"Yes, if you understood me, Mom, you would see that I am trying to explain it, in blues, without words, the explanation somewhere behind the words. To explain what will be always there" (Gayl Jones, Corregidora, p 66).Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay In the novel Corregidora by Gayl Jones, the past is presented as a terrifying and dominating force that practically physically infects those who must live with it. Ursa's mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother all live with the pain of what was done to them in the past. Their memories, which Ursa must carry and pass on, are deeply troubling for her - and should be for all of us - and also carry with them the agony of older women, their resentment and distrust of regard for men. She cannot break free from Corregidora's tyranny, even as a free woman, as she is instead trapped in relationships with abusive and unfaithful men. The women of Corregidora are freed from legal servitude, but the mark left on them by the legacy of slavery makes “real” freedom impossible. (Many of these motifs appear later in Toni Morrison's Beloved, where the rage of the past – and its forgetting – actually manifests itself in a destructive being.) For Ursa, the past has a force so powerful that it dominates her identity individual. . Even her physical appearance – fair skin and thin hair – resembles that of Corregidora. She expresses it herself by responding “I have trouble within me” when asked what pushes her to stay so long (42). When she is suddenly denied the ability to "make generations" (22), she loses not only her "function" as a woman, but also her function as the woman of Corregidora and, consequently, her purpose in life and in her family. But Ursa is a blues singer, and her songs seek to come to grips with a fragmented past that she otherwise couldn't resolve. The non-linear structure of the novel reinforces the erosion of the distinction between past and present. Many of Ursa's flashbacks take place while she is recovering from her attack by Mutt, while she is usually semi-conscious. In her dreams, her own experiences often overlap with her great-grandmother's memories. For Ursa, there is virtually no distinction between her own life and the story she is asked to convey. She is often at the mercy of a past that she never experienced. She speaks to this notion herself when she says, "It was as if I didn't know how close Mutt and I were, or Great Gram and Corregidora" (184). The dream passages, most often presented without indication that they are dreams, leave the reader just as vulnerable to confusion due to the fragmentation of memory, history, and experience as Ursa. Here, the reader must make these connections in order to understand the history of slavery as Jones condenses it. The question of how to bear witness becomes important in the conflict between generations. Although Ursa will not be able to pass on her family's history to another generation of women, she is able to manifest the strength of the past and her own pain in her song. This form of expression is raw and cathartic, and more constructive for Ursa than the obligation to create generations, which she was denied. Ursa finds the strength to revisit her past through song, but her mother fears their raw emotion and frank demonstration of the family's enslavement by Corregidora's memory. "The songs are demons. It is your own destruction that you sing. The voice is a devil," she tells Ursa. "Where did you find these songs? It's the devil's music" (53-54). "I received them from you",.