Corregidora essay with articles to use.

Memory, History and Self-Reconstruction in Gayl Jones's "Corregidora" Author(s): Sirène Harb Source: Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Spring, 2008), pp. 116-136 Published by: Indiana University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25167557 . Accessed: 29/04/2013 13:50

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Memory, History and Self-Reconstruction in Gay I Jones's Corregidora

Sir?ne Harb American University of Beirut, Lebanon

This article explores how Gayl Jones s Corregidora constructs, through the journey of its main protagonist Ursa Corregidora, a viable model for dealing with the painful legacy

of slavery, oppression and haunting by the past. The process of self-redefinition in which Ursa engages is based on the reconfiguration of family and sexuality and the hybridiza tion

of her relationship to individ?alas well as collective narratives.

After probing Ursas

complex psychological journey, the article examines the main elements

mediating the r?in

scription of her life narrative into a broader context ??/"m?tissage involving

sexual and

historical resistance, anchored in the story of Palmares as a Brazilian maroon community

(quilombo). Finally\ the article analyzes the implications and resonances of this model

of revision/reclamation

for Gayl Jones and her theorization of the

interconnectedness of

struggles against oppression in Brazil and the United States.

Keywords: African-American literature / Corregidora I hybridity / gender /

history / memory

In Corregidora, Gayl Jones explores the intersubjective dimensions of storytelling and its repercussions

on the lives of four generations of Corregidora women,

namely Ursa, her mother, grandmother and great grandmother. Ursa's ances

tors, who suffered from the absence of written records reflecting the inhumanity of

their experiences, inscribe such stories on their bodies.They

ensure their continuity

by bearing children who would "leave evidence" through the transmission of the

ancestral legacy. The Corregidora women are thus haunted by the traumatizing burden of history and memory; saturated with stories of injustices, they do not

realize that they are perpetuating the logic, spirit and politics of oppression by

passing traumatic legacies and haunting tales to their offspring.

Living a

repressive version of history, these women are forced to adhere to a

prescribed life story that submerges them in victimization and conditions their

hearts, minds, consciousness and perceptions. After internalizing the stories of

Great Gram so intensely that they "become" this ancestor

during the process of

narration, they pass her instructions to their descendents through storytelling.

However, "passing instructions" in a

prescriptive spirit contradicts the ethics of

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History and Self-Reconstruction in Gayl Jones's Corregidora 117

storytelling and narration since both rely on the establishment of a dialogic/interac

tive relationship between teller and listener, catalyzing processes

of transformation

of one's consciousness and paving the way for the realization of the importance of

autonomy and responsibility. Oblivious to the ethics of transmission and obsessed

by Great Gram's visions of the ultimate act of testifying against Corregidora, the

Portuguese slave owner, the Corregidora women become so powerfully

immersed

in histories of domination and suffering that they are incapable of critically per

ceiving the past and integrating it into their life story. Paralyzing their struggle for transformation and wholeness, the ancestral stories shape immutable versions

of memory that catalyze the perpetuation of the dehumanizing and objectifying effects of psychological enslavement.

Discussions of Corregidora revolve around the ambivalent and traumatic reper

cussions of history and memory (Athey; Rushdy; Simon), oppression and the

enslavement of consciousness (Ward), the novelistic bridging of the histories of

Brazilian and American slavery (Coser) and the negative portrayal of black men

and their relationship to black women (Barksdale; Reckley). A number of critics

link the issue of the reclamation of subjectivity and identity to the voicing of a

private discourse (Dixon), the reconfiguration of black women's sexuality and voice

(duCille; Gottfried; Horvitz) and the performance of blues songs (Byerman; Har

ris; Lindemann; Pettis). Other critics discuss the role of the book in the revision of the black matrilineal literary tradition (Dubey; Pettis) and the historicization of

the family as well as the mother-daughter relationship (Kubitschek).

Differing from these critical interventions, I examine the intersubjective dimensions of storytelling and memory as well as their role in the emplotment of hybrid versions of history and identity in Gayl Jones's Corregidora. This process contributes to the transformation of the gendered and racialized body into a site of

inscription of multivocal counternarratives that work against the ancestral perpetu ation of the oppressor's logic. Specifically, I show how the memory of a fugitive slave community catalyzes processes o? m?tissage through which Jones's protagonist,

Ursa Corregidora, differently conceives and reconstructs familial legacy, personal

history and sexuality. Empowered by such a

reconciliatory move, Ursa is able to

reclaim the ethics and dialogism of storytelling and reconfigure sites of hybrid ization, bringing together the sexual and the historical, the individual and the

collective, the Afro-Brazilian past and the African-American present. Before proceeding with my analysis, I would like to define the term m?tissage

and determine its importance for the exploration of Ursas experiences. I follow

Fran?oise Lionnet's definition of this term as designating the mechanisms of

hybridization and cross-cultural interactions informing processes of resistance to

colonial domination and historical marginalization. What distinguishes m?tissage as a special form of hybridization is that it emphasizes a particular category of cross-cultural

exchange and reading practices; this category involves the processes that enter into play to produce the personal and give it its particular historical and

political character. For Lionnet, m?tissage is:

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118 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 31, Number 3

a form of bricolage, in the sense used by Claude L?vi-Strauss, but as an aesthetic

concept it encompasses far more: it brings together biology and history, anthropology

and philosophy, linguistics and literature. Above all, it is a reading practice that allows

[one] to bring out the interreferential nature of a particular set of texts, which I believe

to be of fundamental importance for the understanding of many postcolonial cultures.

(Autobiographical 8)

Located at border zones, m?tissage is also a

praxis based on the personal and serving

to shape a space for the articulation of new visions of the self in ways that bypass traditional hierarchies and dichotomies (Autobiographical6). This approach results in the "reconstruction] [of] new imaginative spaces where power configurations, inevitable as they are, may be reorganized to allow for fewer dissymmetries in the

production and circulation of knowledge" (6). In this respect, it is worth noting that Lionnet's theorization o? m?tissage prefigures Homi Bhabha's characterization of hybridization

as creating

a third, unclassifiable zone, an "interstitial passage

between fixed identifications open[ing] up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy" (4).

In her books, Lionnet mainly uses

m?tissage to

analyze postcolonial representa tions and constructions of memory and subjectivity. By applying this interpretive

model to Corregidora, I would like to show how m?tissage can be used equally to

explore the intricacies of African-American literature. In fact, m?tissage

is particu

larly relevant to the analysis of this type of literature because it addresses the issue of the politicization and historicization of the personal, which is a contested space for slaves and their descendents. At the same time, it is based on a vision of hybrid

ity that reclaims multiplicity and challenges the binary logic of master narratives based on traditional dichotomies and polarizations.

