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  • Love and the Trauma of Resistance in Gayl Jones's Corregidora
  • Stephanie Li (bio)

Shifting between scenes of nineteenth-century slave life in Brazil and contemporary 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 self-destructive 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 nineteenth-century 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 [End Page 131] poignantly through the bondage inflicted by the legacy of slavery, not by its historical condition. For Ursa, slavery is an inherited memory, not a reality that she has experienced firsthand. However, it strongly influences her understanding of social relations, especially those between men and women. Corregidora testifies to the ways that slavery continues to affect contemporary social relations as well as to the powerful forms of resistance that black women have employed in order to endure and to tell their stories.

Ursa's foremothers obsessively tell her brutal stories of their incest to compensate for inadequate historical records of slavery's atrocities. The project of making generationsposes a significant challenge to patriarchal systems of meaning. However, in exploring this oppositional strategy of witnessing, I am most interested in charting how the resistance of one generation becomes the trauma of another. The abuse Great Gram and Gram suffered under Corregidora becomes transposed across generations as these two women ultimately traumatize Mama and Ursa through their suffocating narration. Despite the subversive nature of their command, the Corregidora women perpetuate a relationship between men and women that continues to be rooted in objectification and production while denying female sexual pleasure. Madhu Dubey argues that Corregidora provides a powerful critique of the matrilineal model of tradition, challenging the notion "that the mother's past should provide the ground for the daughter's utterance" (253). My reading of Jones's novel further explores the problems of inheriting a totalizing maternal narrative within the context of Ursa's search for voice, identity, and meaningful relationships. While critics have primarily read Ursa's journey to self-expression through her performance as...

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