As I progress further within the world of academia and learn to exercise my critical voice, I am left wondering where love fits in a culture dominated by avarice and self-indulgence. As a student I am taught to engage the world with a critical eye, while as a woman I am taught to believe without in an idealized notion of romantic love. The traditional phallocentric culture has created a world, and a language through which women must navigate that world, which is built on a foundation of trenchant binary oppositions: love/ hate, pleasure/ pain, freedom/ slave, and most fundamentally, male/ female. It is these binaries, which have throughout history oppressed women, that bell hooks attempts to examine and deconstruct with her unique blend of theory and praxis. Once these oppressive traditions are dismantled, what remains in their place is a political and personal collectivity of black women’s experiences, a collective which allows hook’s praxis oriented model to reach “beyond the public and the private” to a space which encompasses lived experience as well as black feminist ideology.   

Understanding and defining love has created in our culture a division between the reality of human relationships and the overly romanticized erotic ideal portrayed by the global entertainment industry. It is this division which hooks argues in her novel all about love, is the “source of our difficulty in loving” (2000, 3). How then do we reconcile the practice of our everyday existence with the abstract and idealized concept of love? How do both racism and sexism function in the representation of love within traditionally marginalized cultures and subcultures? How do we begin to understand how love functions in relationships and within created communities? As hooks remarks, “Only love can heal the wounds of the past. However, the intensity of our woundedness often leads to a closing of the heart, making it impossible for us to give or receive love that is given to us. To open our hearts more fully to love’s power and grace we must dare to acknowledge how little we know of love in both theory and practice” (xxix). If love is to function as a healing force within women’s lives, we must first understand how love has been distorted by the values of patriarchal culture. We must examine the theoretical and practical applications of love through the lens of racial and sexual “otherness” to discern how love is represented and practiced within black feminist discourse. We must attempt to integrate the theory produced in academic discourse with the experiences embodied in popular culture. To elucidate this integration I will be using the feminist theories of bell hooks and Gayl Jones (1975) novel Corregidora. It is only through understanding how feminist theory and expressions of mass consciousness in popular culture combine to explain black women’s experiences that we can begin to understand how to embark upon the journey back to love as a healing force and not as a representation of betrayal and pain. It is only then that love can become something that we run towards and not something that we must run from.

At this point I feel I must preface any further argument by saying that I am not intending to claim that black men do not suffer as a result of this lovelessness in American culture. I wholly believe that they do, as I will show in my analysis of Corregidora. I am aware that there has been much criticism of female authors such as Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Gayl Jones within both academia and popular culture. As Ann duCille asserts in her essay Phallus (ies) of Interpretation, “These writers are chief among the many black women artists charged not only with historical inaccuracy but with racial infidelity as well—with in effect putting their gender before their race, their (white) feminism before their black family—and inventing historical fictions that serve a feminist rather than a black nationalist agenda” (2000, 444). What is for many back female authors an attempt to critically engage American culture has become for many men an attack on black masculinity. I do not wish to belittle in any way the criticisms of writers such as Addison Gayle and Ishmael Reed. I do, however, wish to focus my aim on discovering how love, or a lack thereof, influences the lived experiences of those who are black and female, not those who are black or female.

As we begin to examine how a lack of love permeates American culture, it is imperative to understand that this lack is most pronounced in those members of our culture that remain marginalized from Western hegemonic discourse. Of these marginalized “others,” black women writers represent a subclass that is severely influenced by lovelessness. They are targets for not only the racism that saturates American popular culture but are also the victims of sexism. Alice Walker illustrates this division between black female artists and societal representations of love in her essay In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens when she states,

“Black women are called, in the folklore that so aptly identifies one’s status in society, “the mule of the world,” because we have been handed the burdens that everyone else – everyone else – refused to carry. We have also been called “Matriarchs,” “Superwoman,” and “Mean and Evil Bitches.” Not to mention “Castrators” and “Sapphire’s Mama.” When we have pleaded for understanding, our character has been distorted; when we have asked for simple caring, we have been handed empty inspirational appellations, then stuck in the farthest corner. When we have asked for love, we have been given children. In short, even our plainer gifts, our labors of fidelity and love, have been knocked down our throats.” (1984, 237). 

In this sense we see that black women are given love only to have that love compromised by society’s expectations of subservience. As such, love becomes allied with power and betrayal. Love becomes something that black women ask for, but are denied, because they must shoulder the responsibilities and burdens that contemporary patriarchal society refuses to carry.

