Corregidora essay with articles to use.

Living the Legacy: Pain, Desire, and Narrative Time in Gayl Jones' "Corregidora" Author(s): Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg Source: Callaloo, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Spring, 2003), pp. 446-472 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3300872 . Accessed: 29/04/2013 13:45

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LIVING THE LEGACY Pain, Desire, and Narrative Time in Gayl Jones' Corregidora

by Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg

for Maryemma Graham

Gayl Jones' Corregidora traces the legacy of slavery through the lives of four

generations of women, the last of whom, Ursa, experiences the effects of that legacy as they surface in her contemporary heterosexual relationships. The fulfillment of female sexual desire in Corregidora remains, however, an impossibility. Similarly, the novel's narrative structure, rather than surging forward to climax and the warm

dispersal of denouement, remains "like a fist drawn up" (Corregidora 75), unopened, unrelieved. This image is suggestive in considering the parallel between black female (sexual) subjectivity under a dominant patriarchal system and the subjectivity of a

person experiencing the pain of torture, as well as the problems of representation accruing to both. For Jones' image contains not only the tension marking the gesture of the closed fist (fingers clenched in anger or fear, or even in the aroused suspension before sexual fulfillment), but also the violent dis-connection of the fist "drawn up," ready to strike, yet somehow restrained. Contact, in this gesture, is always interrupt- ed, and always tinged with a violence. The same may be said for the sexual desire of the novel's protagonist, Ursa Corregidora.

Indeed, such conditions of frustration and violent disconnection are appropriate to the representation of female desire within the larger scope of slavery's traumatic

legacy of sexual torture. If Teresa de Lauretis argues that the representation of women as historical, speaking subjects presupposes the construction of a "different narrative

temporality" which would open "other spaces for identification, other positionalities of desire" (Alice Doesn't 83), then Jones pushes back the radical potentiality of that

opening to reveal what lies before it: the strained impossibility of women's desire (and the bodily frustration accompanying that impossibility) within the racist-heterosex-

ist-patriarchal containment of (Black) Woman as ground of male desire, Woman as lack. I propose that by structuring her novel in a pattern of traumatic repetition, Jones offers neither the satisfactory closure of a linear narrative (of either progress or decline), nor the redemptive healing of a circular narrative recalling ancestral strength. Instead, Corregidora's readers are put in the position of "hearer," or witness, rather than of spectator, and what we witness is the traumatic impossibility of female desire, and therefore of full female subjectivity, resulting from torture's legacy.

The designation of Corregidora as a novel of trauma, a traumatic narrative, is apt. Still, recent critical assertions that Corregidora adheres strictly to a structure of

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traumatic testimonial have trouble accounting for the central paradox at the heart of trauma itself as defined in traditional psychoanalytic terms; that is, the simultaneous absence and literal presence of the traumatic event as experienced by the survivor.1 If, as Madhu Dubey argues, Corregidora's narrative structure performs the "eruption" of Ursa's (ancestral) past into her present life, the novel's temporal and referential ambiguities-that is, its withheld, misplaced, and misunderstood words and ges- tures, its repetitious conflation of times and events, ultimately constituting a literal impossibility of reference-also indicate a narrative contained within what I will call a pained present, symptomatic of the representation of a body still in pain rather than of a traumatized subject attempting to grasp a pain which sustains itself upon living memory. The distinction here is slight, but suggestive: certainly pain lives on through the traumatic repetition characteristic of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and in its characteristically repetitious testimony; however, by examining the ways in which Ursa exhibits the behavior of a person still in pain, rather than a person traumatically re-experiencing a past pain (which is indeed not always strictly her own), we might broaden our understanding of the burden of historical legacy, strategies for its representation, and responses to such representations.

Applying theories of bodily pain to Jones' narrative might also offer a different understanding of Ursa's subjectivity-or of her difficulty achieving full subjectivity. For Ursa's subjectivity is constructed through the seams of a parallel problematic as both a "body in pain," to borrow Elaine Scarry's metaphysical term, and more specifically as a black female body contained within a violent heterosexual system predicated upon penetration, both historically manifested under slavery, and as it remains a determining feature of contemporary patriarchal culture. I will argue here that full subjectivity, that of a woman speaking and achieving her desire, is connected in Corregidora with a clitoral pleasure located outside the frame of that penetrative system in an economy in which voice = sex = subjectivity. Within this economy, the voice of female desire is also the voice of pain, and the inability to adequately reference female desire is tied to the inability to adequately reference pain. Both problems of reference, then, are subsumed under the brutalities of a continuum which begins with slavery in 19th-century Brazil and continues into the present of contem- porary U.S. patriarchy. Important to a consideration of the effects of torture within the slave systems of the Americas, such inexpressibility of both pain and desire is not simply a function of the universal, metaphysical difficulty of articulating corporeal experience, but is also quite specifically the product of historical systems of racial oppression purposefully structured to silence such articulation.

Corregidora, then, provides an opportunity to ponder the relation of the represen- tation of pain-and specifically, I would argue, of torture-with the representation of female desire. Such analysis demands an examination of the ways in which Ursa's experience, as well as the experiences of her foremothers (experiences which she literally re-lives as part of her ancestral memory), adhere to the formal structure of torture, a move which requires a shifting of that paradigm itself.

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"History's Intricate Invasions" Or: What is Torture?

Some recent critical readings of Corregidora have sought to define its narrative structure and content as traumatic, a repetitive intrusion of the historical legacy of slavery into the novel's present time. Certainly this point is supported by the plot structure. The action of the first half of the novel closely follows the patterns of

sleeping, waking, and daydream symptomatic of trauma survivorship, and the subjects of the dream sequences which interrupt the narrative are most often events from Ursa's past, as well as her foremothers'. Yet moving out from this point, shifting slightly to address Corregidora as a novel about torture occupying the narrative time of a pained present, offers perspective upon both the novel's narrative strategies and

ideological inscription, as well as upon the "repressed underside"2 of torture-its implicitly gendered constitution and its structural connection to female sexuality and

subjectivity. Undertaking this critical endeavor requires addressing a series of related questions about what actually constitutes torture: Who is tortured? Under what conditions? In what kinds of places? By whom? For what purpose? Posing such

questions provides a supplement to universalist definitions of torture which have dominated traditional human rights discourses, a supplement necessary to under-

standing how different kinds of bodies experience different kinds of pain (indeed, how certain kinds of pain have been assigned to certain kinds of bodies), as well as how a great deal of pain has been systematically overlooked or repressed in legal, economic, political, civic, and cultural contexts.

Traditionally, torture has been distinguished from other violences by its public, political nature. Consider the following definition from Article One of the United Nations Convention Against Torture (1984):

Torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, wheth- er physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted by or at the instigation of a public official on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or confession, punishing him for an act he has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating him or other persons.

Crucial to the paradigm constructed by this definition is the identity of the torturer as a masculine or gender-neutral person operating in a public capacity. Current feminist human rights theorists and activists have persistently worked to dismantle this distinction between systematic or state (public) and arbitrary or individual (private) torture, arguing that it is misleading and working to define more specifically what kinds of acts constitute torture. Some contemporary international conventions and treaties have remedied the elisions occasioned by the public/private divide by articulating the ways in which torture is specifically raced, gendered, classed, and nationalized, so to speak, and have, as part of that process, redefined rape-tradition- ally considered a "private" act and excluded on that basis from international human rights conventions-as a crime against humanity.3 Still, many foundational interna- tional documents defining and governing human rights violations continue to ex-

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clude or narrowly define rape and sexual or domestic violence according to univer- salist prescriptions based upon a theoretical public-private split. Examining the language of the Geneva Conventions, which does not name rape a "grave breach" identifiable as an international crime, Rhonda Copelon argues that "if the egregious- ness of rape is to be fully recognized, rape must be explicitly recognized as a form of torture" (201). Copelon historicizes her argument in terms of the shift in torture's paradigm, from being "largely understood as a method of extracting information," to becoming "commensurate with willfully causing great suffering or injury ... In the

contemporary understanding of torture, degradation is both vehicle and goal" (202). In this regard, rape, an act which is both predicated upon and stages the impulse to "degrade and destroy a woman based on her identity as a woman" (199), is paradig- matic.

