Gayl Jones’ Corregidora and “Days That Were Pages of Hysteria”

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This paper examines traumatic return as hysterical symptom in Gayl Jones’ 1975 novel Corregidora. A novel that re-imagines both enslavement and post-emancipation in Brazil and North America, Corregidora examines the effects of keeping visible, across space and time, a history of sexual violence that originates in enslavement but does not end there. Corregidora is the story of four generations of women who charge one another to “make generations” in order to keep their history as “visible as the blood.” Writing Corregidora during the Black Arts Movement and a demand for positive race images, Jones, nevertheless, asserts that, “sometimes politics... can also tell you what you cannot do, tell you what you must avoid, tell you that there’s a certain territory politics won’t allow you to enter, certain questions politics won’t allow you to ask in order to be “politically correct”. I think sometimes you just have to be “wrong”; there’s a lot of imaginative territory that you have to be “wrong” in order to enter.” Jones revisits the sexual violence that emerges in a narrative like Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and decidedly enters “wrong” territory with a psychological, not an explicitly political, narrative that complicates more familiar representations of enslavement with images of profound sexual violence. As Jones navigates this largely uncharted territory she begins the profoundly discomfiting task of embodying and complicating the “facts” of enslavement. She looks at and listens to the ghosts that haunt our stories and ritualistically re-members them in ways that risk reanimation and yet, in that space of repetition and witnessing, might ameliorate some of the lasting conditions of enslavement.