BROKEN BLUES: THE GRAMMAR OF SILENCE IN CORREGIDORA By Nick Erichson

BROKEN BLUES: THE GRAMMAR OF SILENCE IN CORREGIDORA
By Nick Erichson

The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and
episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching
consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to
transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but
by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic
lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical
chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.
— Ralph Ellison
“There is no binary division to be made between what
one says and what one does not say; we must try to
determine the different ways of not saying such things,
how those who can and those who cannot speak of
them are distributed, which type of discourse is
authorized, or which form of discretion is required in
either case. There is not one but many silences, and
they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie
and permeate discourses.”

― Michel Foucault,
The History of Sexuality, Volume 1
Much of contemporary feminist and critical-race criticism
focuses its attention on the achievement of “voice,” with the act of
“speech” serving as metonymy for material empowerment and
liberation. Such analyses often rely on an (often explicit) binarism
which sets the liberatory power of speech against the stifling
oppression of silence: one fails to exercise vocality only if
disempowered, disenfranchised, muzzled, or gagged. Whether rooted in social coercion or physical imposition, silence is chosen for the
subject, never by.
In Gayle Jones’ Corregidora, a novel which explores the
ramifications of trauma and historical oppression in the constitution of
black female subjectivity, silence figures as heavily in dialogue as
speech itself. Perhaps the most prolific leitmotif in the novel is a
pronoun (usually, narrator Ursa’s “I”) along with the phrase “said
nothing,” a silence which echoes across Ursa’s conversations with
family members, amorous suitors, and abusive paramours.
Considering the popular treatment of “voice” in contemporary literary
discourse, a monophonic treatment of Ursa’s silence rings bright and
tempting: if speech is a clear reflection or site of empowerment,
Ursa’s silences evince a total dearth of agency. But such a reading
risks muffling the complex timbre of Jones’ narrative. In a host of
interviews and editorial pieces, Jones has labeled the canon of her
early work, inclusive of Corregidora, “blues narratives.” While the
narrative content of blues music is readily apparent in Corregidora—
both offer a realist account of black existence attuned to historical
trauma, diasporic exchange and the tribulations of everyday life—
Jones also draws upon the formal elements of the blues in both Ursa’s
personal dialogue and Corregidora’s overarching structure.
As such, Ursa’s silences are best contextualized through the
lens of music, specifically the blues, where silence can serve as a
structuring compositional element with contextually specific semantic
content. I argue that Ursa’s silences can be divided into four essential
types—stiflings, rests, and breaks—which, when read through the culturally specific frame of the blues, each reveal a unique facet of
Ursa’s conflicted subject position.
Ursa’s first set of silences—what I have labeled stiflings—
most closely align with traditional conceptions of silence as
disempowerment. These non-musical silences occur when an outer
force subjugates Ursa in to silence, rendering her unable to vocalize
her agency and preserve her subjectivity; they serve as a textual
imagining of the skipping record, the malfunctioning instrument, the
unwanted evacuation of all phonic content from clearly musical work.
The Corregidora women’s narrative is defined by stiflings, back to the
very moment when Brazilian authorities burned all records of the
women’s mistreatment at the hands of Corregidora. As a response,
each member of the Corregidora family has been implored to “make
generations,” or produce offspring to recount their legacy of rape and
abuse. This representational burden is inscribed in Ursa’s very name:
“Ursa” is the Latin noun for the animal “bear,” and the “Corregidor”
