Angry arts: silence, speech, and song in Gayl Jones's 'Corregidora.'

Gayl Jones's Corregidora (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 Corregidora charges her family to "bear witness," to have children who must memorize her old slavemaster Corregidora's atrocities and recite them at Armageddon, "when the ground and the sky open up to ask them that question that's going to be ask" (41). Hence, sexual commodification is 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 is not excused by it. Through the framework of blighted sexuality and domestic assault, Jones argues that political self-objectification is a vital yet problematic step toward the empowerment of these women.(1) Not solely focused upon violence and retribution, Corregidora also asks how a woman 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 woman 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 is 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 Corregidora 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 is 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 Corregidora 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). What had happened, of course, was the violent reduction of women to objects of exchange. In the abusive economy of Corregidora's Brazilian plantation, Great Gram and her daughter are "'gold [valuable] pussy'"; a woman's vagina equals her economic value and that economic value equals her essence (124). As Corregidora's favorite "'little gold piece'"(10), Great Gram is used for both his profit and his pleasure until she flees to Louisiana, temporarily abandoning their daughter to the same treatment. The text reinforces her identity as an abused "piece" of goods and her daughter's identity as incest victim; the only formal name Jones gives these women is their rapist's surname.

Corregidora's definition of slave women crosses time and place, surfacing in Ursa's first marriage. Ownership based on sexual relations informs her relationship with Mutt Thomas, who identifies Ursa as "his pussy," a term that signifies for him a faithful and loving wife (46). Possession is as important to Ursa's husband as it was to her great-grandfather: "'Ain't even took my name. You Corregidora's, ain't you? Ain't even took my name. You ain't my woman'" (61). Ursa remembers Mutt's "asking me to let him see his pussy. Let me feel my pussy" (46). Great Gram's identity as Corregidora's "gold piece" resonates in Ursa's identity as Mutt's "pussy." Caught up in her mothers' political agenda, Ursa initially allows Mutt to own her body and soul; according to Corregidora rules, a woman is wholly defined by her vagina and her womb.

How can "Corregidora rules" still apply in the mid-twentieth-century United States? Working towards self-realization, Great Gram and Gram transform - but do not abandon - Corregidora's objectifying code. In their philosophy, a woman's body is never her own, and a child is never a person in her own right. Exploring the problems of self-definition through motherhood, Missy Dehn Kubitschek notes that "Ursa loses her identity with her womb" (180). Corregidora's victims unknowingly continue his abuse in their injunction to "make generations." These "self-appointed griots" tell and retell an invariant history whose "power obliterate personality" is remarkable half a century later (Kubitschek 146-147). The Corregidora women respond to their early enslavement by defining themselves and their daughters as wombs intended for the literal bearing of witnesses. Sexual violence doubly limits desire and pleasure for these women. First defined as "pussy," they are now self-defined as womb. The function of woman's body, therefore, is single-minded still: No longer a sexual commodity, it has become a political commodity. Using Ursa's reclamation of desire and sexuality as an example, Gayl Jones argues that political commodification is a stepping stone toward self-empowerment but not an end in itself. Ursa must realize her sexual self in order to resolve her legacy of abuse. As Patricia Hill Collins notes, supplanting "negative images with positive ones can be equally problematic if the function of stereotypes as controlling images remains unrecognized" (106). The empowering mantle of an avenger can become a straitjacket.

Perhaps Corregidora's readers are made most uncomfortable by Jones's refusal to submerge desire under a history of abuse. Gram and Great Gram speak vengeance through their memories, but their stories also resurrect the memory of their abuser. While Corregidora works against smothering sexuality beneath a political veil, we must remember that Jones does not exonerate the slavemaster's atrocities. Neither does she depict rape as anything but vicious. Rather, she is concerned with locating sexual pleasure in the lives of the victimized. Mama tells Ursa that Martin, her husband and Ursa's father, "'had the nerve to ask [Great Gram and Gram] what I never had the nerve to ask. . . . How much was hate for Corregidora and how much was love?'" (131; italics added). Desire's fusion with hatred is made clear in Melvin Dixon's identifying Corregidora as "the lover and husband of all the women" (241). While the deliberately raw narratives of Great Gram and Gram dispel, for me, the image of Corregidora as romantic "lover," Martin's question still forces Jones's readers to examine the highly disconcerting coexistence of desire and abuse.

