"Relate Sexual to Historical": Race, Resistance, and Desire in Gayl Jones's Corregidora

Abstract

Narration in Gayl Jones's work, particularly narrating of experience of New World slavery, constitutes an act of intersubjective communion, creating of a sensibility that hearer is an equal sharer in story to degree of being as involved in its events as teller, of believing oneself to have lived out what another experiences. Although Jones has dealt with how and to what ends creates intersubjective bonding in virtually all her writing, she has made dynamic of intersubjective relations central to her narratives of slavery, those poems and fictions about experiences and long-term psychic effects of New World slavery. In her poem about aftermath of second Palmares quilombo (a Brazilian community of several villages of fugitive slaves), Jones has Bonafacia describe intersubjective effects of hearing Diamantino's narrative: When he told his story / it as if I'd experienced it myself (Xarque 24). In Song for Anninho, her earlier poem about destruction of original Palmares in 1695, Jones has narrator Almeyda recall how hearing her story affected her sense of connection between them. Hearing that she is the granddaughter / of an and has therefore inherited a way of being, Almeyda feels her words and memories / and fears and tenderness run through her blood. That was moment, she says, when I became / my grandmother and she became me (32-33). Jones's characters listen to others' stories so attentively as to feel that they are living out experiences they describe, hearing them with such intensity that they assume an intersubjective communion with their narrators. In her drama, her poetry, and especially in her 1975 novel Corregidora, Jones has made an original contribution to contemporary narratives of slavery, by focusing on intersubjective relations that talking about slave experiences can produce. She employs a form she traces to Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, in which an ancestral of is framed within a novel that dramatizes a modem version of it, in which grandmother's slave narrative prefaces, foreshadows, and provides dramatic and revelatory pattern for granddaughter's own life. Jones demonstrates in Corregidora that ancestral slave is site of both enabling and constricting intersubjective relations which are themselves derived from and which dramatically restructure function of remembering in individual psyches, extended families, and ideological apparatus of modern nation-state (Rowell 42; Liberating Voices 125. 132). Jones's revision of form Hurston established and Paule Marshall reconstituted for contemporary American culture-- of slavery (Rushdy 535)--is significant because Corregidora, like other palimpsest narratives, challenges idea of rugged individualism and signals ways attention to ethnicity since late '60s spells a partial retreat from traditional idea of self-made man (Hijiya 549). In addition, Jones traces specific and complex ways that an ancestral slave works on terrain of family as family produces and reproduces modem desiring subject. Jones focuses on subject of desire as constituted historically in order to show how both spectacular and hidden experiences of slavery, especially historical subjection of desire, operate in formation of contemporary African American subjectivity. Jones's focus, then, is twofold, her vision, one might say, bi-temporal. She demonstrates how historical forces contin ue to inform modem social relations--first, by dwelling on ways an ancestral slave causes unhealthy deviations in psychic and sexual lives in one family descended from slaves and, second, by attending to ways that these historical forces are subtly transmuted in contemporary political debates regarding politics of identity and racial formation in Black Power era. …