In thus working to redefine rape as torture, a move which requires an a priori reconfiguration of the traditional public/private divide in human rights discourse, the point is not simply to broaden the definition of torture to include private as well as public breaches, but more pointedly to denounce such either/or frameworks (which keep the concepts-if not their material effects-intact) so as to account for the ways in which all such breaches are at once one and the same; that is, both private and public.4 In a sense, this rhetorical move simply recapitulates the feminist mantra "the personal is the political," but in the context of feminist human rights discourse it does more, obliterating the spatial and ideological metaphorics of private and public, or, perhaps more accurately, recognizing the fusion of one with the other. Homi Bhabha's

description of the "unhomely moment," part of a larger cultural theory which seeks to account for postcolonial subjectivity, is germane: "The recesses of the domestic space become sites for history's most intricate invasions. In that displacement, the borders between home and world become confused; and uncannily the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting" (9).5

Given the strict dependence of a western worldview upon such obscuring distinc- tions, acknowledging the displacement of home by world (and of world by home) may, as Bhabha notes, generate an initially "divided" and "disorienting" vision. However, from a feminist analytic perspective, such vision may ultimately be rather clarifying than disorienting, revealing the "private, secret, insidious traumas" which are "more often than not those events in which the dominant culture and its forms and institutions are expressed and perpetuated" (Brown 102). Indeed, citing Carole Pateman's analysis of the domestic realm as disavowed underpinning of civil society, Bhabha identifies the unhomely as a distinctly feminist concept committed to bring- ing to light that which has been purposefully hidden beneath the mantle of private life: "the 'unhomely' does provide a 'non-continuist' problematic that dramatizes- in the figure of woman-the ambivalent structure of the civil State as it draws its rather paradoxical boundary between the private and public spheres" (10). This conception of the unhomely provides a meta-discourse with which to analyze the separation of private from public which enables and supports torture as repressive mechanism. Acknowledging the danger of imposing further representational bag- gage onto the already burdenedfigure of woman by rendering her pure symbol of this

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unhomeliness, we might engage with the life experiences of women such as Ursa who are not figures for, but rather subjects of, an unhomely moment which "relates the traumatic ambivalences of a personal, psychic history to the wider disjunctions of political existence" (Bhabha 11). Reading Ursa's intergenerational traumatic experi- ence of the legacy of rape and prostitution under slavery, as well as her experience of a contemporary heterosexual patriarchy uncannily rehearsing that same traumatic experience, is to acknowledge the unhomely as representative of what Bhabha calls a "non-continuist" history; that is, a history which does not smooth itself into easily transmitted tradition but rather wells up into the present as the kind of literal return characterizing trauma itself. In this sense, the binaries public/private, State/individ- ual, past/present-supports for torture's repressive structure-actually bleed to- gether in the everyday experiences of traumatized survivors, unable to articulate themselves as speaking subjects in the shadow of a history which does not pass on. To re-fuse the categories of private and public is to reconnect individuals with the uncannily current events of collective history.

Returning in this light to the question of desire, reading and re-reading Bhabha's phrasing ... history's intricate invasions ... I find myself automatically replacing intricate with intimate in a kind of unconscious readerly substitution. Considered in terms of the unhomely moment's non-continuist temporality, history's invasion of the realm of the individual psyche must be a most intimate one, probing as Bhabha notes the recesses of the domestic, including of course the corners of sexuality, desire, and fantasy. If indeed Ursa's experience of domestic violence, sexual cruelty, and the traumatic return of her maternal ancestors' rapes are historically determined, part of an encounter with an ongoing history, we might do well to regard the deep structure of Bhabha's terminology: if history invades, then we must encounter history as an enemy. This formulation resonates with Bruce Simon's provocative question: "What does it mean to experience New World history as a history of trauma" (94)? Bringing Bhabha's theory to bear on Simon's problematic, we might emphasize the aspect of trauma defined as a literal return of the traumatic (historical) event, asking what it means more specifically to experience the enmity of history in this traumatic return? To experience history as a kind of ill-will, a pain? Analogous to the paradoxical immedi- acy of pain materializing as the "belated" experience of trauma, this formulation posits the urgency of historical legacy which, as represented in texts such as Corregi- dora, undermines a dominant account of history as similarly belated, ungraspable, benign, passed. As Simon points out, using "trauma" to describe history "allows us to challenge another cliche to which those who acknowledge the 'past injustice' of

slavery and segregation often retreat: 'all that's past; it's over and done with; put it behind you; forget about it'" (104). Successfully enacting Simon's challenge-not only bringing history to life, but making the case that, in fact, it never died at all-is Jones' achievement in creating a narrative structure disallowing the linearity, referential certainty, and completion authorizing this cliche of historical "pastness" which Simon correctly identifies as one of contemporary racism's most invidious logics.

Thus, the unhomely dismantling of private and public enacted in Jones' narrative implies, in an historical sense, a tangential deconstruction of the distinctions past and present time. And to consider the invasion of history, the presence of historical legacy

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as rather torture than tradition, is to acknowledge the way in which history is

experienced by its survivors precisely as a pained, sustained present. Which returns us to Ursa, for whom the practices and structures established in a historical (chrono- logical) past continue to vex the present as both psychic return of ancestral experience and actual practice of contemporaries.

"They knew you only by the signs of your sex": Corregidora's Tortured Sexual Universe

On a most basic level, Ursa experiences the enmity of history in the form of rape, the ancestral experience most urgently transmitted through her foremothers' testify- ing to the historical warp of slavery. Indeed, reading rape as torture within the context of Corregidora's specific historic geography means stressing, against the centuries of

purposeful misnaming of sex between black female slaves and white slaveowners as "consensual," the centrality of rape to slavery's system of control. As Catherine Clinton argues, we must understand that "rape was an integral part of slavery, not an aberration or dysfunction" (208). In addition, historians have established that, within the Brazilian slave system, "slave women were used more as prostitutes than as 'breeders,' mostly because the international slave trade continued in Brazil through- out the tenure of slavery, and eradicated the need for the slave population to

reproduce itself" (Robinson 153).6 As such, "Prostitution of female slaves in Brazil amounts to an institutionalized practice of rape" (154).7 Situated within this historical context, female sexuality in Corregidora is contoured around the institutionalized rape of Ursa's great grandmother and grandmother by 19th-century Brazilian slave owner Simon Corregidora and the men to whom he prostituted them, originary violences which produced an incestuous line of women unable to conceive of sexuality apart from the men who "dug up" their genitals. While Ursa is not herself raped, the conflation of Old Man Corregidora with Ursa's first and second husbands, Mutt and

Tadpole, into one figure of violent male sexual expression (effected through an

echoing of patterns of speech and desire over the course of the novel) creates a

parallel-or better, a continuum-of brutal heterosexuality based upon the violent

penetration and consumption of female genitalia characteristic of rape. This contin- uum is complicated by Jones' careful contextualization of the effects upon Mutt and

Tadpole of their traumatic family histories under slavery, revealing their own wound- edness as related to the violence they perpetrate against Ursa. Also, race mediates any simple interpretations of masculine power in the novel, as black men are themselves victims of (sexualized) torture by slave owners such as Corregidora. As Great Gram testifies: "all them beatings and killings [of slave men and women] wasn't nothing but sex circuses, and all them white peoples, mens, womens, and childrens crowding around to see" (Corregidora 125).8 Still, even consensual heterosexual sex in Corregido- ra is rarely, if ever, figured outside of this historical economy, always descriptively echoing the rape/enforced prostitution of Great Gram and Gram, with emphasis on

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the "magic" of the female genitalia, described alternately as a "gold piece" (profit) or as a "hole" (pleasure), and sex boiled down simply to a woman "getting fucked."

Having redefined rape as an act of torture, then, there are two ways in which we might analyze Ursa's sexual subjectivity through the lens of this paradigm, although she has not herself literally been raped: first, as a sufferer of post-traumatic symptoms which, according to Laura S. Brown, may be experienced intergenerationally (108), and which are, in Ursa's case, attached to her foremothers' experience of and testifying about rape. Second, as Brown argues, Ursa's encounters with violent heterosexuality constitute an "insidious trauma," defined by Maria Root as "the traumatogenic effects of oppression that are not necessarily overtly violent or threat- ening to bodily well-being at the given moment but that do violence to the soul and spirit" (Brown 107). The construction of Ursa's sex as a "hole" by both Mutt and Tadpole is metonym for the overarching violence done to Ursa's "soul and spirit" in the present-time of her contemporary sexual relationships, yet this designation also circles back to the rape of Ursa's ancestral mothers, whose genitalia were similarly figured as empty vessels to be filled by men for profit and/or pleasure. In both cases, a negation of identity results from that impulse to "degrade and destroy a woman based upon her identity as a woman," which is the cornerstone of understanding rape as an act of torture. As Gayatri Spivak argues, such reduction of woman to hole is symptomatic of a pervasive, penetrative "uterine social organization" (152) which denies female sexual subjectivity by repressing (and, in the case of female genital mutilation, actually removing) the clitoris. For Spivak, effacement of the clitoris in both dominant discourse and historical practice situates woman within a strictly reproductive economy, repressing both her desire and her subjectivity, often in formal legal terms.9 In Ursa's case, such repression is doubled: the effacement of Ursa's clitoris and her desire for pleasure by her reduction to "hole" would seem to relegate her to a strictly procreative, penetrative, uterine sexuality; however, the loss of her womb in an act of domestic violence by Mutt renders this reduction to "hole" a literal, rather than figurative, description. There is a hole where her uterus should be, an emptiness which excludes Ursa even from this limited reproductive economy, as well as from the procreative politic of her foremothers' imperative to "make generations." So excluded, she is reduced to a vessel for a phallic pleasure useful in the "field of desire" from which, in de Lauretis' reading, a woman designated as "hole" is excluded: "Having nothing to lose . .. women cannot desire; having no phallic capital to invest or speculate on, as men do, women cannot be investors in the marketplace of desire but are instead commodities that circulate in it" (The Practice 217). This analysis of women as commodified by their reduction to sexual "hole" is obviously complicated when applied to texts like Corregidora which represent women who are actually circulated as objects of exchange within the economy of the slave trade; still, in the contemporary context the exclusion of women from the "field of desire" constitutes a negation or denial of full subjectivity, a denial necessary within a certain model of violent heterosexuality to the male accumulation of "phallic capital." Such accumulation approximates in the sexual sphere what Elaine Scarry might call the activity of "world-making" in the scene of torture; that is, the expansion

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of power gained through physical and linguistic control which is central to the torturer's motivation and method.

