Post on 22-Feb-2023
Creating New Communities: Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy and Gayl Jones’ Corregidora
I want out of this
prison. But what prison?
Where am I cloistered? I seenothing confining me. The
prison is within myself, andit is I who am its captive.How to get out? And why am I
thus detained? Luce Irigirayi
When you are the community,
when you are yourchildren,
that is yourindividuality,
there is nodivision.
Toni Morrisonii
In the quotation above, Toni Morrison implies that in black women’s
writing, subjectivity is consistently represented as being shaped by
and within communities. In novels such as The Bluest Eye, Sula, The
Color Purple, Brown Girl, Brownstone, Crick Crack Monkey and Jane and
Louisa Will Soon Come Home, to name only a few novels by black women
writers from the U.S. and the Caribbean, the development of the black
female protagonist is contextualized within carefully delineated
communities. A common sense understanding of a community is that it
assembles and organizes groups of people sharing racial, social,
political or other special interests. However, one aim of this chapter
is to argue that communities are also matrixes of intersecting and
overlapping discourses, that in their function as conduits of
ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality, are active in the formation
of subjects and of subjectivity.iii
For the black girl child, the first community is experienced
through the mediating and pedagogical influence of the mother’s
discourse. In the particular examples of Lucy and Ursa Corregidora,
maternal discourse is a mode of instruction that imposes repressive,
culturally determined, gendered behaviors and identifications,
producing in each young woman a subjectivity “ in discontinuity with
[her]self,” to quote Foucault (Foucault 55). Thus, in this chapter I
argue that in their struggles towards self-definition, both Lucy and
Ursa struggle to break free from psychic entrapment imposed by
internalized maternal discourse, in order to find new discursive
communities within which to constitute new selves.
The abundance of novels and stories in print that foreground the
mother/daughter relationship is ample evidence that Black Women
writers have been preoccupied with this relationship. This
preoccupation also indicates the intensity of black women’s concern
about the emotional consequences of the mother/daughter bond, and also
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underscores the premise supported by feminist psychoanalytic theory,
that the relationship with the mother is central to the development
and health of the female psycheiv. Feminist psychologists and scholars
have shown Mother/daughter bonds to be both supportive and
constricting, both nurturing and destructive. While researchers in the
field find that the emotional ties that secure relations between the
generations may also serve to hold the younger captive to the elder,
they have questioned the inevitability of this pattern, interrogating
the social, psychological and emotional origins of the “prison” that
Irigaray speaks of (above). The direction of these inquiries has led,
constructively in my opinion, away from the emphasis and idealization
of this relationship.
However, the variations between cultures in the patterns and forms
of emotional/psychic exchanges between mother and daughter, have
rarely been addressed by Western feminist psychologists,
understandably perhaps, given the cultural specificity of feminist
psychoanalytic theory, much of which is either European or Anglo-
American. Recently, Black feminist and womanist scholars are have
begun to address questions arising from the psychological impact of
the historical and cultural specificities of black women’s experience,
an area in which there is still much necessary work to be donev.
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Consideration of the history and the literature of black women in the
black Atlantic must provoke questions about the quality and character
of mother/daughter relationships in post-slavery societies; societies
founded historically upon the routine and programmatic destruction of
familial bonds.
Consideration of the psychological consequences of this history
inevitably provokes questions such as, what was the nature of the
relationship between a mother born into slavery or indentureship, and
her daughter born into freedom? What was the relationship between a
black mother and the mulatto daughter of her slave master? What are
the possibilities of identification between a migrant mother born into
economic hardship and grinding social oppression in the agrarian South
or on a Caribbean island, and her daughter, born into the possibility
of opportunity in the European or American metropole? And what are
the effects on the gender identification of women separated from their
mothers and maternal ancestors by migration? These questions touch on
only a few of the patterns of experience that impact Black women’s
lives and subjectivity that beg interrogation.
I am particularly interested in the mother’s role in communicating
to her daughter discourses in the form of oral narratives that shape
the young woman’s subjectivity. In this chapter I will examine the
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mother/daughter relationships represented in Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy
and Gayl Jones’ Corregidora, concentrating on the influence of the
discursive content of maternal pedagogy on the protagonists of these
novels. Lucy grows up on a postcolonial Caribbean island, in a society
shaped by notions of British/white cultural and racial supremacy and
attendant notions of African/black inferiority and incapacity.
Although Ursa Corregidora grows up in the U.S. in the 1930s and ‘40s,
the stories passed down by her mother, grandmother and great-
grandmother telling of their enslavement and incestuous sexual
exploitation by their owner/ancestor, flood her consciousness and keep
her trapped in an imagined construction of oppressive and violent
social relations.
In both novels, the daughters embark on a journey away from the
mother’s discursive terrain: in the case of Lucy, a literal journey,
and in the case of Corregidora, a figurative one. I will argue that
for Lucy and Ursa, the point of arrival is a new discursive community,
one that enables the replacement of internalized, self-destructive
maternal discourse with new narratives that foster agency, self
knowledge and creative self-expression. Ursa enters this community
through her music and through the healing space created by the blues.
Lucy discovers liberatory discourses of womanhood with which to
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replace the colonizing discourses of her mother, and libertarian
ideals which form the basis of a new and imagined community.
Lucy and Corregidora may both be categorized as Bildungsroman, a
genre in which the narrative arc traces the development of the
protagonist away from dependence on family and natal community towards
independence and agency. The power of the mother/daughter bond and the
centrality of that relationship is a both a dominant premise in
women’s Bildungsromane and a feature that distinguishes the more
contemporary woman’s form from the traditional focus on masculine
development. As Elizabeth Abel has noted, the sex of the female
protagonist has forced a transformation of the form to facilitate the
representation of her experience. vi The characteristic focus of the
i Luce Irigaray, “And the One Doesn’t Stir Without the Other.” Trans. Hélène Vivienne Wenzel Signs 7.1 (1981): 60-67. ii Paul Gilroy. ”’Living Memory,’ an interview with Toni Morrison.” City Limits. London, 31 March – 7 April 1988.iii Here I have drawn on Foucault’s formulation of discourse as constitutive ofsubjectivity: “discourse is not the majestically unfolding manifestation of a thinking, knowing, speaking subject but, on the contrary, a totality, in whichthe dispersion of the subject and his discontinuity with himself may be determined.” Michel Foucault. Archeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon Books. 1982. 55.ivSee Nancy Chodorow. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1978; Jessica Benjamin. The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination. New York: Pantheon. 1988; Luce Irigaray. “And the One Doesn’t StirWithout the Other.” Trans. Hélène Vivienne Wenzel. Signs 7.1 (1991): 60-67.v The scholarship of Hortense Spillers in the US and Amina Mama in the UK and Africa has done much to open up this area.vi See the introduction by Elizabeth Abel. Ed. Voyage In. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. 1983.
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female Bildungsroman on the protagonist’s evolving consciousness has
forced the fragmentation and inversion of the traditional narrative
structure, shifting the focus from the external world to the inner,
from physical action in society, to emotional reaction to society.
