The cover of this edition makes it look like a horror movie--and that's not at all wrong. An intense novel, terse as a modern lyric, a monologue organized around its central image: the three generations of women in the house, telling over and over to the child of the fourth generation the story of the brutal incestuous pimp and rapist slave-owner Corregidora, the father of the heroine's grandmother and her mother, hence the source of her surname. The women transmit the trauma to the child because that's the only way to keep it in evidence since the slave-owning class of Brazil destroyed its records. But this transmission keeps the psychological violence going, perpetuates it through the generations. The thesis that it's pernicious to treat history (which has to be learned dispassionately) as if it were memory (which is re-lived and embodied) gets a thorough airing here, and much more persuasively for being dramatized than in the brilliant and facile--in all senses--theorizing of Walter Benn Michaels, who has argued to similar effect in The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History. So what should be done with the history of oppression if it shouldn't be incorporated in childhood at the feet of prior generations?This is the narrative of the last of the Corregidoras, Urse, the blues singer, who is rendered unable to bear children due to her husband's abuse on the second page of the book. While the novel deals with the reverberations of the trauma with which it begins, I started to get the sense that it might have been less traumatic than her female elders' insistence that she must have children to pass on the evidence of Corregidora's depredations. Like other novels of its era-- Portnoy's Complaint or Steps or The World According to Garp--Corregidora is an unremitting stream of more or less unpleasant sexual incidents. Every man proves to be abusive and possessive. But women's own love is also shown to be self-destructive and destructive of others, especially other women. Not to mention the novel's similarly unpleasant--arguably till the end--depictions of lesbians, from the slave-owning Corregidora's wife, who also sleeps with the enslaved women, to Urse's frenemies Cat and Jeffy. In short, the novel seems to represent sexuality itself--male or female, black or white, straight or gay--as a cruel disease. Given old man Corregidora's erotic motive for buying women, Jones can't help but imply, whatever her intention, that diseased and disturbed sexuality was more the cause than the effect of slavery. Perhaps the most memorable discursive passage in the book hints in the style of grim mid-century late modernism (cf. Samuel Beckett ["They give birth astride of a grave"] or Jorge Luis Borges ["Mirrors and copulation are abominable because they multiply the number of men"]) that sex is bad because it perpetuates our cursed species: She thought she had to go to the toilet, and then something told her not to go outside to the outhouse like she was going to, and then she squat down on the chamber pot. And then that's how she had your Gram, coming out in the slop jar. That's how we all begin, remember that. That's how we all begin. A mud ditch or a slop jar or hit the floor or the ground. It's all the same. But you got to make generations, you go on making them anyway.How, then, to tell the necessary tale about oppression, how should the modern black woman give her testimony, if not to her descendants? The question answers itself: I am Urse Corregidora. I have tears for eyes. I was made to touch my past at an early age. I found it on my mother's tiddies. In her milk. Let no one pollute my music. I will dig out their temples. I will pluck out their eyes.From breast to voice, from milk to music, from inert history to incipient revolt: art is the answer.What about the art of this novel? It loses its way toward the end, I think, dissipating tension in a surplus of memories of yet more sexually unpleasant sequences. And the end is maybe prematurely redemptive, given what's gone before, though the novel's sexual climax on the penultimate page is a forceful revelation. Corregidora might have worked better as a novella, short and brutal, since brutality when extended and repeated tends to lose its effect and become numbing. Toni Morrison, who was the editor on this book when it was first published, obviously took a lot of influence from it (in Jones's book we find the slavery-haunted house of the women from old to young as in Beloved, the group of women arrayed around a violent man they both revile but are masochistically drawn to as in Love, even the decadent evil Portuguese slave-owner from A Mercy), but Morrison's Sula, published two years before Corregidora, treats similar subject matter--above all, the black woman's need for independence, from history, from men, from family--with greater emotional variety and amplitude. But this is a minor complaint, like criticizing a knife for not being a fork. Corregidora is a knife.
I first read this novel more than 10 years ago and it became a favorite because I could easily identify it as a blues novel. However, upon re-reading just a few days ago, I was reminded of why Gayl Jones is my favorite author. There was so much more to this novel that I understand better after a decade. The importance of history and "generations" is something that would have gotten past me years ago, but I see how it forms the central point of the novel now. Jones has a way with words and rhythms that remains unmatched by most writers. Her protagonist Ursa Corregidora is as complex as they come and Jones unflinchingly takes the reader through the good and ugly of her life. The story is told from Ursa's point of view, so the reader must step into her world. It is not written like a document from history, so Ursa does not tell the story with a sense of time according to the world around her but according to her world, which is part of the power of her story. As an introduction to Gayl Jones, I could not have done better than this book and have loved her work ever since.
Do You like book Corregidora (1987)?
a sad kind of novella, just shy of 200 pages, jones introduces us to 20-something ursa, a beautiful blues singer in a cafÈ who suffers terribly when she loses both her unborn baby and her ability to bear future children in the same accident (which she blames, rightly, on her husband). she is haunted by matriarchal remembrances of slavery and rape, seduction and oppression, love and hate blurring and bouncing through generations. it's a kind of navigation and self-discovery for our main character, who is terribly limited by her sex, her race, and her class. at times banal, but always real, jones exposes sexual encounters for the twisted hierarchies that they can be. we glimpse the main character's strength in her singing, where we sense lies the only freedom she can carve out, (because of this, it is also the site of men's want to dominate her). finally, with ursa nearing 50, she returns to her ex-husband. "i knew i still hated him. not as bad as then, not with that first feeling, but an after feeling, an aftertaste, or like an odor still in a room when you come back to it, and it's your own. i don't know what he saw in my eyes. his were different now. i cant explain how. i felt that he wouldn't demand he same things. he'd demand different kinds of things. but there'd still be demands."there isnt a happy ending, just the promise that they can try not to hurt each other. and isn't that sometimes all that we can give or hope for?
—Anjanette V
This is a pretty disturbing and powerful book. If you've ever listened to blues, then you know the feeling this book will give you. This is a "blues" novel, to be sure. Set in the 1940s, Blues singer Ursa Corregidora is haunted by the past -- not so much her own, but rather the past of her great grandmother, her grandmother, and her mother. Simon Corregidora, a slave owner, raped both Ursa's great grandmother and grandmother. They obsessively tell the story of all this -- the rape, the torture, the abuse -- to Ursa's mother and to Ursa herself. Since there are no records as evidence for any of this, they impress upon Ursa the responsibility of "making generations" to remind them of what happened as well. But one day Ursa has an "accident", where she miscarries and can no longer have children. We then follow Ursa as she navigates her own world of torture and abuse, and her own struggles with her identity and relationships, told in a brutally gritty way by Gayl Jones.As it says on the back of my book, this is a "brutally honest and painful revelation of what has occurred, and is occurring, in the souls of black men and women"(James Baldwin). Dealing with themes like sexism, slavery, and racism, this is not a very happy read, but it isn't supposed to be either.
—Stian
Very difficult reading here ( or re-reading, as it is a book I read 25 yrs ago). I read my old paperback, pub 1986 and the James Baldwin quote on the front cover: Corregidora is the most brutally honest and painful revelation of what has occurred, and is occurring in the souls of Black men and womem". As a white woman it is way way too easy to forget my privilege. We live in such a hugely racist society, and human history is so damn brutal. There is so much to learn, to remember, to witness, to change.
—Nancy
