“That’s How We All Begin” : Trauma and Collective Memory in Gayl Jones’ Corregidora
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Gayl Jones’ novel Corregidora (1975) poses a daunting challenge to readers both for its thematics and stylistics. The narrative is dominated by explicit depictions of racialized violence and intraracial and intergenerational abuse, interspersed with highly charged language that seems to betray the reproduction of relations enforced through slavery, and characterized by jarring disruptions in narrative chronology, linearity, referentiality, and voice. Accordingly, departing from the tradition of women’s narratives in which intergenerational bonds become prominent sites of emotional support, in Jones’ novel, it is precisely the opposite: Ursa Corregidora, the last of the Corregidora women, must struggle against the maternal histories as narrated by her foremothers in order to create a meaningful present for herself. The novel is marked by repetitive intrusions of scenes from Ursa’s past, which are her great grandmother Great Gram and her grandmother Gram’s verbalization of their own horrific experiences in slavery. Both Great Gram and Gram’s transmission of their own memories of the slave experience to the girl child Ursa reflects their perception of the reproductive black female body as a means of documenting the slave past that has been forcibly erased, misappropriated, and manipulated in official history. In this paper, through an analysis of selected scenes, I explore the tension between individual experience and collective memory as foreground through the narrative style of the novel. I argue that in portraying the eruptions of the past that profoundly disorient Ursa’s sense of self and her relationship with others, Jones thematizes the ways in which the coercive dictation of collective memory becomes traumatic memory of other individuals. I thus contend that the pernicious workings of collective memory in the novel, to which Ursa’s maternal ancestors are also tragically moored, function as the author’s unrelenting critique of racial slavery in the Americas.
Abstract
Gayl Jones’ novel Corregidora (1975) poses a daunting challenge to readers both for its thematics and stylistics. The narrative is dominated by explicit depictions of racialized violence and intraracial and intergenerational abuse, interspersed with highly charged language that seems to betray the reproduction of relations enforced through slavery, and characterized by jarring disruptions in narrative chronology, linearity, referentiality, and voice. Accordingly, departing from the tradition of women’s narratives in which intergenerational bonds become prominent sites of emotional support, in Jones’ novel, it is precisely the opposite: Ursa Corregidora, the last of the Corregidora women, must struggle against the maternal histories as narrated by her foremothers in order to create a meaningful present for herself. The novel is marked by repetitive intrusions of scenes from Ursa’s past, which are her great grandmother Great Gram and her grandmother Gram’s verbalization of their own horrific experiences in slavery. Both Great Gram and Gram’s transmission of their own memories of the slave experience to the girl child Ursa reflects their perception of the reproductive black female body as a means of documenting the slave past that has been forcibly erased, misappropriated, and manipulated in official history. In this paper, through an analysis of selected scenes, I explore the tension between individual experience and collective memory as foreground through the narrative style of the novel. I argue that in portraying the eruptions of the past that profoundly disorient Ursa’s sense of self and her relationship with others, Jones thematizes the ways in which the coercive dictation of collective memory becomes traumatic memory of other individuals. I thus contend that the pernicious workings of collective memory in the novel, to which Ursa’s maternal ancestors are also tragically moored, function as the author’s unrelenting critique of racial slavery in the Americas.
참고문헌 (21)
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