What some critics have read as Jones' heresy seems to be her suggestion that Gram and Great Gram may have enjoyed-or more precisely, desired-their torture(r), even as they hated it/him: "They were with him. What did they feel? You know how they talk about hate and desire. Two humps on the same camel? Yes. Hate and desire both

riding them, that's what I was going to say" (102).10 This passage has been cited as evidence of the Corregidora women's ambivalent feeling for Corregidora, which, given the totality of his abuse of them, is a point of great discomfort for readers. Notice, however, that Ursa's questioning of Gram and Great Gram's experience, their desire, ("what did they feel?") contains within it a statement of the impossibility of that desire. For it is not, we discover, Great Gram's or Gram's hatred and desire that is at issue, but Corregidora's, anthropomorphized in the metaphoric of hate and desire riding them, as in the sexual act, specifically the act of rape, a metaphor which qualifies Ursa's original question about the women's desire as she seems to remember, "that's what I was going to say" (102). The desire of the slave women is actually not referenced at all, rendering it quite literally unspoken, unspeakable. In considering Ursa's difficult qualification of her own musings on the place of desire within the master/slave dialectic, Hortense Spillers' careful reconsideration of terms such as "desire" and "pleasure" within the overwhelmingly repressive apparatus of the slave system is instructive:

Whether or not the captive female and/or her sexual oppressor derived "pleasure" from their seductions and couplings is not a question we can politely ask. Whether or not "pleasure" is possible at all under conditions that I would aver as non-freedom for both or either of the parties has not been settled. Indeed, we could go so far as to entertain the very real possibility that "sexuality," as a term of implied relationship and desire, is dubiously appropriate, manageable, or accurate to any of the familial arrangements under a system of enslavement, from the master's family to the captive enclave. (76)

Challenging the power of conventional language to signify the reality of relationships conducted under the condition of "unfreedom," Spillers exposes the collapse of the

language of desire under the historical weight of systematic torture of black women under slavery. It is precisely this collapse which Jones' narrative dramatizes in its

representations of relationships conducted within the frame of slavery's historical

legacy. In the same way, sex between Ursa and Mutt-Tad as an encounter between

equally desiring subjects is defined in Corregidora as an impossibility: while it is consensual, it also resembles the kind of sexual encounter under slavery, the very essence of which depended upon a lack of bodily consent doubled by the woman's status as slave, removed from the more general sphere of consent (to the law and the state) accompanying personhood and citizenship. It is upon such resemblance that I build

my analysis of the parallels between the mechanisms of a violently penetrative heterosexual scene and the scene of (sexual) torture.

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In this regard, we might note the correspondence of several of the novel's descrip- tions of heterosexual sex with one of the other key features of the scene of torture: the

interrogation. As noted, current analyses of the use of torture identify an historical shift: where torture was once a means of spectacularizing punishment or of extracting information, it is now "used" to repress and degrade the victim; however, interroga- tion, if no longer the primary goal of torture, has most certainly remained central to its method. As Scarry argues, the link between pain and voice is a defining character- istic of torture: "Torture consists of a primary physical act, the infliction of pain, and a primary verbal act, the interrogation" (28). Scarry theorizes the interrogation in terms of the power of the regime to "unmake" the world of the individual while

simultaneously "expanding" its own: "Within the physical events of torture, the torturer 'has' nothing: he has only an absence, the absence of pain. In order to

experience his distance from the prisoner in terms of 'having,' their physical differ- ence is translated into a verbal difference" (37). This link between voice and (having) power manifests for Ursa in her identification as blues singer, a liberating subjectivity which offsets the other forces which would define her; that is, the confines of a violent heterosexual contract as well as the familial sexual legacy against which she struggles. In the former aspect of subjectivity, Ursa finds voice; in the latter ones, she repeatedly loses it.

Acknowledging the connection between voice and pain (in the scene of torture and otherwise), we also might examine the connection between voice and desire, and the

triangulated relationship between the three enacted in Jones' narrative. As noted above, Scarry's identification of the torturer's desire to move from "absence" (or lack) to "having" (presence, or possession, both of which denote power) by coercing the

prisoner's verbalization of bodily pain has much in common with de Lauretis's

analysis of the reduction of woman to "hole," which contrasts woman's lack-that is, her emptiness and lack of (self) possession-with male (phallic) possession. For

Scarry, appropriating the prisoner's voice "make[s] what is taking place in terms of

pain take place in terms of power" (36); in Corregidora, the interrogative mode of address helps to translate female desire and the female body into male pleasure and

power. Indeed, the extent to which Ursa's world (more than just the world of her desire) is unmade by her definition as hole is the precise measure of the use of her female genitalia in a "world-making" expansion of male power: in demanding access to and possession of Ursa's body, Mutt exclaims, "It ain't a pussy down there, it's a whole world" (Corregidora 45, emphasis added). Immediately following this exclama- tion, Ursa angrily identifies Mutt's attempts at possession of her through her body- "Talking about his pussy" (46, emphasis in original). This connection of female

genitalia with male world-making, possession, and power under the contemporary heterosexual contract echoes the racial and sexual power relations characterizing the slave system as revealed in the "genital fantasies" of Corregidora and the other white fishermen and planters populating the world of Great Gram and Gram: "And you with the coffee-bean face, what were you? You were sacrificed. They knew you only by the signs of your sex. They touched you as if you were magic. They ate your genitals" (Corregidora 59).1 Such fantasies manifest in the brutal sacrificial-even cannibalistic-rite of heterosexual penetration by which the subjectivity of a woman

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of color is reduced to her genitalia, which are then violently consumed, leaving, essentially, nothing.

Contemplating the interrogative mode of address as it occurs in Corregidora, it is important to note that Scarry's analysis of the interrogation, situated within the very specific ground of torture authorized by governmental regimes to be enacted upon individual prisoners for nominally "political" purposes, relies heavily upon the kind of public-private division which feminist human rights theorists such as Copelon, Wolper, and Andrea Peters have worked to deconstruct, the same division that has, until recently, precluded formal definition of rape as a form of torture.12 Proceeding with caution, neither placing Mutt and Ursa in the respective positions of "regime" and "prisoner," nor advancing a claim that heterosexual, penetrative sexual relations are a priori constitutive of rape, I would like to tease out some implications of the interrogative mode of address as it is used in Corregidora in specifically (hetero)sexual contexts, to hear Jones' dialogue as it resonates with Scarry's ideas of world "making" and "unmaking" as they occur in the scene of torture. Most, if not all, of Ursa's sexual encounters are marked by the interrogatory statements of her partner (or pursuer, in the case of men who make sexual advances to her). Privileging the reader with glimpses of the discrepancy between Ursa's internal thoughts and her vocalized responses, Jones implicates the male interrogative address in the construction of a consciousness-effacing power imbalance. Indeed, Ursa's responses are often condi- tioned by her male partner to the extent that she repeats his words. Such repetition at the scene of torture, as Scarry asserts, constitutes a further power differential, as "the torturer and the regime have doubled their voice since the prisoner is now speaking their words" (36).

In one of the novel's italicized dream-memory sequences (read by critics such as Simon, Dubey, and Morgenstern as a traumatic repetition of the past in keeping with the symptoms of PTSD), Ursa responds to Mutt's question "What am I doing to you, Ursa?" by stating "You fucking me." When Mutt wonders about her use of language, reminding her that she was once "afraid of those words" (Corregidora 76, emphasis mine), Ursa's response resituates her heterosexual marital relationship within Cor- regidora's torturous legacy of rape and prostitution: "Didn't I tell you you taught me what Corregidora taught Great Gram. He taught her to use the kind of words she did. Don't you remember?" (76).13 Ursa's fright at the violent language of heterosexual penetration indicates the traumatic nature of this dream-memory sequence, empha- sizing this "consensual" sexual scene's similitude with the scene of rape. Moreover, Ursa's repetition of Mutt/Corregidora's words in a form which has been revealed to readers as frightening to her not only doubles Mutt's power, in that he has co-opted Ursa's voice, but also doubles his pleasure by describing it, materializing it in words, turning it from an unspoken absence into an articulated "having." Indeed, given the number of times that that same question is asked of Ursa by both Mutt and Tad (and, by way of historical implication, the fact that it was asked of Great Gram and Gram by Corregidora), it would seem that male pleasure depends upon that quite specific female articulation of what is being done to her. Such invariant linguistic traffic sets up the seemingly inescapable impasse between male as active, master, world-maker, owner of phallus and pleasure, and female as passive, slave, object whose world/

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pleasure is "unmade." It is this binary which Jones probes throughout the novel, complicating its legitimacy and effect.

