances in which
“race” has real power and palpable effects.

3. In the essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Rich (1986) asserts that the
institution of heterosexuality achieves its dominance through the way in which heterosexual
sexuality masquerades as a choice made by women, rather than the primary mode of subser-
vience to male domination.

4. Film citations with page numbers are taken from the film script published in Julie Dash and bell
hooks, Daughters of the Dust: The Making of an Afro American Women’s Film (1992).

5. In Daughters of the Dust the character Iona, who has a Native American lover, ultimately stays
with him on the island when the rest of her family migrates. In Julie Dash’s literary “sequel”
to her film, the novel Daughters of the Dust (1997), Black Native American characters have a
substantial presence. Dash also introduces a new character in the novel, Amelia, whose “red”
features engender suspicion among Sea Islanders unaccustomed to her appearance.

6. Gwaltney recorded similar stereotypes about light-skinned people: “See, people have gotten
colors all mixed up with ideas about what is good or bad or nasty or clean. You know, my
mother said that a lot of her own relatives did not want to eat her cooking because her skin was
light. I mean, a lot of people think that light people are all-well, that they are not clean cooks”
(80).

7. Recently published African-American family histories such as Shirlee Taylor Haizlip’s The
Sweeter the Juice: A Family Memoir in Black and White (1994) document precisely this phenome-
non, wherein a family splits along color lines when some members “pass.”

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8. The idea that childbirth is risky for mulattas who are passing because their racial heritage
might be exposed through childbirth is a consistent theme in both European-American and
African-American literature. Examples include Kate Chopin’s short story “Desiree’s Baby”
(1893) (as analyzed by Werner Sollors [1997]) and Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929).

9. In a framework of lesbian desire, women’s sexuality is “disconnected” from its reproductive
function and the fulfillment of male sexual desire. In this way, lesbian sexuality is not “natural”
but transgressive; female desire for other women is its primary expression.

10. Dash uses clothing, cosmetics and the fact that Yellow Mary and Trula travel without a man to
signify their profession. The women are dressed to reflect the latest in turn-of-the-century
fashion and they wear heavy make-up, details that distinguish them from the Peazant women.
As scholars such as Monique Guillory have argued, historical associations of light-skinned
women with prostitution and with the status of mistress to a white man ground the perceived
and real sexual/economic niche as prostitutes that light-skinned women had after emancipa-
tion. Just as during slavery light-skinned women had a sexual niche as “fancy mulatta
womens” (Corregidora, 173) so too “yellow” women after emancipation appealed to the sexual
appetite of white men.

11. It is interesting to note that in the transition from film script to celluloid for this particular
scene, Trula went from subject to object. In Dash’s published film script, the line is “And, who
is that with her?” (110).

12. I am grateful to Veve Clark for this insightful observation.
13. The actress Trula Hoosier, whose physical features include light-colored skin, curly brown/

blonde, hair and blue/gray eyes, plays the character. A number of viewers in classes in which
I’ve screened the film assume that Trula is white or Latina. Because Latina is a multiethnic and
transnational category, the label encompasses persons who have a wide range of physical
features. Because the African (and Indian) heritage of many Latino countries has been
repressed, features such as dark skin and tightly curled hair in these societies are often not
recognized as African (or Indian). Nevertheless, as historians such as Jack Forbes (1980, 1993)
and Magnus Morner (1967) have written, both the African heritage of southern Europeans and
the legacy of African slaves in Latin America are apparent in the physical features of many so-
called white Latinos and Europeans.

14. Several scholars have analyzed other ways in which Jones deploys the theme of ambivalence
in the novel, particularly with regard to maternity (Sally Robinson, 1991; Stelamaris Coser,
1994; Madhu Dubey, 1995) and sexuality (Bruce Simon, 1998).

15. In Rich’s essay, the “lesbian continuum” accounts for varieties of woman-identified experience
that is familiar for many women, regardless of their sexual orientation. Lesbian existence defines
women who make a conscious decision to partner sexually with other women.

16. My thanks to Elizabeth Dungan for alerting me to this nuance.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many thanks to Barbara Christian, Nerissa Balce, Susan Lee, Sandra Liu, Eithne Luibhead, Veve
Clark, Elizabeth Dungan, Harryette Mullen, Ed Cohen and Arlene R. Keizer for encouragement,
generous close readings and vital critical feedback.

WORKS CITED

Bobo, Jacqueline. Black Women as Cultural Readers. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.
Brown, William Wells. Clotelle, or the Colored Heroine, A Tale of the Southern States. 1867; reprint.

Miami, FL: Mnemosyne Publications Inc., 1969.
Carby, Hazel V. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro American Woman Novelist. New

York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Carter, Angela. The Magic Toyshop. London: Virago, 1967.
Christian, Barbara T. Black Woman Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976. Westport, CT:

Greenwood Press, 1980.
Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment.

New York: Routledge, 1991.

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Coser, Stelamaris. Bridging the Americas: The Literature of Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall and Gayl Jones.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994.

Dash, Julie. Daughters of the Dust. New York: Dutton, 1997.
Dash, Julie and bell hooks. Daughters of the Dust: The Making of an African American Women’s Film. New

York: The New Press, 1992.
Dash, Julie. Dir. Daughters of the Dust. New York: Kino International, 1991.
Davis, Angela Y. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie

Holiday. New York: Pantheon Books, 1998.
Dubey, Madhu. “Gayl Jones and the Matrilineal Metaphor of Tradition.” Signs: Journal of Women in

Culture and Society 20.2 (Winter 1995): 245-50.
Erhart, Julia. “Picturing the What If: Julie Dash’s Speculative Fiction.” Camera Obscura No. 38 (May

1996): 116-131.
Fauset, Jessie Redmond. The Chinaberry Tree: A Novel of American Life. 1931; reprint. New York: G.K.

Hall, 1995.
Comedy American Style. 1933; reprint. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.
Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral. 1929; reprint. Boston: Beacon Press, 1990.

. There is Confusion. 1924; reprint. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989.Forbes, Jack D.
Black Africans and Native Americans. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1980.
. Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples.

Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.
Guillory, Monique. “Under One Roof: The Sins and Sanctity of the New Orleans Quadroon Balls.” In

Race Consciousness: African American Studiesfor the New Century. Ed. Judith Jackson Fossett and
Jeffrey A. Tucker. New York: New York University Press, 1997.

Gwaltney, John Langston. Drylongso: A Self-Portrait of Black America. New York: Vintage Books, 1981.
Haizlip, Shirlee Taylor. The Sweeter the Juice: A Family Memoir in Black and White. New York: Simon

& Schuster, 1994.
Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation.” Framework 36 Third Scenario: Theory

and the Politics of Location. London: Sankofa Film and Video, 1988.
Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins. lola Leroy. 1895; reprint. Boston: Beacon Press, 1987.
Hopkins, Pauline E. Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South. 1900;

reprint. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
.Corregidora. Boston: Beacon Press, 1975.

Larsen, Nella. Quicksand and Passing. 1928; reprint, and 1929; reprint. Ed. Deborah E. McDowell. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986.

Morner, Magnus. Race Mixture in the History of Latin America. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1967.
Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye, 1972. Reprint, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.

Jazz. New York: Plume, 1992.
Mullen, Harryette. “Surviving Ruin: Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust.” Unpublished essay, 1994.
Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s.

New York: Routledge, (1994)
Piper, Adrian. “Passing for White, Passing for Black.” In Adrian Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight:

Volume I: Selected Writings in Meta-Art 1968-1992. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996.
Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” In Adrienne Rich, Blood,

Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979-1985. New York: Norton, 1986.
.On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978. New York: Norton, 1979.

Robinson, Sally. Engendering the Subject: Gender and Self-Representation in Contemporary Women’s
Fiction. New York: SUNY Press, 1991.

Russell, Kathy, Midge Wilson, and Ronald Hall. The Color Complex: The Politics of Skin Color Among
African Americans. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992.

Sandler, Kathe. Dir. A Question of Color. San Francisco: Film Two Productions; California Newsreel,
1992.

Simon, Bruce. “Traumatic Repetition: Gayl Jones’s Corregidora.” In Race Consciousness: African
American Studies for the Nezw Century. Ed. Judith Jackson Fossett and Jeffrey A. Tucker. New
York: New York University Press, 1997.

Sollors, Werner. Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Trinh T., Minh-ha. “Not You/Like You: Post-Colonial Women and the Interlocking Questions of
Identity and Difference.” Making Face, Making Soul/Hacienda Caras. Ed. Gloria Anzaldua. San
Francisco: Aunt Lute Foundation, 1990.

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Walker, Alice. “If the Present Looks Like the Past, What Does the Future Look Like?” In Search of Our
Mother’s Gardens. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983.

Williamson, Joel. New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States, 1980. Reprint, New
York: New York University Press, 1984.

Wilson, Cassandra. “Redbone.” Blue Light ‘Til Dawn. Capitol Records, 1993.
X, Malcolm with Alex Haley. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Grove Press, 1964.

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• Article Contents

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• Issue Table of Contents

Callaloo, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Summer, 2004), pp. 597-846
Front Matter
Amnesty [pp.597-615]
A Stiffer Breeze [pp.616-620]
Vodou … The Soul of the People: An Excerpt from Jacques Stephen Alexis’s “The Musician Trees” [pp.621-628]
The Identity Repairman: From a Conversation with Thomas Sayers Ellis, Editor of Quotes Community: Notes for Black Poets [pp.629-630]
An Excerpt from Quotes Community: Notes for Black Poets [pp.631-645]
The Cure [p.646]
The Way Back [pp.647-648]
After Oz [p.649]
Rope [p.650]
Red Ball Express [p.651]
“Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” [p.652]
Afterglow [p.653]
The Pronoun-Vowel Reparations Song [pp.654-656]
Apologies to My Hair: A Black Woman’s Sonnet [p.657]
The Torturer Explains [p.658]
Bryan, Texas Procession [pp.659-661]
Michael Collins [pp.662-663]
Premonition of June [p.664]
Listening to See [p.665]
Salt [p.666]
Weather Report [p.667]
The Night Tito Trinidad Ko’ed Hacine Cherifi: San Juan, Puerto Rico [p.668]
Saint Dolores: (Phillips Exeter Academy) [p.669]
What You Deserve in This World: For Esther [p.670]
Whose Caribbean?: An Allegory, in Part [pp.671-681]
A Poet of Place: An Interview with M. NourbeSe Philip [pp.682-697]
Reader, I Married Him: An Interview with Alison Mills [pp.698-714]
Cinema of the Oppressed: An Interview with Francisco Newman [pp.715-733]
Barbara Earl Thomas: American Artist
An Interview with Barbara Earl Thomas [pp.735-754]
Resistance, Reappropriation, and Reconciliation: The Blues and Flying Africans in Gayl Jones’s “Song for Anninho” [pp.755-767]
Was Your Mama Mulatto? Notes toward a Theory of Racialized Sexuality in Gayl Jones’s “Corregidora” and Julie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust” [pp.768-787]
Remaking Identity, Unmaking Nation: Historical Recovery and the Reconstruction of Community in “In the Time of the Butterflies” and “The Farming of Bones” [pp.788-807]
Is This Resistance? African-American Postmodernism in “Sarah Philips” [pp.808-828]
‘Voicing the Text’: The Making of an Oral Poetics in Olive Senior’s Short Fiction [pp.829-843]
Back Matter [pp.750-846]

Living the Legacy: Pain, Desire, and Narrative Time in Gayl Jones’ “Corregidora”
Author(s): Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg
Source: Callaloo, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Spring, 2003), pp. 446-472
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3300872

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LIVING THE LEGACY
Pain, Desire, and Narrative Time in Gayl Jones’ Corregidora

by Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg

for Maryemma Graham

Gayl Jones’ Corregidora traces the legacy of slavery through the lives of four

generations of women, the last of whom, Ursa, experiences the effects of that legacy
as they surface in her contemporary heterosexual relationships. The fulfillment of
female sexual desire in Corregidora remains, however, an impossibility. Similarly, the
novel’s narrative structure, rather than surging forward to climax and the warm

dispersal of denouement, remains “like a fist drawn up” (Corregidora 75), unopened,
unrelieved. This image is suggestive in considering the parallel between black female
(sexual) subjectivity under a dominant patriarchal system and the subjectivity of a

person experiencing the pain of torture, as well as the problems of representation
accruing to both. For Jones’ image contains not only the tension marking the gesture
of the closed fist (fingers clenched in anger or fear, or even in the aroused suspension
before sexual fulfillment), but also the violent dis-connection of the fist “drawn up,”
ready to strike, yet somehow restrained. Contact, in this gesture, is always interrupt-
ed, and always tinged with a violence. The same may be said for the sexual desire of
the novel’s protagonist, Ursa Corregidora.

Indeed, such conditions of frustration and violent disconnection are appropriate to
the representation of female desire within the larger scope of slavery’s traumatic

legacy of sexual torture. If Teresa de Lauretis argues that the representation of women
as historical, speaking subjects presupposes the construction of a “different narrative

temporality” which would open “other spaces for identification, other positionalities
of desire” (Alice Doesn’t 83), then Jones pushes back the radical potentiality of that

opening to reveal what lies before it: the strained impossibility of women’s desire (and
the bodily frustration accompanying that impossibility) within the racist-heterosex-

ist-patriarchal containment of (Black) Woman as ground of male desire, Woman as
lack. I propose that by structuring her novel in a pattern of traumatic repetition, Jones
offers neither the satisfactory closure of a linear narrative (of either progress or
decline), nor the redemptive healing of a circular narrative recalling ancestral strength.
Instead, Corregidora’s readers are put in the position of “hearer,” or witness, rather
than of spectator, and what we witness is the traumatic impossibility of female desire,
and therefore of full female subjectivity, resulting from torture’s legacy.

The designation of Corregidora as a novel of trauma, a traumatic narrative, is apt.
Still, recent critical assertions that Corregidora adheres strictly to a structure of

Callaloo 26.2 (2003) 446-

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CALLALOO

traumatic testimonial have trouble accounting for the central paradox at the heart of
trauma itself as defined in traditional psychoanalytic terms; that is, the simultaneous
absence and literal presence of the traumatic event as experienced by the survivor.1 If,
as Madhu Dubey argues, Corregidora’s narrative structure performs the “eruption” of
Ursa’s (ancestral) past into her present life, the novel’s temporal and referential
ambiguities-that is, its withheld, misplaced, and misunderstood words and ges-
tures, its repetitious conflation of times and events, ultimately constituting a literal
impossibility of reference-also indicate a narrative contained within what I will call
a pained present, symptomatic of the representation of a body still in pain rather than
of a traumatized subject attempting to grasp a pain which sustains itself upon living
memory. The distinction here is slight, but suggestive: certainly pain lives on through
the traumatic repetition characteristic of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and
in its characteristically repetitious testimony; however, by examining the ways in
which Ursa exhibits the behavior of a person still in pain, rather than a person
traumatically re-experiencing a past pain (which is indeed not always strictly her
own), we might broaden our understanding of the burden of historical legacy,
strategies for its representation, and responses to such representations.

Applying theories of bodily pain to Jones’ narrative might also offer a different
understanding of Ursa’s subjectivity-or of her difficulty achieving full subjectivity.
For Ursa’s subjectivity is constructed through the seams of a parallel problematic as
both a “body in pain,” to borrow Elaine Scarry’s metaphysical term, and more
specifically as a black female body contained within a violent heterosexual system
predicated upon penetration, both historically manifested under slavery, and as it
remains a determining feature of contemporary patriarchal culture. I will argue here
that full subjectivity, that of a woman speaking and achieving her desire, is connected
in Corregidora with a clitoral pleasure located outside the frame of that penetrative
system in an economy in which voice = sex = subjectivity. Within this economy, the
voice of female desire is also the voice of pain, and the inability to adequately
reference female desire is tied to the inability to adequately reference pain. Both
problems of reference, then, are subsumed under the brutalities of a continuum which
begins with slavery in 19th-century Brazil and continues into the present of contem-
porary U.S. patriarchy. Important to a consideration of the effects of torture within the
slave systems of the Americas, such inexpressibility of both pain and desire is not
simply a function of the universal, metaphysical difficulty of articulating corporeal
experience, but is also quite specifically the product of historical systems of racial
oppression purposefully structured to silence such articulation.

Corregidora, then, provides an opportunity to ponder the relation of the represen-
tation of pain-and specifically, I would argue, of torture-with the representation of
female desire. Such analysis demands an examination of the ways in which Ursa’s
experience, as well as the experiences of her foremothers (experiences which she
literally re-lives as part of her ancestral memory), adhere to the formal structure of
torture, a move which requires a shifting of that paradigm itself.

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“History’s Intricate Invasions” Or: What is Torture?

Some recent critical readings of Corregidora have sought to define its narrative
structure and content as traumatic, a repetitive intrusion of the historical legacy of
slavery into the novel’s present time. Certainly this point is supported by the plot
structure. The action of the first half of the novel closely follows the patterns of

sleeping, waking, and daydream symptomatic of trauma survivorship, and the
subjects of the dream sequences which interrupt the narrative are most often events
from Ursa’s past, as well as her foremothers’. Yet moving out from this point, shifting
slightly to address Corregidora as a novel about torture occupying the narrative time
of a pained present, offers perspective upon both the novel’s narrative strategies and

ideological inscription, as well as upon the “repressed underside”2 of torture-its
implicitly gendered constitution and its structural connection to female sexuality and

subjectivity. Undertaking this critical endeavor requires addressing a series of related
questions about what actually constitutes torture: Who is tortured? Under what
conditions? In what kinds of places? By whom? For what purpose? Posing such

questions provides a supplement to universalist definitions of torture which have
dominated traditional human rights discourses, a supplement necessary to under-

standing how different kinds of bodies experience different kinds of pain (indeed,
how certain kinds of pain have been assigned to certain kinds of bodies), as well as how
a great deal of pain has been systematically overlooked or repressed in legal,
economic, political, civic, and cultural contexts.

Traditionally, torture has been distinguished from other violences by its public,
political nature. Consider the following definition from Article One of the United
Nations Convention Against Torture (1984):

Torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, wheth-
er physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted by or at the
instigation of a public official on a person for such purposes as
obtaining from him or a third person information or confession,
punishing him for an act he has committed or is suspected of
having committed, or intimidating him or other persons.

Crucial to the paradigm constructed by this definition is the identity of the torturer as
a masculine or gender-neutral person operating in a public capacity. Current feminist
human rights theorists and activists have persistently worked to dismantle this
distinction between systematic or state (public) and arbitrary or individual (private)
torture, arguing that it is misleading and working to define more specifically what
kinds of acts constitute torture. Some contemporary international conventions and
treaties have remedied the elisions occasioned by the public/private divide by
articulating the ways in which torture is specifically raced, gendered, classed, and
nationalized, so to speak, and have, as part of that process, redefined rape-tradition-
ally considered a “private” act and excluded on that basis from international human
rights conventions-as a crime against humanity.3 Still, many foundational interna-
tional documents defining and governing human rights violations continue to ex-

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CALLALOO

clude or narrowly define rape and sexual or domestic violence according to univer-
salist prescriptions based upon a theoretical public-private split. Examining the
language of the Geneva Conventions, which does not name rape a “grave breach”
identifiable as an international crime, Rhonda Copelon argues that “if the egregious-
ness of rape is to be fully recognized, rape must be explicitly recognized as a form of
torture” (201). Copelon historicizes her argument in terms of the shift in torture’s
paradigm, from being “largely understood as a method of extracting information,” to
becoming “commensurate with willfully causing great suffering or injury … In the

contemporary understanding of torture, degradation is both vehicle and goal” (202).
In this regard, rape, an act which is both predicated upon and stages the impulse to
“degrade and destroy a woman based on her identity as a woman” (199), is paradig-
matic.

In thus working to redefine rape as torture, a move which requires an a priori
reconfiguration of the traditional public/private divide in human rights discourse,
the point is not simply to broaden the definition of torture to include private as well
as public breaches, but more pointedly to denounce such either/or frameworks
(which keep the concepts-if not their material effects-intact) so as to account for the
ways in which all such breaches are at once one and the same; that is, both private and
public.4 In a sense, this rhetorical move simply recapitulates the feminist mantra “the
personal is the political,” but in the context of feminist human rights discourse it does
more, obliterating the spatial and ideological metaphorics of private and public, or,
perhaps more accurately, recognizing the fusion of one with the other. Homi Bhabha’s

description of the “unhomely moment,” part of a larger cultural theory which seeks
to account for postcolonial subjectivity, is germane: “The recesses of the domestic
space become sites for history’s most intricate invasions. In that displacement, the
borders between home and world become confused; and uncannily the private and
the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it
is disorienting” (9).5

Given the strict dependence of a western worldview upon such obscuring distinc-
tions, acknowledging the displacement of home by world (and of world by home)
may, as Bhabha notes, generate an initially “divided” and “disorienting” vision.
However, from a feminist analytic perspective, such vision may ultimately be rather
clarifying than disorienting, revealing the “private, secret, insidious traumas” which
are “more often than not those events in which the dominant culture and its forms and
institutions are expressed and perpetuated” (Brown 102). Indeed, citing Carole
Pateman’s analysis of the domestic realm as disavowed underpinning of civil society,
Bhabha identifies the unhomely as a distinctly feminist concept committed to bring-
ing to light that which has been purposefully hidden beneath the mantle of private
life: “the ‘unhomely’ does provide a ‘non-continuist’ problematic that dramatizes-
in the figure of woman-the ambivalent structure of the civil State as it draws its
rather paradoxical boundary between the private and public spheres” (10). This
conception of the unhomely provides a meta-discourse with which to analyze the
separation of private from public which enables and supports torture as repressive
mechanism. Acknowledging the danger of imposing further representational bag-
gage onto the already burdenedfigure of woman by rendering her pure symbol of this

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CALLALOO

unhomeliness, we might engage with the life experiences of women such as Ursa who
are not figures for, but rather subjects of, an unhomely moment which “relates the
traumatic ambivalences of a personal, psychic history to the wider disjunctions of
political existence” (Bhabha 11). Reading Ursa’s intergenerational traumatic experi-
ence of the legacy of rape and prostitution under slavery, as well as her experience of
a contemporary heterosexual patriarchy uncannily rehearsing that same traumatic
experience, is to acknowledge the unhomely as representative of what Bhabha calls a
“non-continuist” history; that is, a history which does not smooth itself into easily
transmitted tradition but rather wells up into the present as the kind of literal return
characterizing trauma itself. In this sense, the binaries public/private, State/individ-
ual, past/present-supports for torture’s repressive structure-actually bleed to-
gether in the everyday experiences of traumatized survivors, unable to articulate
themselves as speaking subjects in the shadow of a history which does not pass on. To
re-fuse the categories of private and public is to reconnect individuals with the
uncannily current events of collective history.

Returning in this light to the question of desire, reading and re-reading Bhabha’s
phrasing … history’s intricate invasions … I find myself automatically replacing
intricate with intimate in a kind of unconscious readerly substitution. Considered in
terms of the unhomely moment’s non-continuist temporality, history’s invasion of
the realm of the individual psyche must be a most intimate one, probing as Bhabha
notes the recesses of the domestic, including of course the corners of sexuality, desire,
and fantasy. If indeed Ursa’s experience of domestic violence, sexual cruelty, and the
traumatic return of her maternal ancestors’ rapes are historically determined, part of
an encounter with an ongoing history, we might do well to regard the deep structure
of Bhabha’s terminology: if history invades, then we must encounter history as an
enemy. This formulation resonates with Bruce Simon’s provocative question: “What
does it mean to experience New World history as a history of trauma” (94)? Bringing
Bhabha’s theory to bear on Simon’s problematic, we might emphasize the aspect of
trauma defined as a literal return of the traumatic (historical) event, asking what it
means more specifically to experience the enmity of history in this traumatic return? To
experience history as a kind of ill-will, a pain? Analogous to the paradoxical immedi-
acy of pain materializing as the “belated” experience of trauma, this formulation
posits the urgency of historical legacy which, as represented in texts such as Corregi-
dora, undermines a dominant account of history as similarly belated, ungraspable,
benign, passed. As Simon points out, using “trauma” to describe history “allows us
to challenge another cliche to which those who acknowledge the ‘past injustice’ of

slavery and segregation often retreat: ‘all that’s past; it’s over and done with; put it
behind you; forget about it'” (104). Successfully enacting Simon’s challenge-not only
bringing history to life, but making the case that, in fact, it never died at all-is Jones’
achievement in creating a narrative structure disallowing the linearity, referential
certainty, and completion authorizing this cliche of historical “pastness” which
Simon correctly identifies as one of contemporary racism’s most invidious logics.

Thus, the unhomely dismantling of private and public enacted in Jones’ narrative
implies, in an historical sense, a tangential deconstruction of the distinctions past and
present time. And to consider the invasion of history, the presence of historical legacy

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CALLALOO

as rather torture than tradition, is to acknowledge the way in which history is

experienced by its survivors precisely as a pained, sustained present. Which returns
us to Ursa, for whom the practices and structures established in a historical (chrono-
logical) past continue to vex the present as both psychic return of ancestral experience
and actual practice of contemporaries.

“They knew you only by the signs of your sex”:
Corregidora’s Tortured Sexual Universe

On a most basic level, Ursa experiences the enmity of history in the form of rape,
the ancestral experience most urgently transmitted through her foremothers’ testify-
ing to the historical warp of slavery. Indeed, reading rape as torture within the context
of Corregidora’s specific historic geography means stressing, against the centuries of

purposeful misnaming of sex between black female slaves and white slaveowners as
“consensual,” the centrality of rape to slavery’s system of control. As Catherine
Clinton argues, we must understand that “rape was an integral part of slavery, not an
aberration or dysfunction” (208). In addition, historians have established that, within
the Brazilian slave system, “slave women were used more as prostitutes than as
‘breeders,’ mostly because the international slave trade continued in Brazil through-
out the tenure of slavery, and eradicated the need for the slave population to

reproduce itself” (Robinson 153).6 As such, “Prostitution of female slaves in Brazil
amounts to an institutionalized practice of rape” (154).7 Situated within this historical
context, female sexuality in Corregidora is contoured around the institutionalized rape
of Ursa’s great grandmother and grandmother by 19th-century Brazilian slave owner
Simon Corregidora and the men to whom he prostituted them, originary violences
which produced an incestuous line of women unable to conceive of sexuality apart
from the men who “dug up” their genitals. While Ursa is not herself raped, the
conflation of Old Man Corregidora with Ursa’s first and second husbands, Mutt and

Tadpole, into one figure of violent male sexual expression (effected through an

echoing of patterns of speech and desire over the course of the novel) creates a

parallel-or better, a continuum-of brutal heterosexuality based upon the violent

penetration and consumption of female genitalia characteristic of rape. This contin-
uum is complicated by Jones’ careful contextualization of the effects upon Mutt and

Tadpole of their traumatic family histories under slavery, revealing their own wound-
edness as related to the violence they perpetrate against Ursa. Also, race mediates any
simple interpretations of masculine power in the novel, as black men are themselves
victims of (sexualized) torture by slave owners such as Corregidora. As Great Gram
testifies: “all them beatings and killings [of slave men and women] wasn’t nothing but
sex circuses, and all them white peoples, mens, womens, and childrens crowding
around to see” (Corregidora 125).8 Still, even consensual heterosexual sex in Corregido-
ra is rarely, if ever, figured outside of this historical economy, always descriptively
echoing the rape/enforced prostitution of Great Gram and Gram, with emphasis on

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the “magic” of the female genitalia, described alternately as a “gold piece” (profit) or
as a “hole” (pleasure), and sex boiled down simply to a woman “getting fucked.”

Having redefined rape as an act of torture, then, there are two ways in which we
might analyze Ursa’s sexual subjectivity through the lens of this paradigm, although
she has not herself literally been raped: first, as a sufferer of post-traumatic symptoms
which, according to Laura S. Brown, may be experienced intergenerationally (108),
and which are, in Ursa’s case, attached to her foremothers’ experience of and
testifying about rape. Second, as Brown argues, Ursa’s encounters with violent
heterosexuality constitute an “insidious trauma,” defined by Maria Root as “the
traumatogenic effects of oppression that are not necessarily overtly violent or threat-
ening to bodily well-being at the given moment but that do violence to the soul and
spirit” (Brown 107). The construction of Ursa’s sex as a “hole” by both Mutt and
Tadpole is metonym for the overarching violence done to Ursa’s “soul and spirit” in
the present-time of her contemporary sexual relationships, yet this designation also
circles back to the rape of Ursa’s ancestral mothers, whose genitalia were similarly
figured as empty vessels to be filled by men for profit and/or pleasure. In both cases,
a negation of identity results from that impulse to “degrade and destroy a woman
based upon her identity as a woman,” which is the cornerstone of understanding rape
as an act of torture. As Gayatri Spivak argues, such reduction of woman to hole is
symptomatic of a pervasive, penetrative “uterine social organization” (152) which
denies female sexual subjectivity by repressing (and, in the case of female genital
mutilation, actually removing) the clitoris. For Spivak, effacement of the clitoris in
both dominant discourse and historical practice situates woman within a strictly
reproductive economy, repressing both her desire and her subjectivity, often in
formal legal terms.9 In Ursa’s case, such repression is doubled: the effacement of
Ursa’s clitoris and her desire for pleasure by her reduction to “hole” would seem to
relegate her to a strictly procreative, penetrative, uterine sexuality; however, the loss
of her womb in an act of domestic violence by Mutt renders this reduction to “hole”
a literal, rather than figurative, description. There is a hole where her uterus should
be, an emptiness which excludes Ursa even from this limited reproductive economy,
as well as from the procreative politic of her foremothers’ imperative to “make
generations.” So excluded, she is reduced to a vessel for a phallic pleasure useful in
the “field of desire” from which, in de Lauretis’ reading, a woman designated as
“hole” is excluded: “Having nothing to lose . .. women cannot desire; having no
phallic capital to invest or speculate on, as men do, women cannot be investors in the
marketplace of desire but are instead commodities that circulate in it” (The Practice
217). This analysis of women as commodified by their reduction to sexual “hole” is
obviously complicated when applied to texts like Corregidora which represent women
who are actually circulated as objects of exchange within the economy of the slave
trade; still, in the contemporary context the exclusion of women from the “field of
desire” constitutes a negation or denial of full subjectivity, a denial necessary within
a certain model of violent heterosexuality to the male accumulation of “phallic
capital.” Such accumulation approximates in the sexual sphere what Elaine Scarry
might call the activity of “world-making” in the scene of torture; that is, the expansion

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of power gained through physical and linguistic control which is central to the
torturer’s motivation and method.

What some critics have read as Jones’ heresy seems to be her suggestion that Gram
and Great Gram may have enjoyed-or more precisely, desired-their torture(r), even
as they hated it/him: “They were with him. What did they feel? You know how they
talk about hate and desire. Two humps on the same camel? Yes. Hate and desire both

riding them, that’s what I was going to say” (102).10 This passage has been cited as
evidence of the Corregidora women’s ambivalent feeling for Corregidora, which,
given the totality of his abuse of them, is a point of great discomfort for readers.
Notice, however, that Ursa’s questioning of Gram and Great Gram’s experience, their
desire, (“what did they feel?”) contains within it a statement of the impossibility of
that desire. For it is not, we discover, Great Gram’s or Gram’s hatred and desire that is
at issue, but Corregidora’s, anthropomorphized in the metaphoric of hate and desire
riding them, as in the sexual act, specifically the act of rape, a metaphor which qualifies
Ursa’s original question about the women’s desire as she seems to remember, “that’s
what I was going to say” (102). The desire of the slave women is actually not
referenced at all, rendering it quite literally unspoken, unspeakable. In considering
Ursa’s difficult qualification of her own musings on the place of desire within the
master/slave dialectic, Hortense Spillers’ careful reconsideration of terms such as
“desire” and “pleasure” within the overwhelmingly repressive apparatus of the slave
system is instructive:

Whether or not the captive female and/or her sexual oppressor
derived “pleasure” from their seductions and couplings is not a
question we can politely ask. Whether or not “pleasure” is
possible at all under conditions that I would aver as non-freedom
for both or either of the parties has not been settled. Indeed, we
could go so far as to entertain the very real possibility that
“sexuality,” as a term of implied relationship and desire, is
dubiously appropriate, manageable, or accurate to any of the
familial arrangements under a system of enslavement, from the
master’s family to the captive enclave. (76)

Challenging the power of conventional language to signify the reality of relationships
conducted under the condition of “unfreedom,” Spillers exposes the collapse of the

language of desire under the historical weight of systematic torture of black women
under slavery. It is precisely this collapse which Jones’ narrative dramatizes in its

representations of relationships conducted within the frame of slavery’s historical

legacy. In the same way, sex between Ursa and Mutt-Tad as an encounter between

equally desiring subjects is defined in Corregidora as an impossibility: while it is
consensual, it also resembles the kind of sexual encounter under slavery, the very
essence of which depended upon a lack of bodily consent doubled by the woman’s status
as slave, removed from the more general sphere of consent (to the law and the state)
accompanying personhood and citizenship. It is upon such resemblance that I build

my analysis of the parallels between the mechanisms of a violently penetrative
heterosexual scene and the scene of (sexual) torture.

