Bessie Head

This article delves into the profound exploration of Martin Heidegger's concept of "poetic dwelling" by reinterpreting it through the prism of prosaic artistry, with a specific focus on Bessie Head's seminal work, When Rain Clouds Gather (1968), within the context of postcolonial African literature. Departing from conventional interpretations confined to poetry and Western literary forms, the study elevates prose as a potent medium for encapsulating Heidegger's philosophy of dwelling, extending the discourse beyond Euro-American-centric origins. The analysis meticulously examines Head's narrative strategies, thematic shifts, and symbolic complexity, unraveling the intricacies of "poetic dwelling" embedded in her novel. The protagonist, Makhaya, becomes a vessel for Head's narrative, mirroring her own displacement and facticity as a mixed-race South African woman, exiled writer, and feminist in Botswana. The study contends that postcolonial African prose, exemplified by Head's work, offers a novel lens for interpreting Heidegger's concept, emphasizing its universal nature while acknowledging diverse manifestations across cultures. This perspective aims to enrich the comprehension of Heidegger's 'poetic dwelling' philosophy, expanding its understanding beyond traditional boundaries and shedding light on the intricate representation in world literatures. The article underscores the unique contributions of African literature to the global philosophical and literary canon, urging a reevaluation of ontological dimensions within the vibrant tapestry of African prose.

In this study, I will analyze Bessie Head’s novels, When Rain Clouds Gather (1969), Maru (1971) and A Question of Power (1973) in relation to the transformations of the characters’ senses of
identity and home. The main motive of this book is to explore the impact of displacement on the senses of identity and home in reference to unhomeliness, liminality, and double consciousness. This study acknowledges that identity is not a fixed essence, but it is shaped by differences. Identity is created over time, and it is always shifting and dynamic according to the “subject’s current positionings and conceptualizations of home” (Knott and McLoughlin, 2010, p. 25). Bessie Head chose her characters in When Rain Clouds Gather (1969), Maru (1971) and A Question of Power (1973) based on colonial and postcolonial citizens who experienced transformations of their identities and senses of home as a result of their displacements.

Abstract<br> Identity realisation has remained a major preoccupation of South African writers. African female writers mould social depictions to present a quest for their identity formation demands. For a writer like Head whose personal life and experiences bear a reasonable level of broken identity, her literature captures a burning desire to recreate, rebuild, and realize her lost identity. Using hybridity as a major strand of identity struggle in post coloniality theory, this paper evaluates Bessie Head"s When Rain Clouds Gather to decipher her ideality concerning identity creation and realisation. The paper discovers that Head"s vision of identity realization is achieved as the women become key players in the success of the agricultural programme initiated by Gilbert and Makhaya Maseko. The themes of love and brotherhood are typically achieved by employing the generosity of personalities like Mma-Millipede and the relationship that exists between Makhaya and Paul...

This was a study of Bessie Head’s literary commitment. The objective of the study was to interrogate the extent to which the writer is committed as a woman and as a Third World person based on the text Maru. The study adopted the analytical research design. The data collected through content analysis was coded according to thematic concerns, stylistic choices, the mode of characterization and vision of the author. The postcolonial theory was employed in the reading analysis and interpretation of the selected text. The findings reveal that as a woman, Bessie Head is committed to reconstructing a positive image for her female characters by challenging stereotypical perception of women through dismantling of patriarchal structures that previously relegated women to subordinate roles. This is seen in the presentation of the female characters as strong willed, determined, assertive, independent and enterprising. In delineating the experiences of women as women, she explores their most pe...

This was a study of Bessie Head’s literary commitment. The objective of the study was to interrogate the extent to which the writer is committed as a woman and as a Third World person based on the text Maru. The study adopted the analytical research design. The data collected through content analysis was coded according to thematic concerns, stylistic choices, the mode of characterization and vision of the author. The postcolonial theory was employed in the reading analysis and interpretation of the selected text. The findings reveal that as a woman, Bessie Head is committed to reconstructing a positive image for her female characters by challenging stereotypical perception of women through dismantling of patriarchal structures that previously relegated women to subordinate roles. This is seen in the presentation of the female characters as strong willed, determined, assertive, independent and enterprising. In delineating the experiences of women as women, she explores their most pe...

This study uncovers how language is deployed in the service of a writer's reconstruction and configuration of Otherness through a detailed close-reading of Bessie Head's Maru. This is because of the paucity of scholarship on the ways language is deployed in the fabrication of Otherness in Head's Maru.The position of this study is that language is integral and focal in discourse formation in the construction of the novel as an art and a genre of discourse. The scope of analysis in this study includes: the use of deixis to mark territorial otherness, the deployment of lexico-semantic infraction for exoticism and defamiliarisation, transitivity structures, and interrogative structures to uncover the discourse tenor, power structures which naturalises otherness. This paper adopts an analytic and descriptive approach within Norman Fairclough's strand of Critical Discourse Analysis (hereafter, CDA) which stresses the focal role of language in unveiling the complex realities and regime of social power relations configured in discourse. Fairclough's strand of CDA draws from the gains of Roger Fowler's Critical Linguistics model which argues that language put to use in texts or discourses can tell us about a society's worldview, and cultural practices __ such as ideology, and also from the Social Theory of Michel Foucault where discourse foregrounds asymmetrical social power. Significantly, this paper demonstrates the transdisciplinary synergy between sociolinguistics, theoretical sociology and literature (the novel) by its provision of how linguistic resource deployed in a literary text underscores Otherness as a phenomenon which is social, relational and dialectical. From the analysis, this paper submits that Otherness or the linguistic labelling of a social group and gender as "the outsider" as facilitated by the encoding power of language is man-made, and symptomatic of the politics and dynamics of social power relation.

