Angry Arts: Silence, Speech, and Song in Gayl Jones's Corregidora

Abstract

Gayl Jones's (1975) painfully, often brutally, explores rigid definitional boundaries of the self. Dealing with four generations of black Brazilian-American women who are strictly defined initially by a slaveholder/procurer and then by themselves, the novel challenges us to think about how the system of slavery reifies a concept of black women as hypersexual by regarding them as property. Great Gram charges her family to witness, to have children who must memorize her old slavemaster Corregidora's atrocities and recite them at Armageddon, the ground and the sky open up to them that question that's going to be ask (41). Hence, sexual commodification supplanted by a deliberate, political self-definition. But as Ursa (a childless blues singer and the youngest Corregidora) discovers, this political move has a double-edged drawback: The Corregidoras' agenda severely limits their sexual identities, a limitation which in turn provokes domestic violence. Marked by their family history, Mama and Ursa can neither accept nor refute their mothers' belief that all men are rapists. Their ambivalence finally pushes their husbands to the point of violence. Although this violence stems from Corregidora's sexual abuse, it not excused by it. Through the framework of blighted sexuality and domestic assault, Jones argues that political self-objectification a vital yet problematic step toward the empowerment of these women.(1) Not solely focused upon violence and retribution, also asks how a can renegotiate her sexual desire when she descends from a long line of abuse and rage. In effect, Ursa Corregidora's sexuality has been silenced first by her family's outrageous history, and then by its vow of retribution. She breaks this silence, as Keith Byerman argues, when she achieves an epiphany of self-realization, discovering her own voice and art through the African-American tradition of the blues (180). The blues performer is not only the victim but also, by virtue of the performance itself, the ultimate power (179). This kind of dialectic extends to Gayl Jones herself, who resists the silencing identity of a representative black writer by expanding her depictions beyond what she has called positive race images (Tate 97), and by arguing that there's a lot of imaginative territory that you have to be 'wrong' in order to enter (Jones, Work 234). In applauding but also criticizing certain techniques for black female self-empowerment, Jones enters that territory. In Corregidora, mothers perpetuate as well as suffer from violence. It therefore important to ask: When are mothers' and daughters' bodies both a private and a public space? How are the bodies of mothers as well as of other women politicized within Corregidora? In what ways might their politicization betray women? Ursa's familial project of passing judgment infuses her very name. As Melvin Dixon notes, corregidore means 'judicial magistrate' in Portuguese: By changing the gender designation, Jones makes Ursa a female judge charged by the women in her family to 'correct' (from the Portuguese verb corrigir) the historical invisibility they have suffered (239). Additionally, Ursa in Latin means 'bear,' a word whose associative meaning undeniable here. Rendered sterile when her husband pushes her down a flight of stairs, Ursa must bear witness through her art, the blues. She also bears witness that she has a place beyond retribution and vengeance. Old not only turns Great Gram's sexuality into a product, but also fathers her daughter and her granddaughter, who thus become living emblems of both violence and survival. Each Corregidora woman gives birth to a daughter who must memorize and leave evidence of this family history shaped by slavery and rape. Telling of the official abolition of slavery in Brazil, Ursa's grandmother explains the need for this human evidence: The officials burned all written documentation of slaveholding cause they wanted to play like what had happened before never did happen (79). …