The female form subverts the traditional form in the challenge it
poses to assumptions of a triumphant arrival at a state of autonomous
individuality – assumptions based on an underlying, positivist belief
in the sequential development of a coherent self. Thus, where the
progress of the male Bildungsheld is traditionally linear and marked by
external conflicts from which the male protagonist emerges victorious,
the development of the female protagonist is checkered, riddled with
self-doubt and psychological oscillation between the longing for
fusion and closeness with another, usually the mother, and the
conflicting need for separation. Elizabeth Baer points out that the
struggle does not always result in a measurable victory for the female
protagonistvii: I would argue that this is particularly true of black
women’s Bildungsromane. As instantiated in Lucy and Corregidora, for
black women protagonists, the price of separation is often the loss of
the attachment that forms the very basis of their identity. In the
case of Lucy, the intense emotional bond with the mother is vii Elizabeth Baer makes this point in her essay “The Sisterhood of Jane Eyre and Antoinette Cosway.” Voyage In.
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sacrificed. In the case of Ursa Corregidora, freedom from the profound
identification with the family history passed down through three
generations of maternal forbears also amounts to loss.
Furthermore, Ursa’s relative maturity during the time frame of the
novel, challenges the assumed time-span for development that
undergirds both male and female Bildungsromane. Corregidora draws
attention to the necessity of modifying the conventions of the genre
to represent race as well as gender dynamics, notably the
psychological and social pressures specific to black female experience
that mitigate against the early resolution of psychological conflicts.
Lucy and Corregidora both illustrate the inherently different
psychological features of black women’s development compared to their
white literary contemporaries, as well as the different experiences of
blackness and femaleness produced in Caribbean and African American
contexts.
Lucy: In Search of Community
Female Bildungsromane commonly depict the daughter-as-child deriving a
profound sense of security and joy from this relationship, but as she
grows up, the daughter-as-adolescent struggles to break away from the
mother’s psychic grip. This struggle, commonly figured in the
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“escape from the mother” motif, appears to be in conformity with
classic post-Freudian accounts of the female oedipal conflict.
However, in the socio-political context of the Caribbean, where
Lucy grows up, the oedipal rage of the black girl proceeds from
recognition of a double betrayal on the part of mother. Firstly, she
recognizes that the mother – and therefore she herself – does not
possess a phallus and the power that having a phallus confers; and
secondly, she recognizes that the mother, and therefore she herself,
has no access to whiteness and the power that whiteness confers in the
post-colonial social hierarchy. The adolescent girl reaches a point of
crisis when she realizes that her mother has proffered love as a means
to secure acquiescence and conformity to an order in which black women
are to powerlessness due to femaleness, and also powerlessness due to
blackness. Rage against the mother and overtly rebellious behavior
often accompany this crisis of awareness. The intensity of the rage –
and the rebellion that inevitably follows - that so many Caribbean
Bildungsromane describe is specific to and characteristic of the
colonial condition.
Kincaid’s female protagonists are marked by oppressions that
originate in the colonial past, but are perpetuated in the present by
culture, community and family, specifically by the mother. The
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mother’s function of socializing the girl into a communally sanctioned
gender role is complicated in the Caribbean by the additional
responsibility of preparing her daughter to assume the place
designated for her in the radicalized colonial hierarchy. As critic
Cherene Sherrard points out, “[i]t is a painful irony that a mother
can perpetuate a history of patriarchal, colonial oppression to
ensure her daughter’s survival.”viii Kincaid’s female protagonists
articulate their understanding of the socio-historical genesis of
their wounds, but only Lucy identifies her mother’s complicity in the
colonizing process. Nineteen-year-old Lucy comes from an unnamed
Caribbean island, from a context in which the girl child is devalued,
and in which cultural and social proscriptions deny the mature female
agency. Lucy interprets her mother’s complicity in her oppression as a
personal betrayal and responds with anger – anger that is emblematic
of the Caribbean girl’s awakening to an understanding that her mother
is a source of both love and betrayal.
Although based on research on American families, Nancy Chodorow’s
seminal work on the female Oedipus complex is helpful to
considerations of the mother/daughter relationship in matrifocal
Caribbean cultures, in which the psychic presence of the mother is viii Cherene Sherrard, “The Colonising Mother Figure”, MaComere vol. 2 (1999): 126.
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magnified. Chodorow emphasizes the continued importance of the
female’s emotional and social relationship to her mother as a
significant difference between the female and the male oedipal
conflict.ix Whereas with boys, affections are typically transferred
from the mother to the father and the mother is renounced, with girls,
affections are typically extended to include the father, but the
connection with the mother remains. Chodorow proposes that the
female’s separation from her mother is never complete and as a result,
girls and women remain preoccupied with issues of identification, and
of lack of differentiation and ego-boundaries far longer than males.
Kincaid’s protagonist Lucy is very much a case in point; the entire
novel is centered on her struggle to sever the emotional and
psychological hold of her mother, and to develop or invent a
subjectivity based on her personal history rather than a communal
history of enslavement and colonial oppression.
The novel opens with Lucy’s arrival in New York to take a position
as au pair with an affluent, white, American family. Lucy soon forms a
sympathetic relationship with Mariah, her employer, and their
conversations, which large sections of the narrative recount, provide
space in which Lucy is able to recollect and compare her personal
ix Nancy Chodorow. The Reproduction of Mothering. Chs. 6, 7 & 8.
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history with the “women’s history”, personal and otherwise, to which
Mariah frequently refers. Lucy is also preoccupied with questions of
self worth and personal autonomy in her present situation: in the
space of Mariah’s home and subsequently her own apartment, and in the
unidentified northeastern city. The opportunity for migration, which
is so much a part of the West Indian experience, makes Lucy’s
negotiation of the oedipal conflict a significantly different
experience from that of most of the white American girls that
Chodorow’s discussion references.x Migration offers Lucy the
possibility of the geographical cure, the possibility of confronting
the specific causes and effects of her psychic injuries at a safe
distance from the site of their infliction.
Lucy acknowledges a compulsion to cut herself off from the past
that “back home” represents, prompting her to stuff letters from her
mother into a drawer without reading them. She explains her action:
For I felt that if I could put enough miles between me and the place from which that letter
came…would I not be free to take everything just as it came and not see hundreds of years in every
gesture, every word spoken, every face? (31)
x According to sociologist Karen Fog Olwig, the majority of people born on thesmaller English speaking Caribbean islands eventually migrate to England or North America. See her essay “The Migration Experience: Nevisian Women at Homeand Abroad” in Women and Change in the Caribbean. Ed. Janet Momson. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1993.
