Gayl Jones: "Corregidora"

The author of Corregidora (1975), Gayl Jones, never allowed her face to be seen on the covers of her books. Although she always wanted to keep her privacy and, like J.D. Salinger, desired to be known only by her work not by her personal life, various stories concerning her private dramas have been circulating in the media. One particularly tragic story concerns Gayl Jones and her husband Bob (Higgins) Jones, whom she met at the University of Michigan, where she was a teacher and he a student. Mentally unstable, Bob accused his professors of "conspirational malice" when he got a D in German. Then in the late 1970s he appeared at a gay rights rally with a gun, shouting slogans about "burning in hell", for which he got arrested. Before the trial the couple managed to flee to Paris to return to the U.S. many years later. The novelist always stood by her husband, who finally committed suicide by slitting his throat, and Gayl Jones herself was taken to a mental hospital because the authorities feared she might commit suicide as well.

In her fiction Gayl Jones often portrays violence in order to illustrate the repercussions of slavery for twentieth-century African American families, where racism and sexism permeate the most intimate spheres of life, resulting in brutalization of women and degradation of men. The novel's heroine, blues singer Ursa Corregidora, slowly recovers from trauma and mutilation caused by her jealous husband, who pushed her down from pub stairs because she refused to stop appearing on stage. As a result, she lost her child and her womb. Ursa marries her old-time friend and admirer, Tadpole, who finally dumps her for another girl because Ursa, unable to feel anything during sexual intercourse, failed to give him what he wanted. In the novel Ursa struggles to reconcile the knowledge that she is somehow flawed as a woman because she cannot have children with her sexual desire which has not disappeared with the disappearance of her womb. Ursa is constantly aware of the space between [her] thighs. A well that never bleeds and regrets the silence in [her] womb, bemoaning the inability to feel anything those times he didn't touch the clit.

Ursa's sterility and focusing her sexuality on her clitoris rather than her womb creates a problem because she has been told by her mother and grandmother that without a womb she cannot function as a woman. This logic is a heritage of slavery, which reduced women to being sex objects of exchange: for Corregidora, their father and owner, Great Gram and her daughter were valuable because of their vaginas, which was reflected in his calling each woman his gold pussy. Ursa learns from the stories told her by her Gram what it meant to be a woman under slavery:
Cause tha's all they do to you, was feel up on you down between your legs see what kind of genitals you had, either so you could breed well, or make a good whore. Fuck each other or fuck them. Tha's the first thing they would think about, cause if you had somebody who was a good fucker you have plenty to send out into the field, and then you could also make you plenty money on the side, or inside.

Paradoxically, man-woman relationship based on sexual ownership has not disappeared with the end of slavery: Ursa's abusive husband also calls her his pussy, and Ursa remembers him asking me to let him see his pussy. Let me feel my pussy. It turns out then that in her marriages Ursa is reduced to her vagina and her womb to the same extent to which her Great Gram's sexuality was turned into product by Corregidora, who fathered her daughter and her granddaughter. Thus, Corregidora, who is absent from the novel as a character, becomes an emblem of sexual abuse and violence perpetrated on the "Corregidora women". Ursa's blues singing plays then a symbolic function in the novel, as she bears witness to the pain and survival of her family: I am Ursa Corregidora. I have tears for eyes. I was made to touch my past at an early age... Let no one pollute my music. I will dig out their trumpets. I will pluck out their eyes.

Gayl Jones wrote a novel of extraordinary beauty and lyrical sadness, in which she also dared to raise questions concerning desire's fusion with hatred and to point to the tangled coexistence of desire and abuse. Ursa wonders: Corregidora was theirs more than [Mama's]. Mama could only know, but they could feel. They were with him. What did they feel? You know how they talk about hate and desire. Two humps on the same camel? Yes. Hate and desire both riding them. . . . Still, there was what they never spoke . . . what they wouldn't tell me. How all but one of them had the same lover? ...what I never had the nerve to ask. . . . How much was hate for Corregidora and how much was love? It is for the ability to explore such disquieting issues that I loved the novel best.

Octavia E. Butler: "Dawn"

Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006) was the first African American woman to gain recognition as a science fiction writer. Her novelette titled Bloodchild brought her critical recognition in 1985, when she received the most prestigious award for sf and fantasy - the Hugo Award. Claiming her space in the field so dominated by white men must have been quite an achievement for the colored woman, who was remembered by the icon of African American sf Samuel Delaney as incredibly shy, a student who spoke only when she had something to say, but someone who obviously had great talent.

The first part of Butler's Lilith's Brood trilogy, titled Dawn, takes its readers to a spaceship inhabited by a nomadic alien species called the Oankali, who rescue as many humans as they can from Earth, which is devastated by nuclear war. The Oankali have been working on making the planet habitable again, and the survivors, who have been kept in "suspended animation" (sleep), are awakened to get ready to go back to their world. However, before they do it, the Oankali will use them to interbreed with the human species, since lack of diversity threatens the aliens with extinction. So, as much as the Oankali hate humans for self-destructive violence and hierarchical relations, they decide to mix their genetic material with theirs. As a result, humans will have to share the earth with an alien species in the future - their own children. The first person to be awakened is Lilith, from whose point of view the story is narrated. Lilith has been selected to prepare the other survivors for their return to Earth by training them to survive in the wilderness first.

Having very little experience in reading sf or fantasy, I focus on those aspects of this intriguing and absorbing narrative which appeal to me as a woman reader who is interested in African American women's creative writing. First, by aligning Lilith with the alien species, which she gets to know quite well after spending some time with two representatives of the Oankali, the narrator presents a (very critical) assessment of the human species from an alien perspective: You are hierarchical. That's the older and more entrenched characteristic. We saw it in your closest animal relatives and in your most distant ones. When human intelligence served it instead of guiding it, when human intelligence did not even acknowledge it as a problem, but took pride in it or did not notice it at all... that was like ignoring cancer. I think your people did not realize what a dangerous thing they were doing. The observation has led the Oankali to choose the woman to be a leader and teacher to the groups of survivors who are awakened later because she doesn't seem to possess this characteristic.

Although the depiction of males' aggression, their will to dominate and desire to introduce hierarchical relations in the group may sound too biased and unjust to some readers, this inter-species encounter allows the narrator to make another accurate observation (voiced by an Oankali) concerning human behavior: Different is threatening to most species. Different is dangerous. It might kill you. That was true to your animal ancestors and your nearest animal relatives. And it's true for you. The awakened people react to the alien species with fear and aggression, which is illustrative of human behavior on Earth and which is criticised in the novel. In this way it becomes clear that the main theme of the narrative is very human: tolerance (or, rather, lack of it). In an interview, the writer herself stated the following: Back during the early 1960s there was a United Nations television commercial, the audio portion of which went something like this: "Ignorance, fear, disease, hunger, suspicion, hatred, war." That was it, although I would have added, "greed" and "vengeance" to the list. All or any of these can be the catalyst that turns hierarchical thinking into hierarchical behavior. Amid all this, does tolerance have a chance? Only if we want it to. Only when we want it to. Tolerance, like any aspect of peace, is forever a work in progress, never completed, and, if we're as intelligent as we like to think we are, never abandoned.

The first group fail to get to Earth because the Oankali have to put them back to sleep after they attack the aliens and direct acts of violence against each other. Already pregnant with a half-human-half-alien child, Lilith is left to continue her mission to train another group of newly awakened humans. Will she succeed? What will be the result of the interbreeding? This can only be learned from the next book of the trilogy: Adulthood Rights.