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In this regard, we might note the correspondence of several of the novel’s descrip-
tions of heterosexual sex with one of the other key features of the scene of torture: the

interrogation. As noted, current analyses of the use of torture identify an historical
shift: where torture was once a means of spectacularizing punishment or of extracting
information, it is now “used” to repress and degrade the victim; however, interroga-
tion, if no longer the primary goal of torture, has most certainly remained central to
its method. As Scarry argues, the link between pain and voice is a defining character-
istic of torture: “Torture consists of a primary physical act, the infliction of pain, and
a primary verbal act, the interrogation” (28). Scarry theorizes the interrogation in
terms of the power of the regime to “unmake” the world of the individual while

simultaneously “expanding” its own: “Within the physical events of torture, the
torturer ‘has’ nothing: he has only an absence, the absence of pain. In order to

experience his distance from the prisoner in terms of ‘having,’ their physical differ-
ence is translated into a verbal difference” (37). This link between voice and (having)
power manifests for Ursa in her identification as blues singer, a liberating subjectivity
which offsets the other forces which would define her; that is, the confines of a violent
heterosexual contract as well as the familial sexual legacy against which she struggles.
In the former aspect of subjectivity, Ursa finds voice; in the latter ones, she repeatedly
loses it.

Acknowledging the connection between voice and pain (in the scene of torture and
otherwise), we also might examine the connection between voice and desire, and the

triangulated relationship between the three enacted in Jones’ narrative. As noted
above, Scarry’s identification of the torturer’s desire to move from “absence” (or lack)
to “having” (presence, or possession, both of which denote power) by coercing the

prisoner’s verbalization of bodily pain has much in common with de Lauretis’s

analysis of the reduction of woman to “hole,” which contrasts woman’s lack-that is,
her emptiness and lack of (self) possession-with male (phallic) possession. For

Scarry, appropriating the prisoner’s voice “make[s] what is taking place in terms of

pain take place in terms of power” (36); in Corregidora, the interrogative mode of
address helps to translate female desire and the female body into male pleasure and

power. Indeed, the extent to which Ursa’s world (more than just the world of her
desire) is unmade by her definition as hole is the precise measure of the use of her
female genitalia in a “world-making” expansion of male power: in demanding access
to and possession of Ursa’s body, Mutt exclaims, “It ain’t a pussy down there, it’s a
whole world” (Corregidora 45, emphasis added). Immediately following this exclama-
tion, Ursa angrily identifies Mutt’s attempts at possession of her through her body-
“Talking about his pussy” (46, emphasis in original). This connection of female

genitalia with male world-making, possession, and power under the contemporary
heterosexual contract echoes the racial and sexual power relations characterizing the
slave system as revealed in the “genital fantasies” of Corregidora and the other white
fishermen and planters populating the world of Great Gram and Gram: “And you
with the coffee-bean face, what were you? You were sacrificed. They knew you only
by the signs of your sex. They touched you as if you were magic. They ate your
genitals” (Corregidora 59).1 Such fantasies manifest in the brutal sacrificial-even
cannibalistic-rite of heterosexual penetration by which the subjectivity of a woman

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of color is reduced to her genitalia, which are then violently consumed, leaving,
essentially, nothing.

Contemplating the interrogative mode of address as it occurs in Corregidora, it is
important to note that Scarry’s analysis of the interrogation, situated within the very
specific ground of torture authorized by governmental regimes to be enacted upon
individual prisoners for nominally “political” purposes, relies heavily upon the kind
of public-private division which feminist human rights theorists such as Copelon,
Wolper, and Andrea Peters have worked to deconstruct, the same division that has,
until recently, precluded formal definition of rape as a form of torture.12 Proceeding
with caution, neither placing Mutt and Ursa in the respective positions of “regime”
and “prisoner,” nor advancing a claim that heterosexual, penetrative sexual relations
are a priori constitutive of rape, I would like to tease out some implications of the
interrogative mode of address as it is used in Corregidora in specifically (hetero)sexual
contexts, to hear Jones’ dialogue as it resonates with Scarry’s ideas of world “making”
and “unmaking” as they occur in the scene of torture. Most, if not all, of Ursa’s sexual
encounters are marked by the interrogatory statements of her partner (or pursuer, in
the case of men who make sexual advances to her). Privileging the reader with
glimpses of the discrepancy between Ursa’s internal thoughts and her vocalized
responses, Jones implicates the male interrogative address in the construction of a
consciousness-effacing power imbalance. Indeed, Ursa’s responses are often condi-
tioned by her male partner to the extent that she repeats his words. Such repetition at
the scene of torture, as Scarry asserts, constitutes a further power differential, as “the
torturer and the regime have doubled their voice since the prisoner is now speaking
their words” (36).

In one of the novel’s italicized dream-memory sequences (read by critics such as
Simon, Dubey, and Morgenstern as a traumatic repetition of the past in keeping with
the symptoms of PTSD), Ursa responds to Mutt’s question “What am I doing to you,
Ursa?” by stating “You fucking me.” When Mutt wonders about her use of language,
reminding her that she was once “afraid of those words” (Corregidora 76, emphasis
mine), Ursa’s response resituates her heterosexual marital relationship within Cor-
regidora’s torturous legacy of rape and prostitution: “Didn’t I tell you you taught me
what Corregidora taught Great Gram. He taught her to use the kind of words she did.
Don’t you remember?” (76).13 Ursa’s fright at the violent language of heterosexual
penetration indicates the traumatic nature of this dream-memory sequence, empha-
sizing this “consensual” sexual scene’s similitude with the scene of rape. Moreover,
Ursa’s repetition of Mutt/Corregidora’s words in a form which has been revealed to
readers as frightening to her not only doubles Mutt’s power, in that he has co-opted
Ursa’s voice, but also doubles his pleasure by describing it, materializing it in words,
turning it from an unspoken absence into an articulated “having.” Indeed, given the
number of times that that same question is asked of Ursa by both Mutt and Tad (and,
by way of historical implication, the fact that it was asked of Great Gram and Gram
by Corregidora), it would seem that male pleasure depends upon that quite specific
female articulation of what is being done to her. Such invariant linguistic traffic sets up
the seemingly inescapable impasse between male as active, master, world-maker,
owner of phallus and pleasure, and female as passive, slave, object whose world/

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pleasure is “unmade.” It is this binary which Jones probes throughout the novel,
complicating its legitimacy and effect.

Despite Jones’ recognition of ambivalence characterizing the binary architectures
of man/woman, active/passive, master/slave, the path leading out from these

binding (op)positions, which I locate in Ursa’s gestures toward the possibility of a
clitoral desire and pleasure, is fenced in, closed off by the assertive interrogative “Am
I fucking you?” to which Ursa must respond, as if automatically, “You fucking me.”
In one sexual encounter with Tadpole, Ursa narrates, “I was struggling against him,
trying to feel what I wasn’t feeling. Then he reached down and fingered my clitoris,
which made me feel more” (Corregidora 75). Originally figured as a struggle, Ursa’s

pleasure in the sexual act glimmers briefly in this clitoral contact, and is immediately
extinguished as “He stopped.” Ursa asks Tadpole twice to continue this touch,
requests which Tadpole redirects with his own demands that Ursa’s voice-rather
than speaking her own (desire for) pleasure-articulate, and be consumed by, his
desire and pleasure: “What am I doing to you, Ursa? What am I doing to you?” (75).

Ursa tells us “I kept struggling with him. I made a sound in my throat. I didn’t
know what he wanted me to say. What I felt didn’t have words” (75). Unwilling to be
diverted from the expression of her own pleasure, Ursa is unable to speak (his) words,
as this pleasure, like her pain, is inarticulable. Tadpole, however, sharpens his

question from the general “What am I doing to you?” to an implacable particularity:
“Am I fucking you?” Forcing Ursa out of the experience of her body into the universe
of his, Tadpole’s world-expanding interrogative demands and receives her condi-
tioned response. At this moment of her capitulation, the language of Ursa’s narration
enacts the literal return of the traumatic event as it (re)turns to the words used to
describe Great Gram’s rape by Corregidora, “He dug his finger up my asshole.” And
concurrent with this violently articulated penetrative act, Ursa reiterates without

being asked “You fucking me. Yes, you fucking me” (75) in a linguistic excess of giving
way, giving in (to the questioning), giving over (her pleasure, her body). This
excessive, unasked for response is reminiscent of the moment of confession in the
scene of torture, wherein the “prisoner” gives in to the torturer’s demands almost
with a vengeance, telling him what he wants to know in a flood of words designed to
end the pain of the encounter. Now, when Tadpole touches her clitoris Ursa feels pain
rather than the pleasure lost in the struggle of this violent heterosexual encounter.

Tadpole reaches orgasm, while Ursa feels both nothing (no orgasm) and more than

nothing (frustration, pain). Her desire has been foreclosed upon and represented as
an impossibility, a “fist drawn up” (75), with all the violence of that image.

My point in reproducing this long sexual scene is to illustrate the ways in which the

interrogative mode of address (if not the actual interrogation) repeated in Ursa’s
sexual encounters with Mutt and Tadpole supports a reading of Corregidora’s hetero-
sexual universe as tortured-as founded upon a sexuality paradigmatic of rape and

bearing some of the most central characteristics of the “formal” scene of torture-in
a manner which depends upon the violent effacement of clitoral pleasure. Such a
sexual universe is complicated by Jones’ careful construction of Mutt and Tad as
historical subjects determined by their own immersion in the legacy of slavery, and

by her representation of a sexual cruelty just as brutal in the withholding as it is in its

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insistent and often painful penetration. It is, however, still predicated upon the
frustration, the impossibility of articulating, female desire, with the implication that

achieving full female subjectivity will remain similarly impossible. This impossibil-
ity, like the scene of rape/torture itself, is determined both by the “universal”

inarticulability of corporeal experience posed by Scarry, as well as by the specific,
historical racial and sexual repressions produced and enforced by the slave system.

Emphasizing the use of the interrogative mode of address in the sexual encoun-
ter-the site at which the causes and effects of Ursa’s suppressed subjectivity are most

clearly represented-highlights the ways in which Ursa’s voice, and thereby her
consciousness of self or identity, are frustrated in their attempts to fully articulate
themselves. Such frustration is in part determined by the totality of linguistic control

marking the aggressively interrogative speech act; as Scarry writes of the interroga-
tion at the site of torture: “Few other moments of human speech so conflate the modes
of the interrogatory, the declarative, the imperative, as well as the emphatic form of
each of these three, the exclamatory” (29). In this context, hear the seamless transition
from interrogatory to declarative to imperative in one of Mutt’s many articulations of
Ursa’s genital identity as a lack profitable for his own pleasure: “You still got a hole,
ain’t you? Long as a woman got a hole, she can fuck. Let me get up in your hole, baby”
(Corregidora 100). Literally trapped within this linguistic circling of question, state-
ment, and demand designed to produce and make use of her body as corporeal vessel,
there is no mode of address available to or directed at Ursa: no voice with which to

express her self and desire, no ear to hear her.

The Pained Presence of Historical Legacy

Considering her experience from the perspective of an historically situated hetero-

sexuality clarifies the connection between Ursa’s sexuality and subjectivity, a connec-
tion troubled by constant exposure to a heterosexuality tricked out as rape.14 Indeed,
this particular form of insidious trauma has the power to negate a woman’s subjectiv-
ity precisely by canceling her female identity, part of which is her capacity to express
and achieve sexual desire/pleasure. Given its location of both sexuality and subjec-
tivity deep within the history of slavery, Corregidora occupies what Homi Bhabha,
positing a specifically postcolonial aesthetic, has termed a “revisionary time”:

The borderline work of culture demands an encounter with
‘newness’ that is not part of the continuum of past and present
. . . Such art does not merely recall the past as social cause or
aesthetic precedent; it renews the past, refiguring it as a contin-
gent ‘in-between’ space, that innovates and interrupts the per-
formance of the present. The ‘past-present’ becomes part of the
necessity, not the nostalgia, of living. (7)

This past-present is precisely the revisionary, non-continuist historic time with which
Jones experiments in effecting her rare representation of the frustration-often the

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impossibility-of female desire, which is, I would argue, a necessary preliminary to
the radical representation of women as full, historical subjects able to speak their
desire. This frustration of desire is inscribed in narrative terms in the novel’s temporal
and referential ambiguity; specifically, its deliberate hindrance of both temporal
distinction and linguistic reference, and its withholding of meaning and information.
Given that pain and desire are constructed in parallel terms by Jones, full understand-

ing of this inscription depends upon the construction of Ursa’s subjectivity as a

particular historical body (black, female, rooted in the history of slavery) who is still
in pain. Supplementing analysis of Corregidora as a novel of trauma, structured upon
the traumatic intrusion of past pains, examining the ways in which the narrative is
driven by a pain to which Ursa does not always have access is to probe the temporal
paradox of past-presence at the heart of trauma theory itself.

Theorists reading Freud’s conception of trauma and its symptoms in Beyond the
Pleasure Principle articulate the paradoxically synchronous presence and absence of
the traumatic event for the survivor. On the one hand, the trauma ” . . . cannot be
understood in terms of any wish or unconscious meaning, but is, purely and inexpli-
cably, the literal return of the event against the will of the one it inhabits” (Caruth,
“Introduction” 5, emphasis added). The literality of this return suggests an over-

whelming presence of the event itself in terms of its experience by the survivor in

nightmare, daydream, depression, or other symptoms. However, also central to the
definition of trauma is what Caruth terms its “belatedness,” the fact that it cannot be

grasped or known at the time of its occurrence, but is characterized by “an inherent

latency within the experience itself. The historical power of the trauma is not just that
the experience is repeated after its forgetting, but that it is only in and through its

forgetting that it is first experienced at all” (“Introduction” 8). Or, as Bruce Simon
writes, “rather than being a problem of a too-present, too-pressing memory, trauma
is a problem of unclaimed experience and a gap in memory” (104). Both absence-the
fact of the traumatic event as ungraspable in its occurrence-and literalness of

presence are defining characteristics of traumatic occurrence, and it is this contradic-

tory essence to which Caruth refers when she argues that to bear witness to trauma
is precisely to bear witness to an impossibility (“Introduction” 10). In the context of

Corregidora’s tortured sexual universe, I read such impossibility in terms of the
traumatic impossibility of female desire; however, such impossibility must also be
contextualized in terms of the novel’s racial dynamic within the history of slavery.
Madhu Dubey, for instance, has read the “lover’s language” in Corregidora (that is, the
blues) as a discourse of “desire without possibility,” historicizing that lack of possi-
bility in terms of the “disabling history of slavery,” and arguing that the novel’s “final
blues dialogue thus underscores the impossible conditions of heterosexual desire”
(258-59).’5 Agreeing both with Dubey’s assessment of the impossibility of heterosex-
ual desire in Corregidora, as well as with her historicization of that impossibility, my
aim here is to shift focus slightly to the impossibility of female desire more broadly
(including both homo- and hetero-eroticism) through effacement of the clitoris.

In considering the paradoxical aspect of simultaneous presence and absence

characterizing traumatic experience, it occurs to me that current theories of the

metaphysics of pain might be useful in understanding the effects of that “literal”

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return of the event, inasmuch as Ursa does not speak solely as a traumatized subject,
but also as a person still in pain. Some of Ursa’s “symptoms,” manifested in her

patterns of thought and behavior, are a result of the presence of pain, that is, its
contemporaneity, its currency, rather than its belated return. Put in narrative terms,
this contemporaneity informs the novel’s delineation of an ongoing pained present
rather than the intrusion of a traumatic past. Indeed, such temporal terminology is
itself called into question when considering narrative structure; as Dubey asserts,
“the novel’s structure so thoroughly fuses Ursa’s story with the history of her
foremothers that any distinction between past and present becomes inoperative”
(250).

There is also the simple fact that the novel opens as Ursa is pushed down a flight
of stairs. It is not until the end of the novel, however, that Ursa is able both to attribute

agency to Mutt for the violent act that took her womb, and to understand its negative
effect upon her subjectivity. Because of this temporal gap, the narrative representa-
tion of Ursa’s experience of domestic violence demonstrates the belated, ungraspable
aspect of the traumatic event. According to this reading, the novel’s historic archae-
ology may be understood as an approximation of the psychoanalytic method-
examination of the analysand’s past in order to grasp current events or symptoms-
for it is not until nearly the end of the novel that Ursa is able to narrate its opening
events in the clarity of their full implication: “And then it was when I was on my way
home, he knocked his piece a shit down those stairs” (Corregidora 167).

Tracing the metaphysic of pain as it structures Corregidora, in addition to Ursa’s
belated comprehension of domestic violence as traumatic event, it is important to
articulate the very real pain she suffers as a result of it-a supplement, perhaps, to our

reading of the “literalness” of the return of the traumatic event. For Ursa sustains

injuries serious enough to require an emergency hysterectomy, and, upon admission
to the hospital, her pain, and her rage, are so overwhelming that she is reduced to
inarticulable sounds and curses, the “state anterior to language” marking human

response to pain (Scarry 4). The entire first chapter and much of the second are
structured around the rhythms of resting, sleeping, eating, and visits to the physician
typical of recovery from a serious illness or wound. Indeed, the novel’s early repre-
sentations of Tadpole’s relationship with Ursa center upon his nurture of her after her

hysterectomy, making his ultimate betrayal of Ursa and reversion to the novel’s

violently penetrative heterosexual model the more troubling.
The pain, nausea, and exhaustion experienced by Ursa in the opening sequences of

the novel slide into the sense of pain during sex, a pain which-like her desire-Ursa
is unable to articulate. Jones’ portrayal of Ursa’s first sexual encounter with Tad, for
instance, references neither pleasure nor her desire, and is rather rendered solely in
terms of the presence or absence of her pain:

“Does it hurt?”
“Yes, a little [.. .] .”
“How does it feel now?”
“Go on” (49).

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The indeterminacy of Ursa’s final assent, “go on,” belies her prior acknowledgment
that this sexual act hurts. Her unwillingness or inability to articulate the nature of this

pain may be considered according to that theoretical approach to pain which defines
its very essence as its “unshareability,” a “resistance to language” stemming from the
fact that “physical pain-unlike any other state of consciousness-has no referential
content. It is not of or for anything. It is precisely because it takes no object that it, more
than any other phenomenon, resists objectification in language” (Scarry 5). Certainly
the novel is riddled with problems of reference, many of which have to do with the
articulation of pain. However, Ursa’s inability to find words with which to describe
her pain may have less to do with this universal characteristic of pain than with the

specific, historically determined relations of dominance-wherein bodily experience
of slaves was purposefully and forcibly repressed-governing sexuality in the shad-
ow of slavery’s legacy. Witness to the testimony of her foremothers who had no choice
but to allow, in silence, the “digging up” of their genitals by men who owned them,
Ursa has no model for speaking the pain she experiences during the sexual act.
Indeed, conspicuously absent from the women’s testimony is any expression of pain
at their rape and abuse. The testimonies of Great Gram, Gram, and Mama read like
dominant historical accounts-chronologies, statements of fact without affect. Wit-
ness in this model, then, is not a witness to pain or affect, but rather to an otherwise
erased history; bearing witness means retelling events in the same historical narrative
mode from which they were originally excluded. Inasmuch as Mutt and Tadpole
exhibit traces in word and deed of the violence of the Corregidora men, Ursa’s

inability to express her pain at such violence is in part determined by her foremothers’
silence about their pain.

This difficulty of referencing both pain and desire begins early in Corregidora,
manifesting in narrative terms as both a confusion of grammatical referents, as well
as in a controlled withholding or silence. Ursa’s inscription within the linguistic
imperative of male desire and the historical imperative of her foremother’s testimony
limits access to or expression of her pain or her desire. Careful silence, deflection of

interrogation, and withholding expression of thoughts, feelings, or experience are
resistant, self-protective mechanisms, means of remaining outside the demands of

agents who would recycle her pain or pleasure for their own benefit. The prisoner who
refuses to confess, or who tries not to scream, uses silence as her only means of

maintaining a reality outside of the world-expanding reach of the torturer. Similarly,
refusal to engage in dominant discourse is a strategy for those disempowered by it.

Refusing that “American grammar” which, as delineated by Hortense Spillers, in-
forms a dominant symbolic order predicated upon the unthinkable violence of the
slave trade, Ursa might be said to concur with Spillers, who argues for recognition of
the racialized violence of discourse: “We might concede, at the very least, that sticks
and bricks might break our bones, but words will most certainly kill us” (68).

Like silence, purposeful referential ambiguity is a gesture of self-protection against
the vulnerability which necessarily accompanies the expression of pain. Ursa con-

sciously withholds information and emotion, strategically misdirecting the under-

standing of her listeners. Listen to these expressions, culled from just one scene
between Ursa and Tadpole:

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“I wanted him again, but I said nothing.”
“I wanted to ask him why did he, but I was afraid to ask.”
“I laughed, then I frowned. He saw me through the mirror. I

hadn’t meant for him to.”
“I wanted to say, ‘I’m not relaxed enough,’ but I didn’t.”
“It was almost a cry, but a cry I didn’t want him to hear.”

(Corregidora 80-83)

These strategies of controlling expression are learned behaviors, passed on explicitly
in the testimony of Great Gram, Gram, and Mama. In the novel’s longest descriptive
passage chronicling Corregidora’s abuses of Great Gram, told by Mama (who literally
transmogrifies into the voice of Great Gram), Great Gram describes her connection to
a runaway slave, forbidden to her by Corregidora because he is black. In a particularly
horrifying scene, Great Gram imagines that Corregidora’s rape parallels the chase of
this escaped slave man. It is the only occasion in which one of the women admits to
an expression of pain during such an act of torture, in this case a crying which echoes
Ursa’s above, inasmuch as she doesn’t want it to be heard by the one who has caused
it. Great Gram codes her cries so that they are misunderstood by Corregidora,
mistakenly translated as expressions of her pleasure and re-placed as capital within
the economy of his desire:

Yes, tha’s just how I was feeling, while he was up there jumping
up and down between my legs they was out there with them
hounds after that boy … And then there I was kept crying out,
and ole Corregidora thinking it was because he was fucking so
good I was crying. ‘Ain’t nobody do it to you like this, is it?’ I
said, ‘Naw.’ I just kept saying Naw [… ]. (127-28)

Like her cries (whose reference to her pain is strategically ambiguous so as to be

misinterpreted by Corregidora as expressions of her desire, reiterating the symbolic
linking of pain with desire which structures the novel), Great Gram’s only linguistic
utterance, this “naw,” manifests both the required response to Corregidora’s ques-
tion, and, in its unasked for repetition, the linguistic excess marking the moment of
confession discussed earlier as a kind of hysterical verbal giving way. Yet this

response is overdetermined precisely because of its excess: surpassing, in its repeti-
tion, the bounds of the interrogative moment, Great Gram’s repeated “naw”-read by
Corregidora as assent to pleasure in the violent sexual act-becomes her emphatic
refusal to consent to the horrors of her rape and the murder of the escaped slave, the
“no … no … no … ” provoked by terror and unthinkable violence. It is, however,
a refusal which Great Gram is unable to utter so as to be heard. In other words, it is
a refusal without a witness, the historical problem (repeatedly experienced by Gram,
Mama, and Ursa) which contains the narrative itself within the frustrated time of
historical legacy’s pained past-present.

Jones connects the relations of dominance informing this relationship between
voice, sex, and pain with the construction of Ursa’s subjectivity by revealing that her

difficulty referencing either her pain or her desire results from the co-optation of her

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voice (like Great Gram’s before her) for her partners’ pleasure. Just after accepting
Tadpole’s marriage proposal, as he “draws” her into bed, Tadpole asks Ursa if she is
relaxed. Ursa narrates, “I said yes I was relaxed now. I started to tell him Jim said Mutt
wasn’t coming back, but I didn’t. Tadpole got between my legs” (55). The relation
between sex and subjectivity is demonstrated in its negative form as Ursa’s capacity
for speech is literally blocked by Tadpole’s intrusion between her legs. Like her
foremothers, enslaved and identified by the “sign” of their genitals, Ursa literally
speaks from the place/space of her desire and is simultaneously prevented from

speaking that desire by a mostly painful male penetration. This connection between
voice and sex (and pain) is fortified throughout the novel in Ursa’s identification with
the blues, which, as Dubey notes, was “one of the earliest cultural forms that allowed
black women to speak of themselves as ‘sexual subjects”‘ (258). It is also present in
Ursa’s equation of sex with creativity, articulated in her angry question: “And what
if I’d thrown Mutt Thomas down those stairs instead, and done away with the source
of his sex, or inspiration?” (Corregidora 40).

Restraint of voice, speech, and information also structures the novel’s narrative
time such that it performs the pained present of historical legacy, making clear both
the impossibility of clearly demarcating past from present as they permeate one
another through memory and lived experience, as well as disallowing the pleasure of
narrative wholeness derived from a resolution which could only be fraudulent in the
context of that lived legacy. Such restraint denies readerly access to the coherence of

perspective and fullness of disclosure typically ascribed to the first-person narrative
voice. Narrative threads are left unpursued or purposefully misdirected. For in-
stance, in an early conversation between Ursa and her neighbor, Cat, Ursa reveals that
she had been pregnant when Mutt pushed her down the steps. In the context of
traditional novelistic conventions, readerly desire would demand that Mutt be told of
Ursa’s pregnancy so that the plot might deliver the satisfaction of his remorse-or

indignation at his lack of it. However, Mutt is never told of the pregnancy, a lack of
disclosure contributing to a sense of the narrative as a closed fist, unwilling to open
to reveal its secrets, abandoning the reader to the suspended time of an ongoing
historical present.16 It is only in a brief dream sequence that Ursa reveals the possibil-
ity that she was pregnant to Mutt, who responds flippantly, “Don’t make any
promises you can’t keep” (55). The cruelty of this response is the more profound given
the historical imperative to “make generations” which Mutt’s violence has rendered

impossible for Ursa.
Brown and Root’s idea of the insidious trauma experienced by women as daily

(heterosexual) threat might bridge the gap between the immediacy of the body in pain
and the belatedness of the traumatic event as posited by Freud and theorized by
Caruth. Such insidious trauma, inasmuch as it is experienced in the everyday realm,
occupies a contemporaneous temporality rendering it ongoing, rather than a return
of a completed past. Inasmuch as the heterosexual brutality of Ursa’s relationships
with Mutt and Tadpole is inscribed within and partly determined by slavery’s warped
sexual universe, Ursa is still subject to the normalized heterosexual threat of rape and
domestic violence, and consistently experiences the dynamics of rape within the

sphere of consensual heterosexual sex. She also tolerates ongoing harassment from

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men she does not know during her blues performances. This occupation of a pained
present beginning with the experiences of her foremothers which she not only
(re)lives in the trauma of witnessing their testimony, but also lives inasmuch as they
are repeated upon her body in the present, renders Corregidora an unhomely narrative
in which it is difficult to read past and present as distinct temporal modalities. In this
way, Corregidora dramatizes the stagnation of history situated within a dominant
discourse inseparable from the legacy of captivity. As Spillers argues:

Even though the captive flesh/body has been “liberated” [ .. ]
dominant symbolic activity, the ruling episteme that releases the
dynamics of naming and valuation, remains grounded in the
originated metaphors of captivity and mutilation so that it is as
if neither time nor history, nor historiography and its topics
shows movement. (68)

Indeed, it would seem in reading Corregidora that there is nothing of either form or
content outside the insoluble frame of Ursa’s traumatic present. Her identity is
inscribed as a wound; her heterosexual relationships are reenactments of Corregido-
ra’s sexual tortures; her songs are attempts to testify to the collective traumas of the

Corregidora women; and even the desire which she can imagine outside of this
heterosexual frame is either violently effaced or takes brutal form. Because there is no
outside to her pain, Ursa does not experience the intrusion of trauma, but rather
embodies it.

Witness to a Desire

Ursa’s desire to speak (her desire) is stopped by a singularly penetrative heterosex-
uality which excludes clitoral pleasure. Such nullification of desire parallels the
invalidation of her pain, and results in a literal negation of identity and subjectivity,
reflected in one of the novel’s most provocative lines. Located within a long interior
monologue directed at Mutt, Ursa rages, “If it wasn’t for your fucking I” (Corregidora
46). Positioned in the midst of Ursa’s reflections upon Mutt’s violent desire to possess
the double essence of her sex and creativity by way of consuming her blues songs, the
sentence’s grammatical indeterminacy is suggestive. Read as written, the sentence
refers to Ursa’s resentment of the obliterating omnipresence of Mutt’s subjectivity,
evident in the epithet “your fticking I,” the I of his identity overshadowing and

greedily consuming her sex and her voice. Inflected slightly differently, the sentence
might be interpreted as a reference to Ursa’s subjectivity, its deferral to Mutt’s desire
and demand: “If it wasn’t for your fucking, [then] I… ” Read in this way, the sentence

implies the unimaginable potentiality of Ursa’s desire, her subjectivity, inarticulable
as the sentence ends in an indefinite trailing off, marooned outside the realm of

signification.

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The appearance of this uncanny “I” has strong implications in terms of the novel’s
drive to testimony and witness. Indeed, Jones has identified her use of a first-person
narrative perspective, which links her novels to an oral storytelling tradition rooted
in the blues, specifically in terms of testimony, referring to the narrative “I” as the
crucial figure of the witness (Rowell 37). This figure of witness-by definition one
who attests to the validity of an event or experience-is pivotal to healing the
traumatic wound and to the cessation of pain, and critics such as Morgenstern and
Simon have read Corregidora precisely as a novel which enacts a kind of meta-witness:
“witnessing its own act of witnessing” (Morgenstern 105), or, as Simon would have
it, demanding that readers “bear witness to a crisis of witnessing” (103). If Corregidora
does embody such a crisis of witnessing, then it is a crisis rooted specifically in Ursa’s
twofold lack of witness: first, because she lacks the reproductive capability of bearing
the next generation of witnesses to Corregidora’s historical legacy; and second, and
more urgently, because, while partners such as Mutt and Tadpole may listen to her
testimony, there is no one who hears her. A function of her entrapment within the
linguistic overload of Mutt and Tadpole’s unrelenting declarative, imperative, and
interrogatory exhortations, Ursa’s crisis is her inability to find a mode of address or
an addressee suitable to the expression of her pain and desire.

Critics such as Melvin Dixon and Amy Gottfried argue that Mutt and Tadpole
attempt to help free the “oppressive hold” (Dixon 242) of Ursa’s past-implying that
it is at least in part Ursa’s stubborn immersion in this past which renders their
attempts unsuccessful. However, I would argue instead that Ursa’s desire, and the
narrative itself, remain closed, frustrated, and mired in the uncanny temporality of
Bhabha’s past-present because her witnesses do not validate her voice, desire, or pain.
Rather than verifying Ursa’s pain by hearing and acknowledging it, setting the
healing process in motion, both Mutt and Tad invalidate that pain by disavowing it:
ignoring her expressions of pain during sex, and dismissing her attempts to articulate
the intergenerational traumatic pain caused by Corregidora. When Tadpole urges
Ursa to “Get their devils off your back. Not yours, theirs” (Corregidora 61, emphasis in

original), he does not help free the “oppressive hold” of these demons by validating
the immediacy of her experience of Corregidora’s legacy, but rather disavows her
experience of the pain of intergenerational trauma by locating it as elsewhere, not her
own.

