Making Generations and Bearing Witness: Violence and Orality in Gayl Jones's Corregidora

Abstract

In gayl jones's novel Corregidora, Ursa Corregidora, the protagonist and last member of many generations of women who have suffered from a history of abusive relationships centered around the question of reproduction, rejects the written word as a corollary of a male heterosexual violence associated with slavery. Ursa, as well as her author, must then face the question of how to narrate her family's once “written” history in nonpatriarchal terms. In this sense, Jones produces what Henry Louis Gates Jr. has notably designated as the “speakerly text” in African-American tradition, in this case one “designed to represent an oral literary tradition” and to claim that tradition as female (181). Jones's text is consequently structured around a complex sexual and literary antipathy between a primarily male-gendered violence and a female-gendered orality. Throughout the text, reproductive sexuality is constructed as written, violent, patriarchal, and immutably inscribed. By contrast, Jones posits orality as an alternative to male heterosexual desire and Western writing, which are thematically (and, in the end, too univocally) characterized as abusive. The violence that had been almost incestuously handed down from the Portuguese slaver Corregidora to a succession of black men in Ursa's family is ineradicably tied to the process of reproductive sexuality and written inscription. Homosexuality, though problematized for Ursa, is nevertheless imagined as predicated on several kinds of orality, particularly oral narrative and oral sex, that might offer the possibility of nonviolent relationships and noncoercive communication; the text never fully embraces that alternative, however, leaving both Ursa and the reader caught in a kind of closed system. The orality Ursa embraces is explicitly nonreproductive in the terms of slave breeding, the condition that Ursa desperately flees but reifies, and perhaps finally transcends. This orality provides Ursa an alternative to the essentialized genital definitions of the feminine that white slavers and black husbands impose.