was a type of early Spanish judicial official, translated literally as
“corrector” (Encyclopedia Britannica). From birth, Ursa’s subjectivity
has been inscribed with the verbal homophone of the English
translation of Latin nominal “ursa,” the imperative to “bear,” whether
by reproduction or her own account, the “correction” of the historical
narrative of Corregidora’s crimes.
This capacity is imperiled, however, by Ursa’s first personal
“stiflings” in the early pages of the novel: her abusive husband Mutt
attempts to remove her from the stage during a song at Happy’s, later
engaging her in a physical altercation which leads to a miscarriage
and emergency hysterectomy. Recovering in the hospital after the incident, Ursa remarks, “It feels… as if part of my life’s already
marked out for me—the barren part” (6). Ursa’s phrasing in this
passage suggests a highly conflicted interiority: she experiences this
silencing as both an inscription, a marking out of her score, and an
absence, her interiority a vacuum which allows for no transmission of
sound. Ursa draws upon the language of song and instrumentation to
illustrate her resulting affect: in an imagined “response” to Mutt in
one of her fragmented, dream-like narratives, Ursa describes her
infertility as, “a harp string broken, guitar string, string of my broken
belly” (46), later referring to this infertility as “silence in [her] womb”
(99). With birth serving as metonymy for oral transmission in the
Corregidora family, the body serves as a site of personal narrative, the
vagina inextricable from the mouth. Mutt’s actions render both mute:
during sex, Ursa’s vagina is numb to sensation, and stimulation of her
clitoris (the site of personal, non-reproductive pleasure) leads only to
intense pain. She approaches the motions of intercourse mechanically
and passively, usually acquiescing to her partner’s demands and
letting the numbness of her vagina insulate her from discomfort. A
musical analysis of these stiflings is explicit in the text. Ursa’s
body—her instrument of expression—is rendered voiceless, mute. To
strum her broken strings yields only jabbed fingers and fresh wounds.
Ursa’s attempts to reconstitute her subjectivity in the face of
such absences take shape in her employment of rests and breaks,
musical motifs with a more specific location in the context of the
blues. In silences taking the form of the “stop,” Ursa specifically
rejects her role in narratives imposed on her by outer forces, reasserting boundaries between herself and her past and preserving
her interiority. According to Encyclopedia Britannica,
The blues is characterized by expressive
“microtonal” pitch inflections (blue notes), a three-line
textual stanza of the form AAB [a form of call-and-response],
and a 12-measure form. Typically the first two and a half
measures of each line are devoted to singing, the last measure
and a half consisting of an instrumental “break” that repeats,
answers, or complements the vocal line.
Elaborating on the AAB “callback” form, blues historian Chris
Slatten writes,
Perhaps one of the easiest clues to identifying a blues song is
the pattern of the lyrics, or words. You’ll often hear 3 lines of
rhyming lyrics, typically expressing very strong emotions.
The singer sings a line and then repeats it (though it might be
sung slightly differently the second time to emphasize the
emotion being expressed). The singer then sings a different
third line that often responds to or reflects on the previous 2
lines. (Strathmore)
The AAB form takes literal shape in a host of dialogues in
Corregidora, best exemplified by Ursa and Cat’s discussion of Mutt:
“If that nigger love me he wouldn’t’ve throwed me down the
steps,” I called [A]…
“I said if that nigger loved me he wouldn’t’ve throwed me
down the steps.” [A]
“I know niggers love you do worse than that,” she said [B]
(36)
Ursa’s “stops” occur when she rejects her role in furnishing a
“response” (“B”) to externalized dialogues following the AAB form,
as when she recalls being harassed by a stranger outside Happy’s:
He said, “Whose woman is you?” I wouldn’t look at him.
“‘Whose woman is you’ I asked.” I still wouldn’t answer.
“You got your bitch on today, ain’t you?” I stood there.
“I said, ‘Ain’t you got your bitch on today?” (147)