Mutt’s repeated commands that Ursa forget both her foremothers’ pain and her
own, rather than being a helpful incentive to heal, constitute a secondary trauma by
invalidating, repressing, refusing to acknowledge Ursa’s voicing of the first. Against
Mutt’s wishes, however, Ursa’s insistent refusal to forget is in fact the foundation of
her survival, for, as Dori Laub articulates in the context of the testimony of Holocaust
survivors, “survivors did not only need to survive so that they could tell their stories;
they also needed to tell their stories in order to survive” (63). The revolutionary act of
survival for the express purpose of telling one’s story, bearing witness to oneself,
corresponds to Great Gram, Gram, and Mama’s strategy of making generations to

provide evidence of the atrocity of Brazilian slavery. The revolutionary act of telling
one’s story in order to survive also explains Ursa’s need to sing the blues, and
represents a shift in the paradigm of survival. Laub continues, “There is, in each

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survivor, an imperative need to tell and thus to come to know one’s story … One has
to know one’s buried truth in order to be able to live one’s life” (63, emphasis in

original). Mutt and Tad’s demands are essentially repressive in their desire to

separate Ursa’s past from her present, and self-serving (world-expanding) in their

prescription that she retain a selective memory for the promotion of their pleasure, as

they ask her to “Forget the past, except ours, the good feeling” (Corregidora 100). While
Ursa struggles against the negation of identity accompanying these demands that she
remain silent about both her desire and her pain (or at least her lack of “good feeling”),
she resists the annihilation of her subjectivity precisely by remembering, and by
searching persistently for a witness to hear her testimony. If the narrative remains
frustrated, unresolved, it is because this validating witness is never found, and Ursa
is ultimately unable to speak either desire or pain. However, lest we read Corregidora
simply as an exercise in frustration, let us be clear about the ways in which Ursa does

gesture toward subjectivity and survival through attempts to voice both.
Reading survival as a problematic in the context of pain and trauma may help to

explain the ambivalence of Ursa’s gestures toward a sexual pleasure located in the
clitoris rather than in the womb, as well as the frustration of her attempts to find a
mode of address in which to voice her pain and a willing witness to hear her. This

reading depends upon an examination of the figure of Cat, and her relationship with
Ursa. Most critical readings of Corregidora do not linger upon the function of Cat,
reading her either as symbol of a lesbian alternative to the heterosexual contract

against which Ursa struggles, ultimately provoking Ursa’s homophobic response
(Claudia Tate, for instance, asserts that Ursa is “frightened” by a lesbian encounter at
Cat’s home, attributing her marriage to Tadpole as a means of “quelling her fear” of

“eventually succumbing to homosexual embrace” [139]), or as a symptom of slavery’s
lingering presence in the parallels between Cat’s sexually abusive employer and the

sexually abusive slave owners who populate the novel’s historic canvas. However,
close examination of Cat’s character and relation to Ursa reveals that Cat more

broadly represents the possibility of sex apart from male penetration, as well as the

possibility of witness to Ursa’s desire, if not her pain. Ursa’s rejection of Cat on both
counts is less a function of homophobia, anger, or outrage than it is her inability to

imagine pleasure or desire outside of the pain of the violent heterosexual contract as
she has experienced it. This inability to imagine her own pleasure may be a function
of what trauma theorists have identified as the trauma of survival, a profoundly
challenging aspect of traumatic experience which Cathy Caruth probes by asking, “Is
the trauma the encounter with death, or the ongoing experience of having survived
it?” (Unclaimed Experience 7). In another essay, Caruth clarifies this question by
articulating that “for those who undergo trauma, it is not only the moment of the
event, but of the passing out of it that is traumatic; that survival itself, in other words,
can be a crisis” (“Introduction” 9). Bruce Simon cites Caruth’s remark as evidence for
his argument about the trauma of survival informing Great Gram’s repetitive need to

testify. Taking Simon’s point, I would also suggest expanding this problematic of
survival to refer not only to Great Gram/Gram’s survival of the sexual violence of

slavery, but also to Ursa’s survival of the violence of the heterosexual contract, a
survival which may be read as analogous to the “pleasure” Ursa might achieve were
she to pass out of that contract.

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This analogy between survival and pleasure in the context of trauma theory
deserves closer scrutiny. Deriving her understanding of trauma from Freud’s analysis
of the trauma of war, Caruth defines the traumatic experience as an encounter with
death, articulating the crisis of survival specifically in terms of that encounter
(Unclaimed 62). Following current theorists of trauma such as Kali Tal, who move

beyond “public” traumas such as war or genocide, expanding the definition of trauma
to account not just for encounters with death, but also for events such as rape,
domestic violence, and the “insidious trauma” of the everyday violence accompany-
ing patriarchal heterosexuality, we might then read Ursa’s fear of survival as a fear of
the pleasure accompanying departure from the scene of trauma, in this case, the bond
of the heterosexual contract. Inasmuch as pursuit of or acquiescence to clitoral

pleasure would remove her from the familiar “uterine social organization” (Spivak
152) which has structured the intergenerational traumas of her foremothers as well as
her traumatic experience of domestic violence and violently penetrative heterosexu-

ality, Ursa is as afraid of this pleasure as she is of the scene of violent heterosexual sex.
If Caruth defines survival as the “endless testimony to the impossibility of living,” we

might also say that survival in Ursa’s context becomes an endless testimony to the

impossibility of desire, and of pleasure.
Certainly Jones supports this position by constructing lesbian sexuality, a sexual-

ity situated outside the normative heterosexual contract and at least more nearly
approaching the clitoral pleasure which Ursa desires, as brutal in ways which
sometimes mirror the violent heterosexuality of slavery and contemporary patriar-
chy. For instance, when Cat visits Ursa as she recovers from her fall, she pats Ursa’s

leg through the sheet, twice. Occurring well before the more dramatic homoerotic
events at Cat’s house later in the text, this seemingly benign gesture bears the burden
of Corregidora’s violence as it is linked to a similar gesture made by Great Gram

during her repetitive testimony to Ursa about Corregidora’s rape:

She told me the same story over and over again. She had her
hands round my waist, and I had my back to her … She didn’t
need her hands around me to keep me in her lap, and sometimes
I’d see the sweat in her palms … Once when she was talking, she
started rubbing my thighs with her hands, and I could feel the
sweat on my legs. Then she caught herself, and stopped, and held
my waist again. (Corregidora 11)

Restraining from moral judgment, Jones represents this gesture as the (almost uncon-
scious) repetition of the cycle of abuse, a repetition which Great Gram stops just short
of enacting. However, this gesture is now tinged with a violence which, when

repeated by Cat, taints the possibility of a female erotics outside of its frame. Too,
when Cat chastises her young neighbor, Jeffy, for making sexual overtures to Ursa,
her language is the language of brutal penetration: “If you bother her again I’ll give
you a fist to fuck” (47). Jones carefully implicates this same brutality in the heterosex-
ual system, as Ursa finds herself repeating those violent words in anger to Tadpole’s
lover: “‘If you want something to fuck, I’ll give you my fist to fuck,’ I said, surprised

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at the words I’d echoed” (87). Ursa’s use of language demonstrates the same kind of
unconscious repetition marking her use of Corregidora’s violent language during sex
with Mutt, a repetition revealing the extent to which she is interpolated by the legacies
of slavery and heterosexual patriarchy which contain and traumatize her.

Because Jones so carefully situates lesbianism within the same brutally histori-
cized frame as she does heterosexuality, I would argue that Ursa’s response to Cat is
not simply homophobic, not a fear of lesbian desire, but rather fear of a clitoral desire
and pleasure which would take her outside the frame of both systems. (Indeed, the
direct lesbian “threat” in the novel is embodied not by Cat, but by Jeffy, Cat’s neighbor
and probably her lover, a young woman who makes a pass at Ursa while she sleeps.)
In one of the novel’s italicized “intrusions” of Ursa’s interior monologue, directly
following her deeply painful betrayal by Tadpole, she articulates her fear distinctly in
terms of the clitoris: “Afraid only of what I’ll become, because those times he didn’t
touch the clit, I couldn’t feel anything … Afraid of what I… Afraid of what I’ll come
to … ” (Corregidora 89-90). Jones’ slight shift in structure in these articulations of fear
is crucial. First, there is Ursa’s fear of what she’ll become if she succumbs to clitoral

pleasure, implying, perhaps, that fear of lesbianism cited by Tate and others. Howev-
er, supplemented by the next construction, “Afraid of what I … ” echoing that earlier

uncanny “I” linking sex with subjectivity, Ursa’s fear reverberates as anxiety about
the subjectivity that would accompany achievement of desire, and is finally articulated
in that last expression, of fear of what she will “come” to. This final expression refers
both to what Ursa would become-what subjectivity she might achieve outside the
frame of the dominant system of penetrative sexuality-as well as to the colloquial
use of “come” to mean achieving sexual fulfillment, in this case, from a clitoral, rather
than uterine-penetrative, contact. Ultimately, as revealed in these consuming expres-
sions of fear, Ursa is unable to imagine (sexual) pleasure apart from pain, as the
traumatized subject is unable to imagine survival outside of the frame of the traumatic
event.

It is crucial that at the moment she expresses her fear/desire of clitoral pleasure
and her pain at Tadpole’s betrayal, Ursa’s addressee is Cat, despite having rejected
her early in the novel after her brush with lesbian desire. Indeed, in spite of this

rejection, Cat is arguably Ursa’s best witness in the novel, as it is she who first hears
the pain in Ursa’s singing voice and defines it as strength: “Your voice sounds … like

you been through something. Before it was beautiful too, but you sound like you been

through more now” (Corregidora 44). Cat’s ability to witness Ursa’s pain is linked to
her ability to witness her own pain and desire, and is threatening to Ursa inasmuch
as Cat has successfully removed herself from the frame of the heterosexual contract
which Ursa is unable to leave behind.

It is precisely this ability to witness, which Ursa mis-perceives as Mutt’s, that
informs the novel’s controversial end. For Ursa’s return to Mutt is not redemptive, as
Melvin Dixon and Jerry Ward have argued; neither does it represent “Ursa’s reclama-
tion of desire and sexuality” (Gottfried 54). It is simply a result of her perception of
Mutt as her witness-regardless of whether or not readers consider him an ethical
one. As Mutt’s cousin Jim notes,

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Once you told me that when you sang you always had to pick out
a man to sing to. And when Mutt started coming in, you kept
picking out him to sing to. And then when y’all was married, you
had your man to sing to. You said that you felt that the others
only listened, but that he heard you. (Corregidora 52)

This feeling of being heard is at the heart of the novel’s crisis of witnessing, because
Mutt does not in fact hear Ursa, validating her testimony in the form in which she
renders it, but rather perpetuates her trauma by his violent attempts at repressing her

history and possessing her. Moreover, while Cat was able specifically to hear and to
validate the pain in Ursa’s voice as it was revealed in her blues songs, arguably Ursa’s
most powerful mode of expression and testimony, Mutt’s need to possess Ursa
specifically forecloses upon her opportunity to express herself in this way, culminat-

ing in his attempt to physically pull her from the stage. This act results in the violence
which, in taking her womb, seals the construction of her identity in terms of the lack
that is her “hole.” Still, in spite of this crisis of witnessing at the novel’s core, Ursa’s
desire that Mutt fulfill his role as her witness is demonstrated by her repetitive
reliving of conversations and events between them over the course of the novel, as
well as by the fact that many of her interior monologues are addressed to him. It is this
desire-rather than an “epiphany of self-realization,” as Amy Gottfried (52) would
have it-which draws her back to Mutt in the end.

And, also contrary to many critical readings, I would argue that in this reconcili-
ation, Ursa is still unable to voice her desire, which is not for the fellatio she performs
on Mutt, but rather for its opposite, the cunnilingus which provides Jones’ second
novel, Eva’s Man (1976), with some small measure of closure in Eva’s receiving of

pleasure denied her within the hetero- sexual contract. Reading Eva as an intertextual
signification upon Ursa (especially pertinent given that the novel is premised upon
Eva’s completion of the act of castration considered by Great Gram and remembered

by Ursa in Corregidora’s final scene), it is clear that the pleasure Eva desires, the

pleasure she finally allows herself to experience with her cellmate, Elvira, is clitoral.
While I do not recognize the redemptive closure which some critics have read in

Ursa’s reconciliation with Mutt, the novel does effect two radical representations
which indicate a movement out of its pained narrative present, out of that discursive
stasis identified by Spillers as the historical legacy of captivity: first, the representa-
tion of the frustration of female desire within a violent heterosexual contract which is,
in the system of signs governing representation of women, generally excluded; and
second, the representation of Ursa’s expression of a measure of desire. For if at novel’s
end she has not achieved voice with regard to her sexual desire, she is finally able to

express the desire of a person who has experienced great pain not to be hurt. There is
some promise in the fact that this expression is prompted by Mutt, who similarly is
able to express his desire not to be hurt. However, this desire to end the repetitive
cycle of wounding contains the impossibility of its own imperative (“I don’t want a
kind of woman that hurt you … Then you don’t want me” [185]), placing readers in
the position of Caruth’s trauma witness, “witness to an impossibility,” the impossi-
bility of the desire for a relationship without pain. Rather than providing narrative

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CALLALOO

closure in its call-response blues structure, the novel is left suspended in the troubled
narrative time of historical legacy. However, this last call-response dialogue also
begins the process of eliminating pain by expressing it-or at least by expressing the
desire not to have or inflict pain-which is perhaps the first step toward the represen-
tation of a reciprocal wounding, a syncretic, reconciliatory exchange across difference
which might get history moving again out of its pained past-present and into a future
of desiring subjects and subjects who desire.

NOTES

1. For readings of Corregidora from the perspective of trauma theory see especially Simon’s
“Traumatic Repetition” (1997) and Morgenstern’s “Mother’s Milk” (1996).

2. The phrase is borrowed from Frederic Jameson, who identifies the “underside of culture” as
“blood, torture, death, and terror” (5).

3. See, for instance, the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action; the United Nations Conven-
tion on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women; and even the statute of
the International War Crimes Tribunal (Ishay, Appendix VII). However, as Rhonda Copelon
asserts, the cost of thus identifying rape as torture might be the continued acceptance of the
distinction between rape as atrocity in war or genocidal contexts, and “normal” rape: “The
recognition of rape as a war crime is thus a critical step toward understanding rape as violence.
The next step is to recognize that rape that acquires the imprimatur of the state is not
necessarily more brutal, relentless, or dehumanizing than the private rapes of everyday life,
nor is violation by a state official or enemy soldier necessarily more devastating than violation
by an intimate” (199).

4. There is an even more complex breakdown of these terms in the case of Corregidora; that is,
under the “public” aegis of slavery, the rape/prostitution of Gram and Great Gram would have
been excluded as part of the “private” realm, most likely constructed as consensual sex (a
phenomenon examined by Clinton in “‘With A Whip In His Hand'” [1994]). Further, Ursa’s
experience of often painful penetrative heterosexual sex which ignores and overrides her
desire/pleasure and which might be characterized as a kind of “insidious trauma,” is even
further “privatized” (rendered invisible, or unspeakable) as it occurs as part of the ordinary,
disavowed oppression of everyday patriarchy rather than under the umbrella of a public
event/system such as slavery. Jones’ narrative, then, brings to light in the context of historical
legacy the doubly imposed “privacy” of such events.

5. Considering the delineations of “home and world” from the perspective of human rights
theory, “history’s most intricate invasions” might well describe the invasions of both the
“public” (in the form of the regime/torturer) and the “domestic” (in the form of the ordinary
household objects commonly used to inflict torture) into the very body of the torture victim.
Hear the resonance with Scarry, who identifies one of the principle techniques of the torturer
as the conversion of everyday domestic objects into weapons, “agents of pain” (40). This
process, which undertakes the “mutilation of the domestic” in order to maximize human pain,
is part of torture’s “almost obscene conflation of private and public,” which “brings with it all
the solitude of absolute privacy with none of its safety, all the self-exposure of the utterly public
with none of its possibility for camaraderie or shared experience” (53).

6. For thorough historicization of Corregidora’s setting in the Brazilian (as opposed to U.S.) slave
system, see Coser’s Bridging the Americas (1994) and Robinson’s Engendering the Subject (1991).

7. As codified in the new statute establishing a permanent International Criminal Court (1998),
institutionalized rape (including the strategic use of rape for ethnic cleansing, sexual slavery,
and enforced pregnancy) has been interpreted as a crime against humanity. Defendants in
former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, respectively, have been prosecuted on this ground. See
Gutman and Rieff’s 1999 Crimes of War (323-29).

8. See Hall’s “The Mind That Burns In Each Body” (1983) for historicization of the convergence
of racial and sexual violence in the acts of rape and lynching.

9. Given the specific historical and racial context of Corregidora, it is important to note that
Spivak’s comments about the denial of what she calls “female subject-function” accompanying

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CALLALOO

effacement of the clitoris are part of an exploration of the role of “First-world” academic
feminism in an international context; as such, her comments are qualified by warnings against
reductive constructions of female subjectivity in terms of reproductive freedom and individ-
ualism: “For to see women’s liberation as identical with reproductive liberation is to… see the
establishment of women’s subject-status as an unquestioned good and indeed not to heed the
best lessons of French anti-humanism, which discloses the historical dangers of a subjectivist
normativity” (150-51).

10. See Dubey’s “Gayl Jones and the Matrilineal Metaphor of Tradition” (1995) for a genealogy of
critical response to Corregidora.

11. Jones introduces at this point a female auto-eroticism as an alternative to this violently
consumptive heterosexual system: “And you, Grandmama, the first mulatto daughter, when
did you begin to feel yourself in your nostrils? And, Mama, when did you smell your body with
your hands” (Corregidora 59)?

12. Scarry’s theoretical reliance upon such public-private distinctions is in part a function of her
objects of study; that is, her examination of documents from the files of Amnesty International,
as well as writings about war by theorists such as Clausewitz, Churchill, and Kissinger, among
others. Certainly such war theorists depend upon a traditional understanding and definition
of war as a public event, and it is only quite recently that Amnesty International has begun to
revise its definition of human rights violations to include such “private” or “secret” events as
rape, sexual assault, and domestic violence, especially in its ongoing Campaign for Women’s
Rights. Such an interpretive shift on the part of perhaps the most influential contemporary
international human rights organization also supports the (re)definition of rape as a form of
torture: “This distinction [between ‘private’ and ‘public’ spheres] has led to one of the most
common misconceptions in the field of human rights and one that has influenced Amnesty
International … As a result, many violations of women’s rights have received insufficient
scrutiny and concern. For example, the interpretation of the right to be free from torture has not
encompassed violence against women in the family (such as domestic violence) and violence
against women in the community (such as female genital mutilation)” (Amnesty 20).

13. Critics such as Melvin Dixon and Amy Gottfried have read Ursa’s construction of the parallels
connecting herself with Great Gram/Gram, and Mutt/Tad with Corregidora, as at least in part
responsible for the structure of heterosexual abuse characterizing those contemporary rela-
tionships; see, e.g., Gottfried: “The men who marry Mama and Ursa try to fight against their
imposed definition as rapists. As Corregidora’s legacy wins out, however, their frustration
leads to domestic violence against their wives” (564). Aside from the unapologetic reproduc-
tion of a “blame-the-victim” approach to domestic violence, Gottfried’s reading ignores the
ways in which Jones’ representations of Ursa’s sexual relationships, carefully echoing those of
Ursa’s foremothers’, work purposefully to draw just such parallels between Corregidora/Mutt
and Corregidora/Tad, situating their actions within the orbit of rape so as to question the
power imbalances characterizing contemporary heterosexual relationships within the context
of the intertwined histories of slavery and patriarchy. Read in the light of Ursa’s repeated
gestures toward a clitoral desire denied her within the novel’s purposefully drawn heterosex-
ual universe, Jones’ critique of male heterosexual violence and hegemony is clear-and clearly
deliberate.

14. To talk about Ursa’s subjectivity in relation to her sexuality, her desire, is not to advocate a
biological determinism which reduces woman to (her) sex, woman to womb, or which
identifies female sexuality as solely constitutive of female subjectivity. Indeed, Sally Robinson
has convincingly argued that Jones situates Ursa’s narrative within just such mythically
reductive discourses of the black woman as hyper-sexual “Sapphire” or “Jezebel” precisely to
foreground and then deconstruct them. See also Simon’s “Traumatic Repetition” (1997) for a
reading of the political implications of Great Gram and Gram’s reduction of woman to
procreative potential in their (subversive) imperative to “make generations” in order to bear
witness to a history erased upon the destruction of written record (“evidence”) at the time of
Emancipation.

15. See Baker’s Blues, Ideology and Afro-American Literature (1984) and Carby’s “It Jus Be’s Dat Way
Sometime” (1991) for analysis of the blues in the context of African-American culture and
literary tradition. For a structural reading of Corregidora as blues “text” see Tate’s “Ursa’s Blues
Medley” (1979).

16. Jones weaves the thread of this metaphor into the narrative of Mama’s unwillingness to reveal
her own “private” memory of her husband Martin, a memory to which Ursa desperately wants
access: “And I kept waiting for her to tell me. Sometimes I’d try to feel it out of her with my eyes,
but I couldn’t get it. No. She was closed up like a fist” (Corregidora 101).

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CALLALOO

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Brown, Laura S. “Not Outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma.” Women’s

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Carby, Hazel. “It Jus Be’s Dat Way Sometime: The Sexual Politics of Women’s Blues.” Feminisms: An
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Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991. 746-58.

Caruth, Cathy. “Introduction.” Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore and
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Clinton, Catherine. “‘With a Whip in His Hand’: Rape, Memory, and African-American Women.”

History and Memory in African-American Culture. Ed. Genevieve Fabre and Robert O’Meally.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. 205-18.

Copelon, Rhonda. “Gendered War Crimes: Reconceptualizing Rape in Time of War.” Women’s Rights
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York: Routledge, 1995. 197-214.

Coser, Stela Maris. Bridging the Americas: The Literature of Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, and Gayl Jones.
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de Lauretis, Teresa. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism Semiotics Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
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Dixon, Melvin. “Singing a Deep Song: Language as Evidence in the Novels of Gayl Jones.” Black

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Culture and Society 20.2 (1995): 245-67.
Gottfried, Amy. “Angry Arts: Silence, Speech and Song in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora.” African American

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Gutman, Roy, and David Rieff, eds. Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know. New York and

London: W.W. Norton and Co., 1999.
Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd. “‘The Mind that Burns in Each Body’: Women, Rape, and Racial Violence.”

Powers of Desire. Ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson. New York:
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Ishay, Micheline, ed. The Human Rights Reader: Major Political Essays, Speeches, and Documents From the
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Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University
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Jones, Gayl. Corregidora. Boston: Beacon, 1975.
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Laub, Dori. “Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle.” Trauma: Explorations in Memory.
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Lionnet, Francoise. “Geographies of Pain: Captive Bodies and Violent Acts in the Fictions of Myriam
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Morgenstern, Naomi. “Mother’s Milk and Sister’s Blood: Trauma and the Neoslave Narrative.”
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Peters, Edward. Torture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996.
Peters, Julie, and Andrea Wolper. “Introduction.” Women’s Rights Humana Rights: International

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Robinson, Sally. Engendering the Subject: Gender and Self-Representation in Contemporary Women’s

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Simon, Bruce. “Traumatic Repetition: Gayl Jones’s Corregidora.” Race Consciousness: African-American
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Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17.2
(1987): 65-81.

Spivak, Gayatri. In Other Worlds: Essays In Cultural Politics. New York and London: Routledge, 1988.
Tal, Kali. Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

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Tate, Claudia. “Ursa’s Blues Medley.” Black American Literature Forum 13 (1979): 139-41.
Ward, Jerry. “Escape from Trublem: The Fiction of Gayl Jones.” Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A

Critical Evaluation. Ed. Mari Evans. New York: Anchor Press, 1984.
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• Article Contents

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• Issue Table of Contents

Callaloo, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Spring, 2003), pp. 279-548
Front Matter [pp.287-363]
In Praise of the Young and Black: After Gwendolyn Brooks [pp.279-280]
On Seeing Sylvia Plath Written on a Wall [pp.281-282]
Saint on the Southbound S2, or Ode to a Bus Driver [pp.283-284]
Fakir Floats above Street Level [p.285]
Reading the Black German Experience
Reading the Black German Experience: An Introduction [pp.288-294]
Section One. “Borderless and Brazen.” Theorizing Black German Literary Expression
Others-from-within from without: Afro-German Subject Formation and the Challenge of a Counter-Discourse [pp.296-305]
Showing Her Colors: An Afro-German Writes the Blues in Black and White [pp.306-319]
Section Two. “Auf der Spueren ihrer Geschichte.” Engaging Black German History
Converging Spectres of an Other within: Race and Gender in Prewar Afro-German History [pp.322-341]
“Germany’s ‘Brown Babies’ Must Be Helped! Will You?”: U.S. Adoption Plans for Afro-German Children, 1950-1955 [pp.342-362]
Section Three. Nothing Less than Both. Black German Identity as Political Practice
Black Germans and Transnational Identification [pp.364-382]
Black German Children: A Photography Portfolio [pp.383-400]
Newark Boy Assesses Tornado Damage, Weeks Removed: Martinsville, IN [p.401]
Melody Forensic [p.402]
Rap Video: Chandelier ((World Premier)) [p.403]
The End of School [pp.404-413]
Found Out [p.414]
Above [p.415]
Lipstick [p.416]
South Beach, 1992 [pp.417-430]
Hoops: For Hank Gathers [pp.431-437]
Five Dreams of Offspring [pp.438-440]
Night Letters [pp.441-444]
Wintering [p.445]
Living the Legacy: Pain, Desire, and Narrative Time in Gayl Jones’ “Corregidora” [pp.446-472]
The “Power” and “Sequelae” of Audre Lorde’s Syntactical Strategies [pp.473-485]
“The Place She Miss”: Exile, Memory, and Resistance in Dionne Brand’s Fiction [pp.486-503]
Waking Cain: The Poetics of Integration in Charles Johnson’s “Dreamer” [pp.504-521]
The Illusions of Phallic Agency: Invisible Man, Totem and Taboo, and the Santa Claus Surprise [pp.522-535]
Reviews
“Word Plays Well with Others” Harryette Mullen’s “Sleeping with the Dictionary” [pp.536-538]
“Word Plays Well with Others” Harryette Mullen’s “Sleeping with the Dictionary” [pp.538-540]
“Word Plays Well with Others” Harryette Mullen’s “Sleeping with the Dictionary” [pp.540-541]
“Word Plays Well with Others” Harryette Mullen’s “Sleeping with the Dictionary” [p.542]
The Flesh and Blood Triangle in Paule Marshall’s “The Fisher King” [pp.543-545]
Back Matter [pp.546-548]

Access provided by University of South Dakota (29 Apr 2013 13:54 GMT)

Joanne Lipson Freed

Gendered Narratives of Trauma and Revision in

Gayl Jones’s Corregidora

In�Gayl�Jones’s�novel�Corregidora,�the�legacy�of�slavery’s�sexual�commodification�andvictimization�is�reproduced�in�the�relationships�between�black�men�and�women
in�the�middle�of�the�twentieth�century.�For�the�characters�in�Jones’s�text,�the�past�of
slavery�remains�alive�in�the�present�in�many�ways,�and�the�recurrence�of�this�past
exemplifies�the�process�of�traumatic�repetition.�Corregidora foregrounds�the�traumatic
inheritance�of�women,�but�the�ambiguous�and�less�visible�trauma�of�the�novel’s�men
is�also�essential�to�understanding�the�visions�of�both�past�and�future that�the�novel
provides.�Although�the�language�of�trauma�illuminates�the�way�that�characters�in�the
novel�experience�the�past,�its�implicit�gendering�marginalizes�men’s�sexual�victimiza-
tion�during�slavery�and�the�trauma�that�results�from�it.�This�component�of�men’s
traumatic�inheritance�is�essential�to�the�model�of�revision�and�recovery that�the�novel
ultimately�offers.�Indeed,�although�Corregidora demonstrates�that�the�intrusive�past
of�trauma�can�have�devastating�effects�on�individual�lives,�it�also�suggests�that�by
blurring�the�lines�between�history�and�the�present,�trauma�allows�histories of�oppres-
sion�and�victimization�to�be�rewritten.�Ursa�and�her�husband�Mutt�are�not�doomed
to�repeat�the�past,�but�the�future�they�create�for�themselves�reflects,�rather�than
transcends,�the�legacy�of�slavery’s�gendered�violence.�Moreover,�although�Jones’s�novel
suggests�that�narration�has�the�power�to�revise�the�past,�it�also�makes�clear�the risks
inherent�in�it:�Those�who�witness�traumatic�narratives�in�Corregidora are�often�inter-
pellated�by�them�as�either�the�victims�of�the�perpetrators�of�violence�and�violation.
By�accounting�for�the�gendered�legacies�that�Jones’s�characters�inherit,�readers can
begin�to�understand�what�is�at�stake�in�their�own�act�of�witnessing.

In�psychological�terms,�trauma�is�an�acute�and�intensely�painful�experience,as�well�as�the�mental�and�emotional�after-effects�of�that�experience,�which�can
completely�refigure�the�trauma�sufferer’s�relationship�with�the�surrounding�world.
One�defining�characteristic�of�trauma�is�the�uncontrollable�recurrence�of�events
too�horrible�either�to�be�fully�experienced�by�the�survivor�at�the�time�those�events
occur,�or�to�be�incorporated�into�his�or�her�memory�of�the�past.�As�Cathy�Caruth
explains,�“the�[traumatic]�event�is�not�assimilated�or�experienced�fully�at�the�time,�but
only�belatedly,�in�its�repeated�possession of�the�one�who�experiences�it”�(Introduction
4;�original�emphasis).�This�uncontrollable�resurgence�of�past�pain�is�overcome�only
when�the�trauma�sufferer�is�able�to�integrate�the�traumatic�event�into�a�narrative
that�he�or�she�can�control.�Thus,�as�Bessel�van�der�Kolk�and�Onno�van�der�Hart
describe,�the�ability�to�narrate�the�traumatic�past�as past becomes�the�hallmark�of
recovery:�“[T]he�story�can�be�told,�the�person�can�look�back�at�what�happened;
he�has�given�it�a�place�in�his�history,�his�autobiography,�and�thereby�in�the�whole�of
his�personality”�(176).�To�the�extent�that�traumatic�recurrence�defines�the�survivor’s
experience�of�the�present,�however,�the�healing�that�ends�the�past’s�intrusions�can
also�be�experienced�as�a�failure�to�commemorate�adequately�the�traumatizing�event
or�a�betrayal�of�the�memory�of�other�survivors�and�victims�(Caruth,�Preface�vii).

409
African American Review 44.3 (Fall 2011): 409-420
© 2011 Joanne Lipson Freed

Extending�this�conception�of�individual�trauma,�we�can�understand�suffering�or
violence�inflicted�on�an�entire�community�as�giving�rise�to�a�collective�trauma.�As�Kai
Erikson�suggests,�collective�or�communal�trauma�entails�not�merely�a�community
composed�of�individual�trauma�sufferers,�but�a�community�whose�very�nature�is
transformed�as�a�consequence�of�the�traumatic�event.�In�such�instances,�“traumatic
experiences�work�their�way�so�thoroughly�into�the�grain�of�the�affected�community
that�they�come�to�supply�its�prevailing�mood�and�temper,�dominate�its�imagery�and
its�sense�of�self,�[and]�govern�the�way�its�members�relate�to�one�another”�(Erikson
190).�Focusing�in�particular�on�the�ways�that�slavery�continues�to�structure�the
experiences�of�African�Americans,�Ron�Eyerman�extends�the�definition�of�collective
trauma�further�by�suggesting�that�it�can�be�passed�down�from�generation�to�generation.
Eyerman�understands�the�trauma�of�slavery�to�be�incorporated�into�the�collective
memory�of�the�African�American�community�such�that�individuals�traumatized�by
its�effects�need�not�have�experienced�the�traumatic�events�themselves.�In�place�of
direct�experience,�Eyerman�suggests�that�subsequent�representations�of�the�traumatic
past�preserve�it�as�a�part�of�the�collective�memory,�and�he�points�in�particular�to�the
power�of�the�media�to�substitute�for�first-hand�knowledge�of�slavery’s�abuses.
Significantly,�Eyerman�also�suggests�that�changes�take�place�in�the�transmission�of
traumatic�memory�from�one�generation�to�the�next:�“Because�of�its�distance�from�the
event�and�because�its�social�circumstances�have�altered�with�time,�each�succeeding
generation�reinterprets�and�represents�the�collective�memory�around�that�event
according�to�its�needs�and�means”�(15).�In�this�context,�transforming�the�narrative
of�the�traumatic�past�is�not�necessarily�a�step�towards�recovery,�but�rather�the
means�by�which�trauma�itself�can�be�perpetuated.

