Synopsis

Gayl Joness novels center upon African-American females. She writes in the first person, often in a non-chronological order. Jones claims that her novels based on the blues form with an emphasis on the wrongs men commit against women and the ways in which women suffer. She is highly regarded and innovative voice of African-American women. She describes the many aspects of racism, sexism, and history from a womans perspective, coloring all with a dark and disturbing tone. She is credited as one of the first writers to focus extensively on historical, racial, and sexual violence and its relationship to AfricanAmerican women. She has earned the praise of fellow writers such as Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and John Updike. The first chapter discusses brief biography of Jones with the statement of the thesis. The second chapter conducts a review on the authors performance to authorize the scholarship of Jones.

The third chapter History depicts Joness innovative use of oral forms from African-American culture is responsible for the favorable reviews from Black Nationalist critics. In An Interview with Gayl Jones

Charles Rowell says, Jones discusses how her use of oral

traditions progressed from an unconscious storytelling device to a deliberate narrative choice: I didnt think out the fact that my early stories were written in first person as if an audience were being spoken to and that this sense of speaking to people rather than writing to them was important to me . . . It wasnt until Corregidora that this became a deliberate decision and conscious working out, the specific connections between Afro-American oral traditions and literary forms. (33) Joness novels depend upon and manipulate the relationship between storyteller and audience. Jones says
that as she was writing both Corregidora and her second novel, Evas Man, she was particularly interested in oral traditions of storytelling. women. Ursas story is intimate history of and for black

It tells a story of black female subjectivity and tells

it in a way that relies on an intimacy between the storyteller and her audience. History needs to be preserved in the name of justice. Corregidora thematizes a concern with the transmission of culture and with the recording and judging of a history of violence. Jones draws on the blues in a way that enables the

voice of her protagonists. Finding and speaking from that blues voice in many cases encourages power and change. For Ursa of Corregidora, that power and change result from her reconciliation with her slave heritage, and for Eva they follow from her exploring lesbianism. Jones draws from the blues history to address a different audience that of contemporary African-American women as opposed to European Americans. Jones uses the novel, a Western form to explain the history, and incorporates the blues as a way of explaining it to enable her commentary on the lives of African-American women. Jones explores some of the same themes as the history of blues in Evas Man. Evas blues center on themes of history, reminiscence, sexual history, poverty, and racism. Eva tells the reader early on in her narration about Elvira, her cellmate, who makes sexual advances toward her, but to no avail. By the end of the novel Eva succumbs to Elviras advances by allowing her to perform oral sex on her. This controversial ending, which functions in the same fashion as a blues signature in oral performance, distances the reader from the narration, while at the same time causes her to reflect on her own sexual identity The novels The Healing and Mosquito contain international characters of African descent as well as lengthy historical ruminations on other ethnic groups and the imaginative role of Africa. Joness The Healing functions as a kind of decolonizing

agent amid late twentieth century American literary and popular culture. Jones risks all kinds of gaps in logic and development. Sometimes she leaps the chasm and sometimes she takes a nose dive, but on the whole the dares are worth her trouble. After establishing the authority and viability of the black female faith healer in the initial two chapters, the dialect becomes more elastic and complex as the story within a story shifts flashbacks and increasingly shorter to the relationship between Harlan and Joan. Jones uses this uses this transition only point out that the content of characters experiences and observations is ultimately more important than their relationships with each other. The novels attitude is revealed most notably through the complex linguistic techniques of its protagonist, Harlan Jane Eagleton, a figure whose highly fluid identity is reflected in her manner of speaking. Although Harlan is extremely curious, open-minded, and socially transcendent, occasionally she is ridiculed for her humble origins and lack of conventional education. Harlans unconventional, adaptable identity ultimately is one of international semantic proportions. She is called Dottoressa in Milan and Curandera in Brazil (13), each name carrying with it slightly different linguistic meanings, the nuances of divergent cultural connotations. Harlan herself is acutely aware of these variations, manipulating and nuancing her identity at will in to

various situations.

Since the publication of Corregidora, Evas

Man, and The Healing Joneswork has garnered substantial critical attention from scholars, particularly those reconsidering the painful histories and legacies of slavery and the black female body. The scholarly discourse on Mosquito, has been sparse, even though the novel directly treats one of the most prominent threads in current scholarship on the African diaspora black internationalism. Joness novel develops a detailed account of a US African-American internationalism that interrogates and goes beyond recent discourse by positioning an individual who is not only black but also both female and working class as the agent of this border crossing. Joness main character and novel display is not simply border crossing. Jones consciously and powerfully articulates a new type of hemispherism. Jones constructs Mosquito as an individual who explicitly claims knowledge of the US Southwest, in particular, and the world, in general, for herself and for other cosmopolitan Negroes, to employ Mosquitos term. Mosquito is a

king sized US African-American truck driver who travels from place to place, making connections with Native Americans, Chicanos, and other inhabitants of America. She works on the new underground railroad transporting Mexicans across the US border, at first unknowingly and quite consciously. Mosquito observes and relates the many histories and realities that characterize