It is no coincidence that Ursa can voice her desire through the blues; Jones has explained that Corregidora is a "blues novel" because "blues talks about the simultaneity of good and bad. . . . Blues acknowledges all different kinds of feelings at once" (Harper 700). While Ursa's mothers speak freely about sexual abuse, sexual desire appears only in the seams of their narrative. Ursa muses about the possibility of their pleasure: "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?" (59)

Corregidora is at its riskiest in hinting that desire can exist in even the most abusive situations. Jones notes that her readers are often "bothered by the fact that the author doesn't offer any judgments or show her attitude toward the offense, but simply has the characters relate it" (Tate 97). Like Jones, Ursa does not judge her mothers, but only puzzles over Grandmama's and Great Gram's "desire":

Corregidora was theirs more than [Mama's]. Mama could only know, but they could feel. They were with him. What did they feel? You know how they talk about hate and desire. Two humps on the san camel? Yes. Hate and desire both riding them. . . . Still, there was what they never spoke . . . what they wouldn't tell me. How all but one of them had the same lover? Did they begrudge [Mama] that? Was that their resentment? (102-03)

These questions are enormously difficult, perhaps unanswerable, and Jones's insistence upon asking them reveals the inevitable confusion resulting from linking sexuality with personal and political revenge. More importantly, Jones delineates the extent to which Ursa's mothers have been cheated.

The text shows that desire may sprout between the cracks of a thwarted life, but the plant will never be strong and healthy. No one can forget Corregidora's identity as rapist and slave-breeder, yet he also provides Great Gram and Gram with their only sexual experience: an experience of fear, rape, and incest. In a twisted sense Corregidora is the only "lover" they ever have, yet their memories of him have maimed their desire as surely as Mutt has maimed Ursa's body. She cannot conceive a child while her mothers cannot conceive of sexual love: Corregidora "'made them make love to anyone, so they couldn't love anyone'" (104).

The Corregidora women's repression of desire for political reasons can be read as a response to slavery's capitalist control of black women's sexuality: They bear witnesses rather than human units of labor (see Collins 76). Furthermore, as Collins and Hazel Carby have noted, the justification for "breeding" blackslaves is inextricable from nineteenth-century ideologies of white and black womanhood. The "cult of true womanhood," with its required suppression of sexuality, did not simply exclude black women, but also - in labeling them Jezebels or whores - used them as a contrasting backdrop for white women's "purity" (see Carby 23-31, 34-35, 38). This strategy virtually sanctioned the extensive sexual violence black women suffered at the hands of white men. The sexually aggressive "matriarch" and the morally inferior "welfare mother," two images of black women fabricated by contemporary white culture, continue this association (see Collins 77, 78).

In dealing with black female sexuality, Corregidora stands apart from much of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century black women's fiction. When black women writers (for example, Jessie Fauset) grappled with the ideology of true womanhood, they sought to dissociate their bodies from "a persistent association with illicit sexuality," and so deleted sexuality entirely from their representations of black women (Carby 32; see also 167-68, 174). Corregidora, in challenging instead of fleeing that association, reclaims the erotic as a realm of human agency (see Collins 164, 166, 192). Ursa's struggle to voice her own desire inevitably leads her to that realm.

Although she does not wholly renounce her familial identity of woman-as-womb, she does acknowledge pleasure in a limited way. Certainly, Corregidora's violent legacy has circumscribed Ursa's sensation of desire; she initially changes the terms of her self-definition by focusing her sexuality upon her clitoris rather than her womb. Unlike her mothers, who try to substitute rage for gratification, Ursa localizes her desire, at one point realizing that "'. . . those times he didn't touch the clit, I couldn't fed anything'" (89). The work of Gayatri Spivak and Helene Cixous, each with her own emphasis on the specificity of the body, is helpful in evaluating this localized reclamation of sexuality. In "French Feminism in an International Frame," Spivak describes the clitoris as something suppressed or effaced in the interest of defining "woman as sex object, or as means or agent of reproduction" (151). Since female sexual pleasure has nothing to do with reproduction, the clitoris is what Spivak calls "women's excess in all areas of production and practice" (82). Ursa centers her pleasure precisely on the point that "exceeds" both Corregidora's racist appropriation and her mothers' political objectification of the female body. In doing so, she takes her first step toward reclaiming her entire body from an initially racist, politically motivated agenda.