Often, such dialogues occur within Ursa’s hostile intimate
relationships; in a violent sexual imposition by Mutt, Ursa recounts,
He’d kept asking, “What’s wrong baby? Ursa, honey, what’s
wrong?”…
“I can’t, Mutt.”
“Hell if you can’t, you got a cunt, ain’t you?”
I said nothing.
“What’s wrong, baby? What do you call it?”
I still wouldn’t answer. (152)
Interactions such as this one—threats, harassment, and general
encroachments upon Ursa’s subjectivity—present Ursa with a cruel
and malfeasant song, one in which she desires no part. To raise
protest or objection, however, would only complete the form of the
song presented to her; to disengage completely from this abnegating
structure, Ursa chooses to remain silent. Though situated firmly in
resistance rather than pure empowerment, these cases of silence
represent an intentional act of defiance on Ursa’s part, an experience
completely counter to her aforementioned experiences of disabling
muteness.
Ursa’s final silences—which I have termed breaks—occur
when Ursa is silent following a particularly charged passage or
exchange, often one following the aforementioned AAB form. For
example, Ursa is racked with silence when her mother offers her own
account of her negotiation with romance and Corrigidora’s abuse
(131); similarly, when overcome with anger after discovering
Tadpole’s infidelity, Ursa is drawn into silence before remarking “I
was holding back too much now,” leaving Tadpole’s room and
consequently, their relationship (91). Music critic Bill Broughton
describes the break as the moment when a song “Takes a breather,
drops down… and then comes storming back again” (79). In the
blues, breaks offer the vocalist a chance to rest, allowing the
surrounding instrumentation to take over the expressive space of the
voice and “signify” on preceding musical passages. The break often
serves as an airier juxtaposition to both the preceding and following
musical phrase, drawing clear delineations in a musical passage. In
the context of Ursa’s personal and historical narrative, then, Ursa’s
employment of the break can be seen as an attempt to reinstall
boundaries between herself and her history, or to “riff”/signify on her
past experiences and create space for herself to “explain… Without
words” (66). As with the AAB callback structure, the break is made manifest in the logic of Ursa’s familial history: Ursa’s Great-Grandmother was raped and abused by Corregidora [A]; Ursa’s Grandmother suffered similar abuse at his hands, with slight variation
in subject-position and form [A]; Ursa’s mother lived a full life in response to this legacy, remaining conscripted to Great-Grandmother’s plea to “make generations” [B]. In the Corregidora women’s historical song, Ursa occupies the position of the break, the
electric fourth and final “measure.” Her existence, while forced to
tarry with the structures imposed on her by previous historical
measures, offers a space for change and progression; while defined by
a certain sort of silence (in this case, Ursa’s infertility), it allows for
expanded forms of non-verbal expression, beckoning the possibility
of a new beginning. As the novel progresses, Ursa demonstrates fewer
stiflings and rests and increases her use of the break; the novel ends
on a scene wherein Ursa performs fellatio on Mutt, begetting a
“break” by voluntarily silencing her primary instrument of expression
(184). While performing the act, Ursa recalls the fact that her
grandmother once bit Corregidora’s penis during the course of oral
sex, becoming aware of her own power in the moment but deciding
not to repeat the action on Mutt. In the course of her break, Ursa at
once confronts the power and agency to be found in her submissive
position and rejects the narrative imposed on her by the generational
trauma of her ancestry, electing instead to “riff” on it, acknowledging
her history while reconstituting it in a formulation more closely
aligned to her personal desires. In the course of the break, Ursa moves
towards self-constitution, towards the reconstruction of an interiority
previously defined by history and trauma.
Though this essay has attempted to furnish some rudimentary
classifications for Ursa’s silences, it would be a disservice to Jones to
assert that each instance of Ursa’s speechlessness can be made to
perfectly fit such a critical frame. The blues, as a genre, is defined by
improvisation, variation, and disjunction; in Corregidora, this
movement, change, and context-specificity plays as great a role in the
logic of Ursa’s experience as do formal structures like the AAB
callback form. However, this close reading of Ursa’s silences and
their overarching structures performs important work in tracing the
development of Ursa’s subjectivity, revealing a more nuanced portrait
of her interior aims, motives, and history.

Works Cited

Brewster, Bill and Frank Broughton. How to DJ Right: The Art and
Science of Playing Records. Grove Press, 2003.
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Blues.” Encyclopædia
Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 25 Feb. 2019,
www.britannica.com/art/blues-music.
Foucault, Michel, and Robert Hurley. The History of Sexuality.
Penguin, 2008. Jones, Gayl. Corregidora. Beacon Press, 1998.
Sedgwick, Eve. Epistemology of the Closet. University of California
Press, 2008.
“What Makes the Blues Sound like the Blues?” Strathmore, www.strathmore.org/shades-of-blues/education-portal/blues-
clues.

Nick Erichson, a first-year from Austin, Texas, is pursuing a double
major in English and Philosophy with a correlate in Political Theory.
Their academic interests include English literature, critical theory,
politics, ethics, creative writing, and electronic music composition.
They serve as Senator for Student Affairs for the Class of 2022 and
enjoy working within a number of campus social justice organizations
and literary/academic publications. After graduation, Nick hopes to
pursue graduate study in the humanities or a career in labor
organizing/abolition work.

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