October 27, 2006
Corregidora: The Blues as Narrative
The blues and music play an integral part in Gayl Jones’ novel Corregiadora. Ursa as a blues singer uses music as a narrative to map the historical trajecotories of slavery onto the present. Because she cannot bear the children that her grandmother deems as necessary in preserving the hertiage of slavery and the seuxal exploitation her family endured the narrative becomes Ursa’s to bear alone. The blues in Corregidora serve as an outlet with which to negotaite this history of violence and degradation and ultimately Ursa’s performace of the blues transforms into an act of resistance. As Ashraf H.A. Rushdy notes in the African American Review, Summer 2000, “The sexual and racial categories inherited from plantation culture can be contested through the blues because they offer a productive cultural formation. Like the family narratives to which the blues are so closely aligned throughout Corregidora, the blues performance produces an enabling version of the past and reproduces a healthier set of resources for the reconstitution of the desiring subject, because the blues also follow the practice of the family narratives in contesting the representations of a desiring subject either utterly freed from or utterly imprisoned by the past” (273-297). The blues have a long history of serving as a vehicle for the articulation of suffering and ultimately the redemption of the spirit. Th inlfuence the blues had on jazz introduced blues singers such as Billie Holiday into the mainstream of American popular culture. See excerpts on the Harlem Renaissance and Langston Hughes’s “Weary Blues” on this site for more on the blues. Remnants of the blues and its leagacy are prevalent in contemproray American, African American and World music such as hip-hop, rythm and blues, and rap.
Bibliography:
Rushday, Ashraf H.A. “‘Relate Sexual to Historical’: Race, Resistance and Desire in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora.” African American Review 34 (Summer 2000): 273-297.