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Carrza DuBose
“See what they are doing with this woman”:
Voicing Sexual and Physical Abuse in Gayl Jones’s Eva’s Man
In “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” Toni Morrison contends that stimulating scholarship along with a fervent African American literary presence has allowed those writers whom have been silenced to become witnesses. Morrison makes the claim that it is chief and crucial that African Americans writers, particularly black women writers, who are usually silenced and disregarded within the American literary canon, imagine life and reality for themselves as opposed to life being imagined for them by someone else (20). According to Morrison:
We have always been imagining ourselves. We are not Isak Dinesen’s ‘aspect of nature,’ nor Conrad’s unspeaking. We are the subjects of our narrative, witnesses to and participants in our own experience, and, in no way coincidentally, in the experience of those with whom we have come in contact. (20)
So it is not surprising that Gayl Jones’s Eva’s Man, along with her masterpieces Corregidora and White Rat delineate Morrison’s important claim that black writers “imagine for themselves.” Jones, who was mentored by Morrison, and whose work was also edited by the 1993 Nobel Prize winner at the dawn of her literary career, situates or imagines her characters solely through the lens of black female protagonists. Jones states, in her highly intellectual Liberating Voices: Oral Traditions in African American Literature that:
When . . . African American creative writers began to trust the literary possibilities
of their own verbal and musical creations and to employ self-inspired techniques, they began to transform . . . European and European American models and [gain] greater artistic sovereignty. (1)
Jones’s judgment about African American art and the power of African American literature outside the lens of the dominant canon epitomizes the African American quest for examining and exploring their own voices and experience. Jones reiterates in Liberating Voices that “African American [writing] from the turn-of-the century to the present shows a movement toward the freeing of African American character and voice in literature” (17). But this has not been achieved without a price – especially for black female writers like Jones whose oftentimes merciless critique of black male patriarchal tyranny and subjugation have garnered her some exceedingly negative criticism in the past, particularly for her views on how black women are disapprovingly treated in black society and beyond. As aforementioned, the callous criticism stems from how Jones epitomizes Morrison’s utterance about placing the voice where it belongs – in the hands of black female narrators like Jones’s Eva Medina Canada in Eva’s Man. The stunning narration found in Eva’s Man gives voice and connotation to the many unspeakable acts of violence and cycles of sexual abuse black females suffer at the hands of men; in doing so, Jones delimits the broad spectrum of patriarchal control.
Jones’s first novel pinpoints Eva Medina Canada’s experience with abuse at the hands of many men: Freddy Smoot who “has his popsicle up in [her] (13); Tyrone, a man her married mother sleeps with; her cousin Alfonso who gropes her; Mr. Logan, who gloatingly tells her: “You felt me and can still feel me” (34); and finally Davis, a man she meets and ultimately kills by biting off his penis with her teeth. The novel begins with Eva Medina already incarcerated after the murder of Davis and continues on in a highly complex and psychologically centered whirlwind. Through a fragmented structure-less plot that moves fluidly through space and time, Jones unearths Eva’s clandestine and disconcerting privileged thoughts, thus allowing the novel to end in the same way it begins: in a cyclical universe where the reader is allowed to see, in fragments, the torture Eva suffers from the beginning of her life to the inauspicious end, where she remains in jail. The novel is told through memory and flashbacks, adding to Eva’s already complex, misapprehended social and psychological reality.
Eva’s narration exposes and introduces the reader to her dysfunctional fractured past, one that involves, as noted above, her mother’s infidelity and the sexual violence that stems after Eva’s father discovers his wife’s extramarital affair. This dysfunctional and violent introduction into a black male/female relationship becomes a paradigm for Eva’s subsequent relationships with men, usually involving violence. Jones’s attempt to answer pressing questions about how sexual abuse and physical violence are married is complex and highly revealing. As Jones has stated herself: “I start with the telling, and sometimes the answers come out in the telling” (ix). As a result, Eva’s Man, along with many of Jones’s novels, is not just a story, but a telling, a telling that is not simply rooted in anti-maleness, but one that brilliantly psychoanalyzes the world of physical violence and gender relations. Jones provides psychological insights into why violence and gender struggles are generally unimportant and habitually acceptable in many circles. In her essay, “Toward an All-Inclusive Structure,” Casey Clabough’s corroborates Jones when she states that Eva, the tortured narrator, tells of “[celebration] and [condemnation]” and convincingly “portrays . . . abusive patriarchal oppression, castigations and valorizations” (1). In giving an honest and accurate depiction of a black female reality, Jones accomplishes in Eva’s Man a neutral and multi-layered perspective; she achieves a feat rarely encountered in literature written by African American female writers and transcends the normative ways in which sexual abuse and physical violence are rendered.