Like Spivak, Helene Cixous also discusses desire; however, Cixous locates female sexual pleasure all through the body rather than focusing on a "phallic" point - i.e., the clitoris. While Cixous's biological and racial essentialism cannot be ignored,(2) we can use her work to further understand the search for desire in Corregidora. As long as Ursa confines her pleasure to a singular, finite location, she is still limiting her desire, still defining her sexual self in narrow terms. Cixous's emphasis upon the multiplicity of female pleasure is relevant to my discussion precisely because it works against that narrowing definition. Cixous visualizes a "woman's body, with its thousand and one thresholds of ardor" and its "profusion of meanings that run through it in every direction" (315), while Ursa's limited sense of desire leads to her difficulty in "feel[ing] anything" sexually. That difficulty haunts her through the novel, and is largely responsible for destroying her two marriages. More importantly, it reinforces her belief that she is somehow flawed as a woman, and feeds into her family's code of objectification. In the logic of her mothers, without a womb, how can she function as a woman? Ursa's sterility tortures her with the knowledge that she can no longer fulfill her "purpose." She cannot forget the "'space between [her] thighs. A well that never bleeds,'" and bemoans the "'silence in [her] womb'" (99).

Corregidora's emphasis upon the body ties in with Cixous's and Spivak's perspectives on female desire, which work against what Elizabeth Spelman calls white feminism's somatophobia: "fear of and disdain for the body" (126). Alluding to Simone de Beauvoir's observation that women have been "regarded as 'womb,'" Spelman connects feminism's "negative attitude toward the body" with "white solipsism in feminist thought" and, significantly, with "the idea that the work of the body and for the body has no part in real human dignity" (127). From Jonathan Swift's scatological poetry to Claude Levi Strauss's research on the significance of women's menstrual cycles in "primitive" cultures, women (but not most men) are indeed represented as having lives "determined by basic bodily functions. . . . Superior groups, we have been told from Plato on down, have better things to do with their lives" (127). As Spelman rightly points out, when this disdain for bodies divorces "the concept of woman . . . from the concept of woman's body," it posits a kind of a historical woman, one who

has no color, no accent, no particular characteristics that require having a body. . . . And so it will seem inappropriate or beside the point to think of women in terms of any physical characteristics, especially if their oppression has been rationalized by reference to those characteristics. (128)

In short, there would be no difference between the lives of a black woman of 1892 and a white woman of 1992.

Biological determinism can be a treacherous landscape for any feminist discussion. Nonetheless, Gayl Jones's physically oriented focus upon female pleasure necessitates a careful look at the body.

The Corregidora women's consistent self-identification with reproductivity is a stunning variation upon Gayatri Spivak's location of women within a Marxist framework of production. While women biologically "produce" children, Spivak notes that, socially speaking, "the legal possession of the child is an inalienable fact of the property right of the man who [biologically, yet also legally! 'produces' the child" (79). I do not want to recreate Spivak's entire Marxist argument here; what interests me is her statement that, culturally, "the man retains legal property rights over the product of a woman's body."(3) This emphasis upon property and production intersects with the experiences of black slave women squarely at the crossroads of reproduction and desire. As Spivak notes, a system of product/ownership leaves no room whatsoever for sexual pleasure. Naturally, she adds,

One cannot write off what may be called a uterine social organization (the arrangement of the world in terms of the reproduction of future generations, where the uterus is the chief agent and means of production) in favor of a clitoral. The uterine social organization should, rather, be "situated" through the understanding that it has so far been established by excluding a clitoral social organization. (152)

That is, recognition of women's sexual desire alongside their "value" as (re)producers is one way of empowering them as subjects of pleasure rather than passive objects of exchange, and women's "pleasure-as-excess" finds an appropriate sign in the clitoris - a sign that Ursa acknowledges in her rejection of her mothers' imposed self-definition.