The consequences and repercussions of using m?tissage as an

analytical tool

will be explored through its application to the study of Ursa Corregidoras expe riences and survival strategies. In the particular

case of this character, m?tissage involves the braiding of the personal and sexual on the one hand and the cultural, historical and linguistic domains on the other. Consequently, m?tissage becomes an ideological signifier that contributes to the negotiation of the complexity of

this African-American character's experience. Such a

negotiation is

possible since

m?tissage points not only to the impossibility of total immersion in the present but

also to the destructive, if not deadly, effect of clinging to a monolithic version of

the past. As such, m?tissage catalyzes processes of critical mediation and conscious

self-refashioning that work against stagnant versions of history and identity. As the novel shows, such versions mark the lives of Ursa Corregidora and

her family, leaving their mark on their perception of self. In her quest for self

refashioning, Ursa revisits, and works through, the controversial implications of the

transgenerational tales that dominated her childhood, in order to determine the

limitations that she should impose upon the invasive slave past and its haunting details. Throughout this process, she acquires a deeper insight into the importance and perils of remembering ancestral narratives. The family history Ursa is told and

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History and Self-Reconstruction in Gayl Jones's Corregidora 119

retold not only revolves around the experiences of Great Gram and Gram, it is

also informed by the perspective of various narrators who inherit the generational

tales. In addition, it is mythologized because of the temporal gap separating the

storytellers from the people who have had a direct experience of the events. As Ursa puts it, "My great-grandmama told my grandmama the part she lived through that my grandmama didn't live through and my grandmama told my mama what

they both lived through and my mama told me what they all lived through and we

were suppose to pass it down like that from generation to

generation so we'd never

forget" (9). When Ursa tries to tell the stories of her family, she discovers that they have acquired a legendary character and have become "prescripted" (Horvitz 251),

losing the intimacy that generational narratives must preserve to enrich and nurture

personal history. Ursa is fully aware of the importance of her familial legacy; she

attempts to probe its repercussions on her life and its significance for her sense of

continuity. However, she refuses to become prisoner of that history

or to receive

instructions prescribing her feelings about the past.

The past Ursa has been handed down by Great Gram is limiting and imprison ing because it is exclusively inspired by "dictated feelings": Great Gram not only passes on stories to Ursa, she also tells her how to feel about these stories reflecting the ancestral experiences

on the Brazilian plantation. Having completely integrated the coercive language used by Great Gram in her account of the brutal rapes she had been subjected to in Brazil, Ursa is obsessed by the insistence on continuity conveyed through the discourse of her ancestor, which is impersonal and full of

repetitive refrains. In these refrains, Corregidora is a central word connected to

a number of coercive situations that are narrativized, forming the story Ursa is

instructed to tell and transmit to future generations. This protagonist feels "fated" to

literally and figuratively reproduce the details of the ancestral story since she was

forced to believe totally in its truthfulness and never question its veracity. In fact,

when five-year-old Ursa asks her great grandmother after hearing the story, "You

telling the truth, Great Gram?" her maternal ancestor reacts

violently by slapping her and saying:

When I'm telling you something don't you ever ask if I'm lying. Because they didn't

want to leave no evidence of what they done?so it couldn't be held against them. And

I'm leaving evidence. And you got to leave evidence too. And your children got to leave

evidence. And when it come time to hold up the evidence, we got to have evidence

to hold up. That's why they burned all the papers, so there wouldn't be no evidence to

hold up against them. (14)

In this passage, Great Gram specifically refers to the burning of slave trade docu

ments, which was ordered at the beginning of the 1890s by the minister of finances in Brazil, Rui Barbosa (Coser 129). Unconsciously acting as an oppressor and ask

ing for "unqualified acceptance" of her story (Dubey 253), Ursa's great grandmother teaches her a harsh lesson about the consequences of doubting the veracity of the

Corregidora legacy. The little girl's question about the authenticity of the ancestral narrative is countered by physical punishment and

a continuous stress on her own

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120 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 31, Number 3

and her children's duty to "leave evidence." Great Gram's story, characterized by

"absolute truth-telling claims," reproduces the spirit of oppression as it

"replicates the masterful and repressive gestures of the dominant tradition it tries to supplant"

(Dubey 253). Consequently, five-year-old Ursa learns that her questions belong to a forbidden realm; they allow her great grandmother to reproduce violence on her

body. As a result, early in her life, this protagonist is presented with a distorted view of communication as a form of re-enactment of Corregidoras abusive assaults. She

is also taught that she must "make generations" who would "leave evidence" and

keep the family tale alive; in other words, Ursa is ordered to transform her body into a "site of history's inscription" (Horvitz 248).

This protagonist, however, is able to notice the loss of the emotional quality of Great Gram's stories. Ursa recalls that as a young girl, she heard her great grand mother recount stories as though she

were transported by the words conveying

the depth of the sexual and psychological abuse Corregidora had forced her to go

through: "It was as if the words were helping her, as if the words repeated again and

again could be a substitute for memory, were somehow more than the memory. As

if it were only the words that kept her anger" (11). Great Gram's use of the "words"

defies the ethics of storytelling in which traditions are "never separate from the

people, the human implications"; as Jones says, this multidimensional art is "about

all... [of one's] connections as a human being" ("Gayl Jones: An Interview" 693). The memories Ursa has of her great grandmother's tales of slavery do

not leave

room for ambivalence as a "human implication" because Great Gram forced this

protagonist never to

question the mnemonic projections of the ancestral story. Her

tales presented "absolute" versions of the past, characterized by evil and intense

victimization. With its polarization of past and present and its lack of ambivalence and paradoxes, the ancestral narrative does

not leave any space for Ursa to explore her personal story. Having

been transformed into a rigid, monolithic entity, the

intergenerational tale reinforces the obsessive potential of the ghosts of the past.

As a myth characterized by resistance to mutations and interactive exchanges, the

memory of Ursa's maternal ancestors has been frozen in space and time, in a state

of stasis and stagnation. Moreover, the legend told and retold by Great Gram is

absorbed by Ursa, who repeats it without realizing its implications on her life story.

Unconsciously, she fixes this narrative and distances it from her sense of self instead

of using it as a tool of revision and reclamation. Ursa is thus held prisoner by the

colonizing power of her great grandmother's imitation of the dominant language described by bell hooks as "a territory that limits and defines" ("'this is'"296).

