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

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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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