Jones, Gayl (b. 1949), novelist, poet, playwright, professor, and literary critic. Born in Lexington, Kentucky, a state that surfaces in much of her work, Gayl Jones has forged an eclectic career, marked by periods of silence, and since the early 1980s, a withdrawal from public existence. Jones began merging academic and creative pursuits early in her life; she was writing stories while in second grade and, as an undergraduate at Connecticut College in 1971, received the college's award for best original poem in 1969 and 1970. Her story “The Roundhouse” also won the Frances Steloff Award for Fiction in 1970. By 1975 she had earned an MA and a DA in creative writing at Brown University and had published Corregidora, her first novel. (Her editor for Corregidora and Eva's Man, the novel that followed it in 1976, was Toni Morrison, then at Random House.) While still a graduate student Jones also published the play Chile Woman (1974) and The Ancestor: A Street Play. From Brown, Jones went on to become an assistant professor of English and Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Michigan. In 1975 she received the Howard Foundation Award, followed first by a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1976, and then by a fellowship from the Michigan Society of Fellows for the years 1977 to 1979.
An associate professor when she left Michigan in the early 1980s, Jones has since kept her life exceedingly private. Her reclusiveness is perhaps best illustrated, if not explained, by her once stating that she most wanted to resemble those writers who, like J. D. Salinger, are known solely by their work, not their personal lives.
For Jones that work has taken a diverse array of forms: two plays, two novels, a collection of short fiction, three books of poetry, and, in 1991, a scholarly work examining the intersections between African American oral traditions and African American fiction—intersections for which her own fiction is noted as well. In various interviews Jones has emphasized the role of listening in her formation as a writer. The person to whom she listened first, and most closely, was her mother, herself a fiction writer. Lucille Jones would read to her children the stories she wrote for them. Additionally, because Gayl and her brother were never banished from the room when adults were talking, they grew up hearing the stories of older generations, an experience that probably catalyzed Jones's interest in exploring histories in her own fiction. The stories she listened to intrigued her with their form as well as their content, the myriad dialects, shifts, and cadences of African American voices. In fact, perhaps the single strongest element in Jones's work is its evocation of human speech; she has said that she had to hear something before she could write it.
Not surprisingly, Jones has been influenced by a wide-ranging group of artists whose voices she felt were true, including Alice Walker, Ernest J. Gaines, Geoffrey Chaucer, James Joyce, Michael S. Harper, Miguel de Cervantes, Ernest Hemingway, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcí Márquez, and Zora Neale Hurston (although Jones has argued that Hurston's anthropological perspective distanced her from her created dialogue). And, since much of her work sings as well as speaks, musicians like Ma Rainey, Billie Holiday, and Ella Fitzgerald are also important to Jones.
The kind of language that stems from the call-and-response of black sermons, the improvisational motifs of jazz, and the repetitions of the blues structures Jones's early play Chile Woman, and is particularly evident in the form and “ritualistic” dialogue of Corregidora. Composed of bluesy refrains, lyrical monologues, and fantastic dream sequences, Corregidora's form shares much with that of Eva's Man. Both works also display Jones's preoccupation with the manifold dimensions of language through their deliberate echoes of African American dialects and colloquialisms. To a lesser extent, Corregidora's combined emphasis on family history and the virulence of racial and sexual persecution recurs in Jones's second novel. Yet it is Corregidora that best depicts what Jones has called the “blues relationship” between men and women: a relationship that, like the blues, encompasses both good and bad, both tenderness and violence. Moreover, the blues' acknowledgment of simultaneous opposites helps to define Jones's authorial stance. While she recognizes the importance of political strategies for writers, Jones refuses to allow her work to be hemmed in by a political agenda. In locating the cultural and historical influences at work in the lives she depicts, Jones avoids pigeonholing her characters into politically correct categories—particularly characters that function merely as uplifting African American role models. In fact, some readers have criticized her insistence on creating literature that does not conform to positive images of black women and men (see especially her interview with Claudia Tate in Tate's Black Women Writers at Work, 1983).
Jones's fiction often uses violence to illustrate the interconnectedness of public events and personal lives, portraying, for example, the twentieth-century repercussions of slavery in the Americas for black families. Perhaps most notably, her work graphically probes the harsh fusing of racism and sexism, documenting the ways in which sex can be used to degrade and brutalize primarily women (but also men) in Corregidora, Eva's Man, and the short-story collection White Rat (1977; rpt. 1991). In depicting sexual relationships under the double rubric of power and coercion, both heterosexual and lesbian, Jones gives some of the most unflinching renderings of sex and desire in contemporary fiction, descriptions made all the more striking by her deliberately stark, colloquial language. Yet it could be argued that several of White Rat's stories make up the broadest arena for Jones's writing about sexual relations. In “The Women”, a young girl tersely recalls her mother's series of lesbian relationships as she discovers her own heterosexuality, yet the story closes on a troubling note as the choice she makes seems half-forced upon her. Inexplicable and often degrading sexual passions structure “Jevata”, while “Persona” deals with a female professor's silenced desire for other women. White Rat also gives evidence of Jones's experimentation in forms of the vernacular, ranging from the earthy prose of the title story's narrator to the rich, interior realm of madness in “Version Two”, to the deliberate spare opacity of “Your Poems Have Little Color in Them”—a story that examines an artist's difficulties with both speaking and not speaking, and with storytelling. Since, according to Jones, this last is the only piece in the collection that touches on autobiography, it may reveal some motive for the fact that, with White Rat, Jones stopped publishing fiction.
