African American Literature by Hans A. Ostrom

Author:Hans A. Ostrom
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABC-CLIO
Published: 2020-11-28T16:00:00+00:00

Jones, Gayl (1949–)

Fiction writer, poet, playwright, professor, and literary critic. Born in Lexington, Kentucky, Gayl Jones was creatively precocious, writing her first short story at the age of seven. Writing was a family affair: her grandmother, Amanda Wilson, wrote plays for church productions, and her mother, Lucille, was a fiction writer who wrote and read stories for her children. In a 1982 interview, Jones said that if her mother had not read to her as a child, she probably would never have thought of writing (“About My Work”). After high school, where her teachers described her as brilliant but painfully shy, Jones left the South to attend Connecticut College, where she earned a BA in English in 1971. By 1973, she had earned her MA in creative writing at Brown University, and she had seen her first play, Chile Woman, produced in 1974. In 1975, she earned her doctorate in creative writing at Brown and published Corregidora, her first novel. Jones’s creative writing teacher, the poet Michael S. Harper, had given the manuscript to Toni Morrison, who edited both it and Jones’s second novel Eva’s Man (1976) for Random House.

Beginning what has become a lifelong exploration of both the physical and the psychological scars of slavery, Jones employs a compelling narrator in Corregidora in the figure of blues singer Ursa Corregidora. Wrestling with the painful complexities of her marriage, Ursa testifies to the impact of slavery, and the impact of its sexual legacy, on three generations of females. Amid the brutality, Ursa works out a mode of healing. She seems driven, as one critic suggests, by the mantra “Tell your story, or the master’s story stands” (Burns). With the publication of this novel, lauded by Darryl Pinckney in The New Republic as “a small, fiercely concentrated story, harsh and perfectly told,” Jones was hailed as a major new literary talent by such writers as John Updike and James Baldwin.

Jones further explored her preoccupation with psychological obsession, contradiction, and trauma, and what she calls the “blues relationship” between the sexes, in Eva’s Man (1987). This almost surreal work is told from the perspective of Eva Medina Canada, a victim of physical and sexual abuse, who ends up institutionalized for a disturbing act of murder and dismemberment by way of dental castration. Jones has described Eva’s Man as “a horror story,” “a kind of dream or nightmare” she felt compelled to transcribe. Jones’s fascination with voices—with how things are said and not just with what is said—is paramount in all her works. Beyond the pervasive influence of the blues, she is especially drawn to writers whose narratives are somehow connected to the oral tradition, from Chaucer, Cervantes, Ernest Hemingway, Ralph Ellison, and James Joyce, to Margaret Laurence, Jean Toomer, Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison, and Zora Neale Hurston.

Jones was an assistant professor of English and Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Michigan from the late 1970s to the early 1980s, at which point she and her husband left the United States until 1988 because of legal problems.

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