Despite Jones' recognition of ambivalence characterizing the binary architectures of man/woman, active/passive, master/slave, the path leading out from these

binding (op)positions, which I locate in Ursa's gestures toward the possibility of a clitoral desire and pleasure, is fenced in, closed off by the assertive interrogative "Am I fucking you?" to which Ursa must respond, as if automatically, "You fucking me." In one sexual encounter with Tadpole, Ursa narrates, "I was struggling against him, trying to feel what I wasn't feeling. Then he reached down and fingered my clitoris, which made me feel more" (Corregidora 75). Originally figured as a struggle, Ursa's

pleasure in the sexual act glimmers briefly in this clitoral contact, and is immediately extinguished as "He stopped." Ursa asks Tadpole twice to continue this touch, requests which Tadpole redirects with his own demands that Ursa's voice-rather than speaking her own (desire for) pleasure-articulate, and be consumed by, his desire and pleasure: "What am I doing to you, Ursa? What am I doing to you?" (75).

Ursa tells us "I kept struggling with him. I made a sound in my throat. I didn't know what he wanted me to say. What I felt didn't have words" (75). Unwilling to be diverted from the expression of her own pleasure, Ursa is unable to speak (his) words, as this pleasure, like her pain, is inarticulable. Tadpole, however, sharpens his

question from the general "What am I doing to you?" to an implacable particularity: "Am I fucking you?" Forcing Ursa out of the experience of her body into the universe of his, Tadpole's world-expanding interrogative demands and receives her condi- tioned response. At this moment of her capitulation, the language of Ursa's narration enacts the literal return of the traumatic event as it (re)turns to the words used to describe Great Gram's rape by Corregidora, "He dug his finger up my asshole." And concurrent with this violently articulated penetrative act, Ursa reiterates without

being asked "You fucking me. Yes, you fucking me" (75) in a linguistic excess of giving way, giving in (to the questioning), giving over (her pleasure, her body). This excessive, unasked for response is reminiscent of the moment of confession in the scene of torture, wherein the "prisoner" gives in to the torturer's demands almost with a vengeance, telling him what he wants to know in a flood of words designed to end the pain of the encounter. Now, when Tadpole touches her clitoris Ursa feels pain rather than the pleasure lost in the struggle of this violent heterosexual encounter.

Tadpole reaches orgasm, while Ursa feels both nothing (no orgasm) and more than

nothing (frustration, pain). Her desire has been foreclosed upon and represented as an impossibility, a "fist drawn up" (75), with all the violence of that image.

My point in reproducing this long sexual scene is to illustrate the ways in which the

interrogative mode of address (if not the actual interrogation) repeated in Ursa's sexual encounters with Mutt and Tadpole supports a reading of Corregidora's hetero- sexual universe as tortured-as founded upon a sexuality paradigmatic of rape and

bearing some of the most central characteristics of the "formal" scene of torture-in a manner which depends upon the violent effacement of clitoral pleasure. Such a sexual universe is complicated by Jones' careful construction of Mutt and Tad as historical subjects determined by their own immersion in the legacy of slavery, and

by her representation of a sexual cruelty just as brutal in the withholding as it is in its

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insistent and often painful penetration. It is, however, still predicated upon the frustration, the impossibility of articulating, female desire, with the implication that

achieving full female subjectivity will remain similarly impossible. This impossibil- ity, like the scene of rape/torture itself, is determined both by the "universal"

inarticulability of corporeal experience posed by Scarry, as well as by the specific, historical racial and sexual repressions produced and enforced by the slave system.

Emphasizing the use of the interrogative mode of address in the sexual encoun- ter-the site at which the causes and effects of Ursa's suppressed subjectivity are most

clearly represented-highlights the ways in which Ursa's voice, and thereby her consciousness of self or identity, are frustrated in their attempts to fully articulate themselves. Such frustration is in part determined by the totality of linguistic control

marking the aggressively interrogative speech act; as Scarry writes of the interroga- tion at the site of torture: "Few other moments of human speech so conflate the modes of the interrogatory, the declarative, the imperative, as well as the emphatic form of each of these three, the exclamatory" (29). In this context, hear the seamless transition from interrogatory to declarative to imperative in one of Mutt's many articulations of Ursa's genital identity as a lack profitable for his own pleasure: "You still got a hole, ain't you? Long as a woman got a hole, she can fuck. Let me get up in your hole, baby" (Corregidora 100). Literally trapped within this linguistic circling of question, state- ment, and demand designed to produce and make use of her body as corporeal vessel, there is no mode of address available to or directed at Ursa: no voice with which to

express her self and desire, no ear to hear her.

The Pained Presence of Historical Legacy

Considering her experience from the perspective of an historically situated hetero-

sexuality clarifies the connection between Ursa's sexuality and subjectivity, a connec- tion troubled by constant exposure to a heterosexuality tricked out as rape.14 Indeed, this particular form of insidious trauma has the power to negate a woman's subjectiv- ity precisely by canceling her female identity, part of which is her capacity to express and achieve sexual desire/pleasure. Given its location of both sexuality and subjec- tivity deep within the history of slavery, Corregidora occupies what Homi Bhabha, positing a specifically postcolonial aesthetic, has termed a "revisionary time":

The borderline work of culture demands an encounter with 'newness' that is not part of the continuum of past and present . . . Such art does not merely recall the past as social cause or aesthetic precedent; it renews the past, refiguring it as a contin- gent 'in-between' space, that innovates and interrupts the per- formance of the present. The 'past-present' becomes part of the necessity, not the nostalgia, of living. (7)

This past-present is precisely the revisionary, non-continuist historic time with which Jones experiments in effecting her rare representation of the frustration-often the

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impossibility-of female desire, which is, I would argue, a necessary preliminary to the radical representation of women as full, historical subjects able to speak their desire. This frustration of desire is inscribed in narrative terms in the novel's temporal and referential ambiguity; specifically, its deliberate hindrance of both temporal distinction and linguistic reference, and its withholding of meaning and information. Given that pain and desire are constructed in parallel terms by Jones, full understand-

ing of this inscription depends upon the construction of Ursa's subjectivity as a

particular historical body (black, female, rooted in the history of slavery) who is still in pain. Supplementing analysis of Corregidora as a novel of trauma, structured upon the traumatic intrusion of past pains, examining the ways in which the narrative is driven by a pain to which Ursa does not always have access is to probe the temporal paradox of past-presence at the heart of trauma theory itself.

Theorists reading Freud's conception of trauma and its symptoms in Beyond the Pleasure Principle articulate the paradoxically synchronous presence and absence of the traumatic event for the survivor. On the one hand, the trauma " . . . cannot be understood in terms of any wish or unconscious meaning, but is, purely and inexpli- cably, the literal return of the event against the will of the one it inhabits" (Caruth, "Introduction" 5, emphasis added). The literality of this return suggests an over-

whelming presence of the event itself in terms of its experience by the survivor in

nightmare, daydream, depression, or other symptoms. However, also central to the definition of trauma is what Caruth terms its "belatedness," the fact that it cannot be

grasped or known at the time of its occurrence, but is characterized by "an inherent

latency within the experience itself. The historical power of the trauma is not just that the experience is repeated after its forgetting, but that it is only in and through its

forgetting that it is first experienced at all" ("Introduction" 8). Or, as Bruce Simon writes, "rather than being a problem of a too-present, too-pressing memory, trauma is a problem of unclaimed experience and a gap in memory" (104). Both absence-the fact of the traumatic event as ungraspable in its occurrence-and literalness of

presence are defining characteristics of traumatic occurrence, and it is this contradic-

tory essence to which Caruth refers when she argues that to bear witness to trauma is precisely to bear witness to an impossibility ("Introduction" 10). In the context of

Corregidora's tortured sexual universe, I read such impossibility in terms of the traumatic impossibility of female desire; however, such impossibility must also be contextualized in terms of the novel's racial dynamic within the history of slavery. Madhu Dubey, for instance, has read the "lover's language" in Corregidora (that is, the blues) as a discourse of "desire without possibility," historicizing that lack of possi- bility in terms of the "disabling history of slavery," and arguing that the novel's "final blues dialogue thus underscores the impossible conditions of heterosexual desire" (258-59).'5 Agreeing both with Dubey's assessment of the impossibility of heterosex- ual desire in Corregidora, as well as with her historicization of that impossibility, my aim here is to shift focus slightly to the impossibility of female desire more broadly (including both homo- and hetero-eroticism) through effacement of the clitoris.