As Lynne Tirrell maintains, when people recount a story, they articulate their

thoughts about a number of events and characters, presenting their personal per

spective and a set of judgments. Those who listen

to a story, however, "confront a

perspective, a character, and a set of judgments" (116). The

notion of "confronta

tion" acquires a

deeper significance in the context of the intergenerational heritage/

narration whose repercussions shape the historical and social perspectives of the

listener. "Confrontation" also constitutes a site of convergence of sympathy and

resistance to stories, and it involves interplay between the subjectivities of the

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History and Self-Reconstruction in Gayl Jones's Corregidora 121

teller's and the listener's experiences (116). Because of her belief in the immutability of stories of the past, Great Gram has given Ursa the material to be transmitted without developing her sense of respect for the "confrontational" and dialogic essence

characterizing the process of storytelling and transmission. Ursa perceives

her family history as a monolithic construct; her understanding of this history, framed by her great grandmother's

formulaic discourse and alienated from Ursa's

sense of identity, paves the way for the composition of a historic narrative based on

an authoritative form of discourse. This type of discourse does not allow for what

Edward M. Bruner describes as "dialogic narration," which is involved in the proj ect of shaping historical meanings and spaces of memory in a collective enterprise based on continual processes of m?tissage. Confined by her great grandmother's

narrative, Ursa is thus doomed to reproduce, through formulaic repetition, the

family legend and suffering. Moreover, because of the monolithic and authoritative character of Great

Gram's tale, Ursa becomes unable to healthily reconstruct her self through what Annette Baier characterizes as a mechanism of psychological self-recreation. Baier

argues that simple consciousness is not a sufficient catalyst for personhood, whose

construction necessitates a more reflective and reflexive consciousness of oneself

and the world. Such a consciousness not only involves a "consciousness of stimuli

relevant to what in fact is self-maintenance in that world," it also requires a sense

of temporality, which allows one to

perceive the self as

having a

past, present and

future. Moreover, it asks for a responsible awareness of one's ancestry and legacy

(Baier 86,88).Through this process, the individual, social, and historical aspects of one's sense of self are "authorized" to interact and shape

one another. Unfortunately, Ursa is deprived of this ability to recreate herself and transform the ancestral tale to reap the practical benefits of telling and retelling the oral story.

Gram, who experienced some of the atrocities of the Corregidora past, pres

ents Ursa with a different perspective on the oral and familial tale. Gram's insight into the art of storytelling and her

comments about the reflexivity of this art open

to Ursa a world of possibilities and create new spaces. These spaces are partially

shaped by the realization of the unreliability of memory and its slippery nature; in fact, as Gram maintains, there are many regenerative and healthy aspects that

can result from the flexibility of memory. Gram's perception of the family legacy is different from her mother's; she does not obsessively and hauntingly stress the

necessity of "leaving evidence." Rather, in her discourse, she underlines the fact that

the process of leaving evidence presents a number of dangers affecting the minds

of the people who are involved in this process: "They burned all the documents, Ursa, but they didn't burn what they put in their minds. We got to burn out what

they put in our minds, like you burn out a wound. Except we got to keep what we need to bear witness. That scar that's left to bear witness. We got to keep

it as

visible as our blood" (72). In this passage, Gram warns Ursa against the residues that might colonize the

minds of the slaves and their descendents. These residues, "what they put in our

minds," are related to distorted notions of self-worth, respect and identity. They

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122 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 31, Number 3

mark the lives of the slaves and their descendents because they perpetuate the

psychological wounds and the politics of oppression characteristic of the era of

slavery. Through her reflections on the past, Gram incites Ursa to rework the tales

she has heard and the silenced stories of her self not only by testifying but also by learning the strategies of survival, based on blocking some of the effects of the past so that they would not control the totality of her life.

Ursa thus realizes that she must refuse to be transformed into a site of arti

ficial memory or a "lieu de m?moire? Indeed, as Pierre Nora maintains, "lieux de

m?moire'' "originate [d] with the sense that there is no spontaneous memory"(289); consequently,

in order to preserve the mnemonic traces, people constructed sites of

memory, including museums, festivals, etc. These lieux are inhabited by

a crystal

lized, fixed and stable form of memory (Nora 284). In a parallel way, Ursa's body and soul are facing the literal and figurative threat of becoming a museum for the perpetuation of a past that Great Gram thinks is dying. Instead of inscribing the horrors of the past

on her body, which is, to use Peter Brooks's words, a "site

of signification?the place for the inscription of stories ? and itself a signifier, a

prime agent in narrative plot and meaning" (5-6), Ursa

must learn how to work the

historical process in reverse. Rather than reconstruct the past by starting from "the

trace" as historians do (Ricoeur, Reality), Ursa has to discard some of the horrible

details of the past without losing sight of the importance of preserving the memory related to the traumatic events recounted to her.

Consequently, this protagonist must find a way of controlling the power of

past events/stories by reducing their presence to what Gram calls "a scar," which

would allow her to alleviate the haunting by the past without subjecting it to full

amnesia. Ursa should thus place this familial history under the Sign of the Other, a process by which "history

. . . tends as a whole to make the past remote from the

present. It can even

expressly attempt to

produce an effect of strangeness in contrast

to the desire to make the unfamiliar familiar ..." (Ricoeur, Reality 15; emphasis

Ricoeur's). Through this enterprise, Ursa would feel that, to a certain extent, the

past has been transformed into a strange and different land, which would enable

her to effect what Ricoeur calls a "spiritual decentering" (Reality 16) or distancing from the inherited past.

Gram is able to suggest to Ursa an alternative way of perceiving memory

and its relationship to the self because she has deep insight into the dynamics of

remembering and the flexible character of memory. Moreover, this ancestral figure knows that memory is slippery

and mutable; it involves processes of construction

and reconstruction that result in the grafting of narratives of pain and suffering on the body and soul of the listener. Consequently, as Gram tells Ursa, sometimes

the borderlines separating one's memory from that of the previous generations

are transformed and blurred. For instance, although it is logically impossible that

Gram remembers the period of abolition and the various events that accompanied

it because she was very young, she acknowledges that "sometime it seem like I

do [remember them] too" (78). This emotional reconstruction of the memory of an event that Gram never witnessed might be due to the powerful impact of the

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History and Self-Reconstruction in Gayl Jones's Corregidora 123

stories Great Gram told her daughter about abolition, making her feel that she

has experienced them. Gram not only reveals to Ursa the fragility of reconstructed

memories and oral narratives, she also explains to her the dependence

of memories

on feelings, which

are themselves unstable and transformable. As she maintains,

it is "hard to always remember what you were feeling when you ain't feeling it

exactly that way no more" (79). In this passage Gram is specifically telling Ursa

about her feelings towards Corregidora, whose image was altered by the details

of Great Gram's stories. Although the experiences that produced such memories

are extremely painful and devastating,

as Gram maintains, the feelings and the

memories of feelings are

subject to

change and transformation.

