Almeyda’s granddaughter, narrates the title piece
of Xarque and Other Poems. She remembers the
stories of her grandmother, as told by her mother,
who has become a healer and a cook for the mas-
ter. The world has become more complex, and the
pure heroism of Almeyda and Anninho is no lon-
ger possible.
Orality is also important in the poems that make
up The Hermit Woman (1983). Most of the poems
are narrated by black women of Brazil. “Wild Figs
and Secret Places,” for example, describes the in-
teraction between a woman of vast local knowl-
edge and a mapmaker sent by the colonizers. The
text mingles her comments to and about him, her
memory of a trial of a woman for consorting with
the devil, and his later comments about the narra-
tor to other Europeans. What this blend suggests
is the dangerous nature of free women, their resis-
tance to being “mapped,” and the Western impulse
to control the world by naming it.
The relationship of storytelling to resistance
and freedom is also the theme of Jones’s book of
criticism, Liberating Voices. In it she explores the
consequences for 20th-century African-American
writing of the choice to incorporate aspects of the
oral tradition into written literature.
In two more recent novels, The Healing (1998)
and Mosquito (1999), Jones continues the positive
direction evident in her poetry. Harlan Jane Eagle-
ton, a beautician turned faith healer, narrates The
Healing. Her restorative powers are a gift that she
neither understands nor exploits. In many ways
she seeks to be seen as an ordinary person, dealing
with love, loneliness, and human conflict. Her nor-
mality in seen as well in her southern black speech,
which reinforces the importance to Jones of the
oral tradition. The first novel to ever be published
by Beacon Press, The Healing was nominated for
a National Book Award and as a New York Times
Notable Book for 1998. Jill Nelson of The Nation
(May 25, 1998) called The Healing “a haunting
story, beautifully written.”
Mosquito is, in some ways, the most radical of
Jones’s works. Its title character violates all ex-
pectations of black narrative in that she is a truck
driver working in the Southwest who becomes
involved in the sanctuary movement, bringing in
Latin American refugees. Her best friend is a Chi-
cana bartender-novelist-detective, and their con-
versations, as well as Mosquito’s narrative, conflate
the discourses of black English, “Spanglish,” and
literary theory. Through the characters and their
stories, the author challenges virtually all the ste-
reotypes associated with race and gender in Amer-
ican culture.
Jones’s achievement is in her testing of the
boundaries of violence, sanity, sexuality, and sto-
rytelling as these subjects are represented in both
fiction and poetry. She raises profound questions
about the dynamics of race and gender and does
so in texts that themselves defy conventional clas-
sification. Yet, as her criticism suggests, she sees
such experimentation in the tradition of African-
American literature.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Byerman, Keith E. Fingering the Jagged Grain: Tra-
dition and Form in Recent Black Fiction. Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1985.
Gottfried, Amy S. “Angry Arts: Silence, Speech, and
Song in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora.” African Ameri-
can Review 28, no. 4 (1994): 559–570.
Harris, Trudier. “A Spiritual Journey: Gayl Jones’s
Song for Anninho.” Callaloo 5 (1982): 105–111.
Lionnet, Francoise. “Geographies of Pain: Captive
Bodies and Violent Acts in the Fictions of Myriam
Warner-Vieyra, Gayl Jones, and Bessie Head.” Cal-
laloo 16, no. 1 (1993): 132–152.
Nelson, Jill. “Hiding from Salvation.” Nation, (25 May
1998), pp. 30–32.
Tate, Claudia C. “Corregidora: Ursa’s Blues Medley.”
Black American Literature Forum 13 (1979): 139–
141.
Keith ByermanJordan, June (1936–1999)
A prolific writer and poetic genius, June Jordan was
born on July 9, 1936, in Harlem to Jamaican and
Panamanian immigrant parents, Granville Ivan-
hoe and Mildred Jordan, and raised in the Bedford
Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. She began writing
poetry at age seven. Educated at Barnard College288 Jordan, June