Corregidora (novel)

Jones uses a fragmented style of writing to incorporate the Corregidora family history of trauma into Ursa's present narrative.

Overall, Corregidora considers difficult themes of generational trauma, preservation of memory, domestic and sexual violence, and womanhood and motherhood.

[1] The novel opens with Ursa Corregidora recounting her marriage with Mutt Thomas and the "accident" on the staircase behind Happy's Café.

Upstairs, Tadpole learns that Mutt signed the divorce papers and asks Ursa to marry him.

When Ursa wakes up from a night of irregular sleep, Tadpole describes how his Papa was a slave that became a blacksmith, but his Mama was denied the land he had bought when she went to claim it.

One night, Tadpole doesn't come to pick up Ursa, and she finds him in bed with Vivian, a young new singer.

Ursa describes to Mutt how her life is tied into the lives of her ancestors and how the memories of their trauma still affect her.

Ursa learns that her father, Martin, worked at a restaurant across the street from the depot, where Mama used to have lunch.

[2] The third section opens with Ursa remembering the suicide of the Melrose woman and her childhood friend, May Alice.

That night, Mutt made a sexual advance, but Ursa turned him down, remembering the Corregidora women.

Ursa speaks to a man who is performing at the Drake hotel about the blues and remembers how Corregidora raped her Great Gram.

In turn, the Corregidora women embody a practice of remembrance, or “holding up evidence” by “making generations”, in such a way that specifies their wombs as a site of redoubling- a redoubling that centralizes their purported reproductive capacities as a conduit for both reprisal and redress that renders their trauma legible.

At as early as five-years of age, Ursa describes her grandmother telling her these histories and insisting she remember them.

In particular, academics have considered how Ursa's familial trauma under slavery affects her romantic relationships in the present.

In her critical essay, Stella Setka discusses the impacts of this "traumatic rememory" inherited from her ancestry.

Ursa's grandmother emphasizes how important it is to continue sharing their histories of sexual violence and slavery.

Beya considers history to be a haunting presence in Corregidora, emphasizing the simultaneous mourning and healing in re-experiencing this trauma.

At first thought, Ursa's return to Mutt seemed like a choice rooted in an inability to work through the trauma she experienced in her own body and those of her foremothers.

Upon deeper reflection, Ursa's return resonates as her way of continuing that work and witnessing through confronting a vehicle of trauma (Mutts verbal abuse, controlling demands and later physical violence) in ways that her foremother did not narrate directly to her, but she senses or realizes.

Since Ursa's grandmothers were raped by their slaveowners, Jones writes a violent history for all of the Corregidora women.

Specifically, Joanne Lipson Freed points out the duplication of sexual exploitation in each of the lives of each Corregidora woman.

Moving from Baldwin to Morrison to Jones to concretize incest as motif, she encapsulates the ways in which incest as a figurative sexual arrangement is conditioned upon an unintelligibility — a “disruptive chronology”, fragmented subjectivities, and traces of the tragic, the obscene, and parodic — made manifest by the line of Corregidora women that ends and finds release with Ursa (Abdur-Rahman 127).

Ursa describes how the Corregidora women were compelled to "make generations," connecting motherhood to remembering their trauma.

Academic articles that evaluate Jones' Corregidora recurrently analyze the themes of womanhood and motherhood.

Fulani takes a psychological approach to understanding this correlation, noting the influence of gender and conflict on the community.

Particularly, critics have placed Gayl Jones among a canon of Black women writers for her manipulation of structure and speech as literary devices.

[8] Other than the overall favorable critical response Jones has received for Corregidora, the novel has been critiqued for lacking detailed physical descriptions of its characters.

[9] In an interview by Claudia Tate, Gayl Jones describes her intention to draw on the African American tradition of oral storytelling.

Tate's subsequent remark that Corregidora felt like a private story in her reading forms the critique that the novel is unable to reproduce an oral history.

[10] Writers including James Baldwin and Maya Angelou have commented on Corregidora as honest and painful as well as a murky American tale (respectfully).