Albeit the novel is replete with horrific and oftentimes graphic sexual images, Eva Medina Canada ultimately becomes empowered as a result of being able to voice her own reality, particularly in the narration itself. In the short paragraph below, Eva gives a powerful metaphor of her own abusive, violent life:
An owl sucks my blood. I am bleeding underneath my nails. An old owl sucks my blood. He gives me fruit in my palms. We enter the river again . . . together. They are doing with this woman. See. They are doing with this woman. See what they are doing with this woman. (177)
Like Ursa in Corrigedora and most of the female protagonists found in White Rat, Eva struggles with her voice but manages to tell through narration. As a result, she, like many of Jones’s characters, runs the risk of losing her version of the telling, or, as literary theorist David Burn states in “Scar Tissue: The Painful Beauty of Gayl Jones’ Corregidora,” her story might become secondary to the “master’s story” – but it does not (2). Although Eva repeatedly states: “I said nothing,” simply nodding her head, telling what happens through narration as opposed to dialogue, she does, however, continue to express throughout the novel that no one “explain [her] (172).” This narrative strategy, among others, is illustrative of Jones as an exemplar rhetorician and master of the art of storytelling: she allows her characters to speak without speaking; and yet Eva’s unspoken thoughts trump any control abusive men have over her mental and physical state. This also, in turn, becomes indicative of Eva’s interior thoughts and the irony involved in maintaining her own sense of experience.
In revealing Eva Medina’s thoughts, Jones trumpets and brings to the fore her own fixation with the “psychology of her characters.” This preoccupation gives elevation to an improved understanding of Eva Medina’s isolated and tortured quandary. According to Jones:
I am interested principally in the psychology of my characters—and the way(s) in which they order their stories—their myths, dreams, nightmares, secret worlds, ambiguities, contradictions, ambivalences, memories, imaginations, ‘their puzzles’ . . . I am interested in human relationships. (4)
Thus Eva Medina, by telling her “nightmares,” even if not voiced through dialogue entirely, empowers her own sense of self; she is able to think about “memories” and “contradictions” in hopes of finding ways to articulate them. As aforementioned, the audience is au fait on Eva’s unspeakable thoughts even if they are not always spoken.
Jones thus gives rise to a black literary feminism or black “heroinism” when she allows Eva Medina to fight back in articulating or disclosing her mental state within the narration; yet in contrast, Eva ironically replicates the same violence and cyclical abuse she endured as a child and later on as an adult. In a pivotal prison scene, Eva bares, in the course of her thoughts, how Davis feels about her and what she is capable of before she kills him:
He asked me what he was doing to me. I said he was fucking me. He said I was doing hell to him. He called it my stringray. He was on my ass, coming in through that way. I wanted to tell him how I was feeling. But I would never tell him. (158)
Jones emphasizes how the victim transforms or becomes the victimizer. Howard Clabough reinforces this exact same notion when she states: “Even more troubling, though, is the unconscious adoption of the male victimizing philosophy by women in the community . . . they conceive it to be the natural order of things” (11). In showing the repercussions of sexual and physical abuse and its “banality” in most societies, Jones reinforces the importance and danger reverse abuse entails. Although the men ultimately become victimized as Clabough states, the victimizer and victim, both, as Jones displays in the construction of her male and female characters, become plighted by the very same abuse they communally take in and enact. This is one of many challenges Eva faces when trying to protect herself within the hegemonic patriarchal social structure.
