Bridges to Memory

Postmemory in Contemporary Ethnic American Women's Fiction

Maria Rice Bellamy

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780813937977
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Tracing the development of a new genre in contemporary American literature that was engendered in the civil rights, feminist, and ethnic empowerment struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, Bridges to Memory shows how these movements authorized African American and ethnic American women writers to reimagine the traumatic histories that form their ancestral inheritance and define their contemporary identities. Drawing on the concept of postmemory—a paradigm developed to describe the relationship that children of Holocaust survivors have to their parents' traumatic experiences—Maria Bellamy examines narrative representations of this inherited form of trauma in the work of contemporary African American and ethnic American women writers.

Focusing on Gayl Jones's Corregidora, Octavia Butler's Kindred, Phyllis Alesia Perry's Stigmata, Cristina García's Dreaming in Cuban, Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman, and Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker, Bellamy shows how cultural context determines the ways in which traumatic history is remembered and transmitted to future generations. Taken together, these narratives of postmemory manifest the haunting presence of the past in the present and constitute an archive of textual witness and global relevance that builds cross-cultural understanding and ethical engagement with the suffering of others.

1

“A New World Song”

Creating a Legacy Worth Preserving in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora

Over a decade before Toni Morrison imagined Denver ingesting the blood of her murdered sister along with her mother’s milk in Beloved, Gayl Jones wrote in Corregidora of generations of women born and bred to receive and reproduce an unimaginable tale of sexual violence perpetrated during slavery in Brazil. Ursa, the novel’s protagonist and the fourth generation of Corregidora women, is literally nursed on her traumatic ancestral history: “I was made to touch my past at an early age. I found it on my mother’s tiddies. In her milk” (77). The family saga begins with Great Gram, whom slaveholder Corregidora takes out of his fields when she is still a child to work in his whorehouse, and continues with Gram, Great Gram’s daughter fathered by Corregidora, who is raised, raped, and prostituted by her own father. Gram later gives birth to Ursa’s mother (Mama, also fathered by Corregidora) but raises her in Kentucky after she and her mother escape from Brazil. Because the official documents of Brazilian slavery are destroyed at emancipation, Great Gram and Gram make it their mission to provide evidence of the atrocities they suffered; their strategy, to “make generations,” requires that their story be passed down from mother to daughter so it will never be forgotten (41). According to this strategy, Mama and Ursa exist to transmit Great Gram and Gram’s traumatic narrative. The novel opens, however, with Ursa facing the crisis of not being able to bring the next generation after she loses her uterus when an encounter with her enraged husband Mutt turns violent and ends with her falling down a flight of stairs. Suddenly unable to fulfill the script her ancestors have written for her, Ursa must redefine her relation to her traumatic inheritance and her purpose as a woman.

Jones’s Corregidora stands apart from the profusion of novels published by black women in the 1970s. Toni Morrison, who served as Gayl Jones’s editor, declared about Corregidora that “no novel about any Black woman could ever be the same after this. [Gayl Jones] had changed the terms, the definitions of the whole enterprise” (“Reading”). Jones’s bold exploration of female sexuality redefines the terms of female desire by considering its meaning outside of the reproductive arena. Writing in the early 1970s, Jones fully engages while fully resisting the tenets of the Black Nationalist and Black Arts movements, offering a subtle but compelling critique of contemporary ideology. In keeping with the Black Arts aesthetic, her narrative form marries vernacular storytelling with blues culture. Jones inscribes African American history and culture in written form, extending an African American literary tradition based in orality. In opposition to the Black Arts aesthetic, however, Jones refuses to subordinate her artistic vision to contemporary political concerns and chooses to depict characters and situations that few readers could consider heroic or necessarily empowering. Corregidora also stands out as the first novel of this era written by an African American woman to intervene in the history of slavery from the perspective of a contemporary protagonist engaging her own traumatic inheritance, thus creating a narrative of postmemory.