That sign also defies women's relegation to an inferior status in Freudian terms. When Helene Cixous attacks the notion of what she calls "the supreme hole," she refers to both the "lack" of a phallus in women, as perceived by Freud, and the literal cavity of the vagina and womb. Focusing upon woman's "lack" results in the consistent identification of the "female" with "the negative" - an absence and a deformity. Instead, Cixous focuses upon female desire through her location of pleasure throughout the body, and argues for the "nonexclusion either of the difference or of one sex" and "the effects of the inscription of desire, over all parts of my body and the other body" (314). In contrast, the Corregidora women see a chance to create a tabula rasa upon which they can inscribe their story of sexual violence and rage. But is that all they see? The enforcement of a singular, fixed meaning upon their sexuality would seem to eliminate desire from their lives. Still, Jones's careful and persistent questioning about their "hate and desire" suggests that the issue of vengeance is not so clear-cut as it first appears.

En route to reclaiming her sexuality from this political agenda, Ursa recognizes her family's rigid code of binary oppositions between male and female. Their history categorizes each sex, both black and white. All men are rapists; all women, victims who sustain themselves upon their anger. Fashioning Corregidora's sexual commodification of their bodies into political self-commodification, Ursa's mothers do turn his racist, oppositional perspective to their own advantage. In doing so, however, they insist upon what Keith Byerman calls a "dualistic universe" of victims and rapists (180). Historically, this mode of "either/or dichotomous thinking" has fed racist as well as sexist objectification; both Collins and Christian have observed how easily white culture's concept of black women as "Other" leads to forms of manipulation (see Collins 68-69; and Christian, Perspectives 160). Additionally, Toni Cade Bambara writes that "stereotypical definitions of 'masculine' and 'feminine'" oppose "what revolution for self is all about - the whole person" (qtd. in Collins 184-85). 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. Martin beats Mama until her face is swollen and discolored. Mutt Thomas drunkenly pushes Ursa down a flight of stairs, killing her fetus and leaving her sterile. Ursa must resolve both the racist brutality of her mothers' lives and the limitations of their response to that brutality. Until she can do so, she is subject to the violence engendered by Corregidora's atrocities. Familial memories distort her sense of self, and both her husbands victimize her in part (but only in part) because she sees herself as a victim. Ursa needs to transcend the cycle of violence that her mothers have unknowingly passed on to her. To some degree, she can do so by fully understanding her sexual self.

Ursa's identity as a daughter is pivotal to this understanding. She must "'go on making dreams . . . till [she] feel[s] satisfied that [she] could have loved'" Mutt, and realizes that she "'couldn't be satisfied until [she] . . . had discovered [Mama's] private memory" of Martin (103-04). With her accident and two failed marriages behind her, Ursa visits her mother to learn about her parents, She needs to see herself as a child born of love rather than of rape. Asking about her father for the first time in her life, she tells Mama that what "'happened with you was always more important [than Corregidora]. What happened with you and him'" (111).

Mama is not a victim of rape or incest when she marries Martin. Identified as a walking womb, however, she still categorizes her husband as a tool for vengeance, telling Ursa, "'. . . I knew I wasn't looking for a man'" (117), but "'. . . my whole body wanted you. . . and knew it would have you, and knew you'd be e girl'" (114; italics added). Because Mama's body wants a daughter - not a man, not a lover - that body enacts an emotional form of parthenogenesis: Needing a man to conceive a daughter, Mama does not want"' his fussy body, not the man himself'" Ursa reflects that Mama had "'gone out to get that man to have me and then didn't need him, because they'd been telling her so often what she should do'" (101). Denied a sense of herself as a private and sexual being, Mama always hears the angry voices of her mothers and their rapist when she closes her eyes. Aware of her own complicity in this denial, she remembers her first sexual experience: "'. . . all of a sudden it was like I felt the whole man in me, just felt the whole man in there. . . . I wouldn't let myself feel anything'" else (117-18; italics added).