The painful reality of the expectation of shouldering the burden of revenge is the crux of Ursula Corregidora’s story. With this text, Jones creates for the reader a novel that travels through an ancestral narrative of slavery across the Americas from Brazil to the United States while simultaneously showing how the pain of that narrative is recreated through memory, language, and generations of successive black women.  Expected to avenge the matrilineal legacy of abuse by “making generations,” Ursa is haunted and burdened by her family’s emotional history. Ursa’s great grandmother, Great Gram, was a slave in Brazil who was owned by Old man Corregidora, a man described as a “breeder and whoremonger [who] fucked his own whores and fathered his own breed” (Jones 1975, 9). Great Gram was prostituted, repeatedly raped, and beaten, and eventually gave birth to a daughter who was also raped and abused by her father, Corregidora.

When slavery was abolished in Brazil in 1888 and the Corregidora women were freed, all paper evidence of their enslavement and torture was burned by Corregidora. They were left with an emotional and physical legacy of suffering, but no tangible evidence to substantiate their pain. In an effort to ensure that their history and suffering were never forgotten, Great Gram began a tradition of passing down her story and its accompanying sadness through the generations of Corregidora women that followed her. “My great-grandmama told my grandmama the part she lived through and my grandmama told my mama what the both lived through and my mama told me what they all lived through and we supposed to pass it down like that from generation to generation so we’d never forget” (9). Creating generations to pass on this legacy of abuse is Ursa Corregidora’s destiny, just as it was the fate of her mother before her, and it will be the fate of her daughter. This spoken familial tale has become for the Corregidora women not only a way to recall the past, but also a crutch for the creation of personal identities.     

The novel begins with Ursa Corregidora’s marriage to Mutt in Kentucky in 1947, a marriage which is fraught with misunderstandings, drunken nights, and an inability to communicate. Besides Mutt, the only relationships Ursa has built in her life are with Cat Lawson, an older woman who lives across the street and straightens people’s hair, and Tadpole McCormick, the owner of Happy’s Café where she sings the blues. After a drunken argument with Mutt forces her to lose their child and undergo a hysterectomy, Ursa is forced to confront the demons of the Corregidora family and find a way to move forward with their pain and not be consumed by their collective history.

Love appears to function in this text as a site of fear and oppression for the female characters. As Janice Harris points out in her work Gayl Jones’ Corregidora, “Making generations means making love; but making love for the purpose of human evidence turns what should be an act of love into an act of historical vengeance. The goal of lovemaking subverts the act; the end denies the means” (2). Ursa’s inability to fulfill the matrilineal charge of “making generations” is, however, only a small portion of the problems surrounding giving and receiving love in the lives of the women in this novel. Ann duCille illustrates this point when she states, “What Ursa must ultimately face is not only the crippling contradiction in Great Gram’s charge, but the emotional ambivalence that underpins it: a tangle of mixed emotions and conflicting subjectivities that were no doubt present in a great many liaisons between master and slave, owner and property” (2000, 452-53). Love is confused with power, thus creating it as the site of fear and oppression.

In my desire to examine and understand black feminist experience as it relates to love, I feel that I must first examine the various types of love and their interplay as they are portrayed in contemporary black women’s writing. In the traditional Greek model of love, eros encompasses erotic love, agape encompasses universal or spiritual love, and philos encompasses friendship or fraternal love. It is evident in Corregidora as well as in the theoretical discourse of bell hooks that there is a continual slippage between these three models of love. We are given to understand that a woman is not able to move from the fragmentation of lovelessness to the wholeness of love without possessing the ability to move freely among paradigms. In essence, love cannot assume its healing properties without becoming an amalgamation of all of its possible forms. In this sense, a woman cannot truly love romantically until she incorporates within herself an altruistic spiritual love as well as a communal sisterly love. It is important to note that by spiritual love I do not mean religious love. Although spiritual love can be religious, it does not have to be. As hooks states, “It is first and foremost about commitment to a way of thinking and behaving that honors principles of inter-being and interconnectedness” (1993, 77).     

In all of bell hooks’ theories on love it is evident that there is a direct link between the interconnectedness of black communities and the ability to heal oneself and others through love. For hooks that interconnectedness begins by breaking down the established dichotomies between theory and practice. It begins by merging feminist ideals with the lived experiences and languages of black women. This integration is illustrated poignantly in Sisterhood: Beyond Public and Private when hooks says,  

“When initiating theory from the location of experience one can be less concerned with whether or not you will fall into the trap of separating feminist theory from concrete reality and practice. Working in this way, we engage in a process of theorizing that always returns us to concrete practice.[…]. To me, this is a place, a location, a standpoint to begin the production of theory that does not lead us in a direction that divorces theory from practice.” (1996, 818).