Gram's messages about the past are different than Great Gram's narratives

because they are characterized by

a greater

awareness of the nature of memory, the

transformative character of experiences and the fluidity of emotions. Great Gram's

stories restricted Ursa's psychological development because they were informed by an absolute certainty concerning the power of words

to evoke an exact and precise

memory; moreover, their message presented this memory as the exclusive tool

allowing one to "leave evidence." By contrast, the tales told and transformed by

Gram carry a

liberating potential because they

stress not only the importance of

testifying but also the necessity of freeing the mind from the residues of oppres sion. Gram's stories are flexible because of their openness to the possibility of

change; they defy the rigidity of the legendary tales to stress the infinite capabili ties resulting from processes of reshaping

narratives. Because of this reconstructive

potential, Gram's discourse combines past and present

as it reveals different sites

of meaning. The Corregidora legend circulates through

its transmission from one genera

tion to the other; its damaging effects reside in the dangers represented by empty/

formulaic repetition. Specifically, Ursa must learn how to (re)insufflate breath into

the legendary ancestral stories by refiguring and reliving them through her own

feelings instead of accepting the rigidity of their inherited structure. In other words, Ursa must find the echo of her own experiences in the familial tales. Learning to "hear other people's

voices and [her] own voice" is essential to the process of

reclamation Ursa must initiate (Jones, "Gayl Jones: An Interview" 694). In the novel, the situation of Mama reflects the destructive repercussions

that the ancestral tales have on intersubjective relations. In fact, Mama weaves

a coherent account of her "private memory" (104), which she never revealed to

her daughter. Ultimately, she tells Ursa the full story of her marriage to Martin.

However, she is not capable of producing a coherent narrative of the Corregidora

past. She either presents Ursa with fragments of the story, sounding "as if she were

speaking in pieces, instead of telling one long thing" (123) or loses her own self

during the process of narration: "Mama kept talking until it wasn't her that was

talking, but Great Gram-she wasn't Mama now, she was Great Gram talking"

(124). The tale told and retold to Mama is so overwhelming that "the memory of all the Corregidora women" has become "her memory too,

as strong with her as

her own private memory, or almost as strong" (129).

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124 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 31, Number 3

The case of Mama, whose mind appropriates the fragmented memory associ

ated with the narratives of slavery, provides Ursa with an example illustrating the destructive effects of a past so intensely relived by the subject that it haunts her

psyche and affects her personal identity. Through this process, Mama becomes her

grandmother; however, since the relationship between her "private memory" and

the "memory of all the Corregidora women" is not configured in a healthy way, Mama is unable to "filter" the Corregidora memory and her grandmother's suf

fering through her personal, intimate understanding of the ancestral narrative and

the significance of her own tale. Mama's voice lacks self-definition, and Ursa learns

from her example the importance of striving to find her voice and to recover her self

(Rushdy 278). In fact, the absence of a

reclamatory element from Mama's narrative

reflects her inability to trust her personal voice enough to use it and produce her own version, through the process of emplotment, of the ancestral story. One of the

major challenges for Ursa is to adequately emplot, using hybridization or m?tissage, ancestral and personal memories

so as to give them

a different sequence and form.

In effect, according to Paul Ricoeur, emplotment:

brings together diverse and heterogeneous story elements ...

agents, goals, means, inter

actions, [and] circumstances ... an event must be more than just a single occurrence.

It gets its definition from its contribution to the development of the plot. A story, too,

must be more than just an enumeration of events in serial order; it must organize them

into an intelligible whole, of a sort such that we can always ask what is the thought

of the story. In short, emplotment is the operation that draws a configuration out of a

simple succession. (Time 65; my emphases)

In the context of the Corregidora past, Ursa must strive to initiate processes

of hybridization bringing together the memories of her ancestral and personal struggles and allowing her to configure "an intelligible whole" that braids the events of her ancestral history with her personal memory. Such

a configuration

necessitates the adoption o?"logiques m?tisses'(Lionnet, Postcolonial 1) that require

participation in, and modification of, the dominant stories to help one bear witness and identify, in Toni Morrison's words, "those things in the past that are useful and

those things that are not" (121). Gram's lessons about memory give Ursa the basis for challenging the formulaic

narrative that imprisons her; as a result, she starts perceiving memory

as a con

struct that can work under what Ricoeur terms the "Sign of the Same" to bring the

past into the present. Moreover, this protagonist learns to

perceive history as "re

enactment of the past," which "does not consist in reliving but in rethinking [this

past]" (Ricoeur, Reality 8). By rethinking the past, Ursa realizes that her relation

ship with Mutt involved mutual abuse, and she starts to see the damages resulting

from the process of filtering this relationship exclusively through the lens of her

great grandmother's stories. From the example of her mother, Ursa learns how the

ancestral legend can become "cannibalistic," devouring

its transmitter and audience

when it does not reflect the intimacy of a

personal connection to the tale. Ursa thus

realizes that she must find a way of incorporating these ancestral lessons into her

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History and Self-Reconstruction in Gayl Jones's Corregidora 125

life story in order to bear witness to the atrocities of the Corregidora tale and at the same time protect the integrity of her voice, self and historical location.

A number of critics maintain that Ursa finds her voice by singing the blues

that help her distance herself from the haunting past and participate in a process of translation of memory, which, as Keith Byerman notes, allows her

to inscribe

voice and history in the context of the African-American artistic tradition (180).

Consequently, she "is not

only the victim but also, by

virtue of the performance

itself, the ultimate power" (Byerman 179). The blues are thus perceived as Ursa's

way of transforming the legendary history of the Corregidora victims into a cultural

form of art. Through this process of m?tissage, Ursa puts together her suffering and

that of the Corregidora women to

produce a

"song branded with the new world"

(59) and interpreted in an "African American vernacular voice" (Bell 247). It is true that the blues constitute a form of artistic self-expression catalyzing

Ursa's psychological healing. However, in addition to this form of artistic creation, Ursa uses other means to hybridize the sexual and the historical, the personal and

the collective, thus establishing a different relationship with the intergenerational stories. She challenges their fixation and homogenization, which condemn one,

as

David Lowenthal says, to formulaic repetition (18). What Neil MacGregor argues about heritage is also true of Ursa's ancestral legacy; as he puts it, inheriting is a

process, and people must realize they

are "heirs to the past, heirs to the collections

they own, free to decide for themselves what they are going to do with the past, what it means for them now and what it may mean for them in the future" (qtd. in

Lowenthal 19). As Lowenthal adds, "[W]e must feel sure the past's legacies have become our very own" (19).