The pernicious legacy of slaveowners like Corregidora extends not just to Ursa's mothers. Sexual violence committed against black women also affects black men; as Carby notes, "Black manhood . . . could not be achieved or maintained because of the inability of the slave to protect the black woman in the same manner that convention dictated the inviolability of the body of the white woman" (35). Although Mama and Martin have never been slaves, this ideology of black sexuality permeates their relationship. Her identity as angry victim not only thwarts her sexuality, but also reinforces Martin's sense of powerlessness and frustration as a black man in twentieth-century North America.(4)

Living with him in her grandmother's three-room shotgun house, Mama rarely sleeps with Martin:

". . . he wasn't getting what he wanted from me. . . . I kept telling him it was because they were in there that I wouldn't. [But] even if they hadn't been. . . . "What do we have to do, go up under the house?" he kept asking me.'" (130)

Mama's familial agenda comes full circle, sketching a self-fulfilling prophecy of abuse and victimization as Martin's angry frustration leads first to his disappearance, then to violence. Believing that the only relationship between men and women by Corregidora standards is that of prostitute and client, he beats his wife badly when he next sees her, saying: "'"I wont you to go on down the street, lookin like a whore"'" (121). Her response is, tellingly, no response at all:

". . . I knew there wasn't nothing I could do if he did [beat me]. I knew I wouldn't do nothing even if I could. . . . I carried him to the point where he ended up hating me, Ursa. And that's what I knew I'd keep doing. That's what I knew I'd do with any man." (120-21)

Mama's self-identity as inevitable victim is thus even more malignant, because more powerful, than Martin's rage.

Frustration and violence reemerge in Ursa's own marriage when Mutt pushes her down a flight of steps. Certainly, Mutt is accountable for his behavior, but Ursa also recognizes the indirect operations of her familial agenda. Her mothers' histories thwart her own desire and infect her marriage until Mutt cries that he's "'tired a hear - ing about Corregidora's women. Why do you have to remember that old bastard anyway?'" In part, Mutt's own slave ancestry explains his possessiveness, but it is also Ursa's inability to "feel anything" sexually that drives him to wild speculations about "'them mens watching after you'" (154). Ursa's sexual focus is limited because, like her mothers, she is held captive by the raging memories of her ancestry. Corregidora established this captivity, but Ursa's mothers are partially culpable for its reinforcement. Mutt, referring to her slave ancestors as well as his, tells Ursa, "'Whichever way you look at it, we ain't them'" (151). But Ursa is them, and will be them for as long as their memories confiscate her body as a witness.

Often she wonders just whose body she inhabits: hers, or the collective body of the Corregidora women? Great Gram and Gram re-tell their history so effectively that Ursa's mother "learned it off by heart"; in fact, "it was as if their memory . . . was her . . . own private memory" (129). At one point her mother's narrative merges so strongly with Great Gram's that "'it wasn't her that was talking, but Great Gram. . . . she wasn't Mama now, she was Great Gram'" (124). Staring at a photograph of herself, Ursa realizes: "I'd always thought I was different. . . . 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. . ." (60). It refers to Corregidora's blood, but also to the horrific remembered lives of Ursa's mothers. She is so forcibly identified with her family that she has no privacy from their relentless memories: "My mother would work while my grandmother told me, then she'd come home and tell me. I'd go to school and come back and be told" (101). These stories - terrible and essential - become her mothers' wedding gift to her.

To resolve her legacy of abuse, Ursa must relocate the site of her desire and embrace a multiplicity of sexual pleasure. She also needs to recognize her own potential for ruthlessness in what Gayl Jones explains is the "blues relationship" between men and women:

Although the main focus of Corregidora . . . is on the blues relationships or relationships involving brutality, there seems to be a growing understanding - working itself out especially in Corregidora - of what is required to be genuinely tender. Perhaps brutality enables one to recognize what tenderness is. (Tate 98)

Tenderness and brutality coalesce in the text's ambivalent closing scene between Ursa and Mutt. Twenty-one years after Ursa's accident, Mutt appears and the two reunite. Still, Ursa's initial thoughts are violently retributive even during a moment of intense sexual intimacy:

I got between his knees. . . . It had to be sexual, I was thinking, it had to be something sexual that Great Gram did to Corregidora. . . . "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. . . can't get her out of his mind the next?" In a split second I knew what it was. . . . 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)

During fellatio Ursa retreats from "broken skin" to stopping just before" - she does not castrate Mutt. The point is that she could have done so.(5) She empowers herself in this sexual union, however violently, by becoming an active agent ("I wanted it too. . . . I got between his knees"), not the passive one who must always "say I want to get fucked" (89; emphasis added; see also Kubitschek 150). In this pivotal scene Ursa slowly begins to reclaim her desire and her body from her family narrative of abuse.