Conceptualizing�slavery’s�systematic�abuses�as�an�instance�of�collective�trauma
suggests�the�convergence�of�two�usually�distinct�representations�of�trauma:�the
political�and�the�personal.�Exemplifying�a�prevalent�tendency�in�both�popular�and
professional�understandings�of�trauma,�Deborah�Horvitz�draws�a�gendered�distinc-
tion�between�political�trauma�and�personal�trauma.�In�the�context�of�persecutions�or
genocides�targeting�a�specific�group�or�community,�she�conceives�of�trauma�as�cul-
tural�or�political,�the�result�of�systematic�violence�carried�out�by�the�dominant�society
against�a�perceived�threat.�Horvitz�cites�slavery�as�one�example�of�this�political
form�of�trauma.�By�contrast,�she�understands�individual�or�personal�trauma�to�be
“sadomasochistic�violence�against�a�designated victim,�who�is�personally�known�by�her
assailant;�victims�of�domestic�abuse�and�incest�are�examples”�(11).�As�the�gendering
of�Horvitz’s�own�language�suggests,�this�model�of�individual�trauma�is�understood
primarily�in�terms�of�sexual�victimization�and�is�overwhelmingly�feminized.�Horvitz
reminds�us�that�the�boundary�between�political�trauma,�which�is�seen�as�implicitly
masculine,�and�personal�trauma,�which�is�feminized�and�sexualized,�is�hardly�absolute;
nevertheless,�this�distinction�is�reinforced�by�dominant�cultural�representations�of
“shell-shock”�and�rape�as�the�two�quintessential,�gender-specific�instances�of�trauma.1

Horvitz’s�designation�of�slavery�as�political�trauma�suggests�the�way�that�slavery’s
atrocities�are�distinguished�and�prioritized�along�gendered�lines.�When�slavery�is
framed�in�the�collective�or�political�context�as�the�deprivation�of�fundamental�rights—
many�of�which�were�at�the�time�legally�circumscribed�for�women�of�all�races—the
definitions�of�slavery�and�the�trauma�it�inflicts�are�implicitly�masculinized.�By�con-
trast,�accounts�of�the�trauma�experienced�by�slave�women�in�particular�are�sexualized,
identified�with�the�unchecked�threat�of�rape�and�sexual�abuse�by�white�masters�and
others.�These�gendered�discourses�of�slavery�reinforce�the�notion�that,�whereas
black�women�were�primarily�sexual�victims,�black�men�were�most�wronged�by�their
political�and�social�disenfranchisement;�such�distinctions�efface�the�systematic�sexual
victimization�of�both�black�women�and men under�slavery�as�a�defining�component
of�its�traumatic�legacy.�If,�however,�we�are�alert�to�what�Maurice�Wallace�describes
as�“an�erotics�of�slavery�which,�forsaking�gender�difference,�places�the�enslaved
biological�male�and�the�enslaved�biological�female�equally�within�the�reach�of�the

410 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW

master’s wanton�hand,”�the�range�interrelated�forms�of�domination�experienced�by
men�and�women�become�visible�in�a�new�way�(87).

Although�readings�of�Corregidora overwhelmingly�center�around�women’s�histories
of�sexual�abuse,�an�understanding�of�the�silenced�narratives�of�black�men’s�sexual
victimization�helps�illuminate�this�novel’s�tangled�and�ambiguous�representation�of
slavery’s�traumatic�legacy.�Unlike�Ursa�Corregidora�and�the�other�women�in�her�family,
who�actively�embrace�the�task�of�memorializing�their�sexual�exploitation�through�the
traumatic�narratives�they�pass�down,�men�like�Tad�and�Mutt�reject�the�importance
of�the�past�and�attempt�to�distinguish�themselves�from�male�relatives�who�lived
through�slavery.�Instead,�by�producing�narratives�that�depict�themselves�and�their
forefathers�as�the�owners�of�material�and�sexual�property,�the�men�in�Jones’s�novel
attempt�to�counteract�slavery’s�logic�of�commodification.�This�discourse�of�ownership,
which�fills�the�silence�left�by�the�men’s�unspoken�stories�of�sexual�victimization,�is
their�traumatic�legacy,�and�as�such�it�is�intimately�interrelated�with�the�women’s�legacy
of�sexualized�commodification.�These�traumatic�memories,�both�reenacted�and
repressed,�constitute�the�legacy�of�slavery�that�Ursa�and�Mutt�together�inherit�and�revise.

For�the�Corregidora�women,�the�sexual�exploitation�of�slavery�is�repeated�andreproduced�in�the�present�through�their�traumatic�narratives.�For�four�genera-
tions,�the�identities�of�these�women�have�been�founded�on�the�rape�and�forced
prostitution�of�Ursa’s�great-grandmother,�and�subsequently�her�grandmother,
by�Simon�Corregidora,�a�Portuguese�plantation�owner�and�whoremaster�in�late-
nineteenth-century�Brazil.�Gram�and�Great�Gram�are�consumed�by�the�memory�of
Old�Man�Corregidora’s�violations;�since�all�official�records�were�destroyed�after
emancipation,�they�take�upon�themselves�the�responsibility�of�preserving�an�account
of�slavery’s�abuses.�Significantly,�the�Corregidora�women�acknowledge�and�even
embrace�their�role�in�reproducing�the�trauma�of�slavery;�as�Madhu�Dubey�describes,
the�women�“mythicize�their�oppressive�history,�and�are�thus�unable�to�perceive�it
has�history,�or�to�imagine�a�future�untainted�by�the�slavery�creed”�(Black Women 78).
Their�investment�in�the�traumatic�past�seems�suggestive�of�the�process�that�Horvitz
describes,�in�which�“powerlessness�becomes�eroticized,�then�entrenched�within�the
victim’s�self-identity”�(21).2 Indeed,�the�fact�that�both�Ursa�and�her�mother�Irene
choose�to�keep�the�last�name�Corregidora�rather�than�taking�their�husbands’�names,
reflects�the�continuing�centrality�of�Simon�Corregidora’s�abuses�in�the�women’s
self-definition.

Following�Eyerman’s�model�of�collective�trauma,�Ursa�and�Irene,�who�did�not
experience�slavery,�inherit�the�memory�of�Gram’s�and�Great�Gram’s�sexual�victim-
ization;�in�this�instance,�the�source�of�the�younger�women’s�trauma�is�the�narrative
that�Gram�and�Great�Gram�provide�of�the�traumatic�events�they�experienced.�From
childhood,�Ursa�is�inundated�with�graphic�descriptions�of�Corregidora’s�abuses;�these
powerful�memories�overwhelm�Great�Gram,�leading�her�to�blur�the�line�between
past�and�present�by�acting�out�Corregidora’s�incestuous�sexuality�on�Ursa:

Great Gram sat in the rocker. I was on her lap. She told the same story over and over again. She had her
hands around my waist, and I had my back to her. . . . Once when she was talking, she started rubbing my
thighs with her hands, and I could feel the sweat on my legs. Then she caught herself, and stopped, and held
my waist again. (Jones�11;�original�emphasis)

Great�Gram’s�account�of�her�own�molestation�brings�it�to�life�in�the�present�as�she
begins�to�touch�Ursa�with�the�same�sexualized�possessiveness�with�which�Old�Man
Corregidora�touched�her.�And�although�Great�Gram�catches�herself�physically,�she
nevertheless�continues�to�compulsively�repeat�the�story�of�Corregidora’s�violations.
Thus,�although�Ursa�did�not�directly�experience�the�sexual�victimization�that�took
place�during�slavery,�Great�Gram’s�narration�of�the�traumatic�past�reproduces�it�and

gENdEREd NARRAtIVEs oF tRAuMA ANd REVIsIoN IN gAyL JoNEs’s CoRREgIdoRA 411

makes�Ursa�in�turn�a�victim�of�sexual�abuse.�Gram�and�Great�Gram�are�committed
to�the�continuance�of�this�traumatic�memory,�and�they�enjoin�Ursa, like�her�mother
before�her,�to�“make�generations”�and�pass�the�family�legacy�of�sexual�trauma�on�to
her�own�daughter�(Jones�22).

For�much�of�the�novel,�Ursa’s�identity�as�a�Corregidora�woman�defines�her�to�the
exclusion�of�other�identities.�Inundated�since�childhood�with�Gram’s�and�Great�Gram’s
accounts�of�slavery,�Ursa�is�unable�to�create�a�narrative�of�her�own�that�differs�from
the�legacy�of�sexual�victimization�she�has�inherited.�Thus,�although�her�mind�is�filled

with�powerful�memories,�she�maintains�they�are�“[a]lways�their�memories,�but�never
my�own”�(Jones�100).�To�a�certain�extent,�Ursa�rebels�against�her�family�legacy�by
leaving�home�to�become�a�blues�singer,�but�when�she�marries�Mutt�Thomas�and
becomes�pregnant�she�begins�to�carry�out�their�generational�mandate.�Ursa�even
sees�her�singing,�which�is�intensely�personal�and�sexual,�as�her�way�of�acting�out�her
family’s�traumatic�narrative:�“They squeezed Corregidora into me and I sung back in return”
(Jones�103;�original�emphasis).�Ursa�strives�to�sing�a�“new�world�song”�that�would
“touch�my�life�and theirs,”�but�without�any�account�of�her�own�or�her�mother’s
experience�of�life�after�slavery,�her�songs�can�only�reproduce�the�pain�of�Gram’s�and
Great�Gram’s�sexual�exploitation�(Jones�59).3�Indeed,�Ursa’s�songs,�which�form�the
basis�of�her�relationship�with�Mutt,�trigger�a�possessiveness�in�him�that�ultimately
echoes�the�sexual�domination�and�commodification�that�are�the�Corregidora�women’s
legacy.

Ursa’s�relationships�with�men�are�haunted�by�the�memory�of�Old�Man
Corregidora:�In�several�instances,�Ursa�allows�for�misunderstandings�that�substitute
Corregidora�in�the�place�of�either�her�first�husband,�Mutt,�or�her�second�husband,
Tadpole.�As�Ursa�recovers�from�a�miscarriage�and�emergency�hysterectomy,�the�result
of�being�pushed�down�a�flight�of�stairs�by�Mutt,�Tadpole�is�with�her�in�the�hospital
and�allows�the�staff�to�mistake�him�for�Ursa’s�husband.�Because�Ursa�has�not taken
Mutt’s�last�name,�the�doctor’s�error�transforms�both�men�into�the�slavemaster:�“�‘He
thought�you�were�Mutt,’�I�said�quietly.�‘I�mean,�my�husband.�He�thought�you�were
Mr.�Corregidora’�”�(Jones�19).�A�similar�slippage�occurs�when�Tad,�who�has�just�been
told�of�Ursa’s�now-unfulfillable�obligation�to�make�generations,�observes�of�Mutt,
“I�guess�you�hate�him�then,�don’t�you.”�Ursa,�in�response,�interposes�Corregidora,
saying�“I�never�knew�the�bastard”�(Jones�10).�Even�after�realizing�her�mistake,�Ursa
allows�it�to�continue,�going�on�to�describe�Corregidora’s�photograph�to�Tad.�These
substitutions�cause�the�traumatic�past�of�slavery�to�repeat�itself:�not�only�does�the
long-dead�Simon�Corregidora�intrude�into�the�present,�but�the�men�who�are�Ursa’s
lovers�are�interpellated�by�his�image,�foreshadowing�their�complicity�in�the�repro-
duction�of�slavery’s�objectifying�sexual�logic.

Although�Ursa�reacts�negatively�to�her�neighbor�Cat’s�expressions�of�same-sex
desire,�the�interactions�between�them�demonstrate�that�like�Ursa’s�heterosexual�rela-
tionships,�her�relationships�with�women�are�equally�determined�by�the�legacy�of
slavery.�As�Great�Gram�describes,�both�Corregidora�and�his�wife�exerted�sexual�claims
over�her,�and�the�violence�and�coerciveness�of�these�relationships�is�reproduced�in�the
sexual�or�sexualized�relationships�between�women�that�Jones�depicts.�The�interactions
between�Cat�and�her�adolescent�lover�Jeffy�reflect�the�same�history�of�violence�that
inflects�Ursa’s�heterosexual�relationships:�When�Jeffy�makes�sexual�advances�toward
Ursa,�Cat�threatens�to�give�Jeffy�“a�fist�to�fuck”�(Jones�47).�Throughout�the�novel�Ursa

412 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW

The revised narrative that Mutt and Ursa

create together is predicated on embracing violence

as an essential component of their intimacy.

insistently�refuses�to�acknowledge�the�possibility�of�same-sex�desire�or�pleasure
offered�by�Cat,�and�later�by�Jeffy.�But�she�nevertheless�repeats�Cat’s�sexualized�threat
when�she�confronts�a�sexual�rival,�the�young�woman�Tad�has�taken�to�bed�in�her�place.
The�language�of�brute�force�and�sexual�victimization�inflects�her�relationships�with
women�as�well�as�with�men,�again�reflecting�the�way�the�traumatic�past�of�slavery
intrudes�into�and�is�reproduced�in�Ursa’s�present.

Just�as�Ursa’s�traumatic�legacy�places�those�around�her�in�roles�defined�by�slavery,
she�understands�her�own�sexuality�in�terms�of�Gram’s�and�Great�Gram’s�procreative
injunction�that�replicates�the�commodification�of�“a�slave-breeder’s�way�of�thinking”
(Jones�22).�Ursa’s�conception�of�her�own�sexuality�is�so�powerfully�linked�to�the�idea
of�reproduction�that�she�is�unable�to�engage�in�sex�or�experience�pleasure�after�her
hysterectomy.�Although�Tad�attempts�to�convince�her�that�“[a]s�long�as�a�woman�got
a�hole,�she�can�fuck,”�his�logic�requires�Ursa�to�redefine�her�sexuality�as�a�woman
who�can�no�longer�make�generations,�which�she�is�incapable�of�doing�(Jones�82).
As�Elizabeth�Goldberg�convincingly�argues,�the�impossibility�of�conception�leaves
Ursa�unable�to�derive�pleasure�from—and�at�times�unable�to�engage�in—penetrative
sex�with�Tad.4 Like�her�daughter,�Ursa’s�mother�Irene�reproduces�slavery’s�commod-
ification in�her�own�failed�relationship�with�her�husband�Martin.�Irene�refuses�to
understand�her�attraction�to�Martin�outside�of�the�terms�of�her�family’s�procreative
injunction,�and�in�place�of�affection�or�sexual�pleasure�she�imagines�her�body�striving
to�become�pregnant�with�a�daughter:

It�was�like�we�got�along�real�well,�like�I�wouldn’t�even�believe�you�could�get�along�that�well
with�a�man.�But�then�I�know�it�was�something�my�body�wanted,�just�something�my�body
wanted.�Naw.�It�just�seem�like�I�just�keep�telling�myself�that,�and�it’s�got�to�be�something
else.�It’s�always�something�else,�but�it’s�easier�if�it’s�just�that.�(Jones�116)

In�this�moment,�and�throughout�the�telling�of�her�story,�Irene�resists�creating�a�nar-
rative�of�her�own�that�can�account�for�her�affectionate�bond�with�Martin,�and�con-
tinues�to�privilege�the�logic�of�commodification�that�instrumentalizes�both�her�own
and�Martin’s�sexuality.�Martin,�who�soon�recognizes�his�role�in�Irene’s�reproductive
mandate,�feels�used�by�her�and�leaves�her�to�raise�their�daughter�alone�in�the�image
of�her�family’s�traumatic�past.

Like�the�Corregidora�women,�the�men�in�Jones’s�novel�are�also�affected�by�thesexual�trauma�of�slavery,�but�unlike�the�women,�they�repress�the�memory�of
black�men’s�sexual�victimization�during�slavery�and�resist�understanding�themselves
as�inheritors�of�this�legacy.�Covering�over�their�silence�about�male�sexuality,�the�men’s
narratives�focus�instead�on�the�ways�that�their�ancestors’�rights�as�property�holders
were�impinged,�and�sharply�contrast�the�experiences�of�their�male�progenitors�with
their�own.�When�Ursa�first�tells�Mutt�about�Corregidora,�he�shares�the�story�of�his
great-grandfather,�a�blacksmith�whose�wife�was�repossessed�into�slavery�in�payment
of�his�debts.�Mutt�denies�the�relevance�of�his�great-grandfather’s�experience�of�slavery,
maintaining�that�“[w]hichever�way�you�look�at�it,�we�ain’t�them”�(Jones�151).�But
despite�this�denial,�Mutt�repeatedly�returns�to�his�great-grandfather’s�example�to
inform�his�relationship�with�Ursa.�When�he�becomes�jealous�of�her�job�as�a�blues
singer,�he�threatens�to�auction�her�off�to�men�in�the�audience�but�decides�not�to
“on�account�of�my�great-granddaddy.�Seeing�as�how�he�went�through�all�that�for�his
woman,�he�wouldn’t�have�appreciated�me�selling�you�off”�(Jones�160).�Despite�the
distinction�Mutt�draws�between�his�great-grandfather’s�circumstances�and�his�own,
Mutt’s�jealousy�of�Ursa’s�commercialized�sexuality�as�a�cabaret�singer�demonstrates
that�he�too�sees�his�wife�as�a�commodity�that�he�is�at�risk�of�losing.�By�acting�out
this�jealousy,�Mutt�affirms�the�continued�effect�of�slavery’s�logic,�which�transforms
his�wife’s�sexualized�body�into�property.

gENdEREd NARRAtIVEs oF tRAuMA ANd REVIsIoN IN gAyL JoNEs’s CoRREgIdoRA 413

414 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW

Thus,�rather�than�allowing�him�to�break�with�the�past,�Mutt’s�refusal�of�slavery’s
legacy�of�commodification�leads�him�to�repeat�it�through�his�relentless�objectifica-
tion�of�Ursa.�His�sexual�language�reproduces�the�language�of�ownership,�and�he
unknowingly�repeats�to�Ursa�a�phrase�that�Corregidora�used�to�describe�Great
Gram,�who�was�both�his�lover�and�his�property:�“Your�pussy’s�a�little�gold�piece,
ain’t�it,�Urs?�My�little�gold�piece”�(Jones�60).�Insisting�on�his�status�as�the�owner�of
Ursa’s�body,�Mutt�attempts�to�assert�his�freedom�from�the�legacy�of�slavery�by
affirming�his�masculine�privilege.�But�by�framing�himself�as�owning�rather�than
owned,�Mutt�nevertheless�continues�the�sexualized�commodification�that�is�the
Corregidora�women’s�traumatic�inheritance�as�well�as�his�own.��Mutt’s�and�Ursa’s
sexual�encounters�thus�implicate�them�both�in�the�reproduction�of�slavery’s�objecti-
fying�logic:�“It’s�my�ass,�ain’t�it?�When�I�screwed�you�last�night�and�asked�you�whose
ass�it�was,�you�said�it�was�mine”�(Jones�164).�Despite�Mutt’s�desire�to�distinguish
himself�from�his�grandfather,�whose�wife�was�taken�from�him�as�property,�Mutt
reproduces�slavery’s�logic�by�asserting�his�absolute�ownership�of�Ursa’s�body.

Like�Mutt,�Tad�too�insists�on�the�discontinuity�between�the�past�of�slavery�and
his�life�in�the�present.�Tad’s�grandmother�was�a�white�orphan�who�was�taken�in�as�a
young�child�by�the�man�who�would�become�her�husband.�Like�Mutt,�Tad�recounts
this�story�in�response�to�Ursa’s�account�of�her�family�history,�making�an�explicit
connection�between�his�narrative�and�hers�that�frames�them�both�as�legacies�of
slavery.�But�by�emphasizing�his�lack�of�physical�resemblance�to�his�light-skinned
mother,�Tad�distances�himself�from�this�history.�Unlike�Ursa�and�the�women�of�her
family,�who�claim�that�their�traumatic�narratives�preserve�the�past�in�the�absence�of
official�records,�Tad�argues�that�the�destruction�of�such�records�demonstrates�the
futility�of�memory.�He�recounts�that�his�father�was�a�soldier�who�stayed�in�France
after�the�war,�allowing�his�mother�to�be�cheated�out�of�the�land�his�father�had
painstakingly�accumulated�to�pass�on�to�subsequent�generations:�“When�Mama�went
into�the�courthouse�to�claim�the�land,�somebody�had�tore�one�of�the�pages�out�of
the�book.�Tha’s�one�reason�I�got�away�from�up�there”�(Jones�78).�Rather�than
memorializing�the�loss�of�the�land�that�would�have�been�his�inheritance,�Tad�distances
himself�both�physically�and�emotionally,�maintaining�that�“they�ain’t�nothing�you�can
do�when�they�tear�the�pages�out�of�the�book�and�they�ain’t�no�record�of�it”�(Jones�78).

Like�Mutt,�Tad�attempts�to�understand�himself�and�his�family’s�past�in�terms�of
the�male�privilege�of�ownership�that�counteracts�the�historical�status�of�black�men
as�property.�His�grandfather’s�simultaneously�paternal�and�sexual�claim�over�the
young�woman�who�becomes�his�wife�both�repeats�and�reverses�the�power�relations
of�slavery:�The�convergence�of�the�sexual�and�paternal�in�the�relationship�between
Tad’s�grandfather�and�his�grandmother�parallels�the�logic�of�the�slave�system,�which
justified�systematic�sexual�exploitation�through�a�discourse�of�paternalistic�responsi-
bility.�Compellingly,�Tad’s�black�grandfather�assumes�the�ownership�role�occupied
by�the�slavemaster,�successfully�claiming�the�body�and�the�sexuality�of�his�white
grandmother.�Even�as�racial�power�structures�are�challenged�or�overturned�by�the
grandfather’s�marriage,�however,�gendered�ones�are�reinforced,�and�Tad’s�grandfather’s
incestuous�desire�for�his�young�adopted�daughter�resonates�with�Corregidora’s�abuse
of�Gram,�who�was�his�own�biological�daughter.�Like�Mutt,�Tad�asserts�the�masculine
privilege�of�his�progenitors�by�identifying�them�as�property�owners,�in�the�case�of
his�grandfather�by�emphasizing�his�claim�over�his�grandmother,�and�in�the�case�of
his�father�by�focusing�on�his�accumulation�of�land.�But�in�making�this�claim,�which
challenges�the�legacy�of�slavery’s�legal�and�social�disenfranchisement,�Tad�also�repro-
duces�slavery’s�commodifying�logic�that�transforms�black�women�into�sexual�property.

Thus�despite�his�claim�to�have�left�this�past�behind,�Tad�understands�the�failure
of�his�relationship�with�Ursa�in�terms�that�echo�his�deprivation�of�the�property�that
was�his�rightful�inheritance.�When�Ursa�is�unable�to�enjoy�sex�with�him,�Tad�sees
himself�as�unfairly�deprived�of�the�sexually�satisfying�woman�he�believed�he�was

gENdEREd NARRAtIVEs oF tRAuMA ANd REVIsIoN IN gAyL JoNEs’s CoRREgIdoRA 415

getting�when�he�married�her.�As�Dubey�succinctly�puts�it,�“any�woman�who�is�out-
side�the�reproductive�system�is�no�longer�a�woman”�to�Tad,�who�understands�Ursa’s
unexpected�deficiency�as�a�denial�of�what�was�rightfully�his�(Black Women 76).�“You
don’t�even�know�what�to�do�with�a�real man,”�Tad�maintains,�asserting�his�right�to
turn�to�another�woman�for�the�pleasure�to�which�he�feels�entitled�(Jones�88).�Ursa’s
unresponsiveness�threatens�to�undermine�Tad’s�masculine�identity,�which�is�based�on
his�ability�to�claim�ownership�and�control�of�her�sexualized�body,�and�his�affair�with�the
young�woman�he�employs�to�sing�in�Ursa’s�place�reasserts�his�masculine�prerogative.

By�constructing�narratives�of�their�forefathers�as�owners�rather�than�as�property,
Mutt�and�Tad�not�only�reproduce�the�legacy�of�commodification�experienced�by�the
Corregidora�women,�but�also�repress�the�narratives�of�black�men’s�sexual�victimiza-
tion�under�slavery�that�powerfully�inform�their�own�traumatic�past.�In�the�accounts
of�the�past�that�Mutt�and�Tad�provide,�slavery’s�most�profound�effect�on�black�men
was�its�circumscription�of�their�ability�to�claim�and�possess�property,�but�the�stories
told�by�Gram�and�Great�Gram�reinscribe�the�threat�of�castration�into�the�men’s
narrative,�and�in�doing�so�suggest�the�ways�that�men’s�and�women’s�traumatic�legacies
are�linked:

There was a woman over on the next plantation. The master shipped her husband out of bed and got in the
bed with her and just as soon as he was getting ready to go in her she cut off his thing with a razor she had
hid under the pillow and he bled to death, and the next day they came and got her and her husband. They
cut off her husband’s penis and they stuffed it in her mouth, and then they hanged her. They let him bleed to
death. They made her watch and then they hanged her. (Jones�67;�original�emphasis)

This�horrific�account�reveals�a�silence�in�the�men’s�narratives�of�slavery�and�suggests
the�way�that�the�forms�of�sexual�victimization�suffered�by�men�and�women�were
profoundly�interrelated.�Both�husband�and�wife�are�the�property�of�the�slavemaster,
subject�to�his�whims�and�proclivities,�and�both�are�punished�for�resisting�them.�In�this
grisly�scene,�the�severing�of�the�man’s�penis�from�his�body�literally�objectifies�his
sexuality,�and�in�doing�so�causes�his�death.�The�woman’s�desire�for�her�husband,�an
assertion�of�their�humanity�and�sexual�agency�which�leads�to�the�husband’s�castration,
is�punitively�and�perversely�reenacted�in�her�death.�Great�Gram’s�description�of�the
way�events�such�as�these�were�transformed�into�“sex�circuses”�for�white�onlookers
serves�to�emphasize�the�way�in�which�the�sexual�violence�inflicted�upon�men�and
women�during�slavery�was�both�a�cause�and�a�consequence�of�their�commodification
(Jones�125).

This�episode�is�narrated�in�Ursa’s�voice�as�a�part�of�the�traumatic�memory�she�has
inherited�from�Gram�and�Great�Gram,�and�its�inclusion�highlights�the�absence�of
such�stories�from�Mutt’s�and�Tad’s�accounts�of�slavery.�Since�men�and�women�alike
were�subject�to�sexual�victimization�during�slavery,�as�this�story�graphically�illustrates,
the�conspicuous�silence�around�sexual�trauma�in�the�men’s�narratives�suggests�a
conscious�or�unconscious�repression�of�this�aspect�of�their�collective�memory.
Indeed,�the�acknowledgment�of�past�sexual�victimization�stands�at�odds�with�the
masculine�identities�that�both�Mutt�and�Tad�are�invested�in�constructing�and�enacting
for�both�their�male�progenitors�and�themselves.�In�much�the�same�way�that�contem-
porary�discourses�of�trauma�marginalize�men’s�experiences�of�sexual�victimization,
Mutt�and�Tad�cannot�accommodate�such�narratives;�by�focusing�on�the�deprivation
of�property�and�effacing�the�threat�of�castration,�the�men�in�Jones’s�novel�affirm
their�masculinity�through�the�language�of�ownership.�But�as�an�implicit�reaction
against�the�legacy�of�sexual�victimization,�the�domineering�and�sexually�possessive
masculinity�they�enact�demonstrates�the�continuing�power�of�this�repressed�traumatic
memory�in�the�present.�Indeed,�if�as�van�der�Kolk�and�van�der�Hart�suggest, “the
compulsion�to�repeat�the�trauma�is�a�function�of�repression�itself,”�the�men’s�silence
surrounding�their�own�legacy�of�sexual�objectification�and�victimization�makes that
traumatic�past�all�the�more�likely�to�intrude�into�and�repeat�itself�in�the�present�(166).

416 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW

Contemplating�her�failed�relationship�with�Mutt,�Ursa�seems�to�understand�the
way�that�their�gendered�legacies�of�slavery�interconnect.�Identifying�herself�with
slave�women�that�were�“[h]ard�because�you�have�to�be,”�Ursa�wonders:�“Maybe�it’s
just�a�man�can’t�stand�to�have�a�woman�as�hard�as�he�is.�If�he�couldn’t�support�her�in
money�he’d�be�wanting�to�support�her�in�spirit”�(Jones�40).�The�masculine�identity
that�Mutt�enacts,�which�is�predicated�on�his�virility�and�his�being�“harder”�than�his
woman,�is�an�attempt�to�respond�to�the�memory�of�a�past�in�which�a�black�man’s
masculine�prowess�was�not�enough�to�protect�either�himself�or�his�woman�from
victimization�and�commodification.�But�as�Ursa�describes�it,�the�hardness�that
threatens�Mutt’s�masculinity�is�part of�women’s�own�legacy�of�slavery,�necessitated
by�the�instrumentalization�of�their�bodies�and�sexualities�that�made�them�“hard
because�you�have�to�be.”�Imagining�the�intimacy�shared�by�slave�men�and�women,
which�is�significantly�absent�from�the�traumatic�narratives�she�has�received,�Ursa
visualizes�“tender-eyed�women�and�hands tender�behind�tobacco�calluses�with�their
men.�Hurt�you�into�tenderness�finally”�(Jones�41).�In�these�terms,�which�envision
the�coexistence�of�hardness�and�pain�with intimacy�and�pleasure,�Ursa�begins�to
rescript�a�new�narrative�of�the�traumatic�past�of�slavery�that�allows�for�her�eventual
reunion�with�Mutt.

Throughout�the�novel,�Ursa�acknowledges,�along�with�pain,�the�possibility�of
love�or�pleasure�that�Great�Gram�insistently�refuses�in�her�narrative.�When�she�is
first�recovering�from�her�hysterectomy,�Ursa�insists�that�a�man�who�loved�her�would
never�have�hurt�her�as�Mutt�did,�but�later,�when�she�reflects�on�their�relationship,
she�admits�that�she�always�experienced�their�love�as�“pleasure�somehow�greater�than
the�pain”�(Jones�50).�This�is�precisely�the�possibility�that�Great�Gram�and�Gram�deny
in�the�narrative�of�victimization�that�they�pass�down�to�the�subsequent�generations
of�women.�Both�Ursa�and�her�mother�speculate�about�the�embodied�experience
that�Gram�and�Great�Gram�omit�from�their�narratives:�“They were with him. What did
they feel? You know how they talk about hate and desire. Two humps on the same camel? Yes.
Hate and desire both riding them”�(Jones�102;�original�emphasis).�Ursa�and�Irene�consider
but�never�articulate�the�question�that�Martin�does�dare�to�ask:�“How�much�was�hate
for�Corregidora�and�how�much�was�love”�(Jones�131).�In�doing�so,�Ursa�begins�to
revise�the�narrative�she�has�inherited�and�consider�new�possibilities�for�her�own
experience�of�love�and�desire.

Imagining�the�possibility�of�pleasure�within�the�traumatic�past�she�has�inherited,
Ursa�also�reconsiders�the�possibility�of�an�enduring�relationship�with�Mutt�in�which
pleasure�and�pain�coexist.�When�he�seeks�her�out,�more�than�twenty�years�after�the
incidents�that�begin�the�novel,�they�reunite�despite�Ursa’s�certainty�that�she�still�hates
him�and�holds�him�responsible�for�her�sterility.�For�Mutt,�too,�returning�to�Ursa
revises�the�ambivalence�of�his�grandfather:�after�his�wife�was�repossessed�into�slavery,
he�ate�onions�to�keep�people�away�and�peppermint�to�attract�them,�unable�to�act�in�a
meaningful�way�on�either�his�fear�or�desire.�Mutt�explains,�“I�tried�it�but�it�didn’t�do
nothing�but�make�me�sick”�(Jones�184).�He�reunites�with�Ursa�despite�the�risk�that
he�will�be�hurt�again,�and�in�doing�so�rewrites�his�grandfather’s�narrative�of�failed
ownership�by�inscribing�his�continued�desire�for�the�woman�he�loves.�Like�Ursa,
Mutt�transforms�the�traumatic�narrative�he�has�inherited�by�returning�and�embracing
the�possibility�of�pleasure�that�coexists�with�pain.

