The Healing Book

"Norvelle once told me that there were certain African folk tales that never gave you an answer; they only left you with a dilemma. Dilemma tales, he called them. What else had he said about them? They were a way of learning. They were another way of learning. "

On the strength of this book, Mosquito and Corregidora (I am yet to read the rest of her output, though intend to) I happily place Gayl Jones in my personal pantheon. She is a damn genius. Her work is complex, subtle, brutal, funny, devastatingly sad, and smart as hell. Her works are dilemma tales in that they do not move toward trite satisfying conclusions, they do not dictate. They have an amorphous quality, like a cloud you move within. The kind of books you spend a long time looking back on after you have finished. There are no easy answers. No Truth with a capital "T", save for Sojourner. Always exceptions and contradictions. As in life. And as in all great art. And what happens to voice, to the "voice" of a narrator, when that voice has been subjected to racial and gender violence and repression? Does it become performative as a way to dance between the cracks? What would it mean for it to be "authentic"? And when we tell stories of the telling of stories of the telling of stories? When the oral tradition becomes like a russian doll?

Anyway, enough pointless pontificating from me. Suffice it to say, you should be reading her.

""To me the reader is a listener and the listener is as much a part of the story as the teller" - from an interview with the author

Thankfully Virago and others are now keeping her in print, though it seems she has more work to come and has been self publishing (see for example). Somebody needs to get in touch with her and get all her work in print so we can have the joy of reading it.