“I’m Leaving Evidence”: Traumatic Rememory, Identity, and the Body in Gayl Jones’s <i>Corregidora</i>

Abstract This article uses Toni Morrison’s concept of rememory to argue for an expanded analysis of the depiction of trauma in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora (1975). Scholarly consensus positions rememory as an empowering decision to revisit the past to create communal bonds and heal traumatic wounds. However, this article contends that in Jones’s novel, the four generations of Corregidora women’s repeated retelling—and thus reliving—of the horrors of Brazilian slavery through rememory is a traumatic event in itself. Although the Corregidora women attempt to empower their descendants by “leaving evidence” through oral histories and the creation of more daughters, they inadvertently homogenize a multigenerational experience that reiterates the sexual and social logics of their enslaved family history rather than healing their traumatic wounds. Corregidora, therefore, reveals traumatic witnessing as rememory’s ability to structure behavior and identity through the continued (re)narrativization of traumatic histories of sexual abuse and enslavement and complicate the traditional understanding of the role of witnessing in the healing of psychological trauma. Here, rememory functions as a sexual and social pedagogy. Rememory shapes the novel’s protagonist Ursa Corregidora, her ancestors, and the men in her life mentally, psychosexually, physically, and interpersonally, leaving them trapped by the past and restricting their behaviors and perceptions. Corregidora communicates how rememory can function not as a painful means of healing but rather as a mechanism that narrativizes and (re)constitutes the ongoing confining sexual economies of slavery.