While the novel’s opening crisis motivates Ursa’s exploration of her ancestral past, her contemplation is triggered by and experienced in connection to her contemporary interactions, which creates the critical interplay of past and present that is the novel’s most compelling feature. Ursa’s experience of postmemory leads her through a process of identifying with her traumatic inheritance, translating it through her contemporary context and life experience, and differentiating from it through blues performance and physical reenactment. Ultimately, this process transforms Ursa’s relationship with her traumatic past from the tyranny of repeating a single narrative of victimization to a comprehensive engagement with the legacy of New World slavery, which recognizes its collective nature and authorizes the creation of testimony through multiple modes of storytelling. Within the novel, Jones performs important postmemorial work through Ursa’s spoken narrative. Beyond the text, Corregidora reimagines black female subjectivity and troubles even as it extends African American cultural and literary traditions.

Accessing African American Postmemory

The most significant challenge Gayl Jones faces in addressing African American postmemory of slavery is accessing a history over one century in the past and largely unwritten. For late-twentieth-century descendants of American slaves, engaging their traumatic inheritance becomes a process of excavating memories and experiences that have been consciously forgotten, distorted, or destroyed. Being largely illiterate and poor, the survivors of slavery were rarely able to write their own testimonies and had good reason to be suspicious of the motives of others attempting to record their personal narratives. Photographic images and documentary sources from the era of slavery similarly were subject to the biases and purposes of those who created them. Stories passed down within families would seem the best means of transmitting this traumatic history, yet this mechanism is complicated by significant breaks in the testimonial chain, due particularly to ancestors who refuse to tell their stories, the passage of time, and the destruction of families during slavery—a factor that problematizes the very concept of generational continuity. The most enduring testimony to the traumatic history of slavery may reside in the bodies of the descendants of slaves. Accessing this form of trauma’s ghost, thus, requires recognizing and deciphering the scraps of history passed down in stories, songs, and traditions and written on black bodies.

In Corregidora Jones uses oral transmission to access the experiential history of slavery and explores how the physical body testifies to the enduring trauma of enslavement. Jones’s conceit of making generations figures the Corregidora women as African griots tasked with remembering tribal history and renders their bodies as the means through which that history is transmitted. The careful repetition of family history creates an uninterrupted testimonial chain from Great Gram’s life in slavery in nineteenthcentury Brazil to Ursa’s life in Kentucky in the mid-twentieth century and yields a contemporary protagonist with a vital, albeit problematic, connection to her ancestral past.

In Corregidora Jones consciously extends an authentic African American cultural legacy through her emphasis on storytelling as the basis and form of her narrative. In an interview with Michael S. Harper, Jones cites listening to people talk when she was a child as her literary foundation: “My first stories were heard stories-from grown-up people talking” (692). She comments further that the stories she heard tapped into the broadest base of African American experience, incorporating “traditions . . . language . . . politics and morality and economics and culture” (693). From this foundation, she tells Charles H. Rowell, she writes her “most authentic stories” in the first-person narrative voice, which enables her to “enter the characters and tell their stories as they would tell them” (37). Using the principles of oral storytelling in Corregidora, Jones renders the lived experience and perspective of ordinary African American people.

Using Ursa’s narrative voice and language, Jones centers the novel on what might otherwise be a marginal character. In the process, she breaks new ground in the African American literary tradition and reimagines the novel itself.¹ Rather than creating framing devices to give readers access to socially marginalized or disempowered figures,² Jones allows Ursa to tell her story in her own raw, unschooled vernacular, explaining that she “was interested in having [Ursa’s] language do everything that anybody’s language used as a literary language can do” (Rowell, “An Interview with Gayl Jones” 32–33). Having ordinary black people tell their stories in their spoken language validates the African American vernacular as a legitimate literary language and celebrates how African American (and other ethnic) people imprint the English language with their cultural resonances: “American English has more dimensions than British English because . . . Black people and Indian people and Chinese people . . . have forced the language to see more than it would have on its own” (Bell, “Gayl Jones” 706). Similarly, Jones uses African American vernacular speech in Corregidora to force the traditional novel form to encompass and express this unique cultural perspective. Redefining appropriate literary language, Jones enters new territory in the African American literary tradition and the development of the novel.