In considering the paradoxical aspect of simultaneous presence and absence

characterizing traumatic experience, it occurs to me that current theories of the

metaphysics of pain might be useful in understanding the effects of that "literal"

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return of the event, inasmuch as Ursa does not speak solely as a traumatized subject, but also as a person still in pain. Some of Ursa's "symptoms," manifested in her

patterns of thought and behavior, are a result of the presence of pain, that is, its contemporaneity, its currency, rather than its belated return. Put in narrative terms, this contemporaneity informs the novel's delineation of an ongoing pained present rather than the intrusion of a traumatic past. Indeed, such temporal terminology is itself called into question when considering narrative structure; as Dubey asserts, "the novel's structure so thoroughly fuses Ursa's story with the history of her foremothers that any distinction between past and present becomes inoperative" (250).

There is also the simple fact that the novel opens as Ursa is pushed down a flight of stairs. It is not until the end of the novel, however, that Ursa is able both to attribute

agency to Mutt for the violent act that took her womb, and to understand its negative effect upon her subjectivity. Because of this temporal gap, the narrative representa- tion of Ursa's experience of domestic violence demonstrates the belated, ungraspable aspect of the traumatic event. According to this reading, the novel's historic archae- ology may be understood as an approximation of the psychoanalytic method- examination of the analysand's past in order to grasp current events or symptoms- for it is not until nearly the end of the novel that Ursa is able to narrate its opening events in the clarity of their full implication: "And then it was when I was on my way home, he knocked his piece a shit down those stairs" (Corregidora 167).

Tracing the metaphysic of pain as it structures Corregidora, in addition to Ursa's belated comprehension of domestic violence as traumatic event, it is important to articulate the very real pain she suffers as a result of it-a supplement, perhaps, to our

reading of the "literalness" of the return of the traumatic event. For Ursa sustains

injuries serious enough to require an emergency hysterectomy, and, upon admission to the hospital, her pain, and her rage, are so overwhelming that she is reduced to inarticulable sounds and curses, the "state anterior to language" marking human

response to pain (Scarry 4). The entire first chapter and much of the second are structured around the rhythms of resting, sleeping, eating, and visits to the physician typical of recovery from a serious illness or wound. Indeed, the novel's early repre- sentations of Tadpole's relationship with Ursa center upon his nurture of her after her

hysterectomy, making his ultimate betrayal of Ursa and reversion to the novel's

violently penetrative heterosexual model the more troubling. The pain, nausea, and exhaustion experienced by Ursa in the opening sequences of

the novel slide into the sense of pain during sex, a pain which-like her desire-Ursa is unable to articulate. Jones' portrayal of Ursa's first sexual encounter with Tad, for instance, references neither pleasure nor her desire, and is rather rendered solely in terms of the presence or absence of her pain:

"Does it hurt?" "Yes, a little [.. .] ." "How does it feel now?" "Go on" (49).

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The indeterminacy of Ursa's final assent, "go on," belies her prior acknowledgment that this sexual act hurts. Her unwillingness or inability to articulate the nature of this

pain may be considered according to that theoretical approach to pain which defines its very essence as its "unshareability," a "resistance to language" stemming from the fact that "physical pain-unlike any other state of consciousness-has no referential content. It is not of or for anything. It is precisely because it takes no object that it, more than any other phenomenon, resists objectification in language" (Scarry 5). Certainly the novel is riddled with problems of reference, many of which have to do with the articulation of pain. However, Ursa's inability to find words with which to describe her pain may have less to do with this universal characteristic of pain than with the

specific, historically determined relations of dominance-wherein bodily experience of slaves was purposefully and forcibly repressed-governing sexuality in the shad- ow of slavery's legacy. Witness to the testimony of her foremothers who had no choice but to allow, in silence, the "digging up" of their genitals by men who owned them, Ursa has no model for speaking the pain she experiences during the sexual act. Indeed, conspicuously absent from the women's testimony is any expression of pain at their rape and abuse. The testimonies of Great Gram, Gram, and Mama read like dominant historical accounts-chronologies, statements of fact without affect. Wit- ness in this model, then, is not a witness to pain or affect, but rather to an otherwise erased history; bearing witness means retelling events in the same historical narrative mode from which they were originally excluded. Inasmuch as Mutt and Tadpole exhibit traces in word and deed of the violence of the Corregidora men, Ursa's

inability to express her pain at such violence is in part determined by her foremothers' silence about their pain.

This difficulty of referencing both pain and desire begins early in Corregidora, manifesting in narrative terms as both a confusion of grammatical referents, as well as in a controlled withholding or silence. Ursa's inscription within the linguistic imperative of male desire and the historical imperative of her foremother's testimony limits access to or expression of her pain or her desire. Careful silence, deflection of

interrogation, and withholding expression of thoughts, feelings, or experience are resistant, self-protective mechanisms, means of remaining outside the demands of

agents who would recycle her pain or pleasure for their own benefit. The prisoner who refuses to confess, or who tries not to scream, uses silence as her only means of

maintaining a reality outside of the world-expanding reach of the torturer. Similarly, refusal to engage in dominant discourse is a strategy for those disempowered by it.

Refusing that "American grammar" which, as delineated by Hortense Spillers, in- forms a dominant symbolic order predicated upon the unthinkable violence of the slave trade, Ursa might be said to concur with Spillers, who argues for recognition of the racialized violence of discourse: "We might concede, at the very least, that sticks and bricks might break our bones, but words will most certainly kill us" (68).

Like silence, purposeful referential ambiguity is a gesture of self-protection against the vulnerability which necessarily accompanies the expression of pain. Ursa con-

sciously withholds information and emotion, strategically misdirecting the under-

standing of her listeners. Listen to these expressions, culled from just one scene between Ursa and Tadpole:

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"I wanted him again, but I said nothing." "I wanted to ask him why did he, but I was afraid to ask." "I laughed, then I frowned. He saw me through the mirror. I

hadn't meant for him to." "I wanted to say, 'I'm not relaxed enough,' but I didn't." "It was almost a cry, but a cry I didn't want him to hear."

(Corregidora 80-83)

These strategies of controlling expression are learned behaviors, passed on explicitly in the testimony of Great Gram, Gram, and Mama. In the novel's longest descriptive passage chronicling Corregidora's abuses of Great Gram, told by Mama (who literally transmogrifies into the voice of Great Gram), Great Gram describes her connection to a runaway slave, forbidden to her by Corregidora because he is black. In a particularly horrifying scene, Great Gram imagines that Corregidora's rape parallels the chase of this escaped slave man. It is the only occasion in which one of the women admits to an expression of pain during such an act of torture, in this case a crying which echoes Ursa's above, inasmuch as she doesn't want it to be heard by the one who has caused it. Great Gram codes her cries so that they are misunderstood by Corregidora, mistakenly translated as expressions of her pleasure and re-placed as capital within the economy of his desire:

Yes, tha's just how I was feeling, while he was up there jumping up and down between my legs they was out there with them hounds after that boy ... And then there I was kept crying out, and ole Corregidora thinking it was because he was fucking so good I was crying. 'Ain't nobody do it to you like this, is it?' I said, 'Naw.' I just kept saying Naw [... ]. (127-28)

Like her cries (whose reference to her pain is strategically ambiguous so as to be

misinterpreted by Corregidora as expressions of her desire, reiterating the symbolic linking of pain with desire which structures the novel), Great Gram's only linguistic utterance, this "naw," manifests both the required response to Corregidora's ques- tion, and, in its unasked for repetition, the linguistic excess marking the moment of confession discussed earlier as a kind of hysterical verbal giving way. Yet this

response is overdetermined precisely because of its excess: surpassing, in its repeti- tion, the bounds of the interrogative moment, Great Gram's repeated "naw"-read by Corregidora as assent to pleasure in the violent sexual act-becomes her emphatic refusal to consent to the horrors of her rape and the murder of the escaped slave, the "no ... no ... no ... " provoked by terror and unthinkable violence. It is, however, a refusal which Great Gram is unable to utter so as to be heard. In other words, it is a refusal without a witness, the historical problem (repeatedly experienced by Gram, Mama, and Ursa) which contains the narrative itself within the frustrated time of historical legacy's pained past-present.

Jones connects the relations of dominance informing this relationship between voice, sex, and pain with the construction of Ursa's subjectivity by revealing that her

difficulty referencing either her pain or her desire results from the co-optation of her

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voice (like Great Gram's before her) for her partners' pleasure. Just after accepting Tadpole's marriage proposal, as he "draws" her into bed, Tadpole asks Ursa if she is relaxed. Ursa narrates, "I said yes I was relaxed now. I started to tell him Jim said Mutt wasn't coming back, but I didn't. Tadpole got between my legs" (55). The relation between sex and subjectivity is demonstrated in its negative form as Ursa's capacity for speech is literally blocked by Tadpole's intrusion between her legs. Like her foremothers, enslaved and identified by the "sign" of their genitals, Ursa literally speaks from the place/space of her desire and is simultaneously prevented from

speaking that desire by a mostly painful male penetration. This connection between voice and sex (and pain) is fortified throughout the novel in Ursa's identification with the blues, which, as Dubey notes, was "one of the earliest cultural forms that allowed black women to speak of themselves as 'sexual subjects"' (258). It is also present in Ursa's equation of sex with creativity, articulated in her angry question: "And what if I'd thrown Mutt Thomas down those stairs instead, and done away with the source of his sex, or inspiration?" (Corregidora 40).