Most likely as a result of her mother's strong influence on her, as well as that of her grandmother, playwright Amanda Wilson, Jones has also worked powerful treatments of the relationships between daughters, mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers into her fiction, especially in terms of shared histories, issues of speech and victimization, and accountability for the future. Interestingly, Corregidora's theme of establishing those “generations” who will keep alive a familial history has a parallel in the author's personal life. Jones recalls her mother's asking about her own responsibility for making generations, a responsibility that Jones has said she regards with a combined sense of guilt and ambivalence.
Jones's latest two novels move in slightly different directions from her previous ones, but they are still solidly focused on women. The Healing (1998) treats an African American woman, who, after an attempt on her life and her miraculous recovery without medical assistance, gains the mysterious power to heal others. In a very unconventional scenario, she travels by bus from one small “water tower” town to another to extend her gift to those who need it. In Mosquito (1999), a more than six hundred page tome of a novel, Jones focuses on an African American woman near the Texas/Mexican border who drives an eighteen wheeler for a living. These depictions may portend an increasingly different locational focus for Jones's fiction.
Jones's poetry has been published in several literary magazines, but also in three separate works: Song for Anninho (1981), which was reissued by Beacon Press in 1999, The Hermit Woman (1983), and Xarque and Other Poems (1985). Some poems echo African American musical traditions, particularly pieces like “Deep Song”, a “blues poem” that Jones wrote while listening to the Billie Holiday song of the same name. The Brazilian slave histories that underpin Corregidora take center stage in Song for Anninho, a prose poem about a love story between two escaped slaves in seventeenth-century Brazil. Like her fiction, much of her poetry is told from the first-person viewpoint, and is concerned with the complexities of love between men and women.
Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature (1991) takes her fictional concerns into the realm of literary criticism and analysis. Her text examines the influence of dialect, folklore, blues, and spirituals in the poetry of Harper, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, and Sherley Anne Williams; and also in authors like Hurston, Jean Toomer, Ann Petry, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison. The diversity of Jones's influences echoes in her critical focus, which finds in her selected authors a combination of European and American literary traditions and African and African American oral forms.
Like Alice Walker, Jones has been criticized for what some readers see as a recurrent indictment against black men, particularly in her first two novels' bleak portraits of abusive husbands and lovers. Yet such criticism is countered by a recognition of those characters' own troubled legacies of racial injustices, as well as by White Rat, which offers several complex renderings of basically good-hearted men. Perhaps a more accurate appraisal of Jones's treatment of African American men—and women—would encompass her resolute account of the ways in which racism and sexism build upon each other, victimizing both sexes. Certainly, her stern gaze makes for grim reading. Yet that grimness is inextricable from the other qualities of Jones's work: vivid delineation of the physical details of sexual desire, and a deliberate implementation of black oral forms stemming from communal speech patterns, folklore, sermons, jazz, and the blues. Together, these qualities place Jones's writing firmly within that literature that melds the substance and the form of African American cultural history.
[See also Eva Medina Canada; Ursa Corregidora.]
Bibliography
- Gayl Jones, “Gayl Jones: An Interview,” interview by Michael S. Harper,
Massachusetts Review 18.4 (Winter 1977): 692–715. - Gayl Jones, “Gayl Jones Takes a Look at Corregidora—An Interview,” interview by Roseann P. Bell, Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature, eds. Roseann P. Bell et al., 1979, pp. 282–287.
- Valerie Gray Lee, “The Use of Folktalk in Novels by Black Women Writers,”
CLA Journal 23 (Mar. 1980): 266–272. - Trudier Harris, “A Spiritual Journey: Gayl Jones's Song for Anninho,”
Callaloo 5.3 (Oct. 1982): 105–111. - Gayl Jones, “An Interview with Gayl Jones,” interview by Charles H. Rowell,
Callaloo 5.3 (Oct. 1982): 32–53. - Gayl Jones, “About My Work,” in Black Women Writers (1950–1980), ed. Mari Evans, 1984, pp. 233–235.
- Jerry W. Ward, Jr., “Escape From Trublem: The Fiction of Gayl Jones,” in Black Women Writers (1950–1980), ed. Mari Evans, 1984, pp. 249–257.
- Mae G. Henderson, foreword to White Rat, 1977; rpt. 1991.
- Patricia Munoz-Cabrera, “(Em)Bodying the Flesh: Mythmaking and the Female Body in Gayl Jones' Song for Anninho and Corregidora,”
PALARA 1 (Fall 1997): 106–116. - Stelamaris Coser, “Stepping-Stones Between the Americas: The Narratives of Paule Marshall and Gayl Jones,”
PALARA 1 (Fall 1997): 80–88
Amy S. Gottfried