In her attempts to engage diverse cultures outside the realm of academia with feminist thinking, hooks has created a theory devoid of the pedantic language of traditional academic discourse, a theory founded upon, and accessible to, the masses of black women that hooks symbolizes.

In Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery, hooks describes her experience of first examining black communities through a theoretical lens.

“I began to think deeply about the way in which the collective lives of black people in contemporary white-supremacist patriarchy have become fundamentally estranged from life-affirming world views and practices. Many black people see themselves solely as victims with no capacity to shape and determine their own destiny. Despite powerful anti-racist struggle in this society, expressed in the sixties' civil rights and black power movements, internalized racism manifested by ongoing self-hate and low self-esteem has intensified.” (1993, 10). 

The question for hooks then became how to heal this collective history of pain and struggle. The answer, she found, is through the collective love of communities, the redemptive love of spirituality, and the individual love of each other. Once answered within her, and reconciled with her feminist ideals, hooks took this question to the larger communities of classrooms and universities where she taught. What she saw in her young black female students was “the same problems that are so acutely visible among the black poor and underclass, problems that are usually seen by liberals in the larger society as rooted primarily in economics” (12). We can clearly see that the diasporic connections of African Americans span the racial, sexual, and class boundaries established by contemporary society; so too should the healing power of communal love. 

In Corregidora this notion of healing through communal love is confused by the sexual and historical dynamics of the text. The familial community of Corregidora women is unable to heal, or even truly love one another because they are so consumed with their history of abuse and the need for “historical vengeance” through generations. Similarly, the relationship with Ursa’s friend Cat becomes confused when she finds out that Cat is having a lesbian relationship with Jeffy, a teenager whom she watches from their neighborhood. Besides Tadpole, the friendship with Cat is the one relationship that holds the most potential in Ursa’s life for a woman-centered love, but that love is never allowed to actualize because of fear. Because Cat is physically abusive to Jeffy and appears to force their sexual intimacy, violence and domination taint Cat’s lesbian relationship, which is similar to the heterosexual relationships portrayed within the text. Instead of offering a feminized space free of violence and domination, which could be used by Ursa to heal the pain of her past, Cat becomes another masculinized force of authority. Ursa never examines the intriguing yet frightening possibilities of a lesbian relationship because she chooses to abandon the friendship with Cat rather than confront her feelings.

“I sat on the cedar chest with my robe open, then I got dressed. I think if Cat or Jeffy had come into the room then, I would’ve got evil. I would have got right evil. It wasn’t until years later that I realized it might have been because of my own fears, the things I’d thought about in the hospital, my own worries about what being with a man would be like again, and whether I really had the nerve to try. But then I just felt evil.” (Jones 1975, 48). 

Instead of attempting to understand her fear, Ursa runs to Tadpole.

In the beginning of their relationship, Tadpole is kind and acquiesces to Ursa’s control. He feeds her, gives her shelter, and attempts to heal her physical body. Initially he does not expect a great deal from Ursa physically or emotionally. He appears content in giving physical sustenance and does not pressure her for a sexual relationship or an emotional intimacy beyond what she is initially comfortable giving. He allows her the silence that she needs to situate herself within a life not governed by the act of childbearing. She allows him to physically heal her, yet she never opens herself up to the possibility of emotional vulnerability within the relationship. As time progresses, Tadpole becomes more aggressive, elevating their relationship to a sexual one as well as demanding emotional vulnerability that Ursa is uncomfortable with and unwilling to give. Her refusal to be controlled by Tadpole’s desire leads to an outward display of his bitterness and need to dominate her both physically and emotionally. Through her refusal to acquiesce, she realizes that his love is no different than Corregidora’s love for Great Gram. Although Tadpole initially appears to offer the possibility of healing through a “masculine” willingness to provide without the expectation of domination, his anger and violence at her refusal to subjugate herself to masculine authority reinforces rather than reinscribes the Corregidora legacy.      