Restraint of voice, speech, and information also structures the novel's narrative time such that it performs the pained present of historical legacy, making clear both the impossibility of clearly demarcating past from present as they permeate one another through memory and lived experience, as well as disallowing the pleasure of narrative wholeness derived from a resolution which could only be fraudulent in the context of that lived legacy. Such restraint denies readerly access to the coherence of

perspective and fullness of disclosure typically ascribed to the first-person narrative voice. Narrative threads are left unpursued or purposefully misdirected. For in- stance, in an early conversation between Ursa and her neighbor, Cat, Ursa reveals that she had been pregnant when Mutt pushed her down the steps. In the context of traditional novelistic conventions, readerly desire would demand that Mutt be told of Ursa's pregnancy so that the plot might deliver the satisfaction of his remorse-or

indignation at his lack of it. However, Mutt is never told of the pregnancy, a lack of disclosure contributing to a sense of the narrative as a closed fist, unwilling to open to reveal its secrets, abandoning the reader to the suspended time of an ongoing historical present.16 It is only in a brief dream sequence that Ursa reveals the possibil- ity that she was pregnant to Mutt, who responds flippantly, "Don't make any promises you can't keep" (55). The cruelty of this response is the more profound given the historical imperative to "make generations" which Mutt's violence has rendered

impossible for Ursa. Brown and Root's idea of the insidious trauma experienced by women as daily

(heterosexual) threat might bridge the gap between the immediacy of the body in pain and the belatedness of the traumatic event as posited by Freud and theorized by Caruth. Such insidious trauma, inasmuch as it is experienced in the everyday realm, occupies a contemporaneous temporality rendering it ongoing, rather than a return of a completed past. Inasmuch as the heterosexual brutality of Ursa's relationships with Mutt and Tadpole is inscribed within and partly determined by slavery's warped sexual universe, Ursa is still subject to the normalized heterosexual threat of rape and domestic violence, and consistently experiences the dynamics of rape within the

sphere of consensual heterosexual sex. She also tolerates ongoing harassment from

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men she does not know during her blues performances. This occupation of a pained present beginning with the experiences of her foremothers which she not only (re)lives in the trauma of witnessing their testimony, but also lives inasmuch as they are repeated upon her body in the present, renders Corregidora an unhomely narrative in which it is difficult to read past and present as distinct temporal modalities. In this way, Corregidora dramatizes the stagnation of history situated within a dominant discourse inseparable from the legacy of captivity. As Spillers argues:

Even though the captive flesh/body has been "liberated" [ .. ] dominant symbolic activity, the ruling episteme that releases the dynamics of naming and valuation, remains grounded in the originated metaphors of captivity and mutilation so that it is as if neither time nor history, nor historiography and its topics shows movement. (68)

Indeed, it would seem in reading Corregidora that there is nothing of either form or content outside the insoluble frame of Ursa's traumatic present. Her identity is inscribed as a wound; her heterosexual relationships are reenactments of Corregido- ra's sexual tortures; her songs are attempts to testify to the collective traumas of the

Corregidora women; and even the desire which she can imagine outside of this heterosexual frame is either violently effaced or takes brutal form. Because there is no outside to her pain, Ursa does not experience the intrusion of trauma, but rather embodies it.

Witness to a Desire

Ursa's desire to speak (her desire) is stopped by a singularly penetrative heterosex- uality which excludes clitoral pleasure. Such nullification of desire parallels the invalidation of her pain, and results in a literal negation of identity and subjectivity, reflected in one of the novel's most provocative lines. Located within a long interior monologue directed at Mutt, Ursa rages, "If it wasn't for your fucking I" (Corregidora 46). Positioned in the midst of Ursa's reflections upon Mutt's violent desire to possess the double essence of her sex and creativity by way of consuming her blues songs, the sentence's grammatical indeterminacy is suggestive. Read as written, the sentence refers to Ursa's resentment of the obliterating omnipresence of Mutt's subjectivity, evident in the epithet "your fticking I," the I of his identity overshadowing and

greedily consuming her sex and her voice. Inflected slightly differently, the sentence might be interpreted as a reference to Ursa's subjectivity, its deferral to Mutt's desire and demand: "If it wasn't for your fucking, [then] I... " Read in this way, the sentence

implies the unimaginable potentiality of Ursa's desire, her subjectivity, inarticulable as the sentence ends in an indefinite trailing off, marooned outside the realm of

signification.

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The appearance of this uncanny "I" has strong implications in terms of the novel's drive to testimony and witness. Indeed, Jones has identified her use of a first-person narrative perspective, which links her novels to an oral storytelling tradition rooted in the blues, specifically in terms of testimony, referring to the narrative "I" as the crucial figure of the witness (Rowell 37). This figure of witness-by definition one who attests to the validity of an event or experience-is pivotal to healing the traumatic wound and to the cessation of pain, and critics such as Morgenstern and Simon have read Corregidora precisely as a novel which enacts a kind of meta-witness: "witnessing its own act of witnessing" (Morgenstern 105), or, as Simon would have it, demanding that readers "bear witness to a crisis of witnessing" (103). If Corregidora does embody such a crisis of witnessing, then it is a crisis rooted specifically in Ursa's twofold lack of witness: first, because she lacks the reproductive capability of bearing the next generation of witnesses to Corregidora's historical legacy; and second, and more urgently, because, while partners such as Mutt and Tadpole may listen to her testimony, there is no one who hears her. A function of her entrapment within the linguistic overload of Mutt and Tadpole's unrelenting declarative, imperative, and interrogatory exhortations, Ursa's crisis is her inability to find a mode of address or an addressee suitable to the expression of her pain and desire.

Critics such as Melvin Dixon and Amy Gottfried argue that Mutt and Tadpole attempt to help free the "oppressive hold" (Dixon 242) of Ursa's past-implying that it is at least in part Ursa's stubborn immersion in this past which renders their attempts unsuccessful. However, I would argue instead that Ursa's desire, and the narrative itself, remain closed, frustrated, and mired in the uncanny temporality of Bhabha's past-present because her witnesses do not validate her voice, desire, or pain. Rather than verifying Ursa's pain by hearing and acknowledging it, setting the healing process in motion, both Mutt and Tad invalidate that pain by disavowing it: ignoring her expressions of pain during sex, and dismissing her attempts to articulate the intergenerational traumatic pain caused by Corregidora. When Tadpole urges Ursa to "Get their devils off your back. Not yours, theirs" (Corregidora 61, emphasis in

original), he does not help free the "oppressive hold" of these demons by validating the immediacy of her experience of Corregidora's legacy, but rather disavows her experience of the pain of intergenerational trauma by locating it as elsewhere, not her own.

Mutt's repeated commands that Ursa forget both her foremothers' pain and her own, rather than being a helpful incentive to heal, constitute a secondary trauma by invalidating, repressing, refusing to acknowledge Ursa's voicing of the first. Against Mutt's wishes, however, Ursa's insistent refusal to forget is in fact the foundation of her survival, for, as Dori Laub articulates in the context of the testimony of Holocaust survivors, "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" (63). The revolutionary act of survival for the express purpose of telling one's story, bearing witness to oneself, corresponds to Great Gram, Gram, and Mama's strategy of making generations to

provide evidence of the atrocity of Brazilian slavery. The revolutionary act of telling one's story in order to survive also explains Ursa's need to sing the blues, and represents a shift in the paradigm of survival. Laub continues, "There is, in each

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survivor, an imperative need to tell and thus to come to know one's story ... One has to know one's buried truth in order to be able to live one's life" (63, emphasis in

original). Mutt and Tad's demands are essentially repressive in their desire to

separate Ursa's past from her present, and self-serving (world-expanding) in their

prescription that she retain a selective memory for the promotion of their pleasure, as

they ask her to "Forget the past, except ours, the good feeling" (Corregidora 100). While Ursa struggles against the negation of identity accompanying these demands that she remain silent about both her desire and her pain (or at least her lack of "good feeling"), she resists the annihilation of her subjectivity precisely by remembering, and by searching persistently for a witness to hear her testimony. If the narrative remains frustrated, unresolved, it is because this validating witness is never found, and Ursa is ultimately unable to speak either desire or pain. However, lest we read Corregidora simply as an exercise in frustration, let us be clear about the ways in which Ursa does

gesture toward subjectivity and survival through attempts to voice both. Reading survival as a problematic in the context of pain and trauma may help to

explain the ambivalence of Ursa's gestures toward a sexual pleasure located in the clitoris rather than in the womb, as well as the frustration of her attempts to find a mode of address in which to voice her pain and a willing witness to hear her. This

reading depends upon an examination of the figure of Cat, and her relationship with Ursa. Most critical readings of Corregidora do not linger upon the function of Cat, reading her either as symbol of a lesbian alternative to the heterosexual contract

against which Ursa struggles, ultimately provoking Ursa's homophobic response (Claudia Tate, for instance, asserts that Ursa is "frightened" by a lesbian encounter at Cat's home, attributing her marriage to Tadpole as a means of "quelling her fear" of