Ursa is able to effect this process of m?tissage, making the legacies of the past her own and achieving

a better understanding of the reasons behind Mama's

incoherent account of the Corregidora story as well as her own obsession by the

ancestral tale after rethinking, in

light of her present experiences, the question that

none of her ancestors would answer (Rushdy 278). This question is related to a secret that Great Gram was unwilling

to tell, which resulted in the creation of an

empty space in the accounts of later generations. Such a gap led to the formation

of a phantom, originating from the unconscious suspicion that there are some ele

ments of a story that have been left unsaid by a family member. Consequently, this

phantom, created because of "the gap that the concealment of some

part of a loved

one's life produced

in us," marks the Corregidora family history. Its "transgenera tional consequences of silence" are transferred "from the parent's unconscious into

the child's," resulting in a haunting effect on the following generations (Abraham 287,289; qtd. in Rushdy 279). In other words, this silence has deep repercussions on several generations and affects the fate of

an entire family lineage.

Such repercussions deeply mark the lives of the Corregidora women. Indeed, in her childhood, Ursa was told that Great Gram did "something that made him

[Corregidora] wont to kill her," and because of her fear, she ran away and aban

doned her daughter in the plantation (79). However, none of the other family members knows the nature of what Great Gram did to Corregidora. As Gram

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126 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 31, Number 3

affirms, Great Gram "never would tell [me] what she did. Up till today she still won't tell [me] what it was she did" (172). Gram never heard any explanation from

Corregidora either. The gap resulting from the secret of what Great Gram did to

Corregidora obsesses her descendents; in the novel, the question about this gap is formulated in the following way: "What is it a woman can do to a man that make him hate her so bad he wont to kill her one minute and keep thinking about her and can't get her out of his mind the next?" (173). The answer to this question would

provide a crucial insight into the lives of the Corregidora women. In fact, Great Gram left the plantation directly after her enigmatic act, and Gram

was afterwards

oppressed, abused and raped by Corregidora, resulting in the birth of Ursa's mother. In a paradoxical way, Great Gram's act of leaving the plantation contributed to

the coming of the next offspring who could bear witness and carry the burden of

leaving evidence to denounce Corregidoras abuse. The

secret act, which obsesses

Great Gram's descendents, seems also to carry the key to the understanding of the

relationship between desire, pain, hatred and love. In the final part of the novel, Ursa finds an answer to the family secret by

bringing together personal and ancestral experiences; through this hybrid act, she initiates a process of historical recovery that shapes, and is shaped by, notions of desire and choice. Critical opinions about the ambivalent relationship between Ursa and her former husband and the issue of their reconciliation are divergent. For instance, Madhu Dubey

states that this reunion fails to "resolve the complica tions of either Ursa's own sexual history

or the broader history of American slavery"

(252). However, it is arguable, as Jones maintains, that the "open-ended" conclu

sion of Corregidora implies "a kind of redemption" ("Gayl Jones Takes" 285; qtd. in Rushdy 279). The solution Ursa finds for the family secret initiates this kind of

redemption since it helps her fight the obsessive haunting by the past and opens up hybrid personal and historical spaces

in the ancestral narrative, which makes

her acquire a different vision of her historical emplacement.

At the end of the novel, Mutt tells Ursa after 22 years of absence that he would

like her to come back to him. He then tells her the story of his great grandfather: because of unsettled debts, the American courts took his wife away from him.

Mutt's great grandfather lost his sanity and ate "onions so

people wouldn't come

around him," and after that, "peppermint so they would" (183-84). After his sepa ration from Ursa, Mutt attempted

to repeat his great grandfather's act, but, as he

tells his former wife, "[I]t didn't do nothing but make me sick" (184). By recount

ing this story to Ursa, Mutt reveals to her that although he respects his ancestral

past, he cannot replicate its events in his own life or use an old strategy to solve

a

contemporary problem. The message of his story is that the past must always

be

remembered but not so intensely as to be relived in an obsessive manner.

Not unlike Mutt, Ursa repeats with a subtle nuance of difference her great

grandmother's act as she engages in sexual intercourse with her former husband.

Her re-enactment brings the past into the present, and it involves, not unlike the

historian's, a "rethinking... [which] already contains the critical moment that forces

[one] to take the detour by way of the historical imagination" (Ricoeur, Reality 8).

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History and Self-Reconstruction in Gayl Jones's Corregidora 127

Ursa's process of remembering reflects her ability to revisit the past and rethink it

without falling into an obsessive, formulaic repetition of its

events. During

an act

of fellatio on Mutt, she expresses her certitude that the secret "had to be something

sexual that Great Gram did to Corregidora" (184). She concludes that her great

grandmother had bitten Corregidoras penis as she was performing fellatio on him, which resulted in the creation of a whole gamut of feelings in the slave owner's

heart. After this "eroticization of pain" (Horvitz 249), Corregidoras emotions

wavered between extreme love and hatred as well as pleasure and pain.

Echoing her great grandmother's experience, Ursa's sexual encounter with

Mutt acts as a catalyst enhancing hybrid remembering and allowing her to rethink

the past by making it interact with the present. Through this m?tissage of past and

present, she reclaims the dynamic and interactive dimensions of storytelling, which,

as Jones maintains, "make[s] movements between kinds of language and kinds of

reality?dreams and memory also being kinds of reality" ("Gayl Jones: An Inter

view" 698). In this process of re-enactment, Ursa redefines her position vis-?-vis the

Corregidora intergenerational tale and rereads the history of her present, body and relations through the experiences of her

ancestors. Moreover, by bringing together the sexual and personal with the historical and collective, she discovers new, plural and heteroglossal sites of resistance that transform the meaning of the historical trace and the significance of the relationship between the Corregidora women and

men. Ursa also recognizes that Corregidoras act was not worse than what "Mutt

had done to me, than what we had done to each other, than what Mama had done

to Daddy, or what he had done to her in return" (184). By adopting this perspec tive, Ursa does not blame the oppressed. She rather implies that

even in stories of

extreme victimhood, women had some limited possibilities of shaping spaces of resistance from which they could fight their objectification.