Ursa reevaluates her role as victim by acknowledging her own power to hurt, a power that is a point of connection for her and Mutt: ". . . was what Corregidora had done to [Great-Gram] any 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 recognizing herself and Mutt in these "others," Ursa also recognizes the pattern of mutual abuse that she must break to reclaim desire (see also Byerman 180-81). Through realizing that the power to hurt lies not only in the victimizers but also in the victims, she empowers those victims. Here, reclaiming desire means first recognizing the potential for mutual abuse between men and women. Locating the other in oneself involves acknowledging that violent possibility, not repressing it. Through this realistic acknowledgment, Gayl Jones breaks a destructive pattern: Ursa opts not for pain, but for pleasure. The text closes with Ursa's realization of her own potential as an abusive agent. It also points toward another potential: that of a woman who can reclaim her body and her desire.

Of course, objectification not only sexually constrains but also silences - a silencing that Corregidora undermines through the blues song and the oral narrative. When a woman's voice and power are equated solely with her reproductive capacity, she is rendered silent and powerless if she will not or cannot bear children. Because she is sterile, Ursa becomes a cipher in her familial code of vengeance. But Jones's deliberate choice of an oral art form for her narrator shatters the silence of a peculiarly "female" identity. Ursa's artistry is separate from "making generations" yet equally valid when she finally sees herself not as an empty womb, but instead as a powerful blues singer. Jones thus contributes to Black feminism's "over-arching theme of finding a voice to express a self-defined Black women's standpoint" - a theme prevalent in other feminist contexts as well (Collins 94).

The Corregidora women's political agenda offers this choice: Sing either the note of vengeance or not at all. Addressing these issues of speech and silencing through an oral narrative, Corregidora weaves a pattern out of the blues and colloquial speech. Jones calls this pattern a "ritualized dialogue": "You create a rhythm that people wouldn't ordinarily use . . . [by taking] the dialogue out of the naturalistic realm" (Harper 699; see also Bell et al. 285; and Byerman 3, 7). Ritualized dialogue calls attention to speech itself, emphasizing the ways in which language can transcend a rigid, calcifying identity. For Ursa, two ways out of her repetitive familial narrative are the blues song and her verbalized anger.

Corregidora consists of an improvisational duet of rage and the blues. Mama calls the blues "devil's music," a label whose associations with sinful chaos evoke Ursa's nearly hysterical anger after her accident. Her delirious cursing heralds her refusal to be hemmed in by the violence of both her family and her husband. Just as Mutt's violence forever alters Ursa's ability to bear witness, her ensuing fury transforms her singing voice. As Cat Lawson tells her, "'. . . it sounds like you been through something. Before it was beautiful too, but you sound like you been through more now'" (44). Infusing her art with rage, Ursa's voice becomes the medium through which she empowers and redefines herself.

When Mutt Thomas's act of violence dovetails with the violence of her mothers' histories, Ursa's identity is circumscribed even more tightly than before. Conceived to bear witness to a brutal past that she herself cannot claim, Ursa is now bereft of both child and purpose. She has been groomed for one kind of role in the theatre of her mothers' past, only to discover that she cannot play - or sing - it. In order to sing at all, she must move through her anger toward an artistry of unlimited possibility. Gayl Jones thus uses the extemporaneous quality of the blues to improvise on her protagonist's rage, ending with an ambivalent yet hopeful ritualistic dialogue between Ursa and Mutt.