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The letters, and the place they come from, are powerful symbols of her
mother, who, for Lucy, embodies her personal history. “My past was my
mother;…she spoke to me in a language any female could understand”
(91). The past was experienced by a Lucy as a specifically female
discourse; “ a language any female could understand.” Lucy’s mother
Miss Annie, speaks the language of black female disempowerment, and in
that language, she has coached Lucy to fulfill the female role that
post-colonial island society has prescribed for her: to service the
needs of men and to act like a “lady” – as opposed to acting like a
“slut”. In the essay “Instructions From Our Mothers: A Loving
Matricide”, (1993) Aritha Van Herk notes the detailed, and often
subliminal training colonial and colonized mothers offer their
daughters in the behaviors and attitudes necessary to negotiate,
survive, and even prosper in their circumscribed situations. xi
However, according to Van Hirk:
the mother’s instructive potentialities [are] usurped by an essentialist yet over-riding
hegemony that has inserted its primary desires…into the helpful deployment and initiatory
mentorship of instruction.(200)
xi Aritha van Hirk, “Instructions from Our Mothers: A Loving Matricide”, Shades of Empire in Colonial and Post Colonial Literatures.Ed. C. Barfoot & Theo D’haen., Amsterdam & Atlanta, GA: Rodopi. 1993.
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Thus the mother’s instruction, orally delivered and perhaps intended
primarily to protect the daughter from the damaging consequences of
mis(s)behavior, becomes a vehicle for the simultaneous transmittal of
colonial values and patriarchal prohibitions. It becomes, in effect, a
colonizing pedagogy.
Kincaid’s short story “Girl”, which takes the form of an
uninterrupted stream of “instructions” unfolds the script of such a
colonizing pedagogy:
Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothes line to dry; don’t walk barehead in the hot sun; cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweet oil;…always eat your food in such a way that it won’t turn someone else’s stomach; on Sunday, try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming…xii
Van Hirk notes that the language of instruction “becomes the language
of interdiction, as in: do not” (200). Maternal instruction is clearly a
form of control, aiming to confine young females within approved
spatial and behavioral limits. Maternal instruction is, en effect, a
discourse of power, orally transmitted, that serves in the
constitution of subservient female subjectivity. Maternal discourse is
thus the means of interpretation and transmittal of the discourses and
xii Jamaica Kincaid, “Girl.” From The Bottom Of The River. New York: Plume. 1984.
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ideologies of power, and as such, functions within the home as an
outpost of the disciplinary regime of the colonial state.
The instruction detailed in “Girl” relates with striking immediacy
to the roles and behaviors expected and required of a young black
female, specifically those of homemaker, wife and “decent” woman. The
girl is instructed on when and how to wash and iron clothes, on how to
cook traditional delicacies, on how to take care of the health of the
household and on how to control a man with sex and with bullying. The
mother’s monologue is punctuated with reminders of proper female
behavior in every context, from the most intimately personal (“soak
your little cloths right after you take them off” (3)) to the social
(“this is how you smile at someone you don’t like too much” (3)). The
monologue is punctuated with reminders to the daughter that she must
behave like a lady, and not like “the slut you are so bent on
becoming”(3). The daughter interrupts her mother’s monologue twice,
once to protest an unjust accusation of unladylike behavior (“but I
don’t sing benna on Sundays” (4)) and once to inquire about the
feasibility of always feeling bread before buying it. The protest is
ignored and the query is irrationally interpreted as unquestionable
sign of latent sluttishness: “you mean to say that after all you are
really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won’t let near the
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bread?” (5). The mother’s tone here invokes a sympathetic response of
shame in the reader on behalf of the silenced daughter; the reader
imagines the girl hanging her head in humiliation. At this moment it
occurs to the reader that shame and humiliation, it’s close relative,
are affective mechanisms the mother manipulates to secure her
daughter’s compliance with her rules, which are also societal norms
she has internalized. The mother’s closing words express contempt for
her daughter that is all the more piercing for its lack of foundation.
Silvan Tompkins argues that ‘[c]ontempt is the mark of the
oppressor,” for when one expresses contempt towards another, and the
other responds with shame, a hierarchical relationship is
established. xiii The oppressor’s contempt eventually produces in the
other internalized self-contempt that inhibits self-esteem and
security in the self. The oppressor’s power and authority are thus
concretized at the expense of the other’s self-confidence. The
stereotypically contemptuous demeanor of colonizer and his/her mimics
may thus be seen as a performance calculated to shame the native/other
into submissiveness based on self-contempt. Thus, at the level of the
individual, this dynamic produces a subjectivity marked by shame and
self-contempt. Historically, at the collective level, this dynamic hasxiii See Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick and Adam Frank. Eds. Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. 139.
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been employed to maintain divisions between races, classes and the
sexes.xiv
”Girl” exemplifies the complexity of a Caribbean maternal
discourse in terms of content, intention and ideological constitution.
As noted above, it illustrates the mother’s role in the construction
of a subjectivity centered in performance of gender roles and,
consequently, the mother’s complicity in the interpellation of her
daughter into a subordinate position within society and within the
nation. In a similar manner, the mother’s discourse also defines and
proscribes the daughter’s place in the cultural community into which
she was born and within in which she will eventually perform the roles
for which her mother has trained her. As I have noted above with
reference to “Girl,” the values and ideologies articulated by the
mother have an affective impact. Thus the young girl not only learns
how to perform the roles deemed appropriate for a black female within
the national and cultural communities; she also learns to internalize
shame and contempt, the punishments for transgressing those roles.
The rebellious Lucy, who hungers for agency and independence, must
of necessity rebel against the maternal interdictions that constrain
her development and her autonomy. The hunger for independence and the
xiv Sedgewick & Frank.139.
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rage against the mother are in conformity with the pattern of the
classic oedipal conflict: what differs is the extreme degree of
severance from the maternal influence that Lucy, a Caribbean girl,
must achieve. For, as Kincaid’s narrative makes clear, in order to
attain liberation from internalized maternal repressions, the girl
must also liberate herself from internalized colonial repressions.
Thus, in Lucy’s mind, the “female language” and the mother who speaks
is elided with its place of origin and its colonizing intent,
engendering an all-consuming and obsessive rage. Lucy is propelled by
that rage into a sequence of rebellions calculated to excise the past
and transform her inner and outer worlds.
Lucy’s rage is rhizomorphic in nature and its pervasiveness
reveals itself gradually as the narrative unfolds. At the outset Lucy
declares a loathing for her entire family (“…people whose smallest,
most natural gesture would call up in me such a rage that I longed to
see them all dead at my feet”(7)), even as she admits to missing them.
However, her deepest anger is reserved for the most oppressive
influences on her young life, which are inextricably connected: the
cultural and political legacies of British colonial government, and
the psychological/emotional power wielded by her mother. Lucy, who
displays an acute awareness of the contemporary effects of the
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economic and social structures of racism and sexism established under
British colonial rule, sees the collusion between her mother’s “home
training” and the Mother Country’s hegemonic agenda very clearly, and
without forgiveness.