Jones’s preoccupation with the physical bodies of the Corregidora women reflects the second means by which African American postmemory is transmitted—the black body on which the history of slavery is written and through which it is passed from generation to generation. Because the slave trade was designed to transform thinking subjects into commodities to be bought, sold and consumed, the enslaved African suffered, in Hortense Spillers’s words, “a willful and violent . . . severing of the captive body from its motive will, its active desire” (386). As the system of slavery developed in the United States, the physical body became the primary value and black skin the primary characteristic of the slave. Blackness then became synonymous with perpetual bondage, and the status of slave passed bodily from mother to child. Projected onto that black body was the sum total of racist discourse created to justify enslavement. The sexual and reproductive abuse of female slave projected onto their bodies a rhetoric of promiscuity, lasciviousness, and unnatural maternity. Further, the female mulatto body, manifesting the results of miscegenation, bore the compounded imputation of impurity and consume-ability. The legacy of slavery lives on in the history recorded on contemporary black bodies. In Corregidora Jones explores the narratives of consumption written on the Corregidora women’s bodies from within and without.

By situating the Corregidora women’s experience of slavery in Brazil where prostitution of enslaved women was a common practice, Jones explores the sexualized history projected onto black women’s bodies from without.³ While enslaved women in the United States were frequently victimized sexually, they were generally not used commercially as prostitutes; nevertheless, Jones’s Brazilian setting defamiliarizes the U.S. context to reveal how little the hypersexualized narrative written on African bodies differed in the two seemingly disparate locales.⁴ Jones demonstrates this through the recurring motif of commodification in both contexts. Early in the novel, we learn that Corregidora calls Great Gram “Dorita. Little gold piece,” equating her sexualized body with gold, the most valuable commodity in commercial exchange (10). Mutt repeats and intensifies this practice in twentieth-century Kentucky. He first hypersexualizes Ursa (and all women) by declaring the vagina to be the “center of a woman’s being” and later commodifies her vagina by claiming it as an object to be owned and traded: “Your pussy’s a little gold piece, ain’t it, Urs? My little gold piece” (46, 60, emphasis added). Ursa’s relationship with Mutt demonstrates how the black female body continues to be read in sexually and commercially objectifying terms, even in contemporary American society.⁵ Jones demonstrates the pervasiveness of this reading as scores of men are drawn to Ursa’s fair complexion and long hair (indicative of her mixed racial ancestry) and onlookers anticipate her being promiscuous and ripe for consumption.⁶ Jennifer Griffiths suggests that in public spaces “Ursa’s body exists as a spectacle, revealing a legacy that she has internalized and that is confirmed by the outside world” (75). Through Ursa, Jones explores the multiple levels of discourse from which the contemporary African American female must disentangle her body.

The claim on Ursa’s body begins, however, in the private space of her home through her ancestors’ call to “make generations.” Great Gram and Gram’s strategy seeks to free the female body from sexual objectification and violation by making it a historical archive and transforming sex from an act of oppression to an act of resistance. These purposes, however, serve to limit rather than liberate their descendants. After Ursa’s hysterectomy, she has no mechanism for constructing a new purpose for her body or apprehending its desire. Because, as Stephanie Athey suggests, “reproduction and sexuality, duty and desire, have never been distinct” for Ursa, she has no understanding of “personal desire which does not resonate with the collective” (181). Making generations boils all sexual desire and activity down to the duty to reproduce and eliminates any related relationship-building possibilities. Stephanie Li contents that a loving relationship with a man could actually be understood as betrayal of the generational bond among Corregidora women because any “emotional connection outside the matrilineal line presents a betrayal of Mama’s [and Ursa’s] familial obligation” (136). The duty to make generations thus results in physical and emotional containment that alienates Ursa from her body and emotions. An important aspect of her postmemorial journey, therefore, will be to recover her body from this bondage and identify her own desire.

Jones uses the claims on Ursa’s body to address contemporary limitations on the sexual freedom of African American women. First, making generations renders in metaphor the politicization of black women’s reproductive capabilities by the Black Nationalist movement. Jones demonstrates that the demand that black women “fight the man with the womb” by breeding revolutionaries offered as narrow a definition of the purpose of the black female body as the Corregidora family narrative (Bambara 210). By extension, these more recent imperatives differ little from slavery’s requirement that female slaves be bred to build the slaveholder’s stock. Second, Ursa’s questioning of her personal and sexual identity after her hysterectomy critiques the black woman’s ability to own her own sexuality and validate herself outside of the reproductive arena. Athey defines Ursa’s loss of her womb as a nonconsensual sterilization and argues that, through this loss, Jones engages long-standing debates about forced or coercive sterilization of poor and minority women. Jones’s engagement with these contemporary issues articulates that even in the era of birth control, “not all women had yet achieved the ‘rights’ to control their own productive capacity” (178). Jones’s use of a contemporary protagonist to engage the traumatic history of slavery thus offers her the opportunity to address the black woman’s experience of sexual disenfranchisement in both temporal and social contexts.

