Happy this took me a few days to read. The heaviness calls for careful attention and time to marinate. ( )

Um, no. I didn't like the subject matter if this book. The protagonist's sole purpose in life, she feels, is generating: babies, that is. She's young and apparently can't be without a man, and when her husband pushes her down the stairs, causing her to miscarry, doctors take out her uterus, for some reason. Now she's just so bummed out because she can't have a baby. I guess the author never heard of anti-natalism, climate change and NAFTA. ( )

This was not the book for me. Important, yes, in brutally revealing the lives of black enslaved women and their subsequent generations of daughters. But detailing domestic abuse, sexual assault, violent relationships, and graphic sex and language just was too much for me to stomach.

I feel some guilt when I react this way to a book. Who am I to not even be able to read about these topics when so many women lived it? But there it is. I skimmed sections and made it to the end. Barely.

Original publication date: 1975
Author’s nationality: American
Original language: English
Length: 176 pages
Rating: I can't rate this because I don't know wether to prioritize my reaction or the writing (which was good) or the importance of the topic
Format/where I acquired the book: ER book
Why I read this: off the shelf, Virago American author monthly challenge

The brutality of the intergenerational trauma is all the more powerful because of the first person narration. Set primarily in the late 40's the novel describes the life of Ursa, a blues singer first married to Mutt. As the story opens, he pushes her down stairs, causing a miscarriage and then hysterectomy. Ursa has been indoctrinated by her grandmother and mother to believe that her purpose is to create a new generation in spite of the abuse by Corregidora, the slave owner who sired her great grandmother, her grandmother, and then her mother, at the same time he sold their sex to other white men. Ursa's matrilineal traumas plague her relationships with both men and women. ( )

***Why a Maybe***
She Changed Black Literature Forever. Then She Disappeared. - article written by Imani Perry on Sept. 17, 2021 in the New York Times Magazine

There are certain things I can't handle. Sometimes poetry can help with that but most of the time I end up in a thought spiral that has no end. Which is why I was surprised that this article hit me so hard but even more; made me want to read a book about a subject matter I have been avoiding my whole life.

There is an unforgettable phrase in the novel — “making generations.” The women in Ursa’s family see “making generations” — that is, continuing their family line despite its horror — as a form of defiant survival.

Through Ursa’s genealogy, the horrific contradiction of Black motherhood in the New World is laid bare: Every Black child born into a slave economy fattened the pockets of enslavers. The love, protection and nurturing of that Black child was dashed into disaster by the cruelty of the social order into which she was born. No matter how beloved the child, trauma was built into the system.

This is something closely related with generational trauma and something so insidious that even now it leaves scars on newborn babies. My personal struggle with this is always how much is culture and how much is just bullshit we should get rid off as fast a possible? And would getting rid of it mean that we would also get rid of the things that made up our culture? A culture born from blood and struggle but nonetheless has value even if I struggle with that fact? On the other hand I feel like having the luxury to even think about these things is such a #firstworldproblems thing. Which is why I loved reading the next part of the article: .

As a 19-year-old, I was disturbed by “Corregidora.” I didn’t really “like” it in a simple sense. It simultaneously alienated and resonated, uncanny in its marriage of Black vernacular with a complete lack of sentimentality. Love wasn’t always patient and kind. Suffering wasn’t always noble and redemptive. Emotionally, I hated that Ursa’s love story was ugly. I still do. I ache at Ursa’s anguish over her hysterectomy. And like most readers, I wanted a healing to her wounds. But “Corregidora” denies that. At 19, I’d been socialized as a child of the civil rights movement to hope for freedom. Gayl Jones answered back: Hope won’t get us out of the funk of history that we live with today. I learned from her that the terror of now is as important a subject for the Black imagination as a speculatively beautiful tomorrow.

Same.

No matter how many times, it keeps being comforting to read how other people (who I assume look sorta like me) have the same struggles surrounding the history of enslaved people, who were my ancestors.

Rather than private exposure, Jones is a master of rendering how trauma resonates through time.

Well that last bit convinced me that this is the kind of story I probably need to read. But if I ever will is another question. It takes a certain state of mind to tackle these things and I try to avoid to get there. I mean... is there ever a good time to have an existential crisis?

Sidenote: The whole article is brilliant. The writer is very gifted and the last paragraph brought me to tears.

So I am growing to accept her distance. The difficulty is my eagerness to figure out how she and other remarkable women who are thinkers and artists live through aging: bridges burned, disaster and disappointments met, life continued. How the fire of creativity in youth cools into commitment. No less passionate but more reliable. Skill settles. Is it visible in the grooves under her eyelids? Rings around her neck, perhaps? I am looking for myself in her, and Jones has the good sense to avoid my demand. She’s given enough, having made space for the generations.