Now that we have a language that enables us to examine the various roles that love assumes in our lives critically, it is important to bring to light the distinction between love and erotic attraction. In her essay Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, Audre Lorde defined the erotic as “a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling. Of course, women so empowered are dangerous. So we are taught to separate the erotic from most vital areas of our lives other than sex” (1984, 53).  We see here that erotic love (eros) is combined with the divine love (agape) as well as a communal female love (philos). We also see erotic love as being associated with power; women are empowered by erotic love, therefore, that love must be suppressed and expressed only through the physical act of sexual intercourse. Love functions in Lorde’s epistemology similarly to hooks, as a healing force that consists of feminine desires repressed by a patriarchal culture. In this sense we see love as a combination of all of its possible forms, distinctly feminine, and corrupted from its original state of beauty by being linked solely to the physical aspects of erotic attraction.

Understanding erotic love in Jones’ text is difficult as love, sexuality, resistance, and the role of memory all intertwine in the creation of black feminist agency and expression. The acquisition of sexual agency through resistance and its role in the Corregidora women’s collective memory is ultimately realized in Great Gram’s narrative of castration on a neighboring plantation. The recollection of this act of literal castration by a neighboring female Brazilian slave serves for her the duel function of the ultimate realization of power through sexual resistance and as a warning against sexual resistance to the hegemonic power structure. Ursa’s mother illustrates this link as she retells the matrilineal legacy saying,

“Any of them, even them he had out in the fields, if he wonted them, he just ship their husbands out of bed, and get in there with them, but didn't nothing happen like what happened over on that plantation, cause I guess that other plantation served as a warning, cause they might wont your pussy, but if you do anything to get back at them, it’ll be your life they be wonting, and then they make even that some kind of a sex show, all them beatings and killings wasn’t nothing but sex circuses, and all them white peoples, mens, womens, and childrens crowding around to see…” (Jones 1975, 125).

In this passage we can clearly see how sexual resistance and memory are directly linked within the collective consciousness of the Corregidora women. In Great Gram’s case, the institution of slavery robbed her of the sexual and personal power that Ursa is struggling throughout the text to situate within herself. The role of sexual agency within the institution of slavery is questioned throughout the text in Great Gram’s memories. We see how powerful female sexuality is within the text, but that power is subverted by the institution of slavery. Great Gram was forced to choose between resistance, which created a loss of life, and submission, which created a loss of self. As a result, she defined sexuality as the site of oppression and passed down this legacy of pain as she “made generations” with Corregidora.

As with Ursa, “making generations” and making love were confused in the relationship between Great Gram and Corregidora. There remains throughout the text the question that only Ursa’s father Martin has the courage to ask, “How much was hate for Corregidora and how much was love?” Although an integral part of Ursa’s healing process, the question is never explicitly answered and remains open to the reader’s interpretation, confusing even further the line drawn between love and hate. This division between love and hate is further illustrated in the struggle between the desire for an identity unburdened by historical memories and one wholly consumed by those memories. In this sense, one can ask a similar question about identity as Martin asked about love… how much of the Corregidora women’s identities are rooted in the past and how much are rooted in the present? Ashraf Rushdy addresses this issue of identity formation in his essay “Relate Sexual to Historical: Race, Resistance, and Desire in Gayl Jones's Corregidora” when he states, “The oral/familial tale in which the past is remembered and offered as a resource for the formation of contemporary identity—a place where voices that carry through time produce both history and personal life memory—is also a place where one’s identity can be broken on the edge of family memory” (2000, 275). Suffering from an inability or lack of desire to examine and question the history passed down to her critically, Ursa continues to act out the familial plot until she is unable to do so physically. At this point she is forced to create an individual identity separate from the past, forced to face the possibility of a redemptive healing love and not solely a subjective painful love.

An integration of erotic, fraternal, and spiritual love is, in hook’s perspective, the only way to have love be a healing force within our lives. hooks asserts “Because we are spiritually empty we try to fill up on consumerism. We may not have enough love but we can always shop. Our national spiritual hunger springs from a keen awareness of the emotional lack in our lives. It is a response to lovelessness” (2000, 72). hooks goes on to say that by spiritual hunger she does not mean a need for organized religion and the accompanying dogma which often serves to uphold the values of a “production-centered commodity culture” (74). Rather, she means a need for acceptance of, and belief in, a higher power than ourselves, i.e., the power of love. In essence, “A commitment to spiritual life necessarily means we embrace the eternal principle that love is all, everything, our true destiny. Despite overwhelming pressure to conform to the culture of lovelessness, we still seek to know love” (77). In seeking to know love, we create within our communities and intimate relationships a spiritual awakening that allows the knowledge of, and commitment to, loves redemptive and healing power over our lives. In the circular nature of healing, “All awakening to love is spiritual awakening” (hooks 83).