Even before that exchange Ursa confronts her own desire and conflicts of power and powerlessness in a dream. She and Mutt voice a repetitive pattern of imperative, pleading, and response. Mutt's lines appear in the following order, punctuated only by Ursa's concise "'Naw'"; "'Come over here, honey'"; "'I need somebody'"; "'I said I need somebody'"; "'I won't treat you bad'"; "'I won't make you sad'"; "'Come over here, honey, and visit with me a little'"; "'Come over here, baby, and visit with me a little'" (97-98). The novel's final dialogue is also ritualistic. Three times Mutt and Ursa chant, respectively: "'I don't want a kind of woman that hurt you'" and "'Then you don't want me.'" The pattern changes slightly but powerfully with Ursa's last reply: "'I don't want a kind of man that'll hurt me neither'" (185). Jones's use of repetition and rhyme is deliberate; in focusing on the sounds of these dialogues she focuses upon Ursa's verbal nature. Ritualized dialogue reminds us that Ursa's art form is the blues song and that the novel is also "about a woman artist who sings the blues." Painting a "portrait of the artist as a young woman," Jones both acknowledges and moves beyond Ursa's roles as "hysteric" and black female victim, thus moving beyond a cultural and literary stereotype (Harris 5, 2).

Jones does not quite turn her sword into a plowshare when she turns Ursa's rough language into art; Corregidora does not entirely refute violence. Instead, Ursa uses it to transform violence into violent art, while acknowledging the brutality in both her mothers' lives and her own. Her rage becomes more personalized after she undergoes the hysterectomy that destroys her fetus as well as the only sexual identity she has ever known. Her resulting fury is so virulent that her second husband, Tadpole, observes, "'. . . you had those nurses scared to death of you. Cussing them out like that. Saying words they ain't never heard before'" (8). The singer's capacity for invective is apparent throughout her deliberately raw narrative.

Violent words liked fuck and cunt are "taught" to the novel's victimized women by their abusers. Early in their marriage, Mutt's use of these words alarms and embarrasses Ursa. Yet soon she learns to "flare back at him with his own kind of words," telling him, "'I guess you taught me. Corregidora taught Great Gram to talk the way she did'" (153). Great Gram's stories are repeated so that her daughters will memorize them and absorb her identity, but Ursa uses her history to create new voices and new songs. She uses speech, voice, and the blues to undermine objectification, but refuses to deny the violence that has created that objectification. Furthermore, without Corregidora, Gram, Mama, and Ursa would not exist at all. As Janice Harris writes, without Corregidora "she would have nothing to bear, no past or present to sing about, no notes, no lyrics. She is and is not one of Corregidora's women" (4). Ursa therefore cannot deny the violence of her familial history. Rather, she works against the political agenda that silences all voices except the one screaming for retribution.

Ursa regains her tongue in her art form. She relocates her creativity from her womb to her throat, an act of redemption foreshadowed in her reflections on sterility: "The center of a woman's being. Is it? No seeds. Is that what snaps away my music, a harp string broken, guitar string, string of my banjo belly. Strain in my voice" (46). In this way, Ursa's art becomes far more important than her ability to "make generations." A singer who sees herself as a broken harp string, Ursa must eventually abandon her damaged self-definition in order to sing at all.

Jones herself works against an imposed definition of herself as writer through her honest treatment of Ursa's familial politics. Unwilling to be pigeonholed as a speaker for her race, Jones agrees with Claudia Tate's observation that many readers object to her depiction of characters "who do not conform to positive images of women or black women," and that "they want to castigate Eva [of Eva's Man! and Ursa as some sort of representative black female" (Tate 97). Corregidora anticipates this question posed by Jones in a later essay:

Should a Black writer ignore [problematic black] characters, refuse to enter "such territory" because of the "negative image" and because such characters can be misused politically by others, or should one try to reclaim such complex, contradictory characters as well as try to reclaim the idea of the heroic image? ("Work" 233)

Certainly, Jones does not deny that political strategy may be helpful to a writer, but she is alarmed by its potentially rigid constraints, warning that an agenda can also "tell you what you cannot do . . . tell you that there's a certain territory politics won't allow you to enter, certain questions politics won't allow you to ask - in order to be 'politically correct.'" As Corregidora makes clear, Jones places herself on the side of risk.