The�terms�of�Mutt’s�and�Ursa’s�reconciliation,�which�revise�the�traumatic�narra-
tives�they�have�received,�suggest�the�possibility�that�they�have�begun�to�control�the
intrusive�past�and�started�the�process�of�healing.�By�acknowledging�the�possibility
of�intimacy�and�pleasure�in�sexual�relationships�that�are�haunted�by�domination�and
commodification,�both�Ursa�and�Mutt�complicate�the�legacies�of�slavery�they�have
inherited�and�assert�the�distinction�between�past�and�present.�In�the�sexual�encounter
that�concludes�the�novel,�Ursa�claims�and�enacts�the�ambivalent�hatred�and�desire
that�Great�Gram�has�silenced�in�her�traumatic�narrative.�After�slavery�in�Brazil�ended,
both�Gram�and�Great�Gram�stayed�with�Corregidora,�and�Great�Gram�fled�to�the

gENdEREd NARRAtIVEs oF tRAuMA ANd REVIsIoN IN gAyL JoNEs’s CoRREgIdoRA 417

United�States�only�after�doing�something�that�made�him�want�to�kill�her.�Even�after
returning�to�rescue�her�daughter,�Great�Gram�never�explains�her�actions,�leaving
Gram�to�wonder:�“What is it a woman can do to a man that make him hate her so bad he
wont to kill her one minute and keep thinking about her and can’t get her out of his mind the
next?”�(Jones�173;�original�emphasis)�When�she�is�reunited�with�Mutt,�Ursa�is�able
to�imagine�and�confront�the�possibility�that�is�repressed�in�the�traumatic�narrative
she�has�inherited.�Acknowledging�that�much�of�her�troubled�relationship�with�Mutt
remains�unchanged,�Ursa�alters�the�power�dynamics�of�their�intimacy�by�fellating
him�for�the�first�time:

[I]n�a�split�second�of�hate�and�love�I�knew�what�it�was,�and�I�think�he�might�have�known
too.�A�moment�of�pleasure�and�excruciating�pain�at�the�same�time,�a�moment�of�broken
skin�but�not�sexlessness,�a�moment�just�before�sexlessness,�a�moment�that�stops�just�before
sexlessness,�a�moment�that�stops�before�it�breaks�the�skin:�“I�could�kill�you.”�(Jones�184)

By�embracing�the�coexistence�of�pleasure�and�pain�in�their�sexual�encounter,�Ursa
alters�the�Corregidora�narrative�to�reflect�the�nature�of�her�relationship�with�Mutt.
Claiming�for�herself�the�power�to�wound,�as�well�as�the�agency�to�choose�not�to,
Ursa�reimagines�her�sexuality�in�terms�that�relegate�her�family’s�traumatic�memory�to
the�past,�but�which�nevertheless�acknowledge�the�legacy�of�violence�that�continues
to�haunt�her�present.

This�scene,�which�hinges�on�Ursa’s�discovery�of�her�power�to�castrate,�is�partic-
ularly�troubling�when�it�is�understood�in�isolation�as�either�sexually�subjugating or
violently�empowering�her.�Suggesting�that�Ursa’s�encounter�with�Mutt�continues slav-
ery’s�legacy�of�sexual�domination,�Goldberg�sees�Ursa’s�initiation�of�oral�sex�as�a
continued�denial�of�her�own�desire�and�pleasure,�and�Bruce�Simon�asserts�that�it�is
the�“literal�return�of�the�history�of�slavery”�rather�than�a�revision�of�that�traumatic
past�(102).�By�contrast,�in�Horvitz’s�view,�the�threat�of�violence�in�Ursa’s�act�reflects
her�desire�for�revenge�and�empowers�Ursa�by�placing�her�briefly�in�the�position�of
inflicting�rather�than�suffering�abuse.�Even�duCille’s�reading,�which�unsettles�any
simple�dichotomy�between�empowerment�and�submission,�fails�to�acknowledge
sexual�violence�as�a�traumatic�legacy�that�is�shared�by�both�black�women�and men.
Significantly,�Mutt�also�realizes�that�the�threat�of�castration�coexists�with�his�experi-
ence�of�pleasure;�this�realization�inscribes�a�uniquely�male�vulnerability�into�his
position�of�masculine�power�and�privilege.�The�possibility�of�castration,�as�yet
repressed�in�the�men’s�traumatic�narratives,�is�repeated�with�a�difference�in�Mutt’s
and�Ursa’s�encounter.�The�sexual�desire�that�exposes�Mutt�to�the�possibility�of�dan-
ger�and�death�is�also�the�source�of�unprecedented�pleasure.

The�novel’s�final�scene�thus�figures�the�revision�of�slavery’s�traumatic�legacy�as
a�shared�endeavor,�what�Stephanie�Li�perhaps�too�strongly�calls��“a�joint�epiphany
between�women�and�men”�(147).�Significantly,�however,�the�revised�narrative�that
Mutt�and�Ursa�create�together�is�predicated�on�embracing�violence�as�an�essential
component�of�their�intimacy,�a�fact�that�the�novel’s�final�lines�reinforce:�“I�don’t
want�a�kind�of�woman�that�hurt�you,”�Mutt�repeatedly�insists,�to�which�Ursa�replies,
“Then�you�don’t�want�me”�(Jones�185).�Ursa’s�narration�then�figures�the�reciprocal
violence�that�continues�to�define�their�relationship:�“He�shook�me�till�I�fell�against
him�crying.�‘I�don’t�want�a�kind�of�man�that’ll�hurt�me�neither,’�I�said.�He�held�me
tight”�(Jones�185).�Neither�Mutt�nor�Ursa�can�claim�that�they�will�not�hurt�one
another,�and�Mutt’s�shaking�necessarily�precedes�their�final�embrace.�Nevertheless,
Mutt�and�Ursa�assert�the�possibility�of�their�own�intimacy�and�pleasure,�revising
together�the�forms�of�sexuality�produced�by�slavery�in�which�they�are�both�implicated.
In�doing�so�they�confront�and�take�control�of�the�repressed�memories�of�black�men’s
and�women’s�sexual�victimization�and�imagine�a�future�that�is�different�from,�if�not
unmarked�by,�the�past.�By�telling�their�own�stories�(or�in�Ursa’s�terms,�singing�a�new
kind�of�song),�they�may�begin�to�differentiate�the�past�of�slavery�from�the�present,
but�they�can�never�leave�the�past�entirely�behind.

418 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW

As�Jones’s�novel�suggests,�the�intrusive�past�of�trauma�is�the�cause�of�suffering,but�it�also�opens�the�possibility�of�a�radical�and�potentially�transformative
intervention�into�the�past.�The�pain�of�the�trauma�sufferer�does�more�than�simply
recall�the�events�of�the�past;�it�brings�those�events�to�life�in�the�present.�Thus,�in�the
formulation�provided�by�Cathy�Caruth,�trauma�sufferers�“become�themselves�the
symptom�of�a�history�that�they�cannot�entirely�possess”�(Introduction�5).�The�very
literalness�of�trauma’s�recurrences,�which�unsettles�the�boundaries�of�history,�makes
it�possible�to�act�on�the�past�as�it�is�brought�alive�in�the�present�and�enables�an
intervention�that�goes�beyond�retrospection.�Through�the�survivor’s�narrative,
which�integrates�the�traumatic�events�into�his�or�her�memory�of�the�past,�those
events�are�reinterpreted�and�rescripted.�Thus,�both�for�the�trauma�sufferers,�to�whom
the�distinction�between�past�and�present�does�not�meaningfully�exist,�and�for�the
witnesses�who�receive�and�acknowledge�their�traumatic�narratives,�the�past�is�made
available�for�transformative�and�potentially�recuperative�re-narration.

When�the�distinction�between�past�and�present�is�called�into�question,�so�too�are
any�straightforward�distinctions�between�true�and�false�representations�of�the�events
that�are�being�constantly�re-experienced�by�the�trauma�sufferer.�In�this�sense,�“what
trauma�has�to�tell�us—the�historical�and�personal�truth�it�transmits—is�intricately
bound�up�with�its�refusal�of�historical�boundaries”�(Caruth,�Introduction�8).�This
refusal,�although�problematic�for�historical�and�juridical�projects,�bestows�fictional
narratives�with�a�particular�power�to�transform—rather�than�simply�re-imagine—the
past.5 The�revisions�of�slavery’s�legacy�enacted�by�Jones’s�characters�thus�represent
something�far�more�powerful�than�a�speculative�project�of�retrospection.�If�we�take
the�claims�of�trauma�theory�seriously,�in�creating�their�own�narrative�Ursa�and�Mutt—
and�by�extension�Jones�herself—transform�the�past�itself,�inscribing�the�possibility
of�intimacy�and�pleasure�not�only�into�the�memory of�slavery,�but�the�very�reality of�it.
The�possibility�that�literature�might�not�merely�address�the�historical�wrongs�of
slavery�but�actively�ameliorate�them�is�an�appealing�possibility�indeed,�for�it�empowers
not�only�the�author�of�such�fictions�but�also�the�readers�and�critics�who�act�as�wit-
nesses�for�the�text’s�traumatic�narrative.�Mirroring�the�clinical�scenario,�in�which�the
therapist�as�listener�becomes�a�necessary�partner�in�the�process�of�healing,�the�reader
of�a�text�like�Corregidora receives�the�outward�address�of�trauma’s�deferred�narrative,
thereby�enabling�it�to�be�relived�and�revised.�By�opening�up�individuals,�communities,
and�history�itself�to�the�possibility�of�transformation,�and�by�placing�narrative�pro-
duction�and�reception�at�the�center�of�the�process�of�healing�it�envisions,�trauma
theory�suggests�a�radical�claim�not�only�about�the�power�of�a�novel�such�as�Corregidora,
but�also�about�the�role�played�by�its�readers.

Trauma�theory’s�centering�of�narrative�in�its�vision�of�recovery�offers�the�possi-
bility�that�a�“new�world�song”�like�Ursa’s�or�a�novel�like�Jones’s�could,�together�with
their�audiences,�begin�to�heal�the�enduring�psychic�wounds�of�slavery�(Jones�59).
But�in�conceiving�of�slavery’s�legacy�as�a�collective�trauma,�Corregidora also�reveals�the
complicity�of�narrative�in�the�reproduction�of�that�trauma.�For�if�the�experience�of
collective�trauma�can�extend�across�generations,�as�Eyerman�suggests,�representations
of�the�traumatic�past�become�the�means�not�only�of�controlling�the�intrusions�of
traumatic�memories,�but�also�of�passing�them�on�to�others.�Addressing�a�contem-
porary�context,�Eyerman�points�to�the�effects�of�the�media�in�the�transmission�of
traumatic�legacies�from�one�generation�to�the�next,�but�in�Jones’s�novel,�oral�narrative
assumes�the�ambiguous�role�of�transferring�as�well�as�transforming�the�traumatic
past�of�slavery.

Indeed,�the�traumatic�narratives�in�Corregidora hold�both�the�promise�of�healing
and the�threat�of�traumatizing�those�who�bear�witness.�Ursa,�a�captive�audience�of
Great�Gram’s�account�of�Corregidora’s�abuse,�identifies�the�role�of�Great�Gram’s
storytelling�in�preserving�her�traumatic�past:�“It was as if the words were helping her, as if
the words repeated again and again could be a substitute for memory, were somehow more than the

gENdEREd NARRAtIVEs oF tRAuMA ANd REVIsIoN IN gAyL JoNEs’s CoRREgIdoRA 419

memory. As if it were only the words that kept her anger”�(Jones�11;�original�emphasis).
Ursa’s�description�of�Great�Gram’s�compulsion�to�narrate�the�traumatic�past�suggests
that�this�repetition�both�alleviates�her�suffering�(the�words�“helping�her”)�and�per-
petuates�it�(the�words�keeping�her�anger).�And�whether�or�not�Great�Gram�is�healed
by�the�process�of�narrating�the�past,�Ursa�is�certainly�traumatized�by�listening�to�it
and�experiencing�its�reproduction.�Despite�Ursa’s�desire�to�sing�blues�songs�that
reflect�her�own�experience�rather�than�the�narrative�of�Corregidora’s�victimization
that�she�has�received,�she�is�never�able�to�create�the�new�song�she�imagines.�In�the
novel’s�final�pages�Ursa�describes�the�song�of�her�life�to�her�mother,�who�listens
with�“the�quiet�kind�of�listening�one�has�when�they�already�know,�or�maybe�when
it’s�a�song�they’ve�sung�themselves,�but�with�different�lyrics”�(Jones�182).�Describing
her�mother’s�familiarity�with�her�song,�Ursa�implicitly�compares�her�own�life�story
to�that�of�her�mother,�who�continues�to�refuse�the�possibility�of�desire�or�intimacy
and�writes�to�Ursa�of�“having�left�a�certain�world�behind�her”�(Ibid.).�Rather�than
suggesting�that�Ursa�has�escaped�her�family’s�traumatic�narrative,�this�comparison
with�Irene�seems�to�affirm�its�continued�influence.

Thus,�to�the�extent�that�Corregidora suggests�the�relevance�of�trauma�theory�to
formulations�of�African�American�identity,�Jones’s�novel�also�problematizes�the
empowering�relationship�trauma�theory�posits�between�narrative�and�recovery.�For
Mutt�and�Ursa,�revising�family�histories�and�searching�for�new�songs�does�enable
the�reinscription�of�intimacy�and�pleasure�into�slavery’s�gendered�legacy�of�sexual
commodification.�But�although�they�may�expand�and�revise�the�roles�they�inherit,
the�possibilities�they�embrace�have�still�been�scripted�by�the�past.�As�with�the�pain
they�know,�the�repressed�pleasure�that�Mutt�and�Ursa�discover,�is�a�part�of�slavery’s
past,�and�the�intimacy�they�share�is�predicated�on�and�haunted�by�the�threat�of�vio-
lence.�The�forms�of�power�and�vulnerability�that�Ursa�and�Mutt�are�able�to�experi-
ence�together�continue�to�reflect�the�gendered�legacies�they�have�inherited,�as�the
asymmetry�of�the�novel’s�final�scene�suggests.�Moreover,�as�the�novel�demonstrates,
traumatic�narratives�hold�the�power�to�reproduce�trauma�as�well�as�to�heal�it,�and
the�act�of�witnessing,�the�text�reminds�us,�is�also�a�dangerous�one.�Witnesses�in
Corregidora risk�becoming�victims�of�the�abuse�of�the�past,�as�the�young�Ursa�does,
or�they�risk�consuming�dehumanizing�events�as�entertainment,�like�the�white�gawkers
Great�Gram�describes.�Rather�than�embracing�the�production�and�reception�of�nar-
rative�as�the�means�of�transforming�an�oppressive�past,�then,�Corregidora offers�a
more�ambivalent�vision:�In�blurring�the�lines�between�past�and�present,�the�novel
gives�writers�and�readers�some�power�over�history,�but�in�doing�so�it�renders�them
responsible�for�the�legacies�of�injustice�that�they�can�never�entirely�leave�behind.

1. In tracing the history of trauma as a scientific field of inquiry, Judith Lewis Herman reveals how it

has always been informed by prevailing notions of gender. Identifying the contexts that periodically

brought the study of trauma to the fore, she describes how the first investigations of hysteria affirmed its

status as a female phenomenon whereas subsequent concern with “combat neurosis” reflected an invest-

ment in soldiers’ manly comportment. Although Herman’s contemporary examples are consciously more

inclusive, she also identifies the Vietnam War and the feminist movement as energizing and enabling

research into P.T.S.D. and domestic abuse, respectively. See Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath

of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).

2. Horvitz’s reading of Corregidora, which places it alongside the narrative of childhood sexual abuse in

Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, centers on the sadomasochism that becomes incorporated into the

identities and desires of female survivors of sexual abuse. Although Horvitz’s formulation does place these

individual experiences of sexual trauma in the context of race and class respectively, it fails to adequately

address the specific question of slavery’s legacy and the traumatic repetition that transmits it from generation

to generation.

3. Dubey, among others, draws on the cultural tradition of the blues to elaborate Ursa’s ability to preserve

and transform her matrilineal inheritance. Although Dubey emphasizes the role of Ursa’s “blues voice” in

Notes

420 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW

allowing her to revise the narratives she has received, I am most interested here in the legacies of the past

that Ursa’s singing reproduces, which Dubey also acknowledges (“Gayl Jones” 264).

4. In her reading of Corregidora, Goldberg convincingly elaborates Ursa’s reproductive or “uterine”

sexuality, which after her hysterectomy precludes her possibility of clitoral pleasure in her sexual encounters

with Tad.

5. In the introduction to her volume, Caruth raises the contentious issue of holding individuals legally

responsible for abuse brought to light through recovered traumatic memory. Similarly, Dominick LaCapra

points to the difficulty of constructing a history of the Holocaust when the traumatic nature of survivors’

memories undermines the epistemological frameworks on which history depends. The challenges that

trauma’s uncontained past poses for legal and historical endeavors suggests important concerns that literary

engagements of trauma theory risk effacing. See LaCapra, Writing Trauma, Writing History (Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins UP, 2001).

Caruth, Cathy. Introduction. Caruth, Trauma 3-12.

—-. Preface. Caruth, Trauma vii-ix.

—-, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995.

Dubey, Madhu. Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994.

—-. “Gayl Jones and the Matrilineal Metaphor of Tradition.” Signs 20.2 (Winter 1995): 245-67.

duCille, Ann. “Phallus(ies) of Interpretation: Toward Engendering the Black Critical ‘I’.” Callaloo 16.3

(Summer 1993): 559-73.

Erikson, Kai. “Notes on Trauma and Community.” Caruth, Trauma 183-99.

Eyerman, Ron. Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity. New York:

Cambridge UP, 2001.

Goldberg, Elizabeth Swanson. “Living the Legacy: Pain, Desire, and Narrative Time in Gayl Jones’

Corregidora.” Callaloo 26.2 (Spring 2003): 446-72.

Horvitz, Deborah. Literary Trauma: Sadism, Memory, and Sexual Violence in American Women’s Fiction.

Albany: SUNY P, 2000.

Jones, Gayl. Corregidora. Boston: Beacon, 1975.

Li, Stephanie. “Love and the Trauma of Resistance in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora.” Callaloo 29.1 (Winter

2006): 131-50.

Simon, Bruce. “Traumatic Repetition: Gayl Jones’s Corregidora.” Race Consciousness: African American

Studies for the New Century. Eds. Judith Jackson Fossett and Jeffrey A. Tucker. New York: New York

UP, 1997. 93-112.

van der Kolk, Bessel A., and Onno van der Hart. “The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the

Engraving of Trauma.” Caruth, Trauma 158-82.

Wallace, Maurice O. Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s

Literature and Culture, 1775-1995. Durham: Duke UP, 2002.

Works

Cited

“I Said Nothing”: The Rhetoric of Silence and Gayl Jones’s “Corregidora”
Author(s): Jennifer Cognard-Black
Source: NWSA Journal, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Spring, 2001), pp. 40-60
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4316782

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III Said Nothing”:
The Rhetoric of Silence and Gayl Jones’s Corregidora

JENNIFER COGNARD-BLACK

Paying attention to gaps and breaks in women’s narratives has long been
a mode of reading performed by feminist and antiracist scholars. This
article builds on such practice by linking contemporary critical discus-
sions of literary silence through Gayl Jones’s Corregidora, a text that
makes the agency of speaking its primary concern. Whereas previous
scholarship has examined how Jones’s protagonist, Ursa Corregidora,
empowers herself via the blues, this essay suggests that the text resists an
easy valorization of voice. By complicating prior interpretations, this
article looks to the mute, missed, and stifled in Corregidora that form a
rhetoric of silence. Examining Jones’s novel in this manner not only
rethinks previous critiques of voice in Corregidora but also offers another
way for considering how to engage antiracist and feminist interpreta-
tions of narratives by and about African American women.

I

There was silence. She sat looking at me. I’d stopped looking at her again.
I could feel her flutter as if she wanted to say something, but she didn’t. I
wouldn’t make it easy. I waited.

Then she said finally, “You don’t know what it’s like to feel foolish all
day in a white woman’s kitchen and then have to come home and feel foolish
in the bed at night with your man…. You don’t know what that means, do
you? ”

I said nothing …. She was looking at me, expecting something. She
wanted me to tell her that I knew what it was like, but I wouldn’t tell her.
(Jones 1975, 64)

This dialogue, from the first chapter of Gayl Jones’s Corregidora, epito-
mizes the narrator’s mode of interaction with other characters, a mode
that defies the conventions of how speech works in novels at the same
time that it rewrites the dynamics of textual conversation into a rhetoric
of silence.1 In form, the passage looks like a verbal exchange: paragraph
breaks distinguish one character’s words from another, quotation marks
designate spoken words, and the first-person narrator provides occasional
glimpses into her private thoughts. Yet for all its seeming status as
dialogue, this “discourse” tells the reader virtually nothing about the
narrator. Like the character who speaks out loud about feeling foolish, we,
the readers, end up feeling a bit foolish ourselves; our desire to know more
about our narrator meets the narrator’s reticence, reticence that iterates

(C2001 NWSA Journal, Vol. 13 No. 1 (Spring)

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“I SAID NOTHING” 41

itself through silent sentences: “There was silence”; “I stopped looking at
her”; “I waited”; “I said nothing.” To write that there was silence erases
the act of writing as a practice of revelation, sharing, communication; to
stop looking refuses the possibility of visualization; to wait suspends the
prospect of narrative action; to say nothing revokes meaning even as the
words themselves appear to say something. Like the inquisitor in this
dialogue, we ask the narrator questions, we watch her, we read her,
expecting something, and she denies our expectation, doesn’t show us
what we want to see or tell us what we want to hear. Ursa Corregidora,
Jones’s narrator, refuses to make reading easy for us.

I take Corregidora as a case study of rhetorical silence because the
expression Ursa most often employs in the novel is a pronoun or proper
name plus the phrase “said nothing” (e.g., “I said nothing”; “Cat said
nothing”; “We said nothing”). At one level, I am intrigued by what it
means when a narrator repudiates her reader, when the “I” is so consis-
tently and insistently held back in the same instant it is extended. But on
another level, I am fascinated that over the quarter-century that Cor-
regidora has functioned as a touchstone for antiracist and feminist liter-
ary criticisms, all of the novel’s reviewers have taken Ursa’s agency of
speaking as their primary concern. Without exception, these scholars
have identified Ursa’s blues as an empowering practice, an inscription of
communal memories that witness Ursa’s individual story at the same
time that they reveal the interrelated histories of her Mama, Gram, and
Great Gram.2 “The form of Jones’s novel is circles within circles,” notes
Janice Harris, “memories within memories … which slowly advance as
Ursa’s ability to sing increases and her and our understanding of her song
grows” (1981, 2). Epitomized by this attention to Ursa’s “song,” Jones’s
previous critics believe Ursa’s narrative stands as a collective memoir to
the suffering endured by black women in slavery as well as an articulation
of black women’s ability to endure.

Of course, it is little wonder that Corregidora has garnered attention as
an oraliterary narrative, for feminist and antiracist opposition to silence is
a practical tautology (although such approaches to silence are not synony-
mous).3 But without negating or attempting to supplant these interpreta-
tions, in this essay I hope to complicate such unilateral readings by
looking to the mute, missed, detained, and stifled in Corregidora that I
believe form a distinct pattern of discursive stillness: a rhetoric of silence.
I find that this rhetoric of silence, as much as blues singing, populates
Ursa’s self-representation, “calling” and demanding a very different “re-
sponse” through its unique refrain, “I said nothing.” Examining Corregidora
in this manner rethinks the importance of attending to how acts of
voicing and withholding voice “speak” differently and demand a different
kind of reader participation. As such, this examination puts pressure on
one of our most relied-upon methods of antiracist and feminist literary

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42 JENNIFER COGNARD-BLACK

criticism, namely criticism that privileges voice over silence. I want to
ask what it means when a narrative negates the authority of memory or
voice and renounces the charge to bear witness against silence.

In the following discussion, then, I examine various manifestations of
the rhetoric of silence in Corregidora, manifestations that show silence to
be a remarkably allusive narrative strategy, one Ursa uses to resist con-
scription and to forge an intricate and versatile counternarrative or “anti-
discourse.” Specifically, I argue that Ursa’s silences commence on the
very first page with the loss of her womb, a loss structured not only as
symbolic silence (i.e., the silence of lost generations and, as a result, lost
history) but also as an impetus for reinventing Ursa’s identity through a
metaphor of what might be called a rapacious silence: the black hole. In
turn, this initial silencing of future generations is complicated by various
cultural “silencers” that accumulate as the story unfolds: the missing
slavery documents that kept Ursa’s foremothers in bondage; the true
nature of their rapist’s, old man Corregidora’s, ancestry; and Mutt’s sexual
violence against Ursa. Importantly, such silencers are the product of
white cultural dominance, and this concept of threatening whiteness
functions as a kind of “present-absence” in the text that prompts further
silences from Ursa. Indeed, combined, Ursa’s womb-lack and the present-
absence of whiteness necessitate, either by choice or by force, a pervading
voicelessness throughout the novel. Explicit narrative examples from the
novel itself serve as the clearest indicators of Ursa’s reticence and help us
understand how to read Ursa and her antidiscourse in a new way. Thus,
my investigation not only enhances previous critical interpretations of
voice in Jones’s novel but also provides another way for thinking about
how we engage antiracist and feminist interpretations of novels by, and
about, black women.

II

The first two pages of Corregidora relate the brief history of Ursa’s mar-
riage to Mutt and their violent exchange that leaves Ursa infertile. Angry
that Ursa continues to perform at Happy’s Cafe after they are married and
jealous that other men watch her sing, Mutt ambushes Ursa after work
one night, telling her, “I’m your husband. You listen to me, not to them”
(Jones 1975, 3). Ursa explains, “That was when I fell. The doctors in the
hospital said my womb would have to come out. Mutt and me didn’t stay
together after that” (4). Thus Corregidora takes as its initiating circum-
stance an instance of compound and interrelated loss, Ursa’s hysterec-
tomy and her ensuing separation from Mutt. This loss is the both the
result of forced silence (i.e., Mutt punishing Ursa for singing the blues to
others) and the circumstance that, in effect, keeps Ursa silent, keeps her

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“I SAID NOTHING” 43

from passing on her family’s brutal history through succeeding genera-
tions. Just home from the hospital, Ursa describes this pervasive sense of
loss, saying it is not so much how she hurts in a physical way but the
feeling “[als if part of my life’s already marked out for me-the barren
part” (6). This emptiness comes from her tangible forfeit, of course, but
also from “feeling as if something more than the womb had been taken
out…. Something I needed, but couldn’t give back. There’d be plenty I
couldn’t give back now” (6).

Adam McKible has argued that in black women’s fiction, the womb
represents a site of ideological contention (1994). Certainly Ursa’s self-
conception is reflected by wombs and in wombs. She is expected to “give
back” by having generations like her foremothers, and she herself is
engendered from roots of aggression, her own body a testament to prac-
tices of rape and forced pregnancy on a slave plantation in Brazil. McKible
believes that in Corregidora, the interplay of “maternal reproduction and
hegemonic practices and discourses intensifies around reproductive is-
sues,” potentially enabling the Corregidora women to revise the morbid
symbolism of the womb into an emancipatory trope (228). Yet McKible
does not attempt to interpret Ursa’s literal and figurative inability to
achieve this promised, emancipatory consciousness, other than to say the
hysterectomy allows Ursa the position of critique, the sagacity to ques-
tion whether a womb is or should be the “center of a woman’s being”
(Jones 1975, 46).

Because of the central place of Ursa’s womb-lack in the novel (as the
narrative opening) and, ironically, its metaphoric role as the thing that
will keep Ursa’s family narrative silent, her womb-lack deserves a closer
reading than McKible offers. Not only does it launch the novel and, at one
level, prompt the following 183 pages that articulate a response to this
complex loss, but, additionally, the language and imagery evoked in
relation to Ursa’s womb-lack confound typical notions of how bodies
interact with and produce words, turning the 183 pages into a response
and a refusal, a silent rejoinder.

For if Corregidora is about anything, it is about how bodies invent and
influence stories: stories of sex and sexuality, pain and pleasure, the uses
and abuses to which bodies are put. As such, the novel is also a mordant
commentary on the assumption that the actions and sensations of the
body are simply a species of writing or that language necessarily reveals
bodies. For instance, Ursa’s dreams are rife with tactile images, exhibiting
and inscribing the body by comparing her inability to have children to
spilled glasses and bruised seeds, the place where her womb should be to
a broken guitar string and curdled milk. These comparisons construct
Ursa’s body as not just defective but also useless: bruised seeds produce no
growth, spilled glasses no drink, a broken string no music, curdled milk no
food. Akin to the dialogue at the beginning of this essay that mimes

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44 JENNIFER COGNARD-BLACK

established literary form only to negate it in the moment of writing,
Ursa’s dreams utilize imagery only to undermine their purpose and form.
At its most basic, imagery inserts a material analog for an abstraction (e.g.,
the personality of a potato, love like chocolate). Imagery makes writing
and the written body tactile. But while Ursa’s dreams suggest concrete
synonyms for her sterility, these images perform a kind of narrative
silence, suspending the imagistic potential to germinate seeds, consume
milk, play music. In other words, the experience of Ursa’s body, its double
“barrenness,” negates language by employing a specific kind of linguistic
silence: the refusal of sensation.

Indeed, Ursa’s descriptions of women’s bodies are predicated on an
incapacity to feel that is repeatedly linked to an incapacity to engage
language. When Ursa takes her first lover after Mutt-Tadpole, her man-
ager at Happy’s-she can’t feel or describe sex with him. “He was inside,
and I felt nothing. I wanted to feel, but I couldn’t” (Jones 1975, 82).
Insensate, her body not only carries but also enacts silence, the act of sex
erased to feeling nothing. Remembering another encounter from child-
hood, Ursa recalls, “I was out in the yard playing with the little boy from
across the street. He’d bet me I didn’t know how to play doctor…. I lay
across [a] board on my belly, and he raised up my dress. Mama saw us.”
Ursa continues:

She jerked me in the back door by the arm, and slammed the door.
“Don’t you know what that boy was doing? He was feeling up your asshole.”
“I couldn’t feel it.”
“If I could see it, I know you could feel it.”
“Mama, I couldn’t feel it.” (42)

Here, verbs and nouns seem to suggest that Ursa is well aware of the
physical world: she feels her belly on the board, the boy raising her dress.
She feels when her Mama yanks her arm. But it is the action that mimes
sex that Ursa cannot feel or articulate-a specific and deliberate senseless-
ness-and this erasure both presages the lost history that is her lost womb
as it iterates the sexual violence from which she is descended.

For, indeed, Ursa’s family history is one in which women’s bodies were
continually “silenced”: Ursa’s Great Gram and Gram were repeatedly
raped by the same slavemaster and made to work as prostitutes; her
mother Irene was beaten up and cast out by her husband, forced to walk
down the street “looking like a whore” (121). In turn, while Ursa’s own
memories of these stories become the text of Corregidora, paradoxically,
they also signal disconnection, dissolution, and suppression-i.e., si-
lences-as fundamental to Ursa’s idea of what a woman’s sexual body is
and what it does in a slave economy.

Ursa’s images are obverse and reverse at once, palpable descriptions of
forced sex and attending threats of consequent sexlessness intertwined.

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“I SAID NOTHING” 45

On the one hand, Ursa remembers and relates stories of sexual assault as
told by her Mama, Gram, and Great Gram:

There was a woman over on the next plantation. The master shipped her
husband out of bed and got in the bed with her and … she cut off his thing with
a razor she had hid under the pillow and he bled to death, and then the next day
they came and got her and her husband. They cut off her husband’s penis and
stuffed it in her mouth, and then they hanged her. (67)

On the other hand, however, it is clear that the price of fighting against
sexual commodification-or “telling” one’s brutal story-is forced si-
lence: having one’s mouth “stuffed” and one’s head (intellect) “hanged”
or having your husband push you down the stairs.