"eventually succumbing to homosexual embrace" [139]), or as a symptom of slavery's lingering presence in the parallels between Cat's sexually abusive employer and the

sexually abusive slave owners who populate the novel's historic canvas. However, close examination of Cat's character and relation to Ursa reveals that Cat more

broadly represents the possibility of sex apart from male penetration, as well as the

possibility of witness to Ursa's desire, if not her pain. Ursa's rejection of Cat on both counts is less a function of homophobia, anger, or outrage than it is her inability to

imagine pleasure or desire outside of the pain of the violent heterosexual contract as she has experienced it. This inability to imagine her own pleasure may be a function of what trauma theorists have identified as the trauma of survival, a profoundly challenging aspect of traumatic experience which Cathy Caruth probes by asking, "Is the trauma the encounter with death, or the ongoing experience of having survived it?" (Unclaimed Experience 7). In another essay, Caruth clarifies this question by articulating that "for those who undergo trauma, it is not only the moment of the event, but of the passing out of it that is traumatic; that survival itself, in other words, can be a crisis" ("Introduction" 9). Bruce Simon cites Caruth's remark as evidence for his argument about the trauma of survival informing Great Gram's repetitive need to

testify. Taking Simon's point, I would also suggest expanding this problematic of survival to refer not only to Great Gram/Gram's survival of the sexual violence of

slavery, but also to Ursa's survival of the violence of the heterosexual contract, a survival which may be read as analogous to the "pleasure" Ursa might achieve were she to pass out of that contract.

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This analogy between survival and pleasure in the context of trauma theory deserves closer scrutiny. Deriving her understanding of trauma from Freud's analysis of the trauma of war, Caruth defines the traumatic experience as an encounter with death, articulating the crisis of survival specifically in terms of that encounter (Unclaimed 62). Following current theorists of trauma such as Kali Tal, who move

beyond "public" traumas such as war or genocide, expanding the definition of trauma to account not just for encounters with death, but also for events such as rape, domestic violence, and the "insidious trauma" of the everyday violence accompany- ing patriarchal heterosexuality, we might then read Ursa's fear of survival as a fear of the pleasure accompanying departure from the scene of trauma, in this case, the bond of the heterosexual contract. Inasmuch as pursuit of or acquiescence to clitoral

pleasure would remove her from the familiar "uterine social organization" (Spivak 152) which has structured the intergenerational traumas of her foremothers as well as her traumatic experience of domestic violence and violently penetrative heterosexu-

ality, Ursa is as afraid of this pleasure as she is of the scene of violent heterosexual sex. If Caruth defines survival as the "endless testimony to the impossibility of living," we

might also say that survival in Ursa's context becomes an endless testimony to the

impossibility of desire, and of pleasure. Certainly Jones supports this position by constructing lesbian sexuality, a sexual-

ity situated outside the normative heterosexual contract and at least more nearly approaching the clitoral pleasure which Ursa desires, as brutal in ways which sometimes mirror the violent heterosexuality of slavery and contemporary patriar- chy. For instance, when Cat visits Ursa as she recovers from her fall, she pats Ursa's

leg through the sheet, twice. Occurring well before the more dramatic homoerotic events at Cat's house later in the text, this seemingly benign gesture bears the burden of Corregidora's violence as it is linked to a similar gesture made by Great Gram

during her repetitive testimony to Ursa about Corregidora's rape:

She told me the same story over and over again. She had her hands round my waist, and I had my back to her ... She didn't need her hands around me to keep me in her lap, and sometimes I'd see the sweat in her palms ... Once when she was talking, she started rubbing my thighs with her hands, and I could feel the sweat on my legs. Then she caught herself, and stopped, and held my waist again. (Corregidora 11)

Restraining from moral judgment, Jones represents this gesture as the (almost uncon- scious) repetition of the cycle of abuse, a repetition which Great Gram stops just short of enacting. However, this gesture is now tinged with a violence which, when

repeated by Cat, taints the possibility of a female erotics outside of its frame. Too, when Cat chastises her young neighbor, Jeffy, for making sexual overtures to Ursa, her language is the language of brutal penetration: "If you bother her again I'll give you a fist to fuck" (47). Jones carefully implicates this same brutality in the heterosex- ual system, as Ursa finds herself repeating those violent words in anger to Tadpole's lover: "'If you want something to fuck, I'll give you my fist to fuck,' I said, surprised

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at the words I'd echoed" (87). Ursa's use of language demonstrates the same kind of unconscious repetition marking her use of Corregidora's violent language during sex with Mutt, a repetition revealing the extent to which she is interpolated by the legacies of slavery and heterosexual patriarchy which contain and traumatize her.

Because Jones so carefully situates lesbianism within the same brutally histori- cized frame as she does heterosexuality, I would argue that Ursa's response to Cat is not simply homophobic, not a fear of lesbian desire, but rather fear of a clitoral desire and pleasure which would take her outside the frame of both systems. (Indeed, the direct lesbian "threat" in the novel is embodied not by Cat, but by Jeffy, Cat's neighbor and probably her lover, a young woman who makes a pass at Ursa while she sleeps.) In one of the novel's italicized "intrusions" of Ursa's interior monologue, directly following her deeply painful betrayal by Tadpole, she articulates her fear distinctly in terms of the clitoris: "Afraid only of what I'll become, because those times he didn't touch the clit, I couldn't feel anything ... Afraid of what I... Afraid of what I'll come to ... " (Corregidora 89-90). Jones' slight shift in structure in these articulations of fear is crucial. First, there is Ursa's fear of what she'll become if she succumbs to clitoral

pleasure, implying, perhaps, that fear of lesbianism cited by Tate and others. Howev- er, supplemented by the next construction, "Afraid of what I ... " echoing that earlier

uncanny "I" linking sex with subjectivity, Ursa's fear reverberates as anxiety about the subjectivity that would accompany achievement of desire, and is finally articulated in that last expression, of fear of what she will "come" to. This final expression refers both to what Ursa would become-what subjectivity she might achieve outside the frame of the dominant system of penetrative sexuality-as well as to the colloquial use of "come" to mean achieving sexual fulfillment, in this case, from a clitoral, rather than uterine-penetrative, contact. Ultimately, as revealed in these consuming expres- sions of fear, Ursa is unable to imagine (sexual) pleasure apart from pain, as the traumatized subject is unable to imagine survival outside of the frame of the traumatic event.

It is crucial that at the moment she expresses her fear/desire of clitoral pleasure and her pain at Tadpole's betrayal, Ursa's addressee is Cat, despite having rejected her early in the novel after her brush with lesbian desire. Indeed, in spite of this

rejection, Cat is arguably Ursa's best witness in the novel, as it is she who first hears the pain in Ursa's singing voice and defines it as strength: "Your voice sounds ... like

you been through something. Before it was beautiful too, but you sound like you been

through more now" (Corregidora 44). Cat's ability to witness Ursa's pain is linked to her ability to witness her own pain and desire, and is threatening to Ursa inasmuch as Cat has successfully removed herself from the frame of the heterosexual contract which Ursa is unable to leave behind.

It is precisely this ability to witness, which Ursa mis-perceives as Mutt's, that informs the novel's controversial end. For Ursa's return to Mutt is not redemptive, as Melvin Dixon and Jerry Ward have argued; neither does it represent "Ursa's reclama- tion of desire and sexuality" (Gottfried 54). It is simply a result of her perception of Mutt as her witness-regardless of whether or not readers consider him an ethical one. As Mutt's cousin Jim notes,

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Once you told me that when you sang you always had to pick out a man to sing to. And when Mutt started coming in, you kept picking out him to sing to. And then when y'all was married, you had your man to sing to. You said that you felt that the others only listened, but that he heard you. (Corregidora 52)

This feeling of being heard is at the heart of the novel's crisis of witnessing, because Mutt does not in fact hear Ursa, validating her testimony in the form in which she renders it, but rather perpetuates her trauma by his violent attempts at repressing her

history and possessing her. Moreover, while Cat was able specifically to hear and to validate the pain in Ursa's voice as it was revealed in her blues songs, arguably Ursa's most powerful mode of expression and testimony, Mutt's need to possess Ursa specifically forecloses upon her opportunity to express herself in this way, culminat-

ing in his attempt to physically pull her from the stage. This act results in the violence which, in taking her womb, seals the construction of her identity in terms of the lack that is her "hole." Still, in spite of this crisis of witnessing at the novel's core, Ursa's desire that Mutt fulfill his role as her witness is demonstrated by her repetitive reliving of conversations and events between them over the course of the novel, as well as by the fact that many of her interior monologues are addressed to him. It is this desire-rather than an "epiphany of self-realization," as Amy Gottfried (52) would have it-which draws her back to Mutt in the end.