Jones's choice to write about a blues singer is double-edged, enabling her to depict "the simultaneity of good and bad," since blues music "doesn't set up any territories. It doesn't set some feelings off into a corner" (Harper 700). Here she foreshadows Houston A. Baker's 1984 observation about the blues, whose "instrumental rhythms suggest change, movement, action, continuance, unlimited and unending possibility" (8). Jones is careful to separate herself from narrators like Ursa Corregidora, but the sign of the blues singer - a woman who often asks the "wrong" questions - does evoke the author's presence as storyteller and blues singer herself. As Janice Harris notes, "Blues singing permits a remarkably open expression of being oppressed . . . in its linguistic license and freedom to improvise" (4-5). Jones "sings the blues" when she insists upon improvising, creating characters who are not inherently "positive race models." Although she argues that she does "not have a political 'stance,'" her writing is political in its refusal to be compartmentalized as "positive" African American work, and in its denial that an African American woman writer can only be one kind of artist (Jones, "Work" 234).

Corregidora's system of slavery and prostitution depends upon the silence of women. Also silenced for and by Ursa's mothers, however, are the voices of desire and love any voice, in fact, that does not speak vengeance. In this way, Jones argues that women as well as men are agents of silencing. Ursa shatters her enforced muteness by singing the blues, an act echoed by Jones's creation of a "blues novel" whose multiple forms of orality and acceptance of both "good and bad" allow the author to speak freely. Corregidora's deliberately colloquial narrative evokes what Jones calls an "up-close" perspective, a direct relationship "between the storyteller and the hearer" (Harper 692, 698). That relationship is perhaps the most appropriate vehicle for Jones's courage in asking such difficult, even unpopular questions about how the political commodification of women's bodies fore closes the real simultaneity of "correct" and "incorrect" desires.

Notes

1. In doing so, she centers her work firmly within certain traditional American quests for self-definition. Patricia Collins offers a cogent analysis of the "journey from internalized oppression to the 'free mind of a self-defined, Afrocentric feminist consciousness" in black women's writing (93-106).

2. Cixous's (and Irigaray's) theories ignore the impact of race and class by not asking "to what extent the body - whether male or female - is a cultural construct, not a 'natural' given" (Suleiman 14). See also Barbara Christian's "The Race for Theory" (225-37).

3. She cites the "current struggle over abortion rights" as proof of "this unacknowledged agenda" (79-80). See also 78 and 81-83 for her entire complex and qualified Marxist analysis.

4. Collins has a provocative section regarding abusive relationships between black women and men. The section culminates in an excellent analysis of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, which illustrates "the process by which power as domination . . . has managed to annex the basic power of the erotic" in black heterosexual relationships (179-89).

5. Published one year after Corregidora, Eva's Man takes this moment to its brutal conclusion: Eva Medina murders, then orally castrates her lover.

Works Cited

Baker, Houston A, Jr. Blues, Ideology and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984.

Byerman. Keith. Fingering the Jagged Grain: Tradition and Form in Recent Black Fiction. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1985.

Carby, Hazel V. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

Christian. Barbara. Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers. New York: Pergamon, 1985.

----- . "The Race for Theory." Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism. Ed. Linda Kauffman. New York: Blackwell, 1989. 225-37.

Cixous, Helene. "The Laugh of the Medusa." Signs 1 (Summer 1976). Rpt. in Critical Theory Since 1965. Ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle. Tallahassee: Florida State UP, 1986. 309-20.

Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990.

Dixon. Melvin. "Singing a Deep Song: Language as Evidence in the Novels of Gayl Jones," Evans 236-48.

Evans, Mari. ed. Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation. Garden City: Anchor, 1984.

Harper, Michael S. "Gayl Jones: An Interview." Massachusetts Review 18.4 (1977): 692-715.

Harris, Janice. "Gayl Jones's Corregidora," Frontiers 5.3 (1981): 1-5.

Jones, Gayl. "About My Work." Evans 233-35.

-----. Corregidore. 1975, Boston: Beacon, 1986.

Kubitschek, Missy Dehn, Claiming the Heritage: African-American Women Novelists and History. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1991.

Spelman, Elizabeth. Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought. Boston: Beacon, 1988.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Routledge, 1988.

Suleiman, Susan Rubin, ed. The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives. Cambridge: Harvard UP. 1986.

Tate, Claudia. Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1983.

Amy S. Gottfried is an assistant professor of rhetoric at Boston University. Her entry on Gayl Jones is forthcoming in The Oxford Companion to African American Literature.