The answer to the "pain and pleasure" involved in the ancestral secret shows

how Great Gram, a slave woman, resisted within the limits of her own capabilities. She tried to seize agency and for a brief moment assert her subjectivity. As she rethinks the historical secret, Ursa establishes a parallelism between Great Gram's

controversial act of resistance to objectification by Corregidora and the type of control she possesses during the act of fellatio on Mutt. Starting from this kind of

parallelism, Ursa configures hybrid spaces linking the sexual and the historical, the

personal and the collective, the Brazilian past and the American present. Such m?tis

configurations contribute to the creation of alternative forms of

self-inscription into the ancestral stories. Moreover, as she works with and through her great

grandmother's experience, Ursa engages in processes of redefinition of the role that

sexuality and desire play in the shaping of acts of resistance. She also probes the means of generating a heteroglossal "daughterly language of desire" out of these

processes of resistance (Dubey 250). Before

exploring such phenomena, one needs to examine the definition and

significance of resistance within the context of the patriarchal system of slavery. In

his discussion of the consequences of the slaves'objectification and their reaction to

the "paternalism" inherent in the system of slavery in the South, Eugene Genovese

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128 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 31, Number 3

maintains that slaves showed, at the same time, "accommodation and resistance to

slavery." Accommodation was a means of

"adaptation," allowing the slaves to accept

"what could not be helped without falling prey to the pressures of dehumaniza

tion, emasculation, and self-hatred." On the other hand, resistance was exhibited

under two forms. The first form was based on "prepolitical non-revolutionary self

assertion," a type of daily resistance involving infanticide, lying, murder, stealing and arson. The second form of resistance included "political responses" such

as

flight and collective violence to counter the savagery of the system (Roll 597-98, 591; qtd. in Rushdy 281). Resistance, in this respect, must be perceived not only as a group of actions informed by specific principles but also as a set of possibilities originating from, and related to, particular historical and social conditions. The careful analysis of historical acts of resistance must be informed by the context

that necessitated these types of actions and the conditions making them possible, producing fear and anxiety in the oppressors' lives by threatening certain spaces, sites and domains

significant to their survival.

For the female victims of New World patriarchal slavery, the main domain of resistance to oppression resided in sexuality. In Brazil, the bodies of slave

women

were exploited

in multiple ways; slave

masters had sexual intercourse with many

female slaves, using their bodies for sexual pleasure and for the increase of the number of workers on the plantation. Moreover, unlike slave

owners in the United

States, Brazilian slave masters obliged slave women to work as prostitutes, thus

securing an additional source of income (Russell-Wood 37). Because of this specific historical background related to the Brazilian system of slavery, it is arguable that resistance would mostly be related

to the domain of sexuality, which constitutes

the main site of oppression. The resistance of the slave women, who suffered from

their transformation into sexual and economic commodities, is best described by Darlene Clark Hine's statement: "The slave woman's resistance to sexual and there

fore to economic exploitation posed a

potentially severe threat to paternalism itself,

for implicit in such action was the slave woman's refusal to accept her designated

responsibilities within the slave system as legitimate" (7; qtd. in Rushdy 281).

Corregidora presents crucial instances of resistance by slave women, giving

Ursa deeper insight into her position vis-?-vis the family secret. In the final scene, this protagonist repeats with

some difference Great Gram's act of resistance, and

she feels that, for a certain period of time, she "became" her great grandmother. As

she puts it, "It was like I didn't know how much was me and Mutt and how much was Great Gram and Corregidora" (184). Significantly, this scene is also a site of

m?tissage of a number of sexual, historical, individual and collective narratives of

resistance to the oppressive conditions of slavery. As Ursa tries to solve the fam

ily "puzzle," she conjures up the stories revolving around the different, plural and

ambivalent means used to counter the humiliations of slavery.

When she feels that she has become a continuation of her great grandmother,

and after she discovers the answer to the Corregidora secret, Ursa has to make

a difficult choice about the type of "action" she must perform on Mutt. In her

struggle for meaning, the past and the present confront each other. As Deborah

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History and Self-Reconstruction in Gayl Jones's Corregidora 129

Horvitz succinctly puts it, "Aware of the fact that she can sexually control

a man

through sadomasochism, Ursa identifies herself as a Corregidora woman; at the

same time, her choice not to exploit that power is her declaration of independence

from her mothers'" (257). Indeed, Ursa is extremely conscious of the power she

has over her former husband, as is shown through her repetition of the statement

"I could kill you"; however, she is also acutely

aware of the dangers accompany

ing the existence of such a power (184). If Ursa chooses to emasculate Mutt as

her means of achieving control, she would be reenacting a historical scene of

emasculation by a slave woman who had to pay a tremendous price for her

act.

Great Gram had told Ursa about a slave woman "over on the next plantation" who

resisted her master's attempt at raping her by cutting off "his thing with a razor

she had hid under the pillow." Her master bled to death and she was punished

by the police who "cut off her husband's penis and stuffed it in her mouth, and

then they hanged her. They let him bleed to death. They made her watch and then

they hanged her" (67). As Great Gram explains to Ursa, choosing resistance over

accommodation might result not

only in

personal suffering but also in extreme

pain for one's family. The story Great Gram tells Ursa points to sexuality as a site of multiple forms

of oppression, including the one practiced by the power of the white state. The state not

only allowed slave owners to abuse slave women, but it also presented

a

castrated and emasculated black man in spectacle in order to punish the acts of

resistance of his wife. As Great Gram puts it, "[W]hat happened over on that

other plantation" was a

"warning, cause

they might want your pussy, but if you

do anything to get back at them, it'll be your life they be wonting, and then they make even that some kind of a sex show" (125). Sexuality also constitutes

a site

of oppression because of the control that the slave owners have over the bodies and sexual desires of the slaves. For example, Corregidora had forbidden all types

of sexual interaction between black men and black women, using his power to

frustrate their desire and their aspirations for emotional fulfillment. This type of

oppression secured close and vigilant control of the black bodies. Because of its direct and indirect connections with the commodification of

desire and with economic policing, sexuality for the slaves does not belong only to the personal domain;

it is rather a space of resistance, defying the regulations

imposed by the institution of slavery. Seeing the punishment reserved for open acts of resistance, which present

a greater danger to their initiators than to their

supposed "targets," the slaves owned by Corregidora draw their own conclusions

from the event that happened on the other plantation. Moreover, they strive to find other types of resistance to their oppressive conditions. The acts of resistance by the Corregidora slaves, as it is implied in the final scene, take two main forms. The first one, mainly physical, is illustrated by Great Gram's act of biting Corregidoras penis. The second form of resistance is represented by the dreams of nurturing communal and social relations transcending slavery and resisting its dehumanizing

objectification. Such a type of resistance is best represented by Palmares, a society formed by fugitive slaves in Brazil.

