Love and the Trauma of Resistance in Gayl Jones's Corregidora

Abstract

Shifting between scenes of nineteenth-century slave life in Brazil and contempo? rary urban America, Gayl Jones's Corregidora examines continuities between the physical enslavement of black women and modern cycles of abuse. Although the Corregidora women are subjected to immense violence and exploitation, Jones foregrounds their demand to overcome and commemorate their traumatic history. However, while the slave past is ever present, the novel does not focus on Great Gram's resistance to Corregidora during her enslavement to him. Descriptions of her life with him suggest a highly ambiguous relationship that complicates conventional conceptions of resistance, agency, and desire. Great Gram remains living with Corregidora well after emancipation and when she eventually flees his plantation, she leaves her daughter behind and becomes even more vulnerable to his perverse cruelties. Martin's question to the elder Corregidora women?How much was hate for Corregidora and how much was love (131)?highlights the troubling intersection between abuse and desire examined in the novel. By exploding the dichotomy between victim and abuser, Jones challenges the notion of any simplistic or singularly directed conception of resistance. This approach does not suggest that Great Gram passively acquiesced to Corregidora's abuse; instead Jones's description urges us to consider the complexities and contradictions of delineating agency and personal identity in circumstances charged with complex issues of intimacy, violence, and need. What does resistance mean when bondage becomes a site of desire or when enslavement is perceived as a defining characteristic of the self? How are we to understand Corregidora's simultaneous role as slave master and lover? And Great Gram as both victim and agent of abuse? Corregidora problematizes notions of freedom by presenting characters that foster their own psychological bondage to trauma. In a social context overdetermined by cycles of abuse, objectification, and disregard of female subjectivity, even love, as expressed through the mother-daughter bond as well as between heterosexual partners, is not a stable and safe value. How are we to understand it as a source of selfdestructive pain as well as a call for healing and understanding? Corregidora addresses these difficult issues largely in a post-emancipation context. The novel is not primarily concerned with describing the nature of nineteenthcentury slave life in Brazil, but rather it focuses upon exploring methods of combating historical erasure and coping with trauma derived from a history of enslavement. Issues of resistance and the struggle to articulate personal desire are dramatized most