Lucy’s migration to the U.S., instigated by Miss Annie in order
that Lucy may eventually gain employment as a nurse and thus be able
to support her family back on the island, actually allows Lucy to
break with country, community and family, and to loosen the emotional
hold of her mother. The painful process of separation is facilitated
by Mariah, Lucy’s American employer, who fulfils the dual role of
mother surrogate and midwife to Lucy’s emerging new identity: as Lucy
observes, “Mariah was like a mother to me, a good mother…Always she
expressed concern for my well-being” (111). Mariah reminds Lucy of her
natural mother’s best qualities, and Lucy loves her because of this;
but she also reminds Lucy of her mother’s deficiencies.
The external dissimilarities between Mariah and Miss Annie seem
enormous, encompassing race, class, nationality and generation, but
Mariah’s hands and the way she moves them remind Lucy powerfully of
her mother’s beloved hands. On the surface its seems that race and
class are significant in Lucy’s fascination with Mariah only to the
extent that by accident of birth, Mariah was able to grow up free of
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the social and psychological oppressions imposed by colonialism. Yet
since that very freedom is both consequent upon, and symbolized by
Mariah’s whiteness, it would be disingenuous to overlook the appeal
that whiteness in itself may hold to Lucy. Initially, Lucy is
influenced by Mariah’s liberal thinking and her feminism; Mariah talks
to Lucy about “women’s history” and listens with understanding when
Lucy reveals her difficult experiences growing up under colonial rule
in the Caribbean. In response to Mariah’s expressions of sympathy Lucy
very quickly begins to see Maria as the “good” mother who listens,
sympathizes and, most importantly, gives the recognition and
affirmation her natural mother did not provide.
Mariah introduces Lucy to new narratives of womanhood that
incorporate ideas of freedom, agency, pleasure and privilege that make
Lucy marvel repeatedly: “How does a person get to be that way?” (17)
Through Mariah, the novel critiques the failure of U.S. feminism to
engage with black women as equals and the failure of white feminists
to place black women’s concerns on an equal footing with their own.
Thus Lucy, having escaped entrapment in the neo-colonial discourse of
her mother, soon begins to resist Mariah’s attempts to seduce her into
a quasi-multicultural feminist community, based simply on the sharing
of personal histories. Mariah’s discourse is a liberal, race-blind,
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neo-colonial narrative that attempts to incorporate Lucy through
induction into the joys of springtime and daffodils, and summers by
the lake. Lucy, however, insists on shaping her own life in the new
location, and gradually draws away from Mariah, bent on shaping her
present existence, and on creating her own past, as she explains it, “
a past that was my own and over which I had the final word” (23).
Despite her problematic blindness to the historical and cultural
specificities of Lucy’s background, white, liberal, affluent Mariah is
able to support Lucy’s individuation in a way that Miss Annie was
incapable of doing. Furthermore, Mariah effectively sets Lucy on the
path to explore her creative potential when she gives her a camera,
for Lucy subsequently develops a keen interest in photography. Mariah
also discusses sex with Lucy, providing information on birth control
and sharing personal experiences in a manner that supports Lucy’s
experimentation in this area. However, as Chodorow notes, the process
of individuation requires separation from mothers and mother figures
alike (Chodorow 168). Lucy moves out of Mariah’s house without leaving
a forwarding address, and, at the same time, she sends Miss Annie a
false address, thus placing herself literally and symbolically out of
reach of them both.
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However, Lucy is still far from achieving psychological separation
at this point. Shortly before moving, she receives a letter from her
mother bearing the news that her father had died of a heart attack.
Lucy grieves for her father’s death, but even in grief, she feels the
pull of her mother’s affection and, paradoxically, the compulsion to
wound her mother. She explains:
I wrote my mother a letter; it was a cold letter. It matched my heart. It amazed even me, but I
sent it all the same…I reminded her that my whole upbringing had been devoted to preventing
me from becoming a slut… I then gave a brief description of my personal life, offering each
detail as evidence that my upbringing had been a failure and that, in fact, life as a slut was quite
enjoyable, thank you very much. (128)
The letter she writes represents a final strike in Lucy’s bid for
freedom from her mother’s influence. However, the sense of freedom she
attains brings little joy, even though she feels she has attained the
independence she truly desires. She explains: “ I was alone in the
world. It was not a small accomplishment. I thought I would die doing
it. I was not happy, but that seemed too much to ask “ (161). She is
unhappy, and lonely, but she willingly accepts the pain of loss and of
loneliness as the price she must pay for emotional freedom from her
mother and her past.
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A new sense of emotional liberation, and a little money of her
own, empowers Lucy to pursue her creative interests. She enrolls in a
photography class at night school, and one of her first photographs is
of a group of objects that emblematize her rebellion against the norms
and standards of Caribbean femininity, that her mother had so
staunchly upheld: “dirty panties and lipstick, an unused sanitary
napkin, an open pocket book scattered about”(121). Each item invokes a
specific Caribbean/female taboo, and at the same time, a particular
Caribbean/maternal interdiction. Dirty panties flout the prohibition
against accumulating and exposing female “dirt”, literally and
metaphorically. The lipstick, in its ancient association with oral
sex, flouts the prohibition against overt female eroticism, and oral
eroticism specifically. The sanitary napkin simultaneously invokes
female shame at “the curse” of menstruation, and masculine fears of
contamination through contact with menstrual blood. The open
pocketbook is both a yonic symbol, fearful in itself, and as a
receptacle for all the kind of “women’s business” - symbolized by
sanitary towels, lipsticks, and panties - that a pocketbook might
contain. Presented near the close of the novel, the photograph is a
statement of Lucy’s accomplishment: liberation from the colonial
standards that her mother embodies.
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However, as noted above, Lucy’s separation from her mother is
still only partial. Chodorow sheds some light here, explaining that a
girl does not “resolve” her oedipal conflict as a boy might do, but
that she remains attached to both parents, with “ongoing
preoccupations [that] grow out of her early relationship with her
mother” (168). (Jamaica Kincaid’s literary preoccupation with the
mother figure certainly supports this claim.xv) Thus, Chodorow points
out, for a girl, the oedipal conflict is to some extent ongoing, in
the form of an ambivalent struggle between a sense of detachment and
separateness and longing for her mother (168). Nevertheless, the space
provided by migration facilitates the achievement of a sense of
separateness and of independence. Lucy shows that even an incomplete
separation from the mother can afford sufficient space in which a
young woman may strive for agency and autonomy.
A hint of the continuation of Lucy’s struggle to break with the
past is given in the novel’s enigmatic final paragraph, which merits
quotation at length.
I was alone at home one night…When I got into bed, Ilay there for along time doing nothing.
Then I saw the book Mariah had given me. It was on the night table next to my bed.
xv The novel that follows Lucy, Autobiography of My Mother, 1992, explores thephenomenon of the Caribbean mother/martyr.