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130 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 31, Number 3

In the final scene, as Ursa performs fellatio on Mutt, she is rethinking two

different scenes from her past. In fact, the author signals that Ursa has in mind

the "hate and love" scene because she remembers the exact words that Gram used

to talk about Great Gram's act: "What is it a woman can do to a man that make

him hate her so bad he wont to kill her one minute and keep thinking about her

and can't get her out of his mind the next?" (184,173). Ursa conjures up another

scene in which "she [Mama] had started talking like Great Gram,"which is also the

moment Ursa heard the story of the slave woman on the neighboring plantation and the tale related to Palmares (184,124-28).

Palmares is mentioned in the story referring to a young slave boy who

runs

away from the Corregidora plantation after he tells Great Gram about his ultimate

hope of "running away and joining up with them renegade slaves up in Palmares"

(126). The reference to Palmares is of a crucial importance since this community is a symbol of collective slave resistance in Brazil. In fact, Palmares is the

most

famous and successful Brazilian quilombo or maroon

society, whose story goes

back to around 1605, with forty African slaves who ran away from Porto Calvo

and started a community in Palmares. The population of Palmares resisted various

attacks between 1672 and 1697, the year of its destruction. In this community, the

fugitive slaves enjoyed a stable social and cultural life inspired by the Angolan

Congolese social, political and economic systems. Indeed,

as Stuart B. Schwartz

notes, there are many structural commonalities between the Brazilian quilombo and

the institution carrying the same name in Angola (KiMbundu kilombo) (122-36). Modeled after an African political system which protected the diversity and free

dom of its subjects, Palmares defended its autonomy against

a number of attacks

by armed forces from Holland and Portugal (Anderson 547-48; Dubey 250).This

quilombo and its last leader, Zumbi, embody "the strongest

resistance to the slave

based colonial regime, and, consequently, the struggle for

economic and political

justice ..." (Anderson 545).

Inspired by an African economic model, Palmares rejected the Portuguese economic and social systems. As Ronald Rassner puts it,

the history of Palmares,

whose population exceeded twenty thousand inhabitants, "is a history of an Afri

can nation in Brazil and the history of a courageous people who maintained their

African traditions, revolting against a landed Portuguese aristocracy

for almost a

century" (202). D?cio Freitas concludes that "[t]hese rustic black republics reveal

the dream of a social order founded on fraternal equality, and for this reason are

incorporated into the revolutionary tradition of the Brazilian people" (210; qtd. in

Anderson 550). Because of its prosperity and autonomy, Palmares constituted a

symbol of success whose stability and example,

as Governor Ferna de Sousa noted,

inspired many slaves to break the chains of captivity and offered

them an alternative

dream of freedom (Ennes 115; qtd. in Rushdy 284). After its destruction, Palmares

became a legend, and its memory was preserved in Brazilian folklore and in the oral

traditions of the people of the state of Alagoas (Ramos; Rassner 204). Palmares and its symbolism

are of a tremendous importance not

only in Cor

regidora but also in Jones's other works, especially

in her poems. For instance, in

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History and Self-Reconstruction in Gayl Jones's Corregidora 131

Songfor Anninho (1981), Palmares, a place and space where nurturing relationships

developed between black men and black women, is presented as the site of a heroic

past that has deep and redemptive repercussions on the present. As Dubey notes,

in this book, the lost Palmares embodies the "continuing imaginative power of the

heritage of resistances" (254). It is also a hybrid source of individual and collective

empowerment that Americans of African descent can turn to in their search for

spiritual regeneration and historical models of resistance. For the young slave boy on the Corregidora plantation, the dream of Palmares is that of a place "where these black mens had started their own town, escaped and banded together" and of a space in which mutual love uniting black men and black women is possible and

respected. The young boy wants to "have him a woman, and then come back and

get his woman and take her up there" (126). The way this boy perceives Palmares is not informed by a sense of historical discontinuity; in fact, when Great Gram tries to explain to him that Palmares was "way back two hundred years ago," his answer is that "Palmares was now' (126; emphasis mine).

For Ursa, the example of the young boy, who conjures up the symbolism of Palmares to inscribe this place in his dreams for a better future, illustrates how the

hybridization of memory and history can become a source of empowerment and

resistance. The boy's reconstructive imagination, working to transform and hybrid

ize the present by reconceiving it in light of examples of historical resistance, goes against the linear, Western perception of time and history. In fact, the

structure of

the boy's answer, "Palmares was now," points

to the necessity of braiding a resistant

past with an oppressive present, achieved through the defiance of Western binary logic and grammar. This form of Western "impossibility," expressed in the dominant

language, evokes the African power of nommo, or the word to create a different

reality.1 In this process of m?tissage, visually articulated through the juxtaposition of

the past (was) and the present (now), the boy subversively uses the creative power

of nommo to express an African perception of time and space in the dominant

language of the oppressors.

An autonomous African republic founded on Brazilian soil, Palmares embod

ied a philosophy of m?tissage since, after "assimilating"

a dominant "value," slavery, it

modified its implications by linking it to the concepts of community and free will. In fact, while on the Brazilian plantations slaves

were doomed to an eternal life of

bondage and commodification, Palmares had a

systematic strategy to perpetuate

freedom; its inhabitants (the Palmarinos), who did not flee plantations of their own

accord, were considered slaves even in Palmares. They could earn their freedom

only by "stealing another slave from a plantation" (Kent 169; qtd. in Rushdy 284). Since Palmares offered to its citizens the possibility of freeing themselves by freeing another person, an authentic sense of collectivity and community

was created. Con

sequently, Palmares used an

aspect from the oppressors'culture (slavery), absorbing it only to reconfigure an alternative form of resistance marked by valuing individual initiative over institutional commodification. Existing and prospering

on Brazilian

soil, this maroon society thus created its own form of what Lionnet calls, follow

ing Cuban poet Nancy Morej?n, "transculturation" {transculturaci?n) {Postcolonial

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132 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 31, Number 3

11). In this respect, it offered a famous example of how "slaves" can become agents of transformation and hybridization through the reworking, Africanization, and subversion of dominant values and narratives.

Using the memory of this model of m?tissage, Ursa

reconstructs her present

by rethinking the configurations of the historical past. Such a reconstruction is done after this protagonist considers her choices: to make Mutt live

a "moment

of pleasure and excruciating pain at the same time, a moment of broken skin but

not sexlessness, a moment just before sexlessness, a moment that stops just before

sexlessness, a moment that stops before it breaks the skin" (184). These choices are

presented in a number of gradations ranging from emasculation

to delicate

nibbling. Ursa's decision not to "break the skin" of her former husband's penis is informed by the example of mutual love in Palmares, evoked through the memory of the young boy's words. This decision is also different from what both the woman on the plantation and Great Gram opted for. In fact, Ursa does

not emasculate

Mutt as the woman on the plantation did to the slave owner nor does she break

the skin of Mutt's penis as Great Gram did Corregidora's. Rather, she stops before

breaking the skin, choosing a more constructive version of the past that allows her

to re-enact differently the slave women's tales of resistance.