But because Mutt, Tadpole, her foremothers, and, through her dreams,
old man Corregidora all insist that Ursa reproduce bodies and, thus,
stories in order to claim an identity, Ursa associates her womb-lack or
ancestral-lack with both undesirability and the loss of the only position
(motherhood) open to her to witness or give voice to her foremothers’
oppressive history. To men, Ursa lacks appeal because she lacks the
ability to provide material for men’s own stories. In typical paternal
prescriptions, sons carry on the father’s “narrative,” and as Mutt warns
Ursa in one of her reveries, “Urs, [Tadpole’s] going to wont more” (75).
Ursa understands that, to men, a womb is the center of a woman’s being
because it represents a man’s participation in language. Indeed, in the
slave economy from which Ursa is descended, black women’s wombs are
the gateway to a whole masculine world of exploitation, monopolization,
and brutality. As Ursa quips, “I have a birthmark between my legs” (45).

To Mama, Gram, and Great Gram, however, Ursa’s womb-lack arrests
the necessary counternarrative that comes from their stories, a history
that fills in the silences of the slavery records and official accounts.
Bearing children is equal to authorship, a liberatory impulse. In Ursa’s
clan, a fertile womb brings forth daughters, provides heirs to an estate of
postcolonial sensibility, and daughters signal rebellion, create bodies
that, in turn, create more daughters. Telling a revised history of slavery to
one’s daughter does two things: it establishes a matrilineage in opposition
to slave patriarchy, and it “embodies” a black female script, a black
female history. In a moment of desperation to give that witness, to break
silence, Ursa decides, “I’ll make a fetus out of grounds of coffee,” the
Brazilian slave crop, and “I’ll stain their hands” (54).

In essence, then, the loss of Ursa’s material and psychological repro-
ductivity means that Ursa lacks language: “Silence in my womb” (99).
Caged within symbolic cages, Ursa is a “barren” or “silent” woman in a
world demanding descendants for identity. Thus Ursa’s cage of silence is
twice-bound. If she has a child, she can express her foremother’s history,
yet a child also signals a participation in a dehumanizing narrative based

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46 JENNIFER COGNARD-BLACK

on the silencing of female bodies: in either case, Ursa is being valued for
the same thing. But rather than capitulate to this either/or dilemma,
partly by necessity and partly by will, Ursa rejects the choice altogether,
refusing to render her story in the form demanded by any of her progeni-
tors. The loss of Ursa’s womb inevitably removes her from this conun-
drum in which a black woman gives birth to a child (to a story) who
embodies a contradiction, both her objectification and her humanity.

The way for Ursa to keep her own mouth from being “stuffed” is,
ironically, for her to choose silence instead of having silence forced upon
her; she creates an antidiscourse to wombs as a path to language. The
opposite of authoring (mothering), the reversal of creating or feeling,
Ursa’s rhetoric of silence undermines a straightforward equation between
wombs and witnessing, bodies and speech.4 Whether it is the slavery lived
by her foremothers or the racist culture evolved from slavery that Ursa
knows, the result of surviving in slavery are Ursa’s representations of
abused, rent flesh: fissures, tears, wounds, and especially holes. From this
perspective, effacing the body’s capacity to feel or be revealed in story
effaces the dynamics of psychic and corporeal oppression.

When one character, Jeffrene, says to Ursa, “I bet you were fucking
before I was born … [blefore you was thought,” she is right. Figuratively,
Ursa has been valued for her sex-and has been forced to have sex-before
even she, herself, was born. And if a woman’s worth is reduced to her
vagina, her “hole,” she is valued according to something interior and
unseen, something that must be felt to be measured. “[T]ha’s all they do
to you was feel up on you down between your legs see what kind of
genitals you had,” explains Ursa’s Mama, relating the history of Great
Gram, “either so you could breed well, or make a good whore” (127). But
if Ursa’s is a history of women prized for their vaginas and their vaginas
alone, then depicting senselessness-the inability to feel the body-as
well as silence-the inability to write others’ stories through the propaga-
tion of bodies-negates the possibility that someone else can control
Ursa’s body. Ultimately, a hole cannot be taken away or exploited for the
purposes of others; even with a hysterectomy, a female retains the capac-
ity to receive, to take in: “And what if I’d thrown Mutt Thomas down
those stairs instead, and done away with the source of his sex, or inspira-
tion, or whatever the hell it is for a man, what would he feel now? At least
a woman’s still got the hole” (40-1). In this manner, Ursa equates the hole
with a kind of silence that has potential liberatory power, and by recon-
ceiving herself as a hole (silence) instead of a womb (story), Ursa cannot be
silenced by an outside force; rather, she is silence. Thus Ursa reclaims the
image of the hole as a powerful, even intimidating, trope. For while the
slavemaster or abusive husband wants to believe the hole is empty, easily
delineated by feeling up inside it, the hole is anything but vacuous.

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“I SAID NOTHING” 47

Indeed, in space a black hole is dense, a full or substantial place that
constantly consumes everything else around it.

Ursa is savvy in her association of herself with such voracious yet
empty density, especially in her relationship with Mutt. “When I first saw
Mutt, ” Ursa recalls, “I was singing a song about a train tunnel. About this
train going in the tunnel, but it didn’t seem like they was no end to the
tunnel, and nobody knew when the train would get out, and then all of a
sudden, the tunnel tightened around the train like a fist” (Jones 1975, 147).
Because it has no beginning and no end, no attributes that can be circum-
scribed by someone outside it, the silence of the hole is the ultimate
weapon against a culture that has fetishized her genitals as a knowable,
marketable commodity. In Ursa’s song, the extended metaphor surpasses
its own representation, for a tunnel or hole cannot be fully captured in
language, always containing unknown capacities and attributes. The hole
represents the “Otherness” the Portuguese or old man Corregidora or
Mutt reject and deny within Ursa and her foremothers. As she tightens her
hold like a fist around these men, Ursa remakes herself into a dangerously
rapacious black hole, a vagina dentata.

While white feminists such as Helene Cixous have encouraged women
to write in the ink made of mother’s milk, give voice via phantasmagoric
motherhood, and thus rewrite culture through the birth of a woman-
centered language to overcome silence and silencing, Ursa denies this
avenue to autonomy and agency because, finally, it speaks the master’s
tongue. White ink is white language, and, a priori, girl babies incarnate an
entire history of sexual abuse. Whereas Cixous calls her theory the “ges-
tation drive”-“just like the desire to write: a desire to live self from
within, a desire for a swollen belly, for language, for blood”-Ursa instead
expels the white beast from her own swollen womb (878). “I dreamed that
my belly was swollen. . . ,” relates Ursa, “and I lay without moving, gave
birth without struggle, without feeling …. But I felt the humming and
beating of wings and claws in my thighs …. His hair was like white
wings” (Jones 1975, 76-7). The distended, distorted belly and this horrific
birth are the consequence of those who rape her, the white and black men
who violate her body and unconscious. Ursa’s recourse to this violence is
to retender her desire. She does this by utilizing a rhetoric of silence (not
writing, not speaking, not white ink or birth) and, literally, the “barrens, ”
i.e., sexual abstinence for twentysome years. Ursa removes herself from
feeling and flesh, from all that has been scorned, used, tom, and violated
on/in black women’s bodies. And the moment when she takes back flesh,
when she is finally able to see a kind of redemption in its fissures and
cracks, is when, at the end of the novel, she tightens her own hole on
Mutt, striating his penis with her teeth and squeezing it with her mouth-
her organ of both silence and language-and thus iterating the threat of

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48 JENNIFER COGNARD-BLACK

the slave woman with the razor under her pillow, the threat of the greedy
black hole. The metaphor of the hole, then, is one instance of Ursa’s
cogent antidiscourse; Ursa rewrites holes and the language of holes into
an empowering “whole” for black women living with the consciousness
of slavery and under the slavery of consciousness.

III

Toward the end of the novel, an old blues singer says to Ursa, “[LIet me tell
you something and I don’t have to spell it out for you cause you know
what I’m talking about.” He continues:

Sinatra was the first one to call Ray Charles a genius, he spoke of “the genius
of Ray Charles. ” And after that everybody called him a genius. They didn’t call
him a genius before that though. He was a genius but they didn’t call him that.
… If a white man hadn’t told them, they wouldn’t’ve seen it…. Like, you
know, they say Columbo discovered America, [and] he didn’t discover America.
(Jones 1975, 169-70)

This vignette provides an insight into how the threat of ideological white-
ness functions as a “present-absence” in Corregidora. Under the slavery
of consciousness, if language indicates the power of whiteness, then
names are suspect, for whites delimit the practices of naming. To guide
the reader through the vagaries of white interpretations, interruptions,
and appropriations of black experience, the old blues singer constructs an
analogy: the concept of artistic genius as well as the very term “genius”
must be applied by the owner of culture in order for the word and its idea
to have significance. If bestowed by someone other than the owner of
culture, even if the named epitomizes the qualities the appellation sup-
posedly signifies, the word’s meaning is absent, detached from meaning.
In other words, Ray Charles is a genius because Frank Sinatra called him
one, which marks the authority of Sinatra, not the genius of Charles.
Without Sinatra, Charles exists outside language; he is the necessary foil,
in fact, to Sinatra’s bid to own the idea of, and meaning behind, “genius.”
In turn, if Sinatra had failed to name Charles a genius, then Charles and
his talents would have been effectively silenced.

The same pertains to history. The written records state that “Columbo”
discovered America, and even if that’s not true, what passes as truth are
the formal, institutional accounts. Fixed and seemingly univocal-often
delivered in an imperturbable, passive, third-person voice-the language
of white record controls what is and what is not history, what is told and
what is censored. While many other studies have looked to Ursa’s stories
and blues as explosive, raucous alternatives to the history old man Cor-
regidora engendered-a first-person voice of riotous expletives and fierce

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“I SAID NOTHING” 49

images to offset the dispassionate voice of textbooks or habeas corpus-it
is important also to examine why the old blues singer does not have to
spell out for Ursa what he’s trying to say. This enigmatic “something” he
wants to talk with her about is how white silencing works: the perpetual
and pervasive threat of lost naming, lost history, lost language.

So even though whiteness as a self-conscious ideology is largely absent
in Corregidora, another way in which silence presents itself as a powerful
antidiscourse is the novel’s handling of whiteness, specifically its func-
tion as the great silencer behind and in Ursa’s narrative. Whiteness is the
“something” that deletes the legal documents testifying to Great Gram
and Gram’s enslavement, that authorizes Mutt’s attempts to stifle Ursa,
and that conceals the ethnic background of old man Corregidora and, as a
result, Ursa’s potential complicity in practices of racial and gender sup-
pression.5

Considered as a threatening silencer, then, whiteness manifests itself
in Corregidora by, first, muffling certain aspects of Ursa’s family history,
in particular the history of Brazilian slavery, at least as defined by lex
scripta. Many of the events from slavery that Ursa’s foremothers recall
were initially codified in written accounts before being expunged. But as
Ursa’s Gram suggests, written documents are but fickle versions of his-
tory. “[T]he officials burned all the papers,” she tells Ursa, “cause they
wanted to play like what had happened before never did happen” (Jones
1975, 79). But Gram remembers what really happened in Brazil and bears
witness to it via oral stories and the body. Ursa’s foremothers tell her that
whites “can burn the papers but they can’t burn conscious, Ursa. And
that’s what makes the evidence.. ., the verdict” (22). As examined in the
previous section, Ursa is expected to make generations (girls) and to tell
them of the horror, the humiliation, and the sexual exploitation of living
as a slave woman in Brazil; her foremothers believe passing down story is
the only way to combat the erasure of their version of history.

Yet this tactic, strangely enough, potentially sustains the hazard of
whiteness as a powerful silencer, for the implicit danger of rewriting the
history of slavery is that one also rewrites white terrorism. In some way,
the retelling of the tale solidifies white despotism and, in effect, the
importance of white record as something that must be acknowledged as
well as disputed. Ursa says, “I can’t make generations. And even if I still
had my womb, even if the first baby had come-what would I have done
then? Would I have kept it up? Would I have been like her [Mama], or them
[Gram and Great Gram]?” (60). She interrogates, insistent, “How many
generations had to bow to [old man Corregidora’s] genital fantasies? ” (59).
Thus, even if Ursa could have extended her foremothers’ oral history, it is
a chronicle of sexual violence, of black female subjectivity as someone
else’s genital fantasies-and Ursa is not so sure she wants to transmit
such terrorism. Indeed, not only does Ursa suspend the storytelling ca-

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50 JENNIFER COGNARD-BLACK

dence along her own lineage, she refuses to reveal it to anyone else: “I
never really told [Mutt]. I only gave him pieces. A few more pieces than I’d
given Tadpole, but still pieces” (60). Ursa’s rhetoric of silence here is a
kind of withholding, a story that exists but, in the words at the conclusion
of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a story not to pass on (1987).

However, herein lies yet another conundrum: Corregidora’s readers
have access to the concentric circles of story through Ursa’s narrative
reveries-reveries that constitute the novel itself. On the one hand, then,
Ursa intends to move beyond the reality of slavery by participating in
silencing herself, by withholding language and the privilege of naming,
rending her objecthood by refusing to articulate its formulation. In this
manner, silence becomes a potent reconception of the real, a decision to
interrupt white narrative and whiteness’ capacity to repress other narra-
tives. Ursa’s silence is the same as no knowledge of history, of place and
space, intention and consequence, shame and bitterness; silence wipes
away the white lies that state that there is a world without blacks as
people. Ursa’s withheld speech crushes old man Corregidora with the
sheer force of her corporeal presence, her mute aspect, an ongoing, mate-
rial signifier that makes it obvious that this world is indeed full of black
people and black women’s instrumentality, full of black artistic geniuses
whether they are named as such or not.

On the other hand, the collective memories of Ursa’s foremothers
continue to exist in the world as history; once articulated, they take on a
life of their own, etched into Ursa’s body and psyche and into the sub-
stance of Ursa’s story to the reader. Their memories undermine the
stifling practices of whiteness: the lost slave titles, the enigmatic ancestry
of old man Corregidora, the social systems that sanction wanton brutality
against black women. A story “not to pass on” is also a story “not to be
passed on,” missed, given up, forgotten. Even if these memories are kept
to the margins of evocation in the text itself, withheld from other charac-
ters, outside the text Ursa reveals this history to her readership. Ursa asks
them (us) to note the present-absence of whiteness in her narrative and
comprehend its discursive menace. Thus, silence is in fact passed on, not
to another black girl-child but to an audience of women and men who, at
least in part, perpetuate certain kinds of silencing, who are themselves the
embodiment, the scripted bodies, of the threatening present-absence of
whiteness.

But it is not enough to focus on how absent whiteness attempts to
silence (or elicits strategic silence from) Corregidora’s black women char-
acters; in order to appreciate how whiteness affects the novel’s black men,
especially Mutt, one must examine, too, how racial ideology and racism
inflect the intellect and actions of masculine masters. To first consider a
Hegelian notion of the master-slave dialectic, “[tihe Master,” writes
Hegel,

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“I SAID NOTHING” 51

is the consciousness that exists for-itself … an existent-for-self-consciousness
that is mediated with itself through another consciousness…. [Tlhe Master
relates himself to the Slave mediately, through the independent existent; for
this is what captures the Slave; this is his chain [and] the Slave thus prove[s]
himself to be a dependent consciousness which has its ‘independence’ only in
Thinghood. (1807, 58-9)

In other words, the slave is granted autonomy only as Thing, as a
superficial liberty, and the master’s supposed independence-his capacity
to name the world around him-exists because of the slave’s dependence:
that obsequious dependence is the single mirror masters have from which
to view their own illusory freedom. Thus, Hegel concludes, the master “is
not certain of existence-for-self as the truth,” an uncertainty that main-
tains his need to display his dominance (61). Building from these precepts,
one might initially begin by asking how this dialectic plays itself out in
terms of the novel’s white, male masters and their control of language
(and, therefore, “reality”). For instance, when Tom Hirshorn attempts to
seduce and then shames Cat for rebuking him, how is the white man’s
need to silence Cat’s sexual autonomy both negated and reflected by Cat’s
actions? Or when old man Corregidora makes generations by raping first
his slaves and then his own daughters, and when one of these “kin”
threatens to bite off his penis-in effect threatening to break the transmis-
sion of the old man’s brutal narrative-how has the slavemaster’s reflec-
tion suddenly altered? How has Corregidora come to perform his own
dependency on his slave-whores?

Such questions are difficult to answer given the limited ways in which
a reader is explicitly shown white hegemony in Corregidora; few scenes
depict white, masculine agency. However, the lurking menace of white
threat facilitates a reading of Mutt as the instigator of domestic violence
against Ursa and her resulting inability to have generations. Mutt’s vio-
lent heterosexuality is an appropriation of the master-slave dialectic
engendered by white, masculine power and results in a desire to stifle
Ursa as well as a dependency on Ursa’s silence, both literal silence (i.e.,
not singing the blues to other men) as well as metaphorical (i.e., not
having children).

Ursa herself links Mutt to the legacy of white, masculine exploitation
her foremothers endured, asking, “But was what Corregidora had done to
her, to them, any worse than what Mutt had done to me… ?” (Jones 1975,
184). Like old man Corregidora’s abuse of Ursa’s family, Mutt takes on the
function of both slavemaster and rapist. For instance, at one point, Mutt
proclaims to the male patrons of Happy’s bar, “I got a piece of ass for sale,
anybody wont to bid on it? ” and at another juncture, Ursa admits, “When-
ever [Mutt] wanted it and I didn’t, he’d take me, because he knew that I
wouldn’t say, No, Mutt, or even if I had, sometimes I wonder about
whether he would have taken me anyway” (159, 156). In this manner,

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52 JENNIFER COGNARD-BLACK

Mutt reproduces the white man’s threat-especially his sexual threat-to
black women. Just as old man Corregidora needs Gram’s and Great Gram’s
abjection for his seeming authority, Mutt depends on Ursa’s compliance
as a silent black woman (a woman he knows won’t say, “No, Mutt”) for
the articulation of his masculine self.

Yet for all of Mutt’s psychic potency over Ursa’s narrative, akin to the
present-absence of whiteness, he is outside the story’s frame until the
final few pages. At the onset of the narrative, he is already barred from
Happy’s, Ursa’s place of work, but also from Ursa’s interior place, her
vagina as well as her divina. She confides, “He’s been barred from my
place too” (4). Throughout the rest of the novel, Mutt’s absence resurfaces
as emptiness, longing, relief, and, subtly, a hushed threat. Eventually Ursa
realizes that Mutt has vanished, that he isn’t going to crash Happy’s to get
at her. “Mutt never stood outside the window [of the bar] anymore. I never
even saw him by accident on the street… [,] and nobody I knew had seen
him…. It probably meant he really was gone” (74). Importantly, Mutt’s
permanent removal preserves Ursa from immediate dehumanization and
sexual humiliation. Although much of the novel is devoted to Ursa’s
embittered recollections of Mutt-her vexation over the consequences of
his malignity-having his flesh-and-blood body removed from the story
grants Ursa a narrative space to recast her and her foremothers’ sexual
abasement. Her imprisoned psyche is set free to lick its proverbial wounds
for a narrative gap of 22 years. Just as the slaveholder’s version of history
must be banished in order for the tradition of female silence to be resisted
and recast, Mutt must be not-there, except as an ominous ghost, so that
Ursa can figure out how to equalize heterosexual inequity, sidestep the
master-slave dialectic, and offer a model of sexual partnership that does
not demean but allows for mutual recognition of gender difference.

Thus, the crucial method of protecting herself against silencing white-
ness (including its agent, Mutt Thomas) is for Ursa to establish an anti-
discourse to the white imaginative landscape; and necessarily, Ursa must
conceive of herself as opposite to the forces that suppress, repudiate, and
erase her selfhood. Yet Ursa’s skin color and ability to pass are touched on
again and again, problematizing her own position as one beyond white-
ness and its discursive terrorism. Ursa is lighter than most blacks in the
novel (save her own foremothers): one woman, Sal, thinks she could
pass-if not as Anglo, then as Spanish-and a wealthy black man mis-
takes Ursa for Latina when he tries to pick her up: “You look like you
Spanish. Where you from?” (71). Ursa’s fair skin is directly equated with
danger by black women who think her beauty is defined by white at-
tributes, “light skin and good hair”: “Who’s that? Some new bitch from
out of town going be trying to take everybody’s husband away from
them? ” (73). Called a “red-headed heifer” (reminiscent of her own father’s
nickname for Gram, a “half-white heifer”), Ursa is legitimized by her
peers only when she marries Mutt, a dark-colored, “satin-black” man.

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“I SAID NOTHING” 53

Furthermore, Ursa keeps that “funny name” of hers, old man Corregidora’s
name, and her father’s nickname for her mama was “Correy. ” In fact, it is
her father’s resounding question-“How much was hate for Corregidora
and how much was love? “-that iterates Ursa’s racial dilemma: she is
perceived, and sometimes treated, as not-black yet she struggles against
Corregidora’s paternity and its complicated inheritance. Indeed, racial
passing and questions of racial identity are further confounded by the
obfuscation of old man Corregidora’s own heritage: “Corregidora himself
was looking like an Indian … so that this light black man looked more
like a white man than he did” (124). As such, Ursa acknowledges their
inexorable interconnectedness, the terrorizer and the terrorized, the white
menace and the black abject, the silencer and the silenced, when she says
Corregidora and she were “united at birth” (77).

Thus, Ursa must safeguard herself against the malicious legacy of old
man Corregidora by comprehending the master’s dependence upon the
slave for his power. Ursa’s understanding is part of becoming a black
woman unto herself, a “slave” who transcends thinghood. Although an
awakening of this sort does not invert the master-slave dialectic, once
Ursa finds out what Gram did to make Corregidora want to kill her (biting
his penis), or how Cat waylayed Tom Hirshorn’s advances (spilling coffee
grounds), she perceives how to challenge the white master’s supremacy
and domination through both domestic manipulation and outright physi-
cal resistance. She now knows herself to be powerful in her abjecthood:
the very creator of old man Corregidora’s supposed mastery, the mythic
black mother who bore him and his “dirty race.” In the dream where she
purges her body of his evil, his forced entry, and gives birth to a monster
with claws and hair “like white wings,” Ursa repudiates white language
but also delivers the self-stylized terrorist, enables his seeming ascen-
dancy while ultimately realizing her own productive force. Finally, then,
Ursa’s narrative of the silencing power of whiteness holds many of the
novel’s contradictions in suspension: insecurity and confidence, sover-
eignty and submission, strength and debility. Pervading all yet always in
the background, whiteness informs cultural myth at the same time it is
structured for cultural subversion. Thus, in Corregidora, the rhetoric of
silence vis-a-vis whiteness-in its various guises of historical erasure,
violent heterosexuality, and racial domination-is always, necessarily
present.

IV

Ursa’s foremothers equate storytelling with truth. “My great-grandmama
told my grandmama the part she lived through that my grandmama didn’t
live through and my grandmama told my mama what they both lived
through and my mama told me what they all lived through and we were

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54 JENNIFER COGNARD-BLACK

suppose to pass it down like that from generation to generation so we’d
never forget” (Jones 1975, 9). Toni Morrison concurs that there is a need
to relate personal stories, especially in matters of oppression (1993). “To
enforce [racial] invisibility through silence is to allow the black body a
shadowless participation in the dominant cultural body. According to this
logic, every well-bred instinct argues against noticing and forecloses adult
discourse” (9-10). And yet as soon as an epistemology, such as literary
discourse, speaks about heterogeneity and the infringement of social
codes on the part of writers of color, it homogenizes the instance, links it
up with a system, and allows it to be co-opted as part of a dominant
paradigm. As such a paradox evolves: speak of a thing, and you conven-
tionalize it; leave it unspoken, and you may very well erase it. This
paradox is central to African American colonialist stories in which giving
voice and portraying multiple voices are necessary to demonstrating and
witnessing alternative accounts of cultural memory. Yet in the world of
material bodies-or as Ursa calls it, “the life not spoken”-historically
blacks have been forced to employ silence for safety. Evelynn Hammonds
provides a contemporary example: “silence about sexuality on the part of
black women academics is not more a ‘choice’ than was the silence
practiced by early twentieth-century black women. This production of
silence instead of speech is an effect of the institutions such as the
academy which are engaged in the commodification of Otherness” (1994,
135). And, in fact, Ursa’s silences are often strategic, willful, a resistance
to the alien talk of masculine violence, white violence, sexual violence,
even when her silences are unsuccessful.

For instance, in the hospital after her hysterectomy, Ursa raves. “You
was cussing everybody out,” Tadpole tells her, “They said they didn’t
know what you was” (Jones 1975, 167). It is a rush of noise, “hard
cussing, ” an unintelligible rant with “words they ain’t never heard before.
They kept saying, ‘What is she, a gypsy?”‘ (8). When the subaltern speaks,
she is misunderstood by the owners of culture; she is exoticized, foreign,
her words mysterious and incomprehensible to scientia. Tadpole, at least
at some level, grasps what Ursa is trying to tell him, relating to her that
she “kept saying something about a man treat a woman like a piece of
shit” (167). Her speech, then, is a form of anger, rebellion, but ultimately
ineffectual since Tadpole-a member of her discourse community-hears
her words and then proceeds to treat her like a piece of shit. Ursa is
invisible in her own speech-labeled a “gypsy,” unintelligible-and, con-
sequently, she ceases to own her language in the moment she ceases to be
heard within it. Ursa’s moment of voice, her attempt at creating a unique
parole, backfires, backlashes.

All the events I’ve discussed in terms of womb-lack and whiteness are
ones in which Ursa meets adversity with reticence, writing the language
of the novel as a language of silence, highlighting her refusal to speak by

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“I SAID NOTHING” 55

informing her reader that, indeed, she’s not speaking. She refuses to
inform Mutt or Tadpole about her pregnancy before the hysterectomy;
rather, she tells Tadpole, “I can’t talk to you about it” when he alludes to
the lost child (8); she resists telling Tadpole that Mutt isn’t going to come
back anymore (55); she never answers Tad when he asks, “What’s wrong? “;
she responds with silence when Tadpole informs her that his grand-
mother was white; she won’t discuss prostitution with Cat: “Now we
ain’t talking about that” (30); though irritated, she doesn’t acknowledge
Sal’s claim that she could pass for Spanish; she will not talk to Cat about
lesbian desire: “I didn’t know what she meant, but I didn’t ask. She kept
looking at me. I wouldn’t look at her” (66);6 she doesn’t explain to her
childhood friend May Alice why she is not her friend anymore: “‘You my
best friend, ain’t you?’ [asked May Alice]. I said nothing” (145); when
listening to her foremothers’ stories, she is expected not to speak-if she
does, she is often admonished to keep quiet. “Don’t ask them that,” says
Mama, “The only reason I’m telling you is so you won’t ask them” (61).

Ursa also expects and extracts silence from others. She starts to slap
Jeffrene to shut her up, “I was going to if she said another word” (39); she
pretends not to hear Cat when Cat jokes about Ursa not having a man; she
wishes Tadpole would have not said he loved her: “I was thinking I’d only
wanted him to love me without saying anything about it” (55). In fact, her
relationships are predicated on silence, especially in moments of tension.
With Tadpole: “He said nothing, and we got in the car. When I looked over
at him, he was looking as if he was mad at me. When he saw me watching
him, he looked ahead quickly, and turned on the ignition” (20). With May
Alice: “I wanted to say something real nasty to her, but instead I ran across
the railroad track without looking…. But after that day … me and May
Alice didn’t speak to each other, and then finally her and her mama
moved” (146). Most strikingly, with Mutt:

He said, “Whose woman is you?”
I wouldn’t look at him.
“‘Whose woman is you’ I asked.”
I still wouldn’t answer.
“You got your bitch on today, ain’t you?”
I stood there.
“I said, ‘Ain’t you got your bitch on today?”‘
I think I got up enough nerve to go inside just because I wanted to get rid of him.
(147)

By revoking her part of these potential dialogues with Tadpole, May Alice,
and Mutt, Ursa evades having other people “own” her with their desires
or needs or anger; put simply, she refuses to be Mutt’s or anyone else’s
woman. More than once Ursa distinguishes between life expressed in
language and the life of experience, “The lived life, not the spoken one”

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56 JENNIFER COGNARD-BLACK

(108). Silence keeps her true to the lived life, defying the entanglement
and possible misstatement that comes from verbal exchange. By not
speaking, Ursa remains aloof, refusing to debase herself by haggling over
representation. She doubts the validity of the spoken life from the start;
even as a child, Great Gram smacks her for asking, “You telling the truth,
Great Gram?” (14). Engagement without engaging refuses the expecta-
tion-even definition-of narrative, and in this manner, Ursa remains her
own sovereign, “whole” in a way that Mama, Gram, and Great Gram
(already dissolved in language) cannot. The intangible mysteries and
particulars that make up Ursa’s inner life are meticulously and purpose-
fully sealed off by her refrain, “I said nothing,” a kind of negative blues, a
phrase that iterates and enacts the barrens she’s experienced her whole
life.

And “I said nothing” further resonates because it revises accepted
notions about how language functions in novels, implying that it is not
necessary to portray character or consciousness through words that speak
or act, that reveal or testify or demonstrate. This interpretation substi-
tutes for conventional narrative form a way of speaking that effaces as it
asserts, like a black hole, eating up the very text it creates, perhaps
reclaiming the processes of “eating the Other” enacted by old man Cor-
regidora, the Portuguese, Mutt, and others. At a local level, withholding
within the moment of telling provides Ursa Corregidora an alternative
technique for telling her story of sexual and racial violence, one that turns
accepted narrative mediums on their ears by, in fact, denying “ears,” and
other organs of language, a comfortable or accustomed mode of interac-
tion. Each time Ursa proffers and revokes her speech, she withholds but
also, simultaneously, she preserves. A life always spoken and only spoken
will always be subject to control, revision, and erasure.

On another level, however, recognizing a rhetoric of silence offers a
multilayered approach for understanding narratives that map the interre-
lated histories of gender and race domination. Identifying the self-con-
scious presence of silence in such works can open up interpretations of
these narratives, teaching readers how to appreciate rhetorical refusals in
tandem with rhetorical assertions. As such, my investigation allows for
another way of conceiving literary analysis beyond the precepts of what
one might call “speech criticism.” In terms of learning how to read
Corregidora, I find Jones’s own preoccupations with listening compelling
evidence that I am being asked by this novel, by Ursa and by Gayl Jones,
to be my own best listener. “I [am] particularly interested,” says Jones in
one of her essays, “in oral traditions of storytelling . .. in which there is
always the consciousness and importance of the hearer, even in the
interior monologues where the storyteller becomes her own hearer” (Tate
1983, 91).

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“I SAID NOTHING” 57

Listening, in this sense, is not an activity of passive reception where the
hearer absorbs the words or omissions of another; rather, listening is
work, a productive strain. Listening is that tender and precarious act of
attempting true empathy, of putting oneself in the proverbial shoes of
another character or person, of taking the lesson, even if that lesson is hard
to take. Listening is one moment where history is made, and in Corregidora,
listening on the part of a reader is a process of acknowledging that Ursa
and her foremothers can reveal something cutting and vital about systems
of meaning-making, a savage use of race and literacy as means for domi-
nation or an antiracist critical praxis that refuses silence as witness.
Corregidora continues to teach me that a rhetoric of silence carries a real-
world capacity to change my notions of reading and my habits of reader-
ship, even as it potentially evades my capacity to understand the fullness
of its complexities.

Jennifer Cognard-Black is an assistant professor in the Department of
English at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. She studies the reception
histories of andpersonal correspondence among nineteenth-century women
writers in England and America. She is particularly interested in histori-
cal reading practices and how the history of professionalization affects
the aestheticism of women novelists. Correspondence should be ad-
dressed to Cognard-Black at Department of English, 18952 E. Fisher
Road, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, St. Mary’s City, MD 20686; jcognard@
osprey. smcm. edu

Notes

1. I am indebted to a number of individuals who read this essay and commented
on its ideas. To Debra Moddelmog, I owe the most thanks. She read and edited
this piece through numerous incarnations, providing me with invaluable
resources and continuous encouragement. Barbara Christian made me think
harder about how Ursa’s blues work in tandem with her rhetoric of silence.
Valerie Gray Lee furnished me with hard-to-find psychoanalytic readings of
black women’s texts. Both Andrea Lunsford and Elizabeth MacLeod Walls
gave me excellent advice on clarity and style. The anonymous reviewers for
the NWSA Journal and the journal’s editor, Margaret McFadden, helped me
hone and clarify the final version. And Anne Cognard, as always, buoyed my
spirits and re-energized my thinking. I could not have finished this essay
without the contributions of these readers. Throughout this essay, I mean
“rhetoric” in the literary rather than the Aristotelian sense of the term.

