Gayl Jones's Corregidora

Adam McKible quotes Marx's description of muniment in The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte in an attempt to reveal the way representations of history are performed in the novel. The quote is educative: "Men [and women] make their own history, besides not spontaneously, infra conditions they have chosen for themselves; rather on terms at a duration existing, given and handed down to them" (McKible 224). Thus, McKible concludes, history maintains a hire on the present by offering ideologically invested stories as commonplace fact (McKible 224).

Corregidora explores the possibilities of singing a love air in a historical context shadowed by Brazilian slavery (Dubey 251). In Corregidora, Ursa, whose "veins are centuries meeting," must shin with the memory of Corregidora. However, Ursa's role and position as a vapors singer is a significant fact toward her reclamation of her self from the tradition of her matrilineage. McKible argues that as a blues singer, Ursa stands as a sign of interpretation at the intersection of social, historical, and subjective forces (McKible 226). She operates as a crossroads of resistance and repression and seeks to create "a variant that would touch me, touch my life and theirs. A Portuguese song, but not a Portuguese song. A new world song" (Jones 59). Her consciousness and creativity point at at once to past and the future, to

Fashioning Corregidora's informal commodification of their bodies into political self-commodification, Ursa's mothers turn his racist, oppositional perspective to their own advantage (Gottfried 564). In doing so, however, they insist upon a binary universe of victims and rapists. Ursa must resolution both the racist brutality of her mothers' lives and the limitations of their response to that brutality. Familial memories colour in her sense of self, and both her husbands victimize her in part because she sees herself as a victim (Gottfried 565).

Undoubtedly, bastard is accountable for his behavior, but Gottfried withal posits that it forces Ursa to recognize the indirect operations of her familia agenda and how her foremothers' histories have cross her own desire and infected her marriage (Gottfried 565).

Thinking report and Reading Names in Four African American Texts," African American Review 28(2) 1994, 223-35.

Corregidora's definition of slave women crosses time and place, surfacing in Ursa's first marriage (Gottfried 560). Ownership ground on sexual relations informs her relationship with Mutt, who identifies her as "his fathead" (Jones 46), a term that signifies for him a faithful and loving married woman but whereby a woman is wholly defined by her vagina and her womb. Possession is as important to Mutt as it was to her great-grandfather. However, caught up in her foremothers' political agenda, Ursa initially allows Mutt to own her clay and soul according to Corregidora rules (Gottfried 560).

Ursa comes to this realization in the closing look with Mutt (Gottfried 566). Twenty-one years after her accident, Mutt appears and the ii reunite. Gottfried notes, however, that Ursa's initial thoughts are violently retributive even during a moment of intense sexual intimacy. She does not castrate Mutt but she realizes she could have. Thus, she empowers herself in this sexual union, however violently, by get an active agent rather than a passive one. In thi
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