By opting for a different course of action, Ursa not only avoids blindly repeat

ing the histories of castration and emasculation, she also uses the notion of "free

will" to effect a subversive hybridization of the Palmares story with her own

ambivalent, uncertain present. Not unlike the slaves who freed themselves by steal

ing other slaves from a

plantation, thus giving them the opportunity of earning their freedom, Ursa, who was a slave to her past, chooses to gain her freedom by

"stealing" her former husband away from the oppressive homelands of the personal and ancestral pasts marked by slavery, injustices,

trauma and miscommunication.

Specifically, Ursa steals her husband when she chooses to stop before breaking the skin of his penis while performing fellatio on him. Through this act, she brings together the promise of Palmares and her fragmented present

as she rereads her life

story through the eyes and words of the young boy on the plantation. Significantly, Ursa makes this conscious decision after she goes over all the other possibilities

or

gradations of pain. Braiding past resistance with present suffering, Ursa uses the

memory of the nurturing relationships in an African republic founded on colonial

soil to provide her with the bases for liberation through its models of healthier

forms of interaction between men and women. She thus emplois the memory

of Palmares and the Afro-Brazilian heritage of struggle to resist the oppressive circumstances of her African-American present.

Through this act, Ursa also reclaims what Dubey calls "the lover's language"

that her ancestors were unable to use in their narrative because they wanted to

maintain the "ideological coherence of their story" (255). Their insistence on

portraying pure and unambivalent hatred vis-?-vis Corregidora silenced the

controversial voice of desire and presented a monolithic perspective, obscuring

the contradictory feelings of love and hatred towards their oppressor. In contrast

to the lover's language, the maternal language of the Corregidora

women refused

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History and Self-Reconstruction in Gayl Jones's Corregidora 133

to acknowledge the complexities of its struggle with the paradoxical nature of sexual desire; it also imposed its limitations on the expression of the daughter's desire.

In the final scene of the novel, Ursa also reconfigures past and self by trans

forming the absence of a womb from a signifier of lack into

a source of empower ment and a means of expression of desire. As she performs fellatio on Mutt, this

protagonist reclaims a different form of feminine sexual power that goes against

the various lessons linking sexuality and reproduction passed to her by her ances tors. It is true that, as Dubey suggests, Ursa "discovers

a potentially destructive

feminine power situated at the very edges of heterosexuality" (258). However, this

protagonist is able, through the memory of Palmares and its specific configura tion of male-female relationships,

to re-emplot such power and reinscribe it into

a

greater context of historical resistance and reclamation of nonreproductive sites of

desire. To use Ricoeur's words, as she "brings together diverse and heterogeneous

story [and history] elements" {Time 65) through the m?tissage of the sexual and the historical as well as the individual and the collective, Ursa rereads past events in a new light. Consequently, she "draws a [hybrid] configuration out of a simple succession of past and present events" {Time 65).

It is worth noting that the changes in the perception of slavery from the 40s to the late 60s help Ursa reread the intergenerational story using a new focus informed by resistance (Rushdy 286). In 1947, when Ursa visits the tales recounted

by Great Gram, she experiences them as

oppressive forces and she perceives slaves

as helpless

victims. However, when she rethinks the same tales in 1969, she discov

ers the stories of slaves who were actively involved in communities of resistance,

which provides her with a different perspective on the present. Consequently, she understands that memories of slavery

are flexible, and not unlike storytelling, they are interactive and open to revisions. Ursa's choice to stress resistance also reflects

the influence of the Black Power Movement on the perception of notions of his

tory, community and empowerment in slavery (Rushdy 287). In Corregidora,]ones thus probes how the story of slavery affected, and

was conditioned by, the project of black cultural reconstruction (Dubey 250).

Through the reconfiguration of different border zones, Ursa finally resists the coercive limitations of what Ricoeur terms the "dividing line between history and fiction" {Reality 1). For this protagonist, if history is represented by the narratives of Great Gram, fiction relies on the potential creativity of what R. G. Collingwood terms "the constructive imagination" (245-46), which involves various mechanisms

of hybridization through repetition, reconstruction and recreation. The process of working through history using these imaginative capabilities necessitates the

acknowledgment of the impossibility of recovering the complete "truth" of the

past. Only after this act of m?tissage involving historical and personal "archaeology" does Ursa redraw personal boundaries to stop the invasion by the past and learn

to mediate between her debt to the ancestral legacy and the requirements of her

present life. Throughout this process, she affects a careful reading of the historical

mapping of the generational stories on her body and psyche.

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134 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 31, Number 3

In her depiction of the historicity of Ursa's experiences, Jones presents complex versions of the past and problematizes its relationship

to personal memory

as well

as to the homogenizing dominant narratives. In this context, the ways in which

the young boy and Ursa perceive and use the story of Palmares provide

an example

of how historical spaces of resistance must be configured by the contemporary African-American people through the resurrection, reappropriation and hybrid ization of certain aspects of their historical legacy. By reclaiming Palmares and the dreams of the Afro-Brazilian slave on the Corregidora plantation, Jones focuses

on the need to fashion a clearer vision related to the interconnectedness of stories

of struggle against oppression in Brazil and the United States. She also provides, through the depiction of the processes of hybridization and emplotment initiated

by Ursa, an example of the healthy use of the oppressive and redemptive potential residing

in the ancestral stories. Throughout this project, Palmares plays

a crucial

role as a model and catalyst for m?tissage and reconstruction.

Note

1. In West African culture, nommo intervenes in the configuration of a number of spiritual systems. It is the magic power of the word that has the capacity to call things into being and to create things

using the unity of word, seed, water and blood. As Janheinz Jahn maintains, nommo bridges the distance

separating the signifier and the signified, the real and the metaphorical, and the living and the dead, a

type of distance stressed and emphasized in the Western belief system (17). The issue of voice is crucial

in this process of naming, and in African cultures it is differently perceived than in Western systems. Rather than point to a previously existing notion or concept, the voice in African thought becomes a

means of creation and of conjuring; its power is literal and performative.

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Athey, Stephanie. "Poisonous Roots and the New World Blues: Rereading Seventies Narration and

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Baier, Annette. Postures of the Mind: Essays on Mind and Morals. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,

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