24
Beside it lay my fountain pen full of beautiful blue ink. I picked up both, and I opened the
book. At the top of the page I wrote my full name: Lucy Josephine Potter. At the sight of it, many thoughts rushed through me, but I could write down only this: “I wish I could love someone so much that I would die from it.” And then as I looked at this sentence a great wave of shame came over me and I wept and wept so much that the tears fell on the page and caused all the words tobecome one great big blur. (163)
The notebook and its blank first page are both potent emblems of
Lucy’s new life, of the experiences yet to be lived/written; and her
name inscribed on the first page asserts her intent to write/live the
life imagined. Lucy sits poised in the moment before rebirth, which is
also a moment of extreme loneliness, for she feels that she has
severed connections with nation, natal community and family and that
she has broken ties with Mariah. She has elected to embrace
alienation, to be part of an atomized community of rebels like the
artist Gaugin, whose political conviction inspires her, as she
explains: “I am not an artist, but I shall always like to be with the
people who stand apart” (98). The blank page and the pen she grasps
intimate a future shaped by her creative will, and, moreover by the
written word as opposed to the spoken discourse that shaped and
conditioned her life in the past.
Yet, while contemplating the black page, Lucy is suddenly overcome
with a yearning for the certainty and security of her mother’s love, a
25
yearning implied in the words she scribbles on the page: “I wish I
could love someone so much that I would die from it.” The longing to
re-experience the intensity and surety of motherlove, prompts tears
that fall and blur the words on the page, triggering “a great wave of
shame” (164), a self-administered humiliation at this failure of
nerve. For in this moment Lucy confronts two possibilities: that
loneliness may be the price of autonomy and self-determination; and
that a complete a break with the past may never be achieved.
What Ursa Wants
The history of the black Atlantic is embedded in Gayl Jones’
Corregidora, embodied in the Corregidora generations, whose lives have
been shaped by oceanic and terrestrial journeys along the major routes
of the Black Atlantic. Old man Corregidora travels from Portugal to
establish a coffee plantation in Brazil; Great Gram survives the
Middle Passage to be bought, raped and prostituted by Corregidora.
Gram escapes the incestuous Corregidora household and flees North to
Louisiana, later journeying further North to settle with her daughter
in Brackton, Kentucky. Ursa’s father, Martin, leaves Cincinnati for
France to fight in World War II and settles there after the war.
Ursa’s journey from Brackton to the unnamed town in which she settles,
26
is the shortest in terms of miles, but her consciousness contains all
the journeys in her ancestral history. Ursa’s has memorized and
internalized her family history of slavery, rape, incest and violence,
the result of repeated tellings and re-tellings of their story by
Great Gram, Gram and Mama. “My veins are centuries meeting” (80), Ursa
tells Mutt, and those centuries span not only time, but the spatial
distances traveled by her foreparents across the black Atlantic.
Corregidora poses a profound critique of the contemporaneous
black feminist and womanist discourse on motherlinks, matriarchy and
female ancestorsxvi and on the reliance of history as the basis of
identity.xvii Through its exploration of the psychic entrapment of Ursa
and her mother by the prescriptions of the Corregidora women’s
narrative, the novel proposes that black matriarchal discourse may
collude with black patriarchal attitudes to disempower and emotionally
disable black women.
Ursa Corregidora’s internalization of the Corregidora women’s
history has been accomplished by means of a maternal discourse that is
simultaneously documentary and pedagogical. Great Gram and Gram’s
xvi “Motherlines” is a feminist notion also expressed as “motherlinks.” The reclamation and valorization of female ancestors a prominent aspect of Alice Walker’s womanist Project. See Alice Walker. In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens. Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace Janovich 1983.xvii For example, black nationalist insistence on historic Africa as the originary site of black identity.
27
narratives are the only remaining “evidence” of old man Corregidora’s
atrocities against them, because “they burned all the papers so there
weren’t no evidence to hold up” (14), as Great Gram explains. Official
records of the traffic in, and violation of slaves were destroyed
after emancipation, leaving the oral text of the Corregidora women as
the only “evidence” of their particular history, evidence that must be
passed down through generations to ensure that their history is not
forgotten. The passing down of the women’s narrative is achieved by
means of a pedagogy based on repeated tellings of the same story,
episode by episode, the story passed on orally from Great Gram through
two generations to Ursa, whose instruction begins in infancy, on her
Great Grandmother’s lap. The narrative of the Corregidora women is a
maternal discourse, that by means of oral transmission, constitutes a
matrilineal community bound as much by the sharing of a narrative of
suffering and survival as by blood. The narrative dominates the
consciousness of Ursa’s mother, and, for the first twenty-five years
of her life, of Ursa herself, precluding the recognition of personal
desire and the development of individual will. Mama’s internalization
of the Corregidora’s maternal discourse negates her individuality to
the extent that she experiences her foremother’s imperative to
procreate as the innate desire of her own body, and substitutes their
28
received memories for her own. She lives an existence that is “spoken,
only spoken” (103), directed by the oral narrative of her foremothers
and its pedagogy of procreation.
The novel reveals the irony implicit in Great Gram’s documentary
project, for by instituting the internalization of her personal
history by future generations, Great Gram also mandates the
internalization of the values and practices of plantation society, and
thereby unknowingly perpetuates the epistemic violence of colonialism.
Personified in the novel by Corregidora, these practices and values
are shaped by a brutally patriarchal white supremacist ideology – the
ideology at the foundation of plantation society. It is tempting to
argue that Ursa’s subjectivity is constituted by the content of this
matriarchal discourse, most particularly by the imperative of “making
generations” (21), in order to pass down the matriarchal history and
thus ensure their survival in memory in perpetuity. However, if the
concept of subjectivity implies an autonomous self-consciousness, as
psychoanalytic theory would indicate, it may be more accurate to
designate Ursa’s consciousness as subjected by, and to, the power of the
matriarchal narrative. Madhu Dubey observes that by reclaiming the
power of maternity denied them by Corregidora’s incestuous violence,
the Corregidora women “claim the power of their wombs” as an
29
oppositional strategy (Dubey 74). I would agree, and add that in the
claiming of maternal power there is coincidence between a strategy to
resist abjection and the loss of bodily integrity, and a strategy to
prevent erasure from history. However the outcome of her maternal
pedagogy for the young Ursa is that she bears a subjectivity founded
on an unquestioning belief in reproductivity as reason for existing.
Furthermore, it is a belief (and a subjectivity) complicit not only
with the value system of the plantation, that afforded status to
highly reproductive female slaves, but also with the contemporary
black patriarchal attitudes that the novel critiques.
If the womb is the primary locus worth in the Corregidora women’s
bodily economy, the vagina is its currency. Great Gram’s pride that
Corregidora named her Dorita, “[l]ittle gold piece” (10), speaks
through the anger with which she tells the young Ursa of the
circumstances of that naming. Corregidora’s metonym defined Great Gram
simultaneously in terms of the pleasure he derived from her genitals,
and the profits she earned him, for in monetary terms, Great Gram’s
most productive activity was prostitution. The equation of woman with
sex organs is yet another attitude shared between the white
plantocratic discourse that Corregidora embodies, and the black
30
patriarchal discourse that Mutt and, in a milder form, Tadpole,
ventriloquize in the novel.