2. Employing both historical and formalistic approaches, these critics have
sought to establish Corregidora in relation to the African American oraliterary

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58 JENNIFER COGNARD-BLACK

tradition and to interpret Ursa’s voice as representative of black female iden-
tity. They have examined aspects such as African American cultural legacies
(e.g., blues singing, folktalk); matrilineal patterns of storytelling; and the
articulation of autonomous, female sexuality in relation to rape, incest, do-
mestic violence, and prescriptive reproduction. Studies of interest are Melvin
Dixon (1984), Madhu Dubey (1994 and 1995), Jerilyn Fisher (1978), Janice
Harris (1981), Rebecca Hyman (1991), Valerie Gray Lee (1980), Francoise
Lionnet (1993), Sally Robinson (199 1), and Gay Wilentz (1994). For compelling
discussions of the revolution of novelistic form in Corregidora, see Joyce
Pettis (1990), Claudia Tate (1979), Jerry Ward (1982), and John Wideman
(1977).

3. Since the publication of Tillie Olsen’s Silences (1965), interest in the personal
and political clout of women’s language has been a hallmark of white feminist
criticism (the work of Adrienne Rich, Marge Piercy, Helene Cixous, and
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar leaps to mind). In turn, over fifteen years ago
when Audre Lorde famously dared black women to transform their silence
into language and action, she instigated an entire oeuvre of antiracist criti-
cism dedicated to, in the words of Lorde, making black women’s thoughts
“verbal and shared, even at the risk of having [them] bruised or misunder-
stood” (1984, 40). Perhaps the most important study in the past few years that
surveys silence from a range of feminist as well as antiracist critical perspec-
tives is Elaine Hedges’s and Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s Listening to Silences:
New Essays in Feminist Criticism (1994), although there are also articles of
interest in Gudrun Grabher’s and Jessner Ulrike’s Semantics of Silences in
Linguistics and Literature (1996).

4. Others have argued that Ursa attempts to reconstruct her splintered body, and
thus her inability to articulate history, as the blues. It is true that Ursa-as-
songwriter desires connection and insight, a clear understanding of where she
comes from and who has shaped her; she wants to be made sense of, to sing
what she calls a new world song. Longing for the narrative authority she sees
in her foremothers-the power to enforce, designate, persuade, inspire, be-
get-Ursa desires the power of an author. But it is crucial to remember that
Ursa’s blues also carry an inherent silence, ultimately something more than
the song’s words can capture: Ursa’s awareness of meaning without language,
of witnessing without verbalization. “[I]f you understood me, Mama, you’d
see I was trying to explain it, in blues, without words, the explanation some-
where behind the words” (66).

5. In recent years, there has been a call among antiracist theorists for studies of
how whiteness informs American literature. For instance, Toni Morrison
(1 993) argues that there is an inclination in contemporary literary criticism to
pigeonhole black characters as victims of violence and systematic maltreat-
ment. As Morrison points out, although it is precisely a consequence of these
inquiries that anything at all has been achieved on matters of literature and
race, such “well-established stud[ies] should be joined with another, equally

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“I SAID NOTHING” 59

important one: the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it. It seems both
poignant and striking how avoided and unanalyzed is the effect of racist
inflection on the subject” (11). Requiring a deconstruction of “blinding white-
ness, ” Morrison asks literary critics to examine symbols and images of aggran-
dizing whiteness at the expense of ineffectual, contained, or dead black char-
acters.

In addition, bell hooks (1992) suggests that readers pursue an evaluation
of whiteness in novels and writings by black authors, asking how white
characters in these novels are mirrored, negated, and/or absorbed by the
presence of blacks and blackness. Hooks maintains that black writers inhabit
a privileged place from which to comprehend and critique white culture; like
the exile, hooks argues, blacks are in a cultural position in the United States
to stand removed from the workings of dominant culture.

6. It is interesting to note that, like whiteness, lesbian desire is a silenced topic
in the novel, one fraught with distinctions of race and racial identity. When
Cat, a friend of Ursa’s and a lesbian, attempts to justify her lifestyle, in typical
fashion Ursa withholds any response to her; the dialogue at the very beginning
of this essay is the heart of this “conversation.” In addition, toward the end of
the book, the novel’s two proclaimed lesbians-Cat and Jeffrene-are depos-
ited in a storyline on “the other side of the street,” keeping lesbian desire at
arm’s distance from Ursa. “[Jeffrene] strangled any impulse I had to go see
Catherine. And after that day, whenever I saw Jeffrene, I’d cross the street”
(Jones 1975, 178). Like the relegated Mutt, the repression of lesbian desire in
the text implicates Ursa’s sense of her own black female sexuality.

It is worth mentioning, however, that Ursa is obviously attracted to Cat
and fears her own lesbian inklings. That she so quickly and efficiently silences
this desire as an alternative may be predicated on the fact that Ursa’s symbolic
is so enmeshed with the violence perpetrated by men’s organs upon women’s;
it is possible that Cat’s lesbianism is outside of Ursa’s system of meaning and
therefore creates a kind of identity-panic that Ursa refuses to concede. Of
course, Jones’s next novel, Eva’s Man (1976), allows the lesbian alternative as
a possibility.

References

Cixous, H6lene. 1975. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Trans. Keith and Paula Cohen.
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1(4):875-93.

Dixon, Melvin. 1984. “Singing a Deep Song: Language as Evidence in the Novels
of Gayl Jones.” In Black Women Writers (1950-1 980): A Critical Evaluation,
ed. Mari Evans, 236-48. New York: Anchor Press.

Dubey, Madhu. 1994. Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

. 1995. “Gayl Jones and the Matrilineal Metaphor of Tradition.” Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and Society 20(21):245-67.

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60 JENNIFER COGNARD-BLACK

Fisher, Jerilyn. 1978. “From Under the Yoke of Race and Sex: Black and Chicano
Women’s Fiction of the Seventies.” Minority Voices 2(2):1-12.

Grabher, Gudrun M., and Jessner Ulrike, eds. 1996. Semantics of Silences in
Linguistics and Literature. Heidelberg, Germany: Universitatsverlag.

Harris, Janice. 1981. “Gayl Jones’s Corregidora.” Frontiers 5(3):1-5.
Hammonds, Evelynn. 1994. “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female

Sexuality.” Differences 6(2&3): 126-45.
Hedges, Elaine, and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, eds. 1994. Listening to Silences: New

Essays in Feminist Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. (1807) 1994. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,

trans. Howard P. Kainz. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
hooks, bell. 1992. “Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination.” In Cul-

tural Studies, eds. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler,
338-46. New York: Routledge.

Hyman, Rebecca. 1991. “Women as Figures of Exchange in Gayl Jones’s Cor-
regidora.” Xanadu: A Literary Journal 14:40-5 1.

Jones, Gayl. 1975. Corregidora. Boston: Beacon Press.
. 1976. Eva’s Man. New York: Random House.

Lee, Valerie Gray. 1980. “The Use of Folktalk in Novels by Black Women Writ-
ers.” CLA Journal 23(3):266-72.

Lionnet, Fran~oise. 1993. “Geographies of Pain: Captive Bodies and Violent Acts
in the Fictions of Myriam Warner-Vieyra, Gayl Jones, and Bessie Head.”
Callaloo 16(1l: 132-52.

Lorde, Audre. 1984. “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.”
In her Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde, 40-4. Freedom,
CA: The Crossing Press.

McKible, Adam. 1994. “‘These are the Facts of the Darky’s History’: Thinking
History and Reading Names in Four African American Texts. ” African Ameri-
can Review 28(2):223-35.

Morrison, Toni. 1987. Beloved. New York: Knopf.
. 1993. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New

York: Random House.
Olsen, Tillie. 1965. Silences. New York: Dell.
Pettis, Joyce. 1990. “‘She Sung Back in Return’: Literary (Re)vision and Transfor-

mation in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora.” College English 52(7):787-99.
Robinson, Sally. 1991. Engendering the Subject: Gender and Self-Representation

in Contemporary Women’s Fiction. Albany: State University of New York
Press.

Tate, Claudia. 1979. “Corregidora: Ursa’s Blues Medley.” Black American Lit-
erature Forum 13:139-41.

, ed. 1983. Black Women Writers at Work. New York: The Continuum
Publishing Company.

Ward, Jerry W. 1982. “Escape from Trublem: The Fiction of Gayl Jones.” Callaloo
5(3):95-104.

Wideman, John. 1977. “Defining the Black Voice in Fiction.” Black American
Literature Forum 11:79-82.

Wilentz, Gay. 1994. “Gayl Jones’s Oraliterary Explorations.” African American
Review 28(1):141-5.

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• Article Contents

p. [40]
p. 41
p. 42
p. 43
p. 44
p. 45
p. 46
p. 47
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• Issue Table of Contents

NWSA Journal, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Spring, 2001), pp. i-xiii+1-217
Front Matter [pp. i-209]
On Unprotected Females, Violence, and Survival in the New World: Introduction [pp. ix-xiii]
Speaking of Cheryl Miller: Interrogating the Lesbian Taboo on a Women’s Basketball Newsgroup [pp. 1-21]
Between L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and Lyric: The Poetry of Pink-Collar Resistance [pp. 22-39]
“I Said Nothing”: The Rhetoric of Silence and Gayl Jones’s “Corregidora” [pp. 40-60]
Old Magic and New Fury: The Theaphany of Afrekete in Audre Lorde’s “Tar Beach” [pp. 61-85]
Subtext and Countertext in “Muriel’s Wedding” [pp. 86-104]
“To and Fro”: Deepening the Soul Life of Women’s Studies through Play [pp. 105-125]
Observations
Collaborative Expeditions in the Academy: Housekeeping and the Art of the Infinite [pp. 126-138]
NWSA Presidential Address
Reflections on “2000 Subversions: Women’s Studies and the ’21st Century'” [pp. 139-149]
Book Reviews
Review: untitled [pp. 150-152]
Review: untitled [pp. 152-156]
Review: untitled [pp. 156-164]
Review: untitled [pp. 164-169]
Review: untitled [pp. 170-172]
Review: untitled [pp. 172-176]
Review: untitled [pp. 176-179]
Review: untitled [pp. 179-183]
Review: untitled [pp. 184-189]
Review: untitled [pp. 189-193]
Review: untitled [pp. 193-194]
Review: untitled [pp. 195-198]
Review: untitled [pp. 199-200]
Review: untitled [pp. 201-203]
Books Received February 2000-July 2000 [pp. 210-217]
Back Matter

Memory, History and Self-Reconstruction in Gayl Jones’s “Corregidora”
Author(s): Sirène Harb
Source: Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Spring, 2008), pp. 116-136
Published by: Indiana University Press
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Memory, History and Self-Reconstruction
in Gay I Jones’s Corregidor

a

Sir?ne Harb
American University of Beirut, Lebanon

This article explores how Gayl Jones s Corregidora constructs, through the journey of its
main protagonist Ursa Corregidora, a viable model for dealing with the painful legacy

of slavery, oppression and haunting by the past. The process of self-redefinition in which
Ursa engages is based on the reconfiguration of family and sexuality and the hybridiza
tion

of her relationship
to individ?alas well as collective narratives.

After probing
Urs

as

complex psychological journey, the
article examines the main elements

mediating the
r?in

scription of her life
narrative into a broader context ??/”m?tissage involving

sexual and

historical resistance, anchored in the story of
Palmares as a Brazilian maroon community

(quilombo). Finally\ the article analyzes the implications and resonances of this model

of
revision/reclamation

for Gayl Jones
and her theorization of the

interconnectedness
of

struggles against oppression in Brazil and the United States.

Keywords: African-American literature / Corregidora I hybridity / gender /

history / memory

In Corregidora, Gayl Jones explores the intersubjective dimensions of storytelling
and its repercussions

on the lives of four generations of Corregidora women,

namely Ursa, her mother, grandmother and great grandmother. Ursa’s
ances

tors, who suffered from the absence of written records reflecting the inhumanity of

their experiences, inscribe such
stories on their bodies.They

ensure their continuity

by bearing children who would “leave evidence” through the transmission of the

ancestral legacy. The Corregidora women are thus haunted by the traumatizing
burden of history and memory; saturated with stories of injustices, they do not

realize that they are perpetuating the logic, spirit and politics of oppression by

passing traumatic legacies and haunting tales to their offspring.

Living
a

repressive version of history, these
women are forced to adhere to a

prescribed life story that submerges them in victimization and conditions their

hearts, minds, consciousness and perceptions. After internalizing the
stories of

Great Gram so intensely that they “become” this
ancest

or

during the process of

narration, they pass her
instructions to their descendents through storytelling.

However, “passing instructions”
in a

prescriptive spirit contradicts the ethics of

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History and Self-Reconstruction in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora 117

storytelling and narration since both rely on the establishment of
a dialogic/interac

tive relationship between
teller and listener, catalyzing processes

of transformation

of one’s consciousness and paving the way for the realization of the importance
of

autonomy and responsibility. Oblivious
to the ethics of transmission and obsessed

by Great Gram’s visions of the ultimate act of testifying against Corregidora, the

Portuguese slave owner, the Corregidora
women become so powerfully

immersed

in histories of domination and suffering that they are incapable of critically per

ceiving the past and integrating it into their life story. Paralyzing their struggle
for transformation and wholeness, the ancestral stories shape immutable versions

of memory that catalyze the perpetuation of the dehumanizing and objectifying
effects of psychological enslavement.

Discussions of Corregidora
revolve around the ambivalent and traumatic reper

cussions of history and memory (Athey; Rushdy; Simon), oppression and the

enslavement of consciousness (Ward), the novelistic bridging of the histories of

Brazilian and American slavery (Coser) and the negative portrayal of black men

and their relationship to black women (Barksdale; Reckley). A number of critics

link the issue of the reclamation of subjectivity and identity to the voicing of a

private discourse (Dixon), the reconfiguration of black women’s sexuality and voice

(duCille; Gottfried; Horvitz) and the performance of blues songs (Byerman; Har

ris; Lindemann; Pettis). Other critics discuss the role of the book in the revision of
the black matrilineal literary tradition (Dubey; Pettis) and the historicization of

the family as well as the mother-daughter relationship (Kubitschek).

Differing from these critical interventions, I examine the intersubjective
dimensions of storytelling and memory as well as their role in the emplotment
of hybrid versions of history and identity in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora. This process
contributes to the transformation of the gendered and racialized body into a site of

inscription of multivocal counternarratives that work against the ancestral perpetu
ation of the oppressor’s logic. Specifically, I show how the memory of a fugitive
slave community catalyzes processes o? m?tissage through which Jones’s protagonist,

Ursa Corregidora, differently conceives and
reconstructs familial legacy, personal

history and sexuality. Empowered by such
a

reconciliatory move, Ursa
is able to

reclaim the ethics and dialogism of storytelling and reconfigure sites of hybrid
ization, bringing together the sexual and the historical, the individual and the

collective, the Afro-Brazilian past and the African-American present.
Before proceeding with my analysis, I would like to define the term m?tissage

and determine its importance for the exploration
of Ursas experiences. I follow

Fran?oise Lionnet’s definition of this term as designating the mechanisms of

hybridization and cross-cultural interactions informing processes of resistance
to

colonial domination and historical marginalization. What distinguishes m?tissage
as a special form of hybridization is that it emphasizes a particular category of
cross-cultural

exchange and reading practices; this category involves the processes
that enter into play to produce the personal and give it its particular historical and

political character. For Lionnet, m?tissage
is:

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118 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 31, Number 3

a form of bricolage, in the
sense used by Claude L?vi-Strauss, but as an aesthetic

concept it encompasses far more: it brings together biology and history, anthropology

and philosophy, linguistics and literature. Above all, it is a reading practice that allows

[one] to bring out the interreferential nature of a particular set of texts, which I believe

to be of fundamental importance for the understanding of many postcolonial cultures.

(Autobiographical 8)

Located at border zones, m?tissage is also
a

praxis based
on the personal and serving

to shape a space for the articulation of new visions of the self in ways that bypass
traditional hierarchies and dichotomies (Autobiographical6). This approach results
in the “reconstruction] [of] new imaginative spaces where power configurations,
inevitable as they are, may be reorganized to allow for fewer dissymmetries in the

production and circulation of knowledge” (6). In this respect, it is worth noting
that Lionnet’s theorization o? m?tissage prefigures Homi Bhabha’s characterization
of hybridization

as
creating

a third, unclassifiable zone, an “interstitial passage

between fixed identifications open[ing] up the possibility of a cultural hybridity
that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy” (4).

In her books, Lionnet mainly
uses

m?tissage
to

analyze postcolonial representa
tions and constructions of memory and subjectivity. By applying this interpretive

model to Corregidora, I would like to show how m?tissage can be used equally to

explore
the intricacies of African-American literature. In fact, m?tissage

is
particu

larly relevant to the analysis of this type of literature because it addresses the issue
of the politicization and historicization of the personal, which is a contested space
for slaves and their descendents. At the same time, it is based on a vision of hybrid

ity that reclaims multiplicity and challenges the binary logic of master narratives
based on traditional dichotomies and polarizations.

The consequences and repercussions of using m?tissage
as an

analytical tool

will be explored through its application to the study of Ursa Corregidoras expe
riences and survival strategies. In the particular

case of this character, m?tissage
involves the braiding of the personal and sexual on the one hand and the cultural,
historical and linguistic domains on the other. Consequently, m?tissage becomes
an ideological signifier that contributes to the negotiation of the complexity of

this African-American character’s experience. Such
a

negotiation
is

possible
since

m?tissage points not only to the impossibility of total immersion in the present but

also to the destructive, if not deadly, effect of clinging to a monolithic version of

the past. As such, m?tissage catalyzes processes
of critical mediation and conscious

self-refashioning that work against stagnant versions of history and identity.
As the novel shows, such versions mark the lives of Ursa Corregidora and

her family, leaving their mark on their perception of self. In her quest for self

refashioning, Ursa revisits, and works through,
the controversial implications of the

transgenerational tales that dominated her childhood, in order to determine the

limitations that she should impose upon the invasive slave past and its haunting
details. Throughout this process, she acquires a deeper insight into the importance
and perils of remembering ancestral narratives. The family history Ursa is told and

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History and Self-Reconstruction in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora 119

retold not only revolves around the experiences of Great Gram and Gram,
it is

also informed by the perspective
of various narrators who inherit the generational

tales. In addition, it is mythologized because of the temporal gap separating the

storytellers from the people who have had a direct experience of the events. As
Ursa puts it, “My great-grandmama told my grandmama the part she lived through
that my grandmama didn’t live through and my grandmama told my mama what

they both lived through and my mama told me what they all lived through and we

were suppose to pass it down like that from generation
to

generation
so we’d never

forget” (9). When Ursa tries to tell the stories of her family, she discovers that they
have acquired a legendary character and have become “prescripted” (Horvitz 251),

losing the intimacy that generational narratives
must preserve to enrich and nurture

personal history. Ursa is fully aware of the importance of her familial legacy; she

attempts to probe its repercussions on her life and its significance for her sense of

continuity. However, she refuses
to become prisoner of that history

or to receive

instructions
prescribing her feelings about the past.

The past Ursa has been handed down by Great Gram is limiting and imprison
ing because it is exclusively inspired by “dictated feelings”: Great Gram not only
passes on stories to Ursa, she also tells her how to feel about these stories reflecting
the ancestral experiences

on the Brazilian plantation. Having completely integrated
the coercive language used by Great Gram in her account of the brutal rapes she
had been subjected to in Brazil, Ursa is obsessed by the insistence on continuity
conveyed through the discourse of her ancestor, which is impersonal and full of

repetitive refrains. In these refrains, Corregidora
is a central word connected to

a number of coercive situations that are narrativized, forming
the story Ursa is

instructed to tell and transmit to future generations. This protagonist feels “fated”
to

literally and figuratively reproduce the details of the ancestral story since she
was

forced to believe totally
in its truthfulness and never question its veracity. In fact,

when five-year-old Ursa asks her great grandmother after hearing the story, “You

telling the truth, Great Gram?” her maternal
ancestor reacts

violently by slapping
her and saying:

When I’m telling you something don’t you ever ask if I’m lying. Because they didn’t

want to leave no evidence of what they done?so it couldn’t be held against them. And

I’m leaving evidence. And you got to leave evidence too. And your children got to leave

evidence. And when it come time to hold up the evidence, we got to have evidence

to hold up. That’s why they burned all the papers, so there wouldn’t be no evidence to

hold up against them. (14)

In this passage, Great Gram specifically refers to the burning of slave trade docu

ments, which was ordered at the beginning of the 1890s by the minister of finances
in Brazil, Rui Barbosa (Coser 129). Unconsciously acting as an oppressor and ask

ing for “unqualified acceptance” of her story (Dubey 253), Ursa’s great grandmother
teaches her a harsh lesson about the consequences of doubting the veracity of the

Corregidora legacy. The little girl’s question about the authenticity of the ancestral
narrative is countered by physical punishment and

a continuous stress on her own

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120 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 31, Number 3

and her children’s duty
to “leave evidence.” Great Gram’s story, characterized by

“absolute truth-telling claims,” reproduces the spirit of oppression
as it

“replicates
the masterful and repressive gestures of the dominant tradition it tries to supplant”

(Dubey 253). Consequently, five-year-old Ursa learns that her questions belong to
a forbidden realm; they allow her great grandmother to reproduce violence on her

body. As a result, early in her life, this protagonist is presented with a distorted view
of communication as a form of re-enactment of Corregidoras abusive assaults. She

is also taught that she
must “make generations” who would “leave evidence” and

keep the family tale alive; in other words, Ursa is ordered to transform her body
into a “site of history’s inscription” (Horvitz 248).

This protagonist, however, is able to notice the loss of the emotional quality of
Great Gram’s stories. Ursa recalls that as a young girl, she heard her great grand
mother recount stories as though she

were
transported by the words conveying

the depth of the sexual and psychological abuse Corregidora had forced her to go

through: “It was as if the words were helping her, as if the words repeated again and

again could

be

a substitute for memory, were somehow more than the memory. As

if it were only the words that kept her anger” (11). Great Gram’s use of the “words”

defies the ethics of storytelling in which traditions are “never separate from the

people, the human implications”; as Jones says, this multidimensional art is “about

all… [of one’s] connections as a human being” (“Gayl Jones: An Interview” 693).
The memories Ursa has of her great grandmother’s tales of slavery do

not leave

room for ambivalence as a “human implication”
because Great Gram forced this

protagonist
never to

question the mnemonic projections of the ancestral story. Her

tales presented “absolute” versions of the past, characterized by evil and
intense

victimization. With its polarization of past and present and its lack of ambivalence
and paradoxes, the ancestral narrative does

not leave any space for Ursa to explore
her personal story. Having

been transformed into a rigid, monolithic entity, the

intergenerational tale reinforces the obsessive potential
of the ghosts of the past.

As a myth characterized by resistance
to mutations and interactive exchanges, the

memory of Ursa’s maternal ancestors has been frozen in space and time, in
a state

of stasis and stagnation. Moreover, the legend told and retold by Great Gram is

absorbed by Ursa, who repeats it without realizing its implications on her life story.

Unconsciously, she fixes this narrative and distances it from her sense of self instead

of using it as a tool of revision and reclamation. Ursa is thus held prisoner by the

colonizing power of her great grandmother’s imitation of the dominant language
described by bell hooks as “a territory that limits and defines” (“‘this is'”296).

As Lynne Tirrell maintains, when people
recount a story, they articulate their

thoughts about
a number of events and characters, presenting their personal per

spective and
a set of judgments. Those who listen

to a story, however, “confront
a

perspective,
a character, and a set of judgments” (116). The

notion of “confronta

tion” acquires
a

deeper significance
in the context of the intergenerational heritage/

narration whose repercussions shape the historical and social perspectives
of the

listener. “Confrontation” also constitutes a site of convergence of sympathy
and

resistance to stories, and it involves interplay between the subjectivities of the

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History and Self-Reconstruction in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora 121

teller’s and the listener’s experiences (116). Because of her belief in the immutability
of stories of the past, Great Gram has given Ursa the material to be transmitted
without developing her sense of respect for the “confrontational” and dialogic
essence

characterizing the process of storytelling and
transmission. Ursa perceives

her family history as a monolithic construct; her understanding of this history,
framed by her great grandmother’s

formulaic discourse and alienated from Ursa’s

sense of identity, paves the way for the composition of
a historic narrative based on

an authoritative form of discourse. This type of discourse does not allow for what

Edward M. Bruner describes as “dialogic narration,” which is involved in the proj
ect of shaping historical meanings and spaces of memory in a collective enterprise
based on continual processes of m?tissage. Confined by her great grandmother’s

narrative, Ursa is thus doomed to reproduce, through formulaic repetition, the

family legend and suffering.
Moreover, because of the monolithic and authoritative character of Great

Gram’s tale, Ursa becomes unable to healthily reconstruct her self through what
Annette Baier characterizes as a mechanism of psychological self-recreation. Baier

argues that simple consciousness is
not a sufficient catalyst for personhood, whose

construction necessitates a more reflective and reflexive consciousness of oneself

and the world. Such a consciousness not only involves
a “consciousness of stimuli

relevant to what in fact is self-maintenance in that world,” it also requires
a sense

of temporality, which allows
one to

perceive the self
as

having
a

past, present and

future. Moreover, it asks for a responsible
awareness of one’s ancestry and legacy

(Baier 86,88).Through this process, the individual, social, and historical aspects of
one’s sense of self are “authorized” to interact and shape

one another. Unfortunately,
Ursa is deprived of this ability to recreate herself and transform the ancestral tale
to reap the practical benefits of telling and retelling the oral story.

Gram, who experienced
some of the atrocities of the Corregidora past, pres

ents Ursa with a different perspective on the oral and familial tale. Gram’s insight
into the art of storytelling and her

comments about the reflexivity of this
art open

to Ursa a world of possibilities and create
new spaces. These spaces are partially

shaped by the realization of the unreliability of memory and its slippery nature;
in fact, as Gram maintains, there are many regenerative and healthy aspects that

can result from the flexibility of memory. Gram’s perception of the family legacy
is different from her mother’s; she does not obsessively and hauntingly stress the

necessity of “leaving evidence.” Rather, in her discourse, she underlines the fact that

the process of leaving evidence presents
a number of dangers affecting the minds

of the people who are involved in this process: “They burned all the documents,
Ursa, but they didn’t burn what they put in their minds. We got to burn out what

they put in our minds, like you burn out a wound. Except we got to keep what
we need to bear witness. That scar that’s left to bear witness. We got to keep

it as

visible as our blood” (72).
In this passage, Gram warns Ursa against the residues that might colonize the

minds of the slaves and their descendents. These residues, “what they put in
our

minds,” are related to distorted notions of self-worth, respect and identity. They

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122 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 31, Number 3

mark the lives of the slaves and their descendents because they perpetuate the

psychological wounds and the politics of oppression characteristic of the era of

slavery. Through her reflections
on the past, Gram incites Ursa to rework the tales

she has heard and the silenced stories of her self not only by testifying but also by
learning the strategies of survival, based on blocking some of the effects of the past
so that they would not control the totality of her life.

Ursa thus realizes that she must refuse to be transformed into a site of arti

ficial memory or a “lieu de m?moire? Indeed, as Pierre Nora maintains, “lieux de

m?moire” “originate [d] with the sense that there is no spontaneous memory”(289);
consequently,

in order to preserve the mnemonic traces, people constructed sites of

memory, including museums, festivals,
etc. These lieux are inhabited by

a
crystal

lized, fixed and stable form of memory (Nora 284). In a parallel way, Ursa’s body
and soul are facing the literal and figurative threat of becoming a museum for
the perpetuation of a past that Great Gram thinks is dying. Instead of inscribing
the horrors of the past

on her body,
which is, to use Peter Brooks’s words, a “site

of signification?the place for the inscription of stories
? and itself a signifier, a

prime agent
in narrative plot and meaning” (5-6), Ursa

must learn how to work the

historical process in reverse. Rather than reconstruct the past by starting from “the

trace” as historians do (Ricoeur, Reality), Ursa has to discard some of the horrible

details of the past without losing sight of the importance of preserving the memory
related to the traumatic events recounted to her.

Consequently, this protagonist must find a way of controlling the power of

past events/stories by reducing their presence
to what Gram calls “a scar,” which

would allow her to alleviate the haunting by the past without subjecting it to full

amnesia. Ursa should thus place this familial history under the Sign of the Other,
a process by which “history

. . . tends as a whole to make the past
remote from the

present. It
can even

expressly attempt
to

produce
an effect of strangeness in contrast

to the desire to make the unfamiliar familiar …” (Ricoeur, Reality 15; emphasis

Ricoeur’s). Through this enterprise, Ursa would feel that,
to a certain extent, the

past has been transformed into a strange and different land, which would enable

her to effect what Ricoeur calls a “spiritual decentering” (Reality 16) or distancing
from the inherited past.

Gram is able to suggest to Ursa
an alternative way of perceiving memory

and its relationship to the self because she has deep insight into the dynamics of

remembering and the flexible character of memory. Moreover, this ancestral figure
knows that memory is slippery

and mutable; it involves processes of construction

and reconstruction that result in the grafting of narratives of pain and suffering
on the body and soul of the listener. Consequently, as Gram tells Ursa, sometimes

the borderlines separating one’s memory from that of
the previous generations

are transformed and blurred. For instance, although it is logically impossible that

Gram remembers the period
of abolition and the various events that accompanied

it because she was very young, she acknowledges that “sometime
it seem like I

do [remember them] too” (78). This emotional reconstruction of the memory of
an event that Gram never witnessed might be due to the powerful impact of the

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History and Self-Reconstruction in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora 123

stories Great Gram told her daughter about abolition, making her feel that she

has experienced them. Gram not only reveals to Ursa the fragility of reconstructed

memories and oral narratives, she also explains
to her the dependence

of memories

on
feelings, which

are themselves unstable and transformable. As she maintains,

it is “hard to always remember what you were feeling when you ain’t feeling it

exactly that way no more” (79). In this passage Gram is specifically telling Ursa

about her feelings towards Corregidora, whose image was altered by the details

of Great Gram’s stories. Although the experiences that produced such memories

are
extremely painful and devastating,

as Gram maintains, the feelings and the

memories of feelings
are

subject
to

change and transformation.

Gram’s messages about the past
are different than Great Gram’s narratives

because they
are characterized by

a
greater

awareness of the nature of memory, the

transformative character of experiences and the fluidity of emotions. Great
Gram’s

stories restricted Ursa’s psychological development because they were informed by
an absolute certainty concerning the power of words

to evoke an exact and precise

memory; moreover, their message presented
this memory as the exclusive tool

allowing
one to “leave evidence.” By contrast, the tales told and transformed by

Gram carry
a

liberating potential
because they

stress not
only the importance of

testifying but also the necessity of freeing the mind from the residues of oppres
sion. Gram’s stories are flexible because of their openness to the possibility of

change; they defy the rigidity of the legendary tales to stress the infinite capabili
ties resulting from processes of reshaping

narratives. Because of this reconstructive

potential, Gram’s discourse combines past
and present

as it reveals different sites

of meaning.
The Corregidora legend circulates through

its transmission from one genera

tion to the other; its damaging effects reside
in the dangers represented by empty/

formulaic repetition. Specifically, Ursa must learn how to (re)insufflate breath into

the legendary ancestral stories by refiguring and reliving them through her own

feelings instead of accepting the rigidity of their inherited structure. In other words,
Ursa must find the echo of her own experiences in the familial tales. Learning
to “hear other people’s

voices and [her] own voice” is essential to the process of

reclamation Ursa must initiate (Jones, “Gayl Jones: An Interview” 694).
In the novel, the situation of Mama reflects the destructive repercussions

that the ancestral tales have on intersubjective relations. In fact, Mama
weaves

a coherent account of her “private memory” (104), which she
never revealed to

her daughter. Ultimately, she tells Ursa the full story of her marriage to Martin.