This rhetorical strategy employed by Jones, in which reverse abuse becomes the focus of Eva’s Man, is not coincidental but a challenge in exposing the many layers of male/female physical and sexual ill-treatment. As aforementioned, Eva ascertains that she can never be physical and sexually safe within the patriarchal structure and that physical and sexual abuse only morphs into verbal attacks where it generally begins. Part of Jones’s discursive approach in divulging the cycle of abuse, is to position Eva in a space where her quagmire as an afflicted woman becomes lucid to both Eva as well as the reader. When she is held before the court, before she discovers the law is both controlled and supported for and by the very men who buffer violent gender interactions, her voice is once again reinforced through narration:
Sometimes, they think I’m lying to them, though. I tell them it ain’t me lying, it’s memory lying. I don’t believe that, because the past is still as hard on me as the present, but I tell them that anyway. They say they’re helping me. I’m forty-three years old, and I ain’t seen none of their help yet. (4)
In her judgments about the complicity of men and their justice system, Eva not only discloses her understandable unreliability as a narrator, but exposes the faulty dynamics involved in her eventual incarceration; Jones gives rise to a broader understanding of gender relations, but most importantly, she critiques men and the limitations they impose on the women who give them life. Jones exposes the reader to the many incongruities and ironies found in female/male sexual and physical politics. As Stephanie Li points out: "Jones . . . urges us to consider the complexities and contradictions of delineating agency . . . in circumstances charged with complex issues of intimacy, violence and need” (1). Jones proposes in Eva’s Man, as well as in her other works, that any system where both sexes are not positively and/or actively involved is not only a faux design, but also one that is anathema to gender egalitarianism.
Jones carries a dissident strategy to bear on the discussion of who is really to blame or who really suffers the most when black female voices are silenced by abuse and violence. Her highly ambitious aim in exposing the root of black male/female abuse conveys some troubling truths about black on black abusive relationships and the ramifications that procure out of black traditionalism, banality and the sophomoric cycle of sexual/physical violence. Jones engages and forces readers to empathize with the ramifications of rejecting a traditionalism that involves violence and abuse. One such ramification or direct corollary is the “victim” who turns in on herself. This becomes evident in many of the scenes throughout Eva’s Man. One poignant scene that bears mentioning is the final one where Eva continues to dream and reveal her experience through metaphor:
He pushes my face into his lap. He combs my hair with his long fingers. I am afraid. We are in the river now. We are in the river now. The sand is on my tongue. Blood under my nails. I’m bleeding under my nails. We are in the river. Between my legs. They are busy with this woman. They are busy with this woman now. They are busy with this woman . . . (176)
This dream of drowning in a watered world, for Eva, is synonymous with being taken sexually; it becomes a corollary for Eva in that she eventually gives in to the nightmare of abuse and violence when she allows Elvira, a prison mate who is sexually attracted to Eva, to do the same thing the men are doing in the water. When Davis “pushes [her] face into his lap,” Eva mimics the forcible behavior when she “leans back . . . and squeezes Elvira’s face between her legs” (176). The homoeroticism in a predominately homo-social prison is not the problem here; the problem is Eva reenacting the same violence when she gives up on her own sense of what defines a healthy sexual relationship; she endorses the sexual abuse of her past in that no reciprocity exists in the sexual encounter: this parallels many relationships where men are the controllers and custodians of female sexual bodies.
Jones thus gives a glimpse into a type of black female protest literature that analytically glares at or challenges male dominated literary discourse. Her intentionality, for the most part, void of polemics for the most part, heightens the awareness of women and their struggle in maintaining the act of resisting unwanted erotic, corporeal aggression.
Works Cited
Burn, David. “Scar Tissue: The Painful Beauty of Gayl Jones’ Corregidora.” http://davidburn.com/scartissue.php 2001, 1-7.
Clabough, Casey. “Toward an All-Inclusive: The Early Fiction of Gayl Jones.” Callaloo. 29.2 (2006), 634-657.
Jones, Gayl. Eva’s Man. Ed. Deborah McDowell. Boston: Beacon Press, 1976.
---. Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition and African American Literature. New York: Penguin Books, 1991.
Li, Stephanie. “Love and the Trauma of Resistance in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora.” Callaloo 29.1 (2006), 131-150.
Morrison, Toni. “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature." Modern Critical Views: Toni Morrison. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea, 1990. 201-230.
Copyright © 2007 Carrza Dubose
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