The novel’s critique of black patriarchal discourse is focused
through parallels in speech and action between Mutt and Corregidora,xviii
for example, the instance in which Mutt, addressing Ursa, echoes
Corregidora almost verbatim: “ [y]our pussy’s a little gold piece, ain’t
it, Urs? My little gold piece” (60). The critique is sustained
through the depiction of Ursa’s interactions with men; for Ursa’s
visibility on stage in Happy’s Café makes her a target of male eyes
and hands, and an object of collective male fantasies of sexual
domination, as Mutt very clearly, and jealously, indicates when he
comments: “ I don’t like those mens messing with you…Mess with their
eyes” (91). In her relationships with Mutt and Tadpole, and in the
fleeting encounters in Happy’s Café, the tenor of Ursa’s interactions
repeatedly establish the assumption current within that community,
that a woman’s sexuality is the customary site of contact with men.
Thus the novel introduces Ursa as a woman whose body and subjectivity
are sites dominated by intersecting patriarchal and matriarchal
xviii Note that by pushing Ursa downstairs, Mutt robs her of her womb, an actionthat equates Mutt with Corregidora, who almost literally robs Great Gram’s womb.
31
discourses. Their complimentarity leaves no space for difference, or
for individuation.
Thus, with the loss of reproductivity and the attendant loss of
sexual desire that follow Ursa’s fall, the foundations of Ursa’s
identity collapse. What follows is a profound and extended process of
self-transformation that begins with an interrogation of the
matriarchal prescriptions that had shaped her existence to that point.
The rushed marriage to Tadpole that seems to promise the possibility
of a functioning heterosexual relationship is soon undermined by
Ursa’s lack of sexual feeling. “What do you want?” (22) Tadpole asks
repeatedly, questioning Ursa’s desires and motivations. Tadpole’s
insistent questioning, and his later abandonment, add impetus to
Ursa’s own interrogation of the Corregidora model of womanhood. This
critical phase, which spans many years of Ursa’s life, is
characteristic of the period of intense inward concentration and inner
struggle often found in women’s Bildungsromane. Whereas for Lucy,
migration brings the change of circumstances that impel and enable her
struggle to liberate herself from the psychic presence of her mother,
for Ursa, the onset of the period of transformation is accompanied an
alteration in physical condition. Ursa’s fall down a flight of stairs
and the consequent loss of her uterus produce a crisis of gender
32
identity, necessitating a critical transformation of her understanding
of womanhood. Thus the novel utilizes the symbolic event of the fall
to create an equivalent disruption of contemporary discourse on
womanhood and female subjectivity, calling for re-examination and
renewal.
As Ursa’s comprehension of the connection between the
matriarchally imposed control of her sexuality and her marital
conflicts increases, her self re-evaluation of self extends to
encompass a re-assessment of the basis of her sexual relationships.
She speculates about her mother’s sexuality and intuits that aspects
of her mother’s past, in particular the relationship with Martin,
Ursa’s father, had been repressed. She recalls her mother’s strange
silence on this period of her life (“She was closed up like a fist”
(101)), and recognizes that silence was a component of her mother’s
strategy for maintaining compliance with her own maternal injunctions.
Ursa returns to Brackton, on a quest to discover a personal history, a
history other than the mythologizing narrative passed down by Great
Gram and Gram.
Prior to her departure, in a dream dialogue with Mutt, Ursa
acknowledges for the first time that the control exerted by the
physical presence in the house at Brackton of Great Gram and Gram. In
33
the dream she perceives with sudden clarity that with the insistent
retelling of their stories, Gram and Great Gram effectively robbed
first her mother, and subsequently, Ursa herself of their capacity for
agency and desire. Still in the dream, Ursa mourns the theft of her
individuality and the lack of the kind of personal history that forms
the basis of autonomous subjectivity. “I never told you how it was. Always their
memories by never my own”, Ursa tells Mutt. Thus Ursa’s return to Brackton
on a quest to persuade her mother to retrieve the repressed contents
of her memory, is a crucial stage in her own process of self-
regeneration. When questioned by Ursa, Mama confesses to having had
sex with Martin for the sole purpose of conceiving a child (Ursa),
which concretizes Ursa’s conviction that her mother had been denied an
independent emotional life, and concretizes her resolve to reclaim or
recreate a life of her own.
The drama of Ursa’s existential crisis both serves as a
vehicle for the novel’s unfolding, and poses a series of question
about the nature of female self-fashioning, such as, how does a woman
fashion a self when the discourses that shaped her sense of
subjectivity have been based on narratives that inflict psychic harm?
How does one heal a psyche marked with a history of brutality and
pain, and by an internalized narrative of brutal experience, of
34
“[d]ays that were pages of hysteria”? (59) Rosalind Coward points out
that sexual experience commonly provides the basis self-knowledge and
a transformed identity in women’s Bildingsromane. However, the danger
with this path, as Coward advises, lies in perpetuating the equation
of woman with her sexuality.xix This is precisely the danger that Jones
courts in Corregidora; however the novel inverts the paradigm, so that
Ursa’s sexual dysfunction becomes the impetus for self-knowledge. Thus
Ursa’s incremental progress in the remaking of sexual identity is
measured more by ideological adjustment rather than by
experimentation.
Following her hysterectomy, Ursa’s attempts at vaginal
intercourse with Tadpole are frustrated by the absence sensation; she
feels pleasure only when Tadpole touches her clitoris. Ursa is
frightened by the implications of this, fearing the loss of
femininity, a fear that proves justified when she finds Tadpole in
their bed with another woman. An interior monologue addressed to her
lesbian friend, Cat, follows this discovery, in which Ursa is barely
able to articulate her anxiety that heterosexuality is no longer
available to her. She is afraid of the only alternative she perceives;
“Afraid only of what I’ll become, because those times he didn’t touch xix Rosalind Coward. “The True Story of How I Became My Own Person,” Female desires: how they are sought, bought and packaged. NY: Grove Press. 1985.
35
the clit, I couldn’t feel anything” (89). Ursa’s monologue alludes to
an earlier conversation with Cat that took place shortly after Ursa
first became aware of Cat’s lesbianism, which, at the time, she had
silently condemned. Ursa revisits the conversation and re-evaluates
Cat’s rejection of heterosexual power games and the subordinate female
role. The monologue marks the beginning of Ursa’s transition away from
a reproductive sexuality: as Madhu Dubey has noted, Ursa has to “find
a new story for herself…a new conception of feminine desire that is
not centered around reproduction” (Dubey 76). The new story is years
in incubation; it emerges years after the shift in perception signaled
by the monologue, after Ursa gets back together with Mutt.