And, also contrary to many critical readings, I would argue that in this reconcili- ation, Ursa is still unable to voice her desire, which is not for the fellatio she performs on Mutt, but rather for its opposite, the cunnilingus which provides Jones' second novel, Eva's Man (1976), with some small measure of closure in Eva's receiving of

pleasure denied her within the hetero- sexual contract. Reading Eva as an intertextual signification upon Ursa (especially pertinent given that the novel is premised upon Eva's completion of the act of castration considered by Great Gram and remembered

by Ursa in Corregidora's final scene), it is clear that the pleasure Eva desires, the

pleasure she finally allows herself to experience with her cellmate, Elvira, is clitoral. While I do not recognize the redemptive closure which some critics have read in

Ursa's reconciliation with Mutt, the novel does effect two radical representations which indicate a movement out of its pained narrative present, out of that discursive stasis identified by Spillers as the historical legacy of captivity: first, the representa- tion of the frustration of female desire within a violent heterosexual contract which is, in the system of signs governing representation of women, generally excluded; and second, the representation of Ursa's expression of a measure of desire. For if at novel's end she has not achieved voice with regard to her sexual desire, she is finally able to

express the desire of a person who has experienced great pain not to be hurt. There is some promise in the fact that this expression is prompted by Mutt, who similarly is able to express his desire not to be hurt. However, this desire to end the repetitive cycle of wounding contains the impossibility of its own imperative ("I don't want a kind of woman that hurt you ... Then you don't want me" [185]), placing readers in the position of Caruth's trauma witness, "witness to an impossibility," the impossi- bility of the desire for a relationship without pain. Rather than providing narrative

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closure in its call-response blues structure, the novel is left suspended in the troubled narrative time of historical legacy. However, this last call-response dialogue also begins the process of eliminating pain by expressing it-or at least by expressing the desire not to have or inflict pain-which is perhaps the first step toward the represen- tation of a reciprocal wounding, a syncretic, reconciliatory exchange across difference which might get history moving again out of its pained past-present and into a future of desiring subjects and subjects who desire.

NOTES

1. For readings of Corregidora from the perspective of trauma theory see especially Simon's "Traumatic Repetition" (1997) and Morgenstern's "Mother's Milk" (1996).

2. The phrase is borrowed from Frederic Jameson, who identifies the "underside of culture" as "blood, torture, death, and terror" (5).

3. See, for instance, the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action; the United Nations Conven- tion on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women; and even the statute of the International War Crimes Tribunal (Ishay, Appendix VII). However, as Rhonda Copelon asserts, the cost of thus identifying rape as torture might be the continued acceptance of the distinction between rape as atrocity in war or genocidal contexts, and "normal" rape: "The recognition of rape as a war crime is thus a critical step toward understanding rape as violence. The next step is to recognize that rape that acquires the imprimatur of the state is not necessarily more brutal, relentless, or dehumanizing than the private rapes of everyday life, nor is violation by a state official or enemy soldier necessarily more devastating than violation by an intimate" (199).

4. There is an even more complex breakdown of these terms in the case of Corregidora; that is, under the "public" aegis of slavery, the rape/prostitution of Gram and Great Gram would have been excluded as part of the "private" realm, most likely constructed as consensual sex (a phenomenon examined by Clinton in "'With A Whip In His Hand'" [1994]). Further, Ursa's experience of often painful penetrative heterosexual sex which ignores and overrides her desire/pleasure and which might be characterized as a kind of "insidious trauma," is even further "privatized" (rendered invisible, or unspeakable) as it occurs as part of the ordinary, disavowed oppression of everyday patriarchy rather than under the umbrella of a public event/system such as slavery. Jones' narrative, then, brings to light in the context of historical legacy the doubly imposed "privacy" of such events.

5. Considering the delineations of "home and world" from the perspective of human rights theory, "history's most intricate invasions" might well describe the invasions of both the "public" (in the form of the regime/torturer) and the "domestic" (in the form of the ordinary household objects commonly used to inflict torture) into the very body of the torture victim. Hear the resonance with Scarry, who identifies one of the principle techniques of the torturer as the conversion of everyday domestic objects into weapons, "agents of pain" (40). This process, which undertakes the "mutilation of the domestic" in order to maximize human pain, is part of torture's "almost obscene conflation of private and public," which "brings with it all the solitude of absolute privacy with none of its safety, all the self-exposure of the utterly public with none of its possibility for camaraderie or shared experience" (53).

6. For thorough historicization of Corregidora's setting in the Brazilian (as opposed to U.S.) slave system, see Coser's Bridging the Americas (1994) and Robinson's Engendering the Subject (1991).

7. As codified in the new statute establishing a permanent International Criminal Court (1998), institutionalized rape (including the strategic use of rape for ethnic cleansing, sexual slavery, and enforced pregnancy) has been interpreted as a crime against humanity. Defendants in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, respectively, have been prosecuted on this ground. See Gutman and Rieff's 1999 Crimes of War (323-29).

8. See Hall's "The Mind That Burns In Each Body" (1983) for historicization of the convergence of racial and sexual violence in the acts of rape and lynching.

9. Given the specific historical and racial context of Corregidora, it is important to note that Spivak's comments about the denial of what she calls "female subject-function" accompanying

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effacement of the clitoris are part of an exploration of the role of "First-world" academic feminism in an international context; as such, her comments are qualified by warnings against reductive constructions of female subjectivity in terms of reproductive freedom and individ- ualism: "For to see women's liberation as identical with reproductive liberation is to... see the establishment of women's subject-status as an unquestioned good and indeed not to heed the best lessons of French anti-humanism, which discloses the historical dangers of a subjectivist normativity" (150-51).

10. See Dubey's "Gayl Jones and the Matrilineal Metaphor of Tradition" (1995) for a genealogy of critical response to Corregidora.

11. Jones introduces at this point a female auto-eroticism as an alternative to this violently consumptive heterosexual system: "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" (Corregidora 59)?

12. Scarry's theoretical reliance upon such public-private distinctions is in part a function of her objects of study; that is, her examination of documents from the files of Amnesty International, as well as writings about war by theorists such as Clausewitz, Churchill, and Kissinger, among others. Certainly such war theorists depend upon a traditional understanding and definition of war as a public event, and it is only quite recently that Amnesty International has begun to revise its definition of human rights violations to include such "private" or "secret" events as rape, sexual assault, and domestic violence, especially in its ongoing Campaign for Women's Rights. Such an interpretive shift on the part of perhaps the most influential contemporary international human rights organization also supports the (re)definition of rape as a form of torture: "This distinction [between 'private' and 'public' spheres] has led to one of the most common misconceptions in the field of human rights and one that has influenced Amnesty International ... As a result, many violations of women's rights have received insufficient scrutiny and concern. For example, the interpretation of the right to be free from torture has not encompassed violence against women in the family (such as domestic violence) and violence against women in the community (such as female genital mutilation)" (Amnesty 20).

13. Critics such as Melvin Dixon and Amy Gottfried have read Ursa's construction of the parallels connecting herself with Great Gram/Gram, and Mutt/Tad with Corregidora, as at least in part responsible for the structure of heterosexual abuse characterizing those contemporary rela- tionships; see, e.g., Gottfried: "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" (564). Aside from the unapologetic reproduc- tion of a "blame-the-victim" approach to domestic violence, Gottfried's reading ignores the ways in which Jones' representations of Ursa's sexual relationships, carefully echoing those of Ursa's foremothers', work purposefully to draw just such parallels between Corregidora/Mutt and Corregidora/Tad, situating their actions within the orbit of rape so as to question the power imbalances characterizing contemporary heterosexual relationships within the context of the intertwined histories of slavery and patriarchy. Read in the light of Ursa's repeated gestures toward a clitoral desire denied her within the novel's purposefully drawn heterosex- ual universe, Jones' critique of male heterosexual violence and hegemony is clear-and clearly deliberate.

14. To talk about Ursa's subjectivity in relation to her sexuality, her desire, is not to advocate a biological determinism which reduces woman to (her) sex, woman to womb, or which identifies female sexuality as solely constitutive of female subjectivity. Indeed, Sally Robinson has convincingly argued that Jones situates Ursa's narrative within just such mythically reductive discourses of the black woman as hyper-sexual "Sapphire" or "Jezebel" precisely to foreground and then deconstruct them. See also Simon's "Traumatic Repetition" (1997) for a reading of the political implications of Great Gram and Gram's reduction of woman to procreative potential in their (subversive) imperative to "make generations" in order to bear witness to a history erased upon the destruction of written record ("evidence") at the time of Emancipation.

15. See Baker's Blues, Ideology and Afro-American Literature (1984) and Carby's "It Jus Be's Dat Way Sometime" (1991) for analysis of the blues in the context of African-American culture and literary tradition. For a structural reading of Corregidora as blues "text" see Tate's "Ursa's Blues Medley" (1979).

16. Jones weaves the thread of this metaphor into the narrative of Mama's unwillingness to reveal her own "private" memory of her husband Martin, a memory to which Ursa desperately wants access: "And I kept waiting for her to tell me. Sometimes I'd try to feel it out of her with my eyes, but I couldn't get it. No. She was closed up like a fist" (Corregidora 101).

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