In Corregidora blues music functions as the healing and redemptive spiritual love. It opens for Ursa, and all of the black women before and after her, a space beyond the public and private, a space of collective catharsis where pain is felt and released through the rhythmic force of music. It is through singing the blues that Ursa is able to give voice to the pain within her that must be healed. Ursa’s inability to give and receive love within her relationships is played out within the text as the antagonism between singing the blues and her relationship with Mutt. Her inability to be emotionally and physically intimate in her relationship with Mutt causes him to become resentful and jealous of Ursa’s blues singing, the one part of her life where she openly expresses intimacy and vulnerability. As with hooks’ theory of the necessity for harmonizing the various forms of love to create healing, Ursa struggles throughout the text to integrate the fragmentation caused by her familial legacy of pain. In order to begin healing she must find a way to incorporate the past symbolized by the legacy of pain with the present symbolized by love and healing. 

Ursa eventually locates this healing process through the disruption of her matrilineal legacy, uncovering the Corregidora family secret and positioning herself within a space that allows for the expression of her emotional and sexual desire. She must choose whether she will give pleasure or pain, resist or submit. In a key scene in the novel, Ursa recognizes the power that female sexuality embodies as giver of pleasure and the potential for real castration. Ursa vocalizes her realization through the repetition of the phrase, “I could kill you.” With this act she is able to make the connection between not only herself and her ancestral pain, but also the connection between Mutt and the generations of black men who have come before him that were emasculated and castrated, both literally and figuratively, by the institution of slavery. She finally realizes that the past holds important knowledge and must be recalled, but it cannot be relived as the Corregidora women have been attempting to do through “making generations.” Her understanding of the need to heal through love is verbalized in Ursa’s internal dialogue as she is swallowing, for the first time, Mutt’s semen and her painful past.

“It was like I didn’t know how much was me and Mutt and how much was Great Gram and Corregidora—like Mama when she had started talking like Great Gram. But was what Corregidora had done to her, to them, any worse than what Mutt had done to me, than what we had done to each other, than what Mama had done to Daddy, or what he had done to her in return, making her walk down the street looking like a whore?” (184).

Here we finally see Ursa come to terms with the interconnectedness of her life and her pain. She has finally become aware of the circular and repetitive nature of pain. Just as Mutt has realized the importance of the blues to her healing, Ursa has realized the importance of moving forward and the importance of learning how to both give and receive love in all of its various forms. Although the text ends without an overt accomplishment of Ursa’s healing, it is apparent that her journey from fragmentation to wholeness through love has begun. The fine line between pleasure and pain, love and hate, and masculinity and femininity, is exposed and Ursa is, for the first time, given the freedom to choose which side of the line she will stand behind when constructing her subjective identity.

It is the healing power of love that enables us to reconcile what we experience with what we desire, and it is critically examining the healing power of love that enables us to examine how love functions within our lives and communities. In Corregidora, as in hooks’ theoretical model, love does not function for black women as the purified and romanticized ideal of traditional Western thought. Rather, love proves redemptive only when it can be understood and practiced in our everyday lives. Love is not simply sexual expression and a fulfillment of individual desire. It is a fluid movement through black female spirituality, collective catharsis, and erotic attraction. Love is the mobilization of communities with the express purpose of instituting change, healing the past, and establishing a future open to experiencing love outside of ourselves. This practice of mobilization is what allows hooks’ feminist theory to function as praxis for healing black women, and it is that healing which allows for stronger and healthier communities.  

REFERENCES

DuCille, Ann. (2000) “Phallus(ies) of Interpretation: Toward Engendering the Black Critical I.” African American Literary Theory. Ed. Winston Napier. New York: NYU Press, 443-459.
Harris, Janice. (1981). “Gayl Jones’ Corregidora”. Frontiers 3, 2.
hooks, bell. (2000). all about love. New York: HarperCollins.
---------(1993). Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery. Cambridge: South End Press.
hooks, bell and Tanya McKinnon. (1996). “Sisterhood: Beyond Public and Private.” Signs 21.4, 814-829.
Jones, Gayl. (1975).  Corregidora. Boston: Beacon Press.
Lorde, Audre (1984). "Uses of the Erotic: The erotic as Power." Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 53-59.
Rushdy, Ashraf H.A. (2000) “ Relate Sexual to Historical: Race, Resistance, and Desire in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora.” African American Review, 273-297.
Walker, Alice. (1984).  In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose. Harcourt Brace.