Confabulating Archives: Gayl Jones's Mother
Gayl Jones's novel The Healing (1998) makes much of confabulation, an errant and gendered mode of speech. This paper studies an unpublished manuscript in the Gayl Jones Collection to consider its uses of confabulation and the "nonliterary" toward a critique of white supremacy in the context of her mother's end of life. Gayl Jones self-published Lucille Jones's writings, and identifies her storytelling as central to the emergence and development of her own writing practices. Gayl Jones arranges and edits the nonliterary against a common history of racial and sexual captivity, and confabulates at the intersections of novel, translation, and Black performance.