In many ways, Buddhism has become the global religion of the modern world. For its contemporary followers, the ideal of enlightenment promises inner peace and worldly harmony. And whereas other philosophies feel abstract and disembodied, Buddhism offers meditation as a means to realize this ideal. If we could all be as enlightened as Buddhists, some imagine, we could live in a much better world. For some time now, however, this beatific image of Buddhism has been under attack. Scholars and practitioners have criticized it as a Western fantasy that has nothing to do with the actual experiences of Buddhists.

Avram Alpert combines personal experience and readings of modern novels to offer another way to understand modern Buddhism. He argues that it represents a rich resource not for attaining perfection but rather for finding meaning and purpose in a chaotic world. Finding unexpected affinities across world literature—Rudyard Kipling in colonial India, Yukio Mishima in postwar Japan, Bessie Head escaping apartheid South Africa—as well as in his own experiences living with Tibetan exiles, Alpert shows how these stories illuminate a world in which suffering is inevitable and total enlightenment is impossible. Yet they also give us access to partial enlightenments: powerful insights that become available when we come to terms with imperfection and stop looking for wholeness. A Partial Enlightenment reveals the moments of personal and social transformation that the inventions of modern Buddhism help make possible.

This was a study of Bessie Head’s literary commitment. The objective of the study was to interrogate the extent to which the writer is committed as a woman and as a Third World person based on the text Maru. The study adopted the analytical research design. The data collected through content analysis was coded according to thematic concerns, stylistic choices, the mode of characterization and vision of the author. The postcolonial theory was employed in the reading analysis and interpretation of the selected text. The findings reveal that as a woman, Bessie Head is committed to reconstructing a positive image for her female characters by challenging stereotypical perception of women through dismantling of patriarchal structures that previously relegated women to subordinate roles. This is seen in the presentation of the female characters as strong willed, determined, assertive, independent and enterprising. In delineating the experiences of women as women, she explores their most pe...

Bessie Head was one of the Drum writers of the 1950s. As critics such as Huma Ibrahim have indicated it was only after her death in 1986 that she was included in discussions on the Drum generation. The result of her prior exclusion has been the double marginalization of Head’s literary contribution, as one of the overlooked black South African writers of the 1950s and the lack of critical acclaim of her as an individual author. For this reason, she is one of the black South African writers who should consciously be given prominence today. This article utilizes an analysis of Head’s novels not attempted so far. It is difficult to interrogate Head’s work fruitfully, unless questions are addressed to whether she approaches her imaginative writing as an Africanist, a feminist or just as a woman. It will be argued that her fiction highlights the plight of the socially marginalized in eccentric and seminal ways and that it bears the potential to enrich debates on Africanism, feminism and ...

Bessie Head was one of the Drum writers of the 1950s. As critics such as Huma Ibrahim have indicated it was only after her death in 1986 that she was included in discussions on the Drum generation. The result of her prior exclusion has been the double marginalization of Head’s literary contribution, as one of the overlooked black South African writers of the 1950s and the lack of critical acclaim of her as an individual author. For this reason, she is one of the black South African writers who should consciously be given prominence today. This article utilizes an analysis of Head’s novels not attempted so far. It is difficult to interrogate Head’s work fruitfully, unless questions are addressed to whether she approaches her imaginative writing as an Africanist, a feminist or just as a woman. It will be argued that her fiction highlights the plight of the socially marginalized in eccentric and seminal ways and that it bears the potential to enrich debates on Africanism, feminism and ...

Home is a very important notion in human life which helps people establish emotional, social and intellectual belonging and identifications so that they can hold on to life. When the sense of home is contested, the sense of identity is impaired too. Those people who are characterized by the sense of disconnectedness and desire to re-establish their home are known as diasporic people. The protagonist of Maru (1971), Margaret is one of those diasporic people who long for home and attachments to people. This article is an attempt to examine the struggle of Margaret against a ruthless and cruel society. In her status as a diasporic individual, Margaret is seen as a nonhuman being due to her race, as a Masarwa, living in Botswana. She is alienated, and treated as a pariah, because she does not belong to a superior race defined by the colonial British forces which ruled Botswana. The article tries to view the protagonist’s estrangement and her experience as a diasporic pariah through the ...

