Content area
Full text
This essay analyzes the ways that Corregidora addresses issues of black female sexuality as they relate to the trauma of slavery. By engaging theories of memory and black feminist criticism, the essay suggests that Ursa liberates herself from historical cycles of oppression by reclaiming her agency and sexuality.
Unlike the majority of neo-slave narratives, which are primarily concerned with imagining and representing the conditions of life under slavery, Gayl Jones's Corregidora attends to the challenges and consequences of remembering the traumatic past in the contemporary moment. This analysis of Corregidora examines the psychological paralysis that occurs when the act of remembering the slave past becomes destructive and further victimizes those who must carry the burden of bearing witness to enslavement and sexual exploitation. I call this destructive force traumatic rememory, which can be understood as a form of collective memory that is haunted by historically entrenched power relations and violence. In Jones's novel, traumatic rememory entraps Ursa Corregidora in the past by reanimating the sexual violence experienced by her foremothers during slavery in her own intimate relationships. However, even as she suffers from the lingering consequences of her foremothers' enslavement, Ursa is able to break the cycle of traumatic rememory by asserting control over her family's narrative through her career as a blues singer. The sense of empowerment that she gains from artistic expression in turn enables her to move toward sexual healing in her intimate relationships, which she effectuates by shifting the site of her sexuality from her vagina to her mouth, a symbol of testimony, creation, and personal agency.
This essay begins by examining the presence of traumas that are historically external to Ursa, but that are nevertheless passed down from previous generations of Corregidora women through successive acts of traumatic rememory. I argue that the crisis of Ursa's infertility forces her to confront the damaging consequences of her foremothers' traumatic rememory and helps her understand the ways in which their history of abuse has impacted her own heterosexual relationships. Further, I attempt to show how the text's exploration of traumatic rememory moves beyond the fabula of the narrative to engage the reader in the transformative process of textual healing, the literary process through which black women writers counter negative social constructions...