Traumatic Possessions: The Body and Memory in African American Women's Writing and Performance

Chapter 4. Uncanny Spaces: Trauma, Cultural Memory, and Female Body in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora

4 / Uncanny Spaces: Trauma, Cultural Memory, and Female Body in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora In “Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle,” Dori Laub describes his experience with the Holocaust-survivor testimony on which he bases his theories about witnessing and recovery: “survivors did not only need to survive so that they could tell their stories; they also needed to tell their stories in order to survive. There is, in each survivor, an imperative need to tell and thus to come to know one’s story, unimpeded by ghosts from the past against which one has to protect oneself. One has to know one’s buried truth in order to be able to live one’s life.”1 Feminist inquiry has also held recovering narratives, or reclaiming “buried” or marginalized truths by and about women, as a fundamental concern. These “ghosts,” literary or artistic foremothers such as described by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own or Alice Walker in “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens,” impede only when left unacknowledged, the lack of a connection to a creative lineage creating what Gilbert and Gubar notably refer to as an “anxiety of authorship” for female authors. Filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha’s “Grandma’s Story” chapter in Woman, Native, Other looks at the imperative of each generation to claim the cultural narrative of the female ancestor and suggests that the repetition of the story fulfills both giver and receiver, giving them a sense of “pleasure in the copy.”2 Specifically, she performs a cross-cultural feminist analysis that includes Gayl Jones’s Corregidora, suggesting that the novel illustrates the female artist’s compelling and pleasurable engagement with bearing witness through repetition. Indeed, at the end of Dessa Rose, Sherley Anne Williams reinforces this perspective when her protagonist, Dessa, uncanny spaces / 69 describes finding an audience for her trauma narrative in the storytellers of future generations. In Sally’s Rape, Robbie McCauley addresses the damage that occurs when these stories remain hidden or denied within the public sphere. However, in Corregidora, the “copy” passed down includes narratives fixed within a cultural framework that implicates the female body in its own trauma. Reproduction is not associated with pleasure here; rather, pleasure is linked to the disruption of narratives that inscribe the female body with the mark of trauma and with the recognition of traumatic memory in its multiple forms. Corregidora provides insight into connections between narrative reproductionandtraumaticrepetition ,beginningwithacrisisrelatedtothe reproductive body that symbolizes this connection. Ursa Corregidora, the protagonist in Corregidora, loses the ability to bear children after her husband pushes her down a flight of stairs, resulting in an emergency hysterectomy. The opening crisis signals a shift in the connection between the female body, traumatic repetition, and narrative reproduction that this chapter hopes to illuminate, and new possibilities for testimony follow that attempt to release the protagonist’s body from the collective anxiety projected onto it, a culturally produced repetition of the original trauma. In “Trauma and Its Challenge to Society,” Alexander McFarlane and Bessel van der Kolk assert that “conflicts between victims’ and the bystanders ’ assessment of the meaning of trauma may set the stage for the trauma to be perpetuated in a larger social setting; soon the allocation of blame and not the trauma itself, may become the central issue.”3 Corregidora confronts traumatic repetition as it has been “perpetuated in a larger social setting” and in individual lives. Recovery here involves a renewed connection between body and voice. The protagonist, Ursa, creates narratives and performances that recognize the ways in which the body functions as speech and text, both discursively as a site of cultural inscription and as the locus of traumatic response. In doing so, she locates her own experience in relation to the bodies of the past and activates multiple levels of witness, including bearing witness to the intersubjective dynamic of witnessing itself, demonstrating that “the crucial if unstable difference between retraumatization and cure may be the difference between the unwitnessed and witnessed repetition: a repetition addressed to and heard by another becomes testimonial.”4 Recognizing the gaps in consciousness created by trauma, Jones uses the body strategically to indicate the limits of language, particularly in relation to expressing post-traumatic experience and acknowledging 70 / traumatic possessions the uncanny figures of female sexuality inherited through the false testimony of patriarchal cultures. The new testimony intervenes by writing trauma, which “involves processes...