Ursa finds her new story – a new discourse that displaces that
of the Corregidora maternal discourse – and also a new awareness of
community, in the blues. When Houston Baker Jr argues that black
people’s experience of slavery in the United States and the blues
rhythms that emerged form that experience, coalesce to form an
“ancestral matrix” (Baker 2), he is naming the locus of Ursa
Corregidora’s blues inspiration. Although spoken rather than sung,
the form of the Corregidoras’ narrative shares characteristics of oral
performance in common with the blues. Reliance on repetition is
particularly striking; repetition in the sense of retelling the story
36
over and over again but also in the sense of repeatedly returning to
beginning, a return characterized as “the cut.”xx Their story partakes
of the functionality of the blues in that it is a means of sharing and
preserving a particularly black experience.
Angela Y. Davis comments on the blues as a form of expression
that from its emergence, enabled black women to articulate their
perceptions and feelings about their lives and their struggle to
survivexxi: as Ursa explains, “Every time I ever want to cry, I sing the
blues” (47). Davis notes an emphasis in women’s blues lyric on
relationships between women and men; she draws attention to the form’s
capacity to encompass contrary emotions and conflicting experience.
These characteristics correlate with the seams of hatred and desire
for old man Corregidora that are woven into the Corregidora women’s
narrative. When Ursa bemoans possession by “the devil blues,” the
blues that “ride your back” and “devil you” (50), she is both
bemoaning the state of possession induced by her foremothers’
discourse and describing the feeling quality of that state. Thus,
although their story is spoken rather than sung, the Corregidoras’
xx See James Snead, “Repetition as a Figure in Black Culture.” Black Literature and Literary Theory. Ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. New York: Methuen. 1994.67.xxi Angela Y. Davis. “Black Women and Music: A Historical Legacy of Struggle.” Wild Women in the Whirlwind. Eds. Joanne M. Braxton and Andrée N. McLaughlin. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990. 4.
37
narrative and the mode of its passage through generations, are the
genesis of the “feeling ways,” and “those blues feelings” (50) that
Ursa expresses in song.
The anatomical change of the hysterectomy and the transformation
of consciousness that follows leave their mark on Ursa’s voice,
audible in an alteration in timbre. Ursa experiences the change as a
strain produced by loss and attributed to the “broken…string of [her]
banjo belly” (46), however Cat interprets the altered tone as an
improvement wrought by experience, that also speaks (or sings) that
experience. “Like Ma,” says Cat, referring to the legendary blues
singer Ma Rainey, “after all the alcohol and men, the strain made it
better, because you could tell what she’d been through” (45). Cat’s
comment poses the voice as a means of communicating experience beyond
mere use of words; for as Angela Davis notes, “[a] word uttered at a
certain pitch may have a different meaning from the same word spoken
[or sung] at another pitch” (Davis 7).
The maturation of Ursa’s voice is an ongoing process that reflects
both her changing subjectivity, and something of the nature and pain
of the experiences that transform her. The altered timbre is the
points to the emergence of her “new story” and her “New World song”
(59) and also a new layer grafted onto the accumulated experience of
38
the Corregidora women. Starting out on the Brazilian plantation, they
move North through Louisiana, to Kentucky. With Ursa’s move still
further North, to Detroit, there is a transition from a rural
experience to an urban context. Thus, in their northward movement, the
migrations of the Corregidora women figure not only the great
northward migrations of African Americans, but also the attendant
collective psychological transformations, which LeRoy Jones
characterizes as follows:
these mass migrations…must have represented a still further change in the Negro as far as
his relation-ship with America was concerned. It can be called a psychological re-alignment…
It was a decision, Negroes made to leave the South…And this decision must have
been preceded by some kind of psychological shift.”xxii
Jones argues that the evolutionary trajectory of the blues moves in
pattern with the paths of black migration North, adapting, or, rather,
being adapted to, each location and new phase of the community’s
shared experience. In the words of Houston Baker Jr, “ the blues offer
a phylogenetic recapitulation – a non-linear, freely associative, non-
sequential meditation – of species experience ” (Baker 5).
Emerging in the period after Emancipation, the blues voiced the
disappointment of black people in the failed promise of freedom and
xxii LeRoi Jones. Blues People. NY: William Morrow & Co. Inc. 1963. 95-6.
39
with the frustrating problems of daily life under new forms of
exploitation and oppression. However, the blues also articulated a new
investment in romantic love, which black people in the United States
were free to pursue for the first time. As Angela Davis explains, for
black people, personal relationships were the primary source of hope
for personal happiness. With the use of double meanings characteristic
of the blues, the dialectics of sexual relationships also functioned
allegorically, representing the struggles of black people within the
larger society. Thus, the yearning expressed for the “do right” man or
woman denotes the communal longing for social justice and a life free
from duress (Davis 11-12). The blues offered a channel for expressions
of individual hopes and individual pain, and a forum for sharing their
articulation, thus constituting a community based on the need to
survive brutal experience and the need to foster dreams of freedom.
The violence that permeates Ursa’s relationship with Mutt and
culminates in her injury, partakes of the sexual tensions and the
sometimes brutal conflicts that characterize heterosexual
relationships lived within, and shaped by the gender discourses of
African American vernacular culture; specifically, the “blues
relationships,” to use Gayl Jones’ description.xxiii Ursa’s dreams and xxiii See Claudia Tate’s interview with Gayl Jones in, Claudia Tate. Black WomenWriters and Work. NY: The Continuum Publishing Company. 1983. 98.
40
recollections revisit scenes from her relationship with Mutt
alternating with scenes of Great Gram, Gram and her mother. These
imaginary returns to the past are an integral aspect of the extended
emotional labor of apprehending, and then liberating herself from the
oppressive gender expectations that each had projected upon her, in
order to evolve a new relationship to each of them.
In contrast to the scenes with Great Gram and Ursa’s mother, who
speak mainly in monologues, the scenes with Mutt are rendered in
dialogue. The dream dialogues and the flashbacks to scenes from the
early days of marriage reveal the continuing struggle for power, as
Mutt attempts to mould a hesitant Ursa to his desire and subject her
to his control, as the following reveals:
“My pussy, ain’t it, Ursa?”“Yes, Mutt, it’s your pussy.”“My pussy, ain’t it baby?”“Yes.”“Well, it’s yours now.” He turned away (156).
This brief exchange, during which Mutt talks Ursa into yielding
control of her sexuality to him in order to consolidate his control of
her by rejection, captures both the rhythmic exchange of the dialogic
blues lyric, and its capacity to figure and dramatize the brutal
potential of erotic engagement. At this moment, Ursa, still young, is
conflicted and ambivalent, pulled between obedience to matriarchal
41
prescriptions, the longing to surrender to her desire for Mutt and the
refusal to surrender to Mutt’s desire for dominance.