Ursa’s fall, however, defamiliarizes her body and requires her to view it, the history written on it, and the claims to which it is subject from a new perspective. Griffiths argues that Corregidora “uses illness and the rest associated with it as a kind of gestational period, fluid and dynamic, through which a new body passes” (78). Ursa’s postmemorial process results in new uses for her body and new means of engaging her traumatic inheritance through performance of the blues, physical reenactment, and creation of narrative. Singing the blues makes Ursa’s body a vessel for artistic expression through which she may transmit her traumatic ancestral and personal history. According to Athey, the blues themselves function as a body, “a womb or template through which the material of experience is analyzed and energized—transformed into communal experience” (183). Through the blues, Ursa’s inheritance is revitalized and reformed from a personal haunting to a means of communal catharsis. Her sexual encounter with Mutt late in the novel reenacts a moment from her ancestral past, making Ursa’s body a vessel for a vital engagement with that past but enabling her to revise her received history. Finally, telling her story in the novel allows Ursa to create a personal testimony birthed through her own body, which differentiates her traumatic memory from herself and replaces the objectifying narrative placed on her body with one of her own creation.

Ursa’s first step toward completing this postmemorial work is identifying or bearing witness to her traumatic inheritance by gathering the stories of her foremothers. Although Ursa tells Tadpole that her mama “told [her] what they all lived through,” Ursa’s mother’s memories are conspicuously absent from the litany of Corregidora history (9). In their household, only the narrative of oppression gets passed down, such that family history essentially stops with the traumatic events in Brazil and every aspect of life after that point is viewed in light of those events. Ursa’s quest to overcome the oppressive hold of the ancestral past and redefine the purposes for her body begins with her effort to reconstruct her family narrative, situate the traumatic legacy within the larger course of family history, and finally assert the importance and meaning of her own “private memory” (129).

Ursa’s Postmemorial Inheritance

Ursa’s remembrance of her ancestral history occurs in generational order in the novel, beginning with Great Gram, and demonstrates both the thoroughness of her indoctrination into her maternal worldview and the calcification of the narratives passed down to her. Ursa’s first recital of her ancestral history occurs immediately after a conversation with Tadpole in which he mentions her unusual name. She answers with an automatic and wellconditioned response: “Corregidora. Old man Corregidora, the Portuguese slave breeder and whoremonger. . . . He fucked his own whores and fathered his own breed” (8–9). Tadpole’s simple question results in what Ashraf Rushdy calls “a formulaic and impersonal discourse,” (37) as she spews out two paragraphs of the history associated with her name and her requirement to “pass it down like that from generation to generation so we’d never forget” (9). Ursa remains absorbed in remembering Great Gram’s history even after Tadpole leaves her presence. Although Ursa demonstrates some control over her recital of her great-grandmother’s testimony in that she speaks of her in the third person, the narrative comes out whole with long passages of Great Gram’s speech repeated verbatim. Both Ursa and her mother’s remembrances are characterized by such regurgitation of received testimony. This spontaneous and nearly unprovoked recital of family history represents a form of traumatic repetition and reveals how every aspect of Ursa’s life is overshadowed by her ancestral inheritance.⁷

From her defamiliarized adult perspective, however, Ursa begins to view her great-grandmother’s spoken narrative more objectively and identify repressions therein. First, by Ursa’s childhood, Great Gram’s testimony has become something external to herself and more real than her actual memories. Ursa recalls, “it was as if the words were helping her, as if the words repeated again and again could be a substitute for memory. . . . As if it were only the words that kept her anger” (11). As an adult, Ursa realizes that the words of Great Gram’s story serve as the vehicle by which she accesses the emotions originally associated with the traumatic events and transmits an anger she no longer truly feels. Second, Great Gra...