This thesis postulates a Marxist feminist perspective in the analysis of Miriam Tlali's fiction. Attention has been given to Tlali's disclosure of the adverse black experience in South Africa, and the various ways which Tlali proposes as the panacea to the situation. Central to her vocation is the pursuit of justice through the transformation of the oppressed people's position of marginality to that of centrality to power and discourse. Tlali's works are thus utilitarian in perspective because of her primary conviction in the oppressed people's accessibility to empowering resources. Her didacticism is validated by her grounding of her fictional content in real life experiences, and letting her fiction act as a mirror of the society. The first two chapters deal with the dynamics of black existence in South Africa, and point to the factors d e f ~ g its uniqueness. Conversations with Miriam Tlali in chapter three gives that existence a perspective which informs her...

This paper is an exploration through Bessie Head's A Question of Power with the intention of discovering traces of bond between Bessie and her protagonist Elizabeth or the author's selfhood in Elizabeth. The finding of the study validates Houston's (2012) arguable assertion that all fiction is autobiographical in some way because it undoubtedly contains elements of the author's actual experience. For, in spite of the fact that Bessie puts her novel under fiction literature, her selfhood and experience explicitly manifest in her heroine.The entire work is structured thus: introduction, background of the author, synopsis of the novel, analysis of the text, summary of the work and conclusion.

Bessie Head's first novel, When Rain Clouds Gather, is perhaps one of her most ethico-political narratives to examine the introduction of modern capitalism and patriarchal science against the haunting spectral of traditional tribal systems in pre-Independence Botswana. Set in Golema Mmidi, which ironically translates to "grow crops," Head provides a detailed historical trajectory of how the imposition of agribusiness development projects onto traditional pastoral livelihoods devoured traditional tribal structures and ecosystems. In this essay, I examine how the implementation of modernized agricultural technology supplanted the collective relationship of subsistence farming, kinship systems, and cattle herding. I argue that When Rain Clouds Gather offers an interdisciplinary space for probing ecologies of pain in which scientific agribusiness projects have violently separated humanity from nature and rendered 63 percent of the Botswana's population food insecure.

This essay identifies and intervenes in the limitations of both the social and the medical models of disability in the postcolonial context, suggesting that those limitations may apply to theorizations of disability more broadly. It suggests that Bessie Head's novel 'A Question of Power,' which represents mental illness and disability without positing a stable etiology for them, illustrates the inapplicability of these ways of thinking about disability under instances of extreme precarity. As such, Head offers a test case for how mental illness and disability writ large might be theorized without the suppositions implicit to the liberal subject.

Bessie Heads' style of writing appeals to psychological matters. In A Question of Power, she digs into the realm of abnormal psychology, hence fixing the work relevant to an interdisciplinary study. In the novel, the problematic situation of a child produced by the South African society in the days of apartheid is portrayed. The kid is passed up by social institutions because though her mother was White, she herself does not look White. Her mother's family disowns her. She does not really know her mother. At maturity, she receives a bizarre marriage and finally decides to migrate to Botswana. She faces discrimination, isolation and culture conflict and leads off to show abnormal behaviour. The novel, though arriving from an era of apartheid, which has been abolished, makes more or less universal and lasting statements about human societies. One sees that under traumatizing social and political situations, children and women suffer acutely and in a special way.

As a counterpoint to social reality, the garden opens a range of possibilities for reinterpreting and reworking some of the myths on which patriarchal and colonial discourses have traditionally relied. This essay examines ways in which Bessie Head's image of the communal agricultural garden achieves these aims.

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.

Bessie Head's ethnographic reportage in Serowe: The Village of the Rain Wind is an important historical document to locate the collapse of sustainable communities and reproductive generation. In this essay, I argue that Head's ethnographic reportage at this historical intersection at the cusp of neoliberalism chronicles how international, national, and regional politics in collusion with transnational pharmaceutical companies undermine women's reproductive bodies and family structures. The result is the reproductive collapse of tribal communities and the absorption of indigenous peoples into the global capitalist economy. Abstract-Bessie Head's ethnographic reportage in Serowe: The Village of the Rain Wind is an important historical document to locate the collapse of sustainable communities and reproductive generation. In this essay, I argue that Head's ethnographic reportage at this historical intersection at the cusp of neoliberalism chronicles how international, national, and regional politics in collusion with transnational pharmaceutical companies undermine women's reproductive bodies and family structures. The result is the reproductive collapse of tribal communities and the absorption of indigenous peoples into the global capitalist economy.

Title Writing desire and history: emergent post-colonial feminist figurations in recent work of Dineo Seshee Bopape. Abstract This article considers the emergent feminist strategies employed by contemporary visual artist Dineo Seshee Bopape in representing the post-colonial feminist subject. This will be done through a surface reading of her work in comparison with the work of the late Bessie Head. It is shown how these women, through their creative practise, shows their desire to not only represent themselves, but also be active participants in history and it's writing. This article draws interdisciplinary and transgenerational parallels between the work of these two women that articulates a concern with creating new forms from chaos, thereby resisting phallo-Eurocentric discourse and historical grand narratives.

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.