However, she is not capable of producing
a coherent narrative of the Corregidora

past. She either presents Ursa with fragments of the story, sounding “as
if she were

speaking in pieces, instead of telling one long thing” (123) or loses her own self

during the process of narration: “Mama kept talking until it wasn’t her that was

talking, but Great Gram-she wasn’t Mama now, she
was Great Gram talking”

(124). The tale told and retold to Mama is so overwhelming that “the memory of
all the Corregidora women” has become “her memory too,

as strong with her as

her own private memory,
or almost as strong” (129).

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124 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 31, Number 3

The case of Mama, whose mind appropriates the fragmented memory associ

ated with the narratives of slavery, provides Ursa with an example illustrating the
destructive effects of a past so intensely relived by the subject that it haunts her

psyche and affects her personal identity. Through this process, Mama becomes her

grandmother; however, since the relationship between her “private memory” and

the “memory of all the Corregidora women” is not configured in a healthy way,
Mama is unable to “filter” the Corregidora memory and her grandmother’s suf

fering through her personal, intimate understanding of the ancestral narrative and

the significance of her
own tale. Mama’s voice lacks self-definition, and Ursa learns

from her example the importance of striving to find her voice and to recover her self

(Rushdy 278). In fact, the absence of
a

reclamatory element from Mama’s narrative

reflects her inability to trust her personal voice enough to use it and produce her
own version, through the process of emplotment, of the ancestral story. One of the

major challenges for Ursa is to adequately emplot, using hybridization or m?tissage,
ancestral and personal memories

so as to
give them

a different sequence and form.

In effect, according to Paul Ricoeur, emplotment:

brings together diverse and heterogeneous story elements
…

agents, goals, means, inter

actions, [and] circumstances … an event must be more than just a single occurrence.

It gets its definition from its contribution to the development of the plot. A story, too,

must be more than just an enumeration of events in serial order; it must organize them

into an intelligible whole, of a sort such that we can always ask what is the thought

of the story. In short, emplotment is the operation that draws a configuration out of a

simple succession. (Time 65; my emphases)

In the context of the Corregidora past, Ursa
must strive to initiate processes

of hybridization bringing together the memories of her ancestral and personal
struggles and allowing her to configure “an intelligible whole” that braids the
events of her ancestral history with her personal memory. Such

a
configuration

necessitates the adoption o?”logiques m?tisses'(Lionnet,
Postcolonial 1) that require

participation in, and modification of, the dominant stories to help one bear witness
and identify, in Toni Morrison’s words, “those things in the past that are useful and

those things that are not” (121).
Gram’s lessons about memory give Ursa the basis for challenging the formulaic

narrative that imprisons her;
as a result, she starts perceiving memory

as a con

struct that can work under what Ricoeur terms the “Sign of the Same” to bring the

past into the present. Moreover, this protagonist learns
to

perceive history
as “re

enactment of the past,” which “does not consist in reliving but in rethinking [this

past]” (Ricoeur, Reality 8). By rethinking the past, Ursa realizes that her relation

ship with Mutt involved mutual abuse, and she
starts to see the damages resulting

from the process of filtering this relationship exclusively through the lens of her

great grandmother’s stories. From the example of her mother, Ursa learns how the

ancestral legend
can become “cannibalistic,” devouring

its transmitter and audience

when it does not reflect the intimacy of
a

personal connection
to the tale. Ursa thus

realizes that she must find a way of incorporating these ancestral lessons into her

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History and Self-Reconstruction in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora 125

life story in order to bear witness to the atrocities of the Corregidora tale and at the
same time protect the integrity of her voice, self and historical location.

A number of critics maintain that Ursa finds her voice by singing the blues

that help her distance herself from the haunting past and participate in a process
of translation of memory, which, as Keith Byerman notes, allows her

to inscribe

voice and history in the context of the African-American artistic tradition (180).

Consequently, she “is
not

only the
victim but also, by

virtue of the performance

itself, the ultimate power” (Byerman 179). The blues are thus perceived as Ursa’s

way of transforming the legendary history of the Corregidora victims into a cultural

form of art. Through this process of m?tissage, Ursa puts together her suffering and

that of the Corregidora
women to

produce
a

“song branded with the
new world”

(59) and interpreted in an “African American vernacular voice” (Bell 247).
It is true that the blues constitute a form of artistic self-expression catalyzing

Ursa’s psychological healing. However, in addition to this form of artistic creation,
Ursa uses other means to hybridize the sexual and the historical, the personal and

the collective, thus establishing a different relationship with the intergenerational
stories. She challenges their fixation and homogenization, which condemn one,

as

David Lowenthal says, to formulaic repetition (18). What Neil MacGregor argues
about heritage is also true of Ursa’s ancestral legacy; as he puts it, inheriting is a

process, and people
must realize they

are “heirs to the past, heirs to the collections

they own, free to decide for themselves what they are going to do with the past,
what it means for them now and what it may mean for them in the future” (qtd. in

Lowenthal 19). As Lowenthal adds, “[W]e must feel sure the past’s legacies have
become our very own” (19).

Ursa is able to effect this process of m?tissage, making the legacies of the past
her own and achieving

a better understanding of the
reasons behind Mama’s

incoherent account of the Corregidora story
as well as her own obsession by the

ancestral tale after rethinking,
in

light of her present experiences, the question that

none of her ancestors would answer (Rushdy 278). This question is related to a
secret that Great Gram was unwilling

to tell, which resulted in the creation of an

empty space in the accounts of later generations. Such
a gap led to the formation

of a phantom, originating from the unconscious suspicion that there
are some ele

ments of a story that have been left unsaid by a family member. Consequently, this

phantom, created because of “the gap that the concealment of
some

part of a loved

one’s life
produced

in us,” marks the Corregidora family history. Its “transgenera
tional consequences of silence” are transferred “from the parent’s unconscious into

the child’s,” resulting in a haunting effect on the following generations (Abraham
287,289; qtd. in Rushdy 279). In other words, this silence has deep repercussions
on several generations and affects the fate of

an entire
family lineage.

Such repercussions deeply mark the lives of the Corregidora women. Indeed,
in her childhood, Ursa was told that Great Gram did “something that made him

[Corregidora]
wont to kill her,” and because of her fear, she ran away and aban

doned her daughter in the plantation (79). However, none of the other family
members knows the nature of what Great Gram did to Corregidora. As Gram

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126 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 31, Number 3

affirms, Great Gram “never would tell [me] what she did. Up till today she still
won’t tell [me] what it was she did” (172). Gram never heard any explanation from

Corregidora either. The gap resulting from the secret of what Great Gram did to

Corregidora obsesses her descendents; in the novel, the question about this gap is
formulated in the following way: “What is it a woman can do to a man that make

him hate her so bad he wont to kill her one minute and keep thinking about her

and can’t get her out of his mind the next?” (173). The answer to this question would

provide a crucial insight into the lives of the Corregidora women. In fact, Great
Gram left the plantation directly after her enigmatic act, and Gram

was afterwards

oppressed, abused and raped by Corregidora, resulting in the birth of Ursa’s mother.
In a paradoxical way, Great Gram’s act of leaving the plantation contributed to

the coming of the next offspring who could bear witness and carry the burden of

leaving evidence
to denounce Corregidoras abuse. The

secret act, which obsesses

Great Gram’s descendents, seems also to carry the key
to the understanding of the

relationship between desire, pain, hatred and love.
In the final part of the novel, Ursa finds an answer to the family secret by

bringing together personal and ancestral experiences; through this hybrid act, she
initiates a process of historical recovery that shapes, and is shaped by, notions of
desire and choice. Critical opinions about the ambivalent relationship between
Ursa and her former husband and the issue of their reconciliation are divergent.
For instance, Madhu Dubey

states that this reunion fails to “resolve the complica
tions of either Ursa’s own sexual history

or the broader history of American slavery”

(252). However, it is arguable,
as Jones maintains, that the “open-ended” conclu

sion of Corregidora implies “a kind of redemption” (“Gayl Jones Takes” 285; qtd.
in Rushdy 279). The solution Ursa finds for the family secret initiates this kind of

redemption since it helps her fight the obsessive haunting by the past and opens
up hybrid personal and historical spaces

in the ancestral narrative, which makes

her acquire
a different vision of her historical emplacement.

At the end of the novel, Mutt tells Ursa after 22 years of absence that he would

like her to come back to him. He then tells her the story of his great grandfather:
because of unsettled debts, the American courts took his wife away from him.

Mutt’s great grandfather lost his sanity
and ate “onions so

people
wouldn’t come

around him,” and after that, “peppermint so they would” (183-84). After his sepa
ration from Ursa, Mutt attempted

to repeat his great grandfather’s act, but,
as he

tells his former wife, “[I]t didn’t do nothing but make me sick” (184). By recount

ing this story to Ursa, Mutt reveals to her that although he respects his ancestral

past, he cannot replicate
its events in his own life or use an old strategy to solve

a

contemporary problem. The message of
his story is that the past must always

be

remembered but not so intensely
as to be relived in an obsessive manner.

Not unlike Mutt, Ursa repeats with
a subtle nuance of difference her great

grandmother’s
act as she engages in sexual intercourse with her former husband.

Her re-enactment brings the past into the present, and it involves,
not unlike the

historian’s, a “rethinking… [which] already contains the critical
moment that forces

[one] to take the detour by way of the historical imagination” (Ricoeur, Reality 8).

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History and Self-Reconstruction in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora 127

Ursa’s process of remembering reflects her ability to revisit the past and rethink it

without falling
into an obsessive, formulaic repetition of its

events.
During

an act

of fellatio on Mutt, she expresses her certitude that the secret “had
to be something

sexual that Great Gram did to Corregidora” (184). She concludes that her great

grandmother had bitten Corregidoras penis as she was performing fellatio on him,
which resulted in the creation of a whole gamut of feelings in the slave owner’s

heart. After this “eroticization of pain” (Horvitz 249), Corregidoras emotions

wavered between extreme love and hatred as well as pleasure and pain.

Echoing her great grandmother’s experience, Ursa’s sexual
encounter with

Mutt acts as a catalyst enhancing hybrid remembering and allowing her to rethink

the past by making it interact with the present. Through this m?tissage of past and

present, she reclaims the dynamic and
interactive dimensions of storytelling, which,

as Jones maintains, “make[s] movements between kinds of language and kinds of

reality?dreams and memory also being kinds of reality” (“Gayl Jones: An Inter

view” 698). In this process of re-enactment, Ursa redefines her position vis-?-vis the

Corregidora intergenerational tale and rereads the history of her present, body and
relations through the experiences of her

ancestors. Moreover, by bringing together
the sexual and personal with the historical and collective, she discovers new, plural
and heteroglossal sites of resistance that transform the meaning of the historical
trace and the significance of the relationship between the Corregidora women and

men. Ursa also recognizes that Corregidoras
act was not worse than what “Mutt

had done to me, than what we had done to each other, than what Mama had done

to Daddy, or what he had done to her in return” (184). By adopting this perspec
tive, Ursa does not blame the oppressed. She rather implies that

even in stories of

extreme victimhood, women had some limited possibilities of shaping spaces of
resistance from which they could fight their objectification.

The answer to the “pain and pleasure” involved
in the ancestral secret shows

how Great Gram, a slave woman, resisted within the limits of her own capabilities.
She tried to seize agency and for a brief moment assert her subjectivity. As she
rethinks the historical secret, Ursa establishes a parallelism between Great Gram’s

controversial act of resistance to objectification by Corregidora and the type of
control she possesses during the act of fellatio on Mutt. Starting from this kind of

parallelism, Ursa configures hybrid spaces linking the sexual and the historical, the

personal and the collective, the Brazilian past and the American present. Such m?tis

configurations contribute
to the creation of alternative forms of

self-inscription
into the ancestral stories. Moreover, as she works with and through her great

grandmother’s experience, Ursa engages in processes of redefinition of the role that

sexuality and desire play in the shaping of acts of resistance. She also probes the
means of generating a heteroglossal “daughterly language of desire” out of these

processes of resistance (Dubey 250).
Before

exploring such phenomena,
one needs to examine the definition and

significance of resistance within the context of the patriarchal system of slavery. In

his discussion of the consequences of the slaves’objectification and their reaction to

the “paternalism” inherent in the system of slavery in the South, Eugene Genovese

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128 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 31, Number 3

maintains that slaves showed, at the same time, “accommodation and resistance to

slavery.” Accommodation
was a means of

“adaptation,” allowing the slaves
to accept

“what could not be helped without falling prey to the pressures of dehumaniza

tion, emasculation, and self-hatred.” On the other hand, resistance was exhibited

under two forms. The first form was based on “prepolitical non-revolutionary self

assertion,” a type of daily resistance involving infanticide, lying, murder, stealing
and arson. The second form of resistance included “political responses” such

as

flight and collective violence to counter the savagery of the system (Roll 597-98,
591; qtd. in Rushdy 281). Resistance, in this respect, must be perceived not only as
a group of actions informed by specific principles but also as a set of possibilities
originating from, and related to, particular historical and social conditions. The
careful analysis of historical acts of resistance must be informed by the context

that necessitated these types of actions and the conditions making them possible,
producing fear and anxiety in the oppressors’ lives by threatening certain spaces,
sites and domains

significant
to their survival.

For the female victims of New World patriarchal slavery, the main domain of
resistance to oppression resided in sexuality. In Brazil, the bodies of slave

women

were
exploited

in
multiple ways; slave

masters had sexual intercourse with many

female slaves, using their bodies for sexual pleasure and for the increase of the
number of workers on the plantation. Moreover, unlike slave

owners in the United

States, Brazilian slave masters obliged slave
women to work as prostitutes, thus

securing an additional source of income (Russell-Wood 37). Because of this specific
historical background related to the Brazilian system of slavery, it is arguable that
resistance would mostly be related

to the domain of sexuality, which constitutes

the main site of oppression. The resistance of the slave women, who suffered from

their transformation into sexual and economic commodities, is best described by
Darlene Clark Hine’s statement: “The slave woman’s resistance to sexual and there

fore to economic exploitation posed
a

potentially
severe threat to paternalism itself,

for implicit
in such action was the slave woman’s refusal to accept her designated

responsibilities within the slave system as legitimate” (7; qtd. in Rushdy 281).

Corregidora presents
crucial instances of resistance by slave women, giving

Ursa deeper insight into her position vis-?-vis the family secret. In the final scene,
this protagonist repeats with

some difference Great Gram’s act of resistance, and

she feels that, for a certain period
of time, she “became” her great grandmother. As

she puts it, “It was like I didn’t know how much was me and Mutt and how much
was Great Gram and Corregidora” (184). Significantly, this scene is also a site of

m?tissage of a number of sexual, historical, individual and collective narratives of

resistance to the oppressive conditions of slavery. As Ursa
tries to solve the fam

ily “puzzle,” she conjures up
the stories revolving around the different, plural and

ambivalent means used to counter the humiliations of slavery.

When she feels that she has become a continuation of her great grandmother,

and after she discovers the answer to the Corregidora secret, Ursa has
to make

a difficult choice about the type of “action” she must perform on Mutt. In her

struggle for meaning, the past and
the present confront each other. As Deborah

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History and Self-Reconstruction in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora 129

Horvitz succinctly puts it, “Aware of the
fact that she can sexually control

a man

through sadomasochism, Ursa identifies herself
as a Corregidora woman; at the

same time, her choice not to exploit that power
is her declaration of independence

from her mothers'” (257). Indeed, Ursa is extremely conscious of the power she

has over her former husband, as is shown through her repetition of the
statement

“I could kill you”; however, she
is also acutely

aware of the dangers accompany

ing the existence of such a power (184). If Ursa chooses to emasculate Mutt as

her means of achieving control, she would be reenacting
a historical scene of

emasculation by
a slave woman who had to pay a tremendous price for her

act.

Great Gram had told Ursa about a slave woman “over on the next plantation” who

resisted her master’s attempt at raping her by cutting off “his thing with a razor

she had hid under the pillow.” Her master bled to death and she was punished

by the police who “cut off her husband’s penis and stuffed it in her mouth, and

then they hanged her. They let him bleed to death. They made her watch and then

they hanged her” (67). As Great Gram explains to Ursa, choosing resistance over

accommodation might result
not

only
in

personal suffering but also
in extreme

pain for one’s family.
The story Great Gram tells Ursa points to sexuality as a site of multiple forms

of oppression, including the one practiced by the power of the white state. The
state not

only allowed slave
owners to abuse slave women, but it also presented

a

castrated and emasculated black man in spectacle in order to punish the acts of

resistance of his wife. As Great Gram puts it, “[W]hat happened over on that

other plantation”
was a

“warning,
cause

they might
want your pussy, but if you

do anything to get back at them, it’ll be your life they be wonting, and then they
make even that some kind of a sex show” (125). Sexuality also constitutes

a site

of oppression because of the control that the slave owners have over the bodies
and sexual desires of the slaves. For example, Corregidora had forbidden all types

of sexual interaction between black men and black women, using his power to

frustrate their desire and their aspirations for emotional fulfillment. This type of

oppression secured close and vigilant control of the black bodies.
Because of its direct and indirect connections with the commodification of

desire and with economic policing, sexuality for the slaves does not belong only
to the personal domain;

it is rather a space of resistance, defying the regulations

imposed by the institution of slavery. Seeing the punishment reserved for open
acts of resistance, which present

a greater danger
to their initiators than to their

supposed “targets,” the slaves owned by Corregidora draw their
own conclusions

from the event that happened on the other plantation. Moreover, they strive to find
other types of resistance to their oppressive conditions. The acts of resistance by
the Corregidora slaves, as it is implied in the final scene, take two main forms. The
first one, mainly physical, is illustrated by Great Gram’s act of biting Corregidoras
penis. The second form of resistance is represented by the dreams of nurturing
communal and social relations transcending slavery and resisting its dehumanizing

objectification. Such a type of resistance is best represented by Palmares, a society
formed by fugitive slaves in Brazil.

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130 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 31, Number 3

In the final scene, as Ursa performs fellatio on Mutt, she is rethinking two

different scenes from her past. In fact, the author signals that Ursa
has in mind

the “hate and love” scene because she remembers the exact words that Gram used

to talk about Great Gram’s act: “What is it a woman can do to a man that make

him hate her so bad he wont to kill her one minute and keep thinking about her

and can’t get her out of his mind the next?” (184,173). Ursa conjures up another

scene in which “she [Mama] had started talking like Great Gram,”which is also the

moment Ursa heard the story of the slave woman on the neighboring plantation
and the tale related to Palmares (184,124-28).

Palmares is mentioned in the story referring
to a young slave boy who

runs

away from the Corregidora plantation after he tells Great Gram about his ultimate

hope of “running away and joining up with them renegade slaves up in Palmares”

(126). The reference to Palmares is of a crucial importance since this community
is a symbol of collective slave resistance in Brazil. In fact, Palmares is the

most

famous and successful Brazilian quilombo
or maroon

society, whose story goes

back to around 1605, with forty African slaves who ran away from Porto Calvo

and started a community in Palmares. The population of Palmares resisted various

attacks between 1672 and 1697, the year of its destruction. In this community, the

fugitive slaves enjoyed a stable social and cultural life inspired by the Angolan

Congolese social, political
and economic systems. Indeed,

as Stuart B. Schwartz

notes, there are many structural commonalities between the Brazilian quilombo
and

the institution carrying the same name in Angola (KiMbundu kilombo) (122-36).
Modeled after an African political system which protected the diversity and free

dom of its subjects, Palmares
defended its autonomy against

a number of attacks

by armed forces from Holland and Portugal (Anderson 547-48; Dubey 250).This

quilombo
and its last leader, Zumbi, embody “the strongest

resistance to the slave

based colonial regime, and, consequently,
the struggle for

economic and political

justice …” (Anderson 545).

Inspired by an African economic model, Palmares rejected the Portuguese
economic and social systems. As Ronald Rassner puts it,

the history of Palmares,

whose population exceeded twenty thousand inhabitants, “is
a history of an Afri

can nation in Brazil and the history of a courageous people who maintained their

African traditions, revolting against
a landed Portuguese aristocracy

for almost a

century” (202). D?cio Freitas concludes that “[t]hese rustic black republics
reveal

the dream of a social order founded on fraternal equality, and for this reason are

incorporated into the revolutionary tradition of the
Brazilian people” (210; qtd. in

Anderson 550). Because of its prosperity and autonomy, Palmares constituted
a

symbol of
success whose stability and example,

as Governor Ferna de Sousa noted,

inspired many
slaves to break the chains of captivity and offered

them an alternative

dream of freedom (Ennes 115; qtd. in Rushdy 284). After its destruction, Palmares

became a legend, and its memory was preserved in Brazilian folklore
and in the oral

traditions of the people of the state of Alagoas (Ramos; Rassner 204).
Palmares and its symbolism

are of a tremendous importance
not

only
in Cor

regidora
but also in Jones’s other works, especially

in her poems. For instance, in

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History and Self-Reconstruction in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora 131

Songfor Anninho (1981), Palmares, a place and space where nurturing relationships

developed between black men and black women, is presented as the site of a heroic

past that has deep and redemptive repercussions
on the present. As Dubey notes,

in this book, the lost Palmares embodies the “continuing imaginative power of the

heritage of resistances” (254). It is also a hybrid source of individual and collective

empowerment that Americans of African descent can turn to in their search for

spiritual regeneration and historical models of resistance. For the young slave boy
on the Corregidora plantation, the dream of Palmares is that of a place “where
these black mens had started their own town, escaped and banded together” and of
a space in which mutual love uniting black men and black women is possible and

respected. The young boy
wants to “have him a woman, and then come back and

get his woman and take her up there” (126). The way this boy perceives Palmares
is not informed by a sense of historical discontinuity; in fact, when Great Gram
tries to explain to him that Palmares was “way back two hundred years ago,” his
answer is that “Palmares was now’ (126; emphasis mine).

For Ursa, the example of the young boy, who conjures up the symbolism of
Palmares to inscribe this place in his dreams for a better future, illustrates how the

hybridization of memory and history
can become a source of empowerment and

resistance. The boy’s reconstructive imagination, working
to transform and hybrid

ize the present by reconceiving it in light of examples of historical resistance, goes
against the linear, Western perception of time and history. In fact, the

structure of

the boy’s answer, “Palmares
was now,” points

to the necessity of braiding
a resistant

past with an oppressive present, achieved through the defiance of Western binary
logic and grammar. This form of Western “impossibility,” expressed in the dominant

language, evokes the African power of nommo,
or the word to create a different

reality.1
In this process of m?tissage, visually articulated through the juxtaposition of

the past (was) and the present (now), the boy subversively
uses the creative power

of nommo to express an African perception of time and space in the dominant

language of the oppressors.

An autonomous African republic founded
on Brazilian soil, Palmares embod

ied a
philosophy of m?tissage since, after “assimilating”

a dominant “value,” slavery,
it

modified its implications by linking it to the concepts of community and free will.
In fact, while on the Brazilian plantations slaves

were doomed to an eternal life of

bondage and commodification, Palmares had
a

systematic strategy to perpetuate

freedom; its inhabitants (the Palmarinos), who did not flee plantations of their own

accord, were considered slaves even in Palmares. They could
earn their freedom

only by “stealing another slave from a plantation” (Kent 169; qtd. in Rushdy 284).
Since Palmares offered to its citizens the possibility of freeing themselves by freeing
another person, an authentic sense of collectivity and community

was created. Con

sequently, Palmares used
an

aspect from the oppressors’culture (slavery), absorbing
it only to reconfigure an alternative form of resistance marked by valuing individual
initiative over institutional commodification. Existing and prospering

on Brazilian

soil, this maroon society thus created its own form of what Lionnet calls, follow

ing Cuban poet Nancy Morej?n, “transculturation” {transculturaci?n) {Postcolonial

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132 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 31, Number 3

11). In this respect, it offered a famous example of how “slaves” can become agents
of transformation and hybridization through the reworking, Africanization, and
subversion of dominant values and narratives.

Using
the memory of this model of m?tissage, Ursa

reconstructs her present

by rethinking the configurations of the historical past. Such a reconstruction is
done after this protagonist considers her choices: to make Mutt live

a “moment

of pleasure and excruciating pain
at the same time, a moment of broken skin but

not sexlessness, a moment just before sexlessness,
a moment that stops just before

sexlessness, a moment that stops before it breaks the skin” (184). These choices
are

presented
in a number of gradations ranging from emasculation

to delicate

nibbling. Ursa’s decision not to “break the skin” of her former husband’s penis is
informed by the example of mutual love in Palmares, evoked through the memory
of the young boy’s words. This decision is also different from what both the woman
on the plantation and Great Gram opted for. In fact, Ursa does

not emasculate

Mutt as the woman on the plantation did
to the slave owner nor does she break

the skin of Mutt’s penis as Great Gram did Corregidora’s. Rather, she stops before

breaking the skin, choosing
a more constructive version of the past that allows her

to re-enact
differently the slave women’s tales of resistance.

By opting for a different course of action, Ursa not only avoids blindly repeat

ing the histories of castration and emasculation, she also
uses the notion of “free

will” to effect a subversive hybridization of the Palmares story with her own

ambivalent, uncertain present. Not unlike the slaves who freed themselves by steal

ing other slaves from
a

plantation, thus giving them the opportunity of earning
their freedom, Ursa, who was a slave to her past, chooses to gain her freedom by

“stealing” her former husband away from the oppressive homelands of the personal
and ancestral pasts marked by slavery, injustices,

trauma and miscommunication.

Specifically, Ursa steals her husband when she chooses to stop before breaking the
skin of his penis while performing fellatio on him. Through this act, she brings
together the promise of Palmares and her fragmented present

as she rereads her life

story through the eyes and words of the young boy on the plantation. Significantly,
Ursa makes this conscious decision after she goes over all the other possibilities

or

gradations of pain. Braiding past resistance with present suffering, Ursa uses the

memory of the nurturing relationships in an African republic founded on colonial

soil to provide her with the bases for liberation through its models of healthier

forms of interaction between men and women. She thus emplois the memory

of Palmares and the Afro-Brazilian heritage of struggle to resist the oppressive
circumstances of her African-American present.

Through this act, Ursa also reclaims what Dubey calls
“the lover’s language”

that her ancestors were unable to use in their narrative because they wanted
to

maintain the “ideological coherence of their story” (255). Their insistence on

portraying pure and unambivalent hatred vis-?-vis Corregidora silenced the

controversial voice of desire and presented
a monolithic perspective, obscuring

the contradictory feelings of love and hatred towards
their oppressor. In contrast

to the lover’s language, the maternal language
of the Corregidora

women refused

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History and Self-Reconstruction in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora 133

to acknowledge the complexities of its struggle with the paradoxical nature of
sexual desire; it also imposed its limitations on the expression of the daughter’s
desire.

In the final scene of the novel, Ursa also reconfigures past and self by trans

forming the absence of
a womb from a signifier of lack into

a source of empower
ment and a means of expression of desire. As she performs fellatio on Mutt, this

protagonist reclaims
a different form of feminine sexual power that goes against

the various lessons linking sexuality and reproduction passed to her by her ances
tors. It is true that, as Dubey suggests, Ursa “discovers

a
potentially destructive

feminine power situated at the very edges of heterosexuality” (258). However, this

protagonist is able, through the memory of Palmares and its specific configura
tion of male-female relationships,

to
re-emplot such power and reinscribe it into

a

greater context of historical resistance and reclamation of nonreproductive
sites of

desire. To use Ricoeur’s words, as she “brings together diverse and heterogeneous

story [and history] elements” {Time 65) through the m?tissage of the sexual and
the historical as well as the individual and the collective, Ursa rereads past events
in a new light. Consequently, she “draws a [hybrid] configuration out of a simple
succession of past and present events” {Time 65).

It is worth noting that the changes in the perception of slavery from the 40s
to the late 60s help Ursa reread the intergenerational story using a new focus
informed by resistance (Rushdy 286). In 1947, when Ursa visits the tales recounted

by Great Gram, she experiences them
as

oppressive forces and she perceives slaves

as
helpless

victims. However, when she rethinks the same tales in 1969, she discov

ers the stories of slaves who were actively involved in communities of resistance,

which provides her with a different perspective on the present. Consequently, she
understands that memories of slavery

are flexible, and not unlike storytelling, they
are interactive and open to revisions. Ursa’s choice to stress resistance also reflects

the influence of the Black Power Movement on the perception of notions of his

tory, community and empowerment in slavery (Rushdy 287). In Corregidora,]ones
thus probes how the story of slavery affected, and

was conditioned by, the project
of black cultural reconstruction (Dubey 250).

Through the reconfiguration of different border zones, Ursa finally resists the
coercive limitations of what Ricoeur terms the “dividing line between history and
fiction” {Reality 1). For this protagonist, if history is represented by the narratives
of Great Gram, fiction relies on the potential creativity of what R. G. Collingwood
terms “the constructive imagination” (245-46), which involves various mechanisms

of hybridization through repetition, reconstruction and recreation. The process
of working through history using these imaginative capabilities necessitates the

acknowledgment of the impossibility of recovering the complete “truth” of the

past. Only after this act of m?tissage involving historical and personal “archaeology”
does Ursa redraw personal boundaries to stop the invasion by the past and learn

to mediate between her debt to the ancestral legacy and the requirements of her

present life. Throughout this process, she affects a careful reading of the historical

mapping of the generational stories on her body and psyche.

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134 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 31, Number 3

In her depiction of the historicity of Ursa’s experiences, Jones presents complex
versions of the past and problematizes its relationship

to
personal memory

as well

as to the
homogenizing dominant narratives. In this context, the ways in which

the young boy and Ursa perceive and
use the story of Palmares provide

an
example

of how historical spaces of resistance must be configured by the contemporary
African-American people through the resurrection, reappropriation and hybrid
ization of certain aspects of their historical legacy. By reclaiming Palmares and the
dreams of the Afro-Brazilian slave on the Corregidora plantation, Jones focuses

on the need to fashion a clearer vision related to the interconnectedness of stories

of struggle against oppression in Brazil and the United States. She also provides,
through the depiction of the processes of hybridization and emplotment initiated

by Ursa, an example of the healthy use of the oppressive and redemptive potential
residing

in the ancestral stories.
Throughout this project, Palmares plays

a crucial

role as a model and catalyst for m?tissage
and reconstruction.

Note

1. In West African culture, nommo intervenes in the configuration of a number of spiritual systems.
It is the magic power of the word that has the capacity to call things into being and to create things

using the unity of word, seed, water and blood. As Janheinz Jahn maintains, nommo bridges the distance

separating the signifier and the signified, the real and the metaphorical, and the living and the dead, a

type of distance stressed and emphasized in the Western belief system (17). The issue of voice is crucial

in this process of naming, and in African cultures it is differently perceived than in Western systems.
Rather than point to a previously existing notion or concept, the voice in African thought becomes a

means of creation and of conjuring; its power is literal and performative.

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• Article Contents

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• Issue Table of Contents

Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Spring, 2008), pp. i-iv, 1-172
Front Matter
Wallace Stevens: Parts of an Autobiography, by Anonymous [pp. 1-21]
Gertrude Stein’s “Historical” Living [pp. 22-43]
A Defensive Eye: Anxiety, Fear and Form in the Poetry of Robert Frost [pp. 44-57]
“Pilgrim’s Blues”: Puritan Anxiety in Robert Lowell’s “For the Union Dead” [pp. 58-80]
The Modern Magnetic Animal: “As I Lay Dying” and the Uncanny Zoology of Modernism [pp. 81-101]
Purdy’s Art of Paraphrase [pp. 102-115]
Memory, History and Self-Reconstruction in Gayl Jones’s “Corregidora” [pp. 116-136]
Writing a New Nation: Literary Bohemianism and the Re-Conceiving of America [pp. 137-142]
Lots of City Poets: A Review of Essays on the “Second Generation” New York School [pp. 143-149]
Writing Murder: Who Is the Guilty Party? [pp. 150-158]
Modernists and the New Millennium: Twenty-First-Century Perspectives on Orwell, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway [pp. 159-164]
Between the O’Neills [pp. 165-170]
Back Matter