life in America, in addition to holding forth on such things as sociocultural theory. Her closest friend is a Chicana intellectual and bartender, Delgadina, who introduces the ironically named Mosquito to the histories, languages, and cultures of the borderlands. Mosquito provides a paradigm for incorporating US African Americans into hemispherist American studies, while also calling attention to the existence of a genealogy of US African American hemispherism and locating itself within it. At the same time, Jones distinguishes her text in noteworthy ways, including making her protagonist significantly different from the exemplary man. Four other aspects of Joness model stand out. First, Mosquito gains and expresses knowledge about communities beyond her own. She works to decipher various local ways of thinking, seeing, and speaking instead of simply being aware of their existence. Mosquito goes beyond basic references to nations and cultures from all over the globe, to employing them in her effort to fathom the vast dimensions of human consciousness. Second, her movements across borders do not replace her link to historical and cultural community. Mosquito names and claims her US African Americanisms even as she creates and names connections with the non-US and the non US African American. Third, Jones critically analyses philosophical discourses on the

historical, contemporary, and future makeup and import of continental America. Mosquito confronts the meaning of the US Mexican border and the concept of the cosmic race. Fourth, she makes us aware of the consistent presence of the voice of Mosquitos Chicana intellectual friend, Delgadina, and the periodic but substantive presence of the voice of her US African-American friend Monkey Bread. By positioning these women as narrative voices at key points, Jones creates a community of speaking cosmopolites who are women of color and who also represent disparate elements of the American community and consciousness. Mosquito the character, because of this sharing of the narrative voice, avoids the burden of having to be the exemplary one. Mosquito is able to escape the trap because epistemology is at the heart of Jones intervention. Fourth chapter Race discuses much of black womens struggle has been characterized by the difficulty in navigating the interrelationship between white supremacy and male superiority. The traditional colour or gender discrimination in the public sphere of paid employment or the private sphere of unpaid familial responsibilities in America has never favoured worked for black women. They also worked for food and shelter without pay in the Southern agricultural industry under racial oppression. The white male harnessed black female sexuality and

fertility to fit into a system of capitalist exploitation. Black womens bodies were commodified to of oppression. perpetuate the institution

Child bearing, paradoxical became one of the few

ways for the enslaved black women to exert power since their fertility produced the children that affected their owners property and labour force. What mothers of black race sacrificed in the past continues into the present in different forms, changing their life and also the paradigm of modern American culture. Gayl Joness novels, Corregidora and Evas Man are critically ambivalent. Criticism of these novels has tended towards evaluation, and even condemnation. The novels actively work to generate radical contradiction. They work to dismantle the social structures and discourses or positioning of the black female subject. The protagonists of these novels do not have proper access to anything as stable and fixed as identity, a position to live without conflict and confrontation. They made an attempt to speak their subjectivity both within and outside the discourses which place their identity from marginal to subjectivity. Joness protagonists, Ursa Corregidora and Eva Medina Canada, are entangled racist structures, in order to forge an identity uncontaminated by them. Such an idealistic social reformer would do nothing to dismantle the

representational and social structures that enforce the marginality of minority subjectivities. Evas Man begins with the dreams of Eva Medina Canada. She is in a prison asylum for poisoning and castrating Davis Caster. She takes the victims insight into the vulnerability of the oppressor to its logical. The details of the events leading up to Evas act are murky. Eva was kept as a prisoner for five days in the hotel room. This is one of several competing interpretations the novel offers. The narration of Evas Man is composed of dreams, memories, interrogations and exchanges between Eva and her cell-mate Elvira. It is a narration, it is originating in Evas consciousness and is fragmented and disjoined. Eva is an unreliable narrator who takes control over her story, but does not put the pieces of the puzzle together. The narration resists unity and the reader is left to soak up Evas experience, just as Evas consciousness throughout her life is presented as a kind of sponge, soaking up the scenes she has witnessed and participated in. Unlike the Corregidora women, Eva exercises a certain control over her narration; while Great Gram and grandmamma speak in a kind of automatic repetition beyond their agency, and are unable to change the narration of their race. Evas narration actively shapes her race so that

others representations of her are displaced by her selfrepresentation. Joness later novels, The Healing and Mosquito, press the limits of the novel in an entirely different direction, by evoking the sound and form of oral storytelling. The narrator of The Healing is a faith healer who can cure afflictions of both the body and mind; the narrator of Mosquito is an AfricanAmerican woman truck driver in South Texas who becomes involved in the new Underground Railroad, transporting illegal immigrants and providing sanctuary. The cultural endeavor begins over the course of The Healing deftly resist American hegemony in an Afrocentric context, while aiding its victims-continues in Mosquito, in which Jones renders her characterizations, ideas, and general literary techniques in increasingly layered and ambitions terms. The Healing has been celebrate as a fleshing out of Jones style, and meagre racial concerns became for some readers of Mosquito an excessive and ill-considered meditation on topics about which she might better have remained silent. Stretching the genre paradigms of the novel, Mosquito makes its own laws and breaks new ground in its unconventional storytelling techniques or radicalizing the novel form at the risk of inviting censure. It is for the accustomed structural standards of fiction matched by its unflinching