In this, and similar, scenes the novel reflects the blues form’s
capacity to bring together in dialogue the voices and perspectives of
both female and male participants of a sexual conflict. Ursa’s inner
debate with Mutt continues after her separation, and the tenor of her
voice as well as the strength of her resistant position undergoes a
gradual adjustment. By their reunion at the close of the novel, Ursa
has forged a mature vision of herself and a mature blues voice, as
Max, who employs Ursa as singer points out: “ You got a hard kind of
voice. Strong and hard but gentle underneath…The kind of voice than
hurt you…and make you still want to listen” (96). In the closing scene
of the novel, Ursa and Mutt confront each other on a equal basis for
the first time. In the act of fellating Mutt Ursa recognizes her power
to both hurt him and please him, while Mutt, delighted and disarmed by
her action, recognizes for the first time the vulnerability intrinsic
to being a passive recipient of pleasure. The dialogue that follows is
rendered in the blues mode, in the form of call and response in which
both parties state their position before capitulating in agreement:
“I don’t want a kind of woman that hurt you,” he said.“Then you don’t want me.”
42
“I don’t want a kind of woman that hurt you.”“Then you don’t want me.”He shook me till I fell against him crying.“I don’t want a kind of man that’ll hurt me neither,”I said.He held me tight (185).
In Ursa’s capitulation, signaled by falling against Mutt, the novel
points the way to resolution of sexual conflict; not only must each
individual be willing to seize and wield power, they must also be
capable of, and willing to surrender.
In the closing scene, the novel’s presentation of the blues as a
basis of community, in the sense of people coming together in unity,
is emblematized. The novel adopts the blues trope of conflict in the
male/female sexual union, noted above, to theorize on the roots and
contemporary manifestation of conflict between men and women in the
black community. In this respect, the novel is also an allegory of the
ideological conflicts within the black intellectual community during
the 1970s, represented most clearly in the divergent agendas of the
patriarchal nationalism of the Black Arts Movement, and black
feminists/womanists. Drawing on the vernacular tradition of the blues,
a tradition valorized by both sides of the conflict, Jones points a
way to resolution, through the self-interrogation and self-
transformation of both parties and through a mutual willingness to
surrender power in the interest of community.
43
Lucy and Corregidora, are so radically different in plot, setting,
characterization and mode of address, as to make a comparison between
them seem unlikely. However, comparison provides insight into the
authors’ contrasting visions of the process of healing of the
subjected female psyche, and, consquentially, their restructuring of
the traditional trajectory of the Buildingsroman to suit the
developmental patterns of their protagonists.
Lucy’s plot is premised on her migration to the U.S. which removes
her from physical community with Miss Annie. Her sustained effort at
emotional severance from her mother takes place simultaneously with a
search for new discourses of womanhood to replace the subjugating oral
discourses of her mother and of her natal community. Lucy engages with
the colonizing narratives of Western liberal feminism, communicated by
Mariah, only briefly. She finds a basis for identification and
ideological community in the self-conscious alienation and political
radicalism of artistic rebels such as Paul Gaugin. Although unable to
completely separate emotionally from her mother, Lucy nevertheless is
able to make an ideological substitution: while still in late
adolescence, the conventional period for Oedipal struggle and
separation, Lucy strives to replace the inferiorizing, orally
44
transmitted narratives that shaped her in the past to create a
subjectivity based on libertarian ideals.
In contrast, Ursa’s transformation of consciousness, while
enabling a separation from the reproductive imperatives of the
matriarchal community of Corregidora women, is premised on the
renegotiation of her relationship to the Corregidora history. Ursa
subsequently defines her positionality in relation to that history and
is able to honor it with her “New World song” without being imprisoned
by it.
Lucy suggests that for a Caribbean woman, a complete break from a
maternal influence that perpetuates discourses rooted in the history
of slavery and colonization may be necessary for the reconstitution of
an autonomous subjectivity. The novel proposes that the task of
reconstitution requires connection with or support from a community
based in liberatory discourses that supports the emergence of au
autonomous subjectivity. At the same time, and in keeping with
theories of women’s individuation noted above, the novel’s closing
scene reveals to the impossibility of achieving a complete break from
maternal influence. Corregidora points to the possibility of
achieving psychic liberation, and the possibility of self-renewal
45
within the alternative discursive spaces of African American
vernacular culture.
However for both Lucy and Ursa, progress towards freeing the
psyche from the grip of history is only possible through engagement
with, and recognition of the imprisoning narratives transmitted
through maternal pedagogy, which necessitates repeated returns to the
scenes of imprisonment. These necessary returns, in Corregidora,
through dreams and flashback and in memory in Lucy, render linear
progress towards resolution of psychic conflict impossible. Progress
towards resolution of the plot in both novels oscillates between
evolutionary movement and the backward pull exerted by the psyche’s
requirement that the past be recapitulated and comprehended. As
previously noted, such recapitulations form a necessary part of the
unfolding of both plot and memory in both novels.
In its portrayal of Lucy’s determination to break with the
oppressive colonial history that shaped her past, Lucy articulates a
yearning, and an experience, that are particular to, and constitutive
of the black Atlantic. Just as Lucy accepts alienation in return for
autonomy, successive waves of Caribbean migrants to the U.S and Europe
have embraced an acceptance of fragmentation as necessary for
psychological survival. As Chinosole has noted, displacement and
46
fragmentation, motifs that define diasporic experience, require the
improvisation of new subjectivities (Chinosole 392). The blank sheet
of paper on which Lucy writes her name at the close of the novel
emblematizes this necessity, and also the creative opportunity that it
offers. However, in the surge of longing for deep emotional bonding,
of the kind Lucy had only ever experienced with her mother, the psyche
asserts the persistence of memory, and demands that the past
experience be acknowledged and incorporated into the improvisational
process.
By contrast, Corregidora points to the motif of change within
continuity as a fundamental dynamic of African American experience.
The migrations of each generation of Corregidora women take them
physically further away from the plantation, however the atrocities of
slavery persist as a psychic reality, created by the internalization
of Great Gram’s oral history. Migration takes the Corregidoras to new
locations, but, until Ursa moves to the city, they remain within the
African American cultural community and also within their particular
matriarchal community. Ursa’s move to the city enables the development
of her art through her immersion in the blues, however, her
individuation evolves without the experience of displacement and
without the repression of the horrific history of her foremothers.
47
Instead, Ursa draws upon the disparate elements of that history, on
Old man Corregidora’s story as well as Great Gram’s, in forging her
personal story, her “New World song”. Feminist psychoanalytic theory
characterizes the path of development through adaptation within
continuity as characteristic of female maturation (Chodorow 121).
Reading the novel allegorically,xxiv then, in its presentation of self-
development as a process of adapting elements from the past as a basis
for renewal while maintaining cultural continuity, Corregidora offers
the African American community a feminist paradigm for self-
transformation.
Notes
48
xxiv Critics agree on the allegorical characteristics of Great Gram’s oral text. However, the impersonality of Ursa’s voice, coupled with Mutt’s disembodiment for all the last pages, support an allegorical reading of the novel. Note also the novel’s comment on Ursa’s name. When she encounters UrbanJones in Brackton, he says, “My name’s Urban, Urban Jones. They both kind of sound alike, don’t they? The Ur” (p.70).
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