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date: 15 February 2025

Head, Bessielocked

Head, Bessielocked

  • Dorothy DriverDorothy DriverDepartment of English and Creative Writing, University of Adelaide

Summary

Bessie Head (b. 1937–d. 1986), claimed as a national literary figure by both South Africa and Botswana, has acquired an international reputation for pathbreaking postcolonial explorations of individual, social, and psychic life. Texts published in her lifetime include three novels, a volume of short stories, and two revisionist histories of Botswana, as well as stories, sketches, essays, poems, and reviews in journals and anthologies. Most of the latter, along with a novella, selected correspondence, and other previously unpublished work, have been posthumously gathered into book-length collections and journal sections. Her most widely celebrated (and most challenging) novel is A Question of Power (1974), with Maru (1971) a close second, but other writing also receives continuing attention.

Born in South Africa to a nonmarital, “mixed-race” union, Bessie Amelia Emery grew up in foster and orphanage care, thereafter working as a teacher and a journalist. After marrying fellow journalist Harold Head and bearing their child, she relocated in 1964, as a single parent, to the then Bechuanaland, now Botswana, where she earned a meager living from writing and market-gardening while dealing with psychological ill health. Although freed from apartheid South Africa and its near overwhelming stranglehold on creativity, her writing frequently recurs to its currents of insult, abuse, and degradation. Botswana offered her a more humane environment, despite problematic race and gender relations. Drawn from her transnational experience, her deftly crafted narratives provide a sustained social critique of the dynamics of power and its intersecting subordinations without descending into crude identity politics, thus formulating what may be called a transnational black aesthetic. Boldly transgressing genre, Head foregrounds the role of creativity, individual and social, as she reimagines a world more hospitable than even her Botswana experience could provide. Into this newly imagined world, the writer resituates and redefines herself, formulating a life-in-writing and a reality-to-come.