confrontation of stereotypes and interactions across cultures. Full of spirit and adventure, burlesque and caricature, Mosquito eludes the literary border guards and fingers the new commissions of culture. It is an important novel in the sense that stereotype is explored not primarily through the conventional perspective of white people objectifying nonwhites, or the postcolonial emphasis on colonizers representing the colonized, but rather as a racial practice within and between minority communities. Subordinating the invasive presence of the dominant culture, Jones instead interrogates interactions among African Americans and Latinos, symbolically maintaining that their mutual discourse is of greater importance than their shared dialogue with white America. At the centre of these cultural dynamics is the narrator, Sojourner Nadine Jane Nzingha (Mosquito), the non-negotiable spirit of a warrior class woman. Fifth chapter expresses the sexism from a womens perspective, coloring all with a dark and disturbing tone. Jones is credited as one of the first writers to focus extensively on sexual violence and its relationship to African American women. Gayl Joness first novel, Corregidora, focuses on the lingering effects of slavery in black America specifically on its sexual and psychological manifestations in the life of Ursa

Corregidora, a Kentucky blues singer. The great granddaughter of a Portuguese plantation owner who fathered not only her grandmother but also her mother, and who used his progeny both in the fields and in his own whorehouse, Ursa is unable to free herself of painful and obsessive family memories. In each personal relationship she finds yet again the sickness of the master- slave dynamic. Her short lived first marriage is convulsive with desire, possessiveness, humiliation, and violence; her second marriage fails as she cannot forget the first. In relating Ursas story, Jones shows the difficulty of loving when abusive relationships have been naturalized by cultural continuity, when so much has been taken that ones only dignity is in withholding. Her taut and explicit idiom, sometimes plainly narrative, sometimes wildly stream-ofconsciousness, captures the nuances of a tormented sexuality that is both specific to black experience and symptomatic of our troubled gender system. I knew what I still felt. I knew that I still hated him. Not as bad as then not with the first feeling, but an after feeling, an aftertaste, or like an odor still in a room when you come back to it, and its your own (183) . The novel ends unbearably intense but strangely hopeful, suggests that we may begin to

heal ourselves only as we confront the deep sexual hatred that pervades our lives. Whereas Corregidora allows us to perceive the construction of personality as sexual process, Evas Man offers a very different kind of experience. Eva Canada, the main character of the novel, tells her tale from an institution for the criminally insane, where she has been imprisoned for a hideous sexual crime of murder and dental castration. Like Ursa, Eva has been damaged by abuse and by a legacy of violence; unlike the protagonist of Corregidora, she has no sense of how her past motivates her present. As she speaks her disjointed narration, an ugly story disrupted by flashes of recalled nastiness, she remains alien to us, a personality beyond promise or repair: I put my hand on his hand, I kissed his hand, his neck. I put my fingers in the space above his eyes, but did not close them. They d come and put copper coins over them. Thats why they told you not to suck pennies. I put my forehead under his chin. He was warm. The glass had spilled from his hand. I put my tongue between his parted lips. I kissed his teeth. (128) In Evas Man, Jones takes us into the pathological mind, and we do not find ourselves there. As the tidy reader-protagonist identification is denied us, we are left with the horror of what

we cant sympathetically imagine. Joness unflinching violation of our strongest taboos raises a number of questions about the roles of writers, readers, and cultural conventions. Joness later novels, The Healing and Mosquito, press the limits of the novel in an entirely different direction, by evoking the sound and form of oral storytelling. The narrator of The Healing is a faith healer who can cure afflictions of both the body and mind; the narrator of Mosquito is an AfricanAmerican woman truck driver in South Texas who becomes involved in the new Underground Railroad, transporting illegal immigrants and providing sanctuary. Both of these narrators experience transformation and a change of consciousness. Harlan Jane Eagleton, the narrator of The Healing, tells her tale backwards. She moves from her experience as a faith healer to her previous career as the manager of the rock star. Her affairs with Joans husband and with an African-German horse breeder, her brief marriage to a medical anthropologist, and her first career, to a medical anthropologist, and her first career, as a beautician. As a faith healer, Harlan continues to promote natural beauty products and to listen to Joans music. The bodyguard of her horse-breeder lover is her witness, so that all of the experiences of Harlans life inform her contemporary identify as a healer. Harlans ability to heal is never

explained; instead, the retrospective narrative stands in for the explanation, suggesting that Harlans increasing independence and ability to manage herself eventually leads to her ability to heal herself, and then to heal others. African-American womens independence is a major theme in Mosquito as well. Mosquito herself is an independent truck driver who refuses to join the union and who eventually forms the worker-owned Mosquito Trucking Company. Her childhood friend, Monkey Bread, joins the Daughters of Nzingha, an African-American womens group that pursues womanish philosophy and advocates economic independence for its members. This emphasis on independence complements rather than contradicts the novels other main theme of independence. It is because Mosquito remains independent from the union that she can carry immigrants in the back of her truck and thereby discharge her social obligations to the immigrants that she understands to be the contemporary versions of fugitive slaves. Final chapter is the summation of the previous chapters it concludes with the analysis.