Bessie Head

The aim of this essay is to present an analysis of the elements concerning some of Bessie Head’s literary works. Because of their valuable and complex background, Head’s novels are linked with her own life and her desire for equality, happiness and freedom in South Africa.
RAMOS, Rodrigo Viriato — Bessie Head: Exiled and longing for equality, happiness and freedom in South Africa. University of Aveiro, 2008.

Bessie Head's decision to leave South Africa for Botswana in 1964 at age twenty-six has been read as the consequence of apartheid's oppressive racial politics that saw her racial ambiguity as particularly threatening. However, as her early South African work would suggest, Head, who would become Botswana's best-known writer, was ostracized as much by burgeoning black nationalist discourses as by apartheid's racism. This article argues that the existing anti-apartheid discourse in post-Sharpeville South Africa was inadequate in comprehending Head's identity as mixed-raced and as a woman, as evident in her juvenilia. In this early work, Head undertook the double task of dismantling not only the racist discourse of apartheid but also the racist/masculinist elements of the available anti-apartheid discourse of her time, in an attempt to accommodate her dissident identity as an anti-apartheid writer and activist—but not male; and not black and not white. Gender, alongside her race, is seen to play a crucial role in Head's inability to construct an anti-apartheid identity in an atmosphere of a sharpening racial dialectic.

The first collection of nonfiction critical writings by one of the leading literary figures of post-apartheid South Africa The most significant nonfiction writings of Zoë Wicomb, one of South Africa's leading authors and intellectuals, are collected here for the first time in a single volume. This compilation features essays on the works of such prominent South African writers as Bessie Head, Nadine Gordimer, Njabulo Ndebele, and J. M. Coetzee, as well as on a wide range of cultural and political topics, including gender politics, sexuality, race, identity, nationalism, and visual art. Also presented here are a reflection on Nelson Mandela and a revealing interview with Wicomb. In these essays, written between 1990 and 2013, Wicomb offers insights into her nation's history, politics, and people. In a world in which nationalist rhetoric is on the rise and right-wing populist movements are the declared enemies of diversity and pluralism, her essays speak powerfully to a host of current international issues.

Bettina Weiss (ed.)
The End of Unheard Narratives
Contemporary Perspectives on Southern African Literatures

This study focuses on contemporary literatures of the southern African region and brings together the work of scholars who cover pressing questions about the constructions of Othering, about locked-away-narratives &ndash stories which are regarded as anathema to society or narratives about the female teras or the twisted “reality” of the construction of the family, the nation, or history. Their work comprises aspects of the implementation of strategic devices which are used to justify and reinforce these constructions, but it also elaborates the strategies which hold the potential to subvert and destabilise rigid conceptions. The study reflects on issues such as the diverse modes of portraying HIV/AIDS in literatures of South Africa and Zimbabwe; it examines the socio-(homo)sexual experiences of Black Men in South Africa; it traces the traumatic transitions in Namibia from the war to its aftermath, read through the prism of gender; it proposes homoerotic readings of Black women's desires; and it demonstrates how “speaking” textiles function as a recurrent image for the contradictions inherent in the postcolonial voice and how they offer new structures to tackle silence. This collection is united by the contributors' attempts to lift the veil from unheard narratives by moving them from the margin to the centre of discussion. The essays vividly demonstrate that the end of unheard narratives, as the title of this book reads, holds a double-sided implication.

The Editor: Bettina Weiss received her PhD in the field of gender and body discourse in African women's writing of Southern Africa at the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany.

The Contributors: Lizzy Attree, Katrin Berndt, Dorothy Driver, Bevelyn Dube, Jessica Hemmings, Robert Muponde, Agnes Muriungi, Tom Odhiambo, Margie Orford, Charles Pfukwa, Meg Samuelson, Annemarié van Niekerk, and Bettina Weiss.

The first collection of nonfiction critical writings by one of the leading literary figures of post-apartheid South Africa The most significant nonfiction writings of Zoë Wicomb, one of South Africa's leading authors and intellectuals, are collected here for the first time in a single volume. This compilation features essays on the works of such prominent South African writers as Bessie Head, Nadine Gordimer, Njabulo Ndebele, and J. M. Coetzee, as well as on a wide range of cultural and political topics, including gender politics, sexuality, race, identity, nationalism, and visual art. Also presented here are a reflection on Nelson Mandela and a revealing interview with Wicomb. In these essays, written between 1990 and 2013, Wicomb offers insights into her nation's history, politics, and people. In a world in which nationalist rhetoric is on the rise and right-wing populist movements are the declared enemies of diversity and pluralism, her essays speak powerfully to a host o...

Jäntti, S. (2017). Reading, interventions. States of interpersonal and intrapersonal violence in Bessie Head’s A Question of Power. In M. Husso, T. Virkki, M. Notko, H. Hirvonen, & J. Eilola (Eds.), Interpersonal Violence. Differences and Connections (pp. 213-226). Routledge.

Find the article: https://jyx.jyu.fi/handle/123456789/52194

This study is the first book-length analysis of African women's writing of Southern Africa with a focus on writing the body. The thesis is that women are not voiceless, but hold a powerful, liberating potential: they "throw their voices" by implementing a strategic corporeal. Notably, this mode is not carried out in a way of emphasising corporeal difference by lack, but by attributing positive markers to the body. It reaches beyond a speaking which only represents women's thoughts and emotions physically - a mode which might render the impression that they are incapable of expressing their conceptions and sentiments linguistically. It is an empowerment that reflects their skill to break up the bonds between language and body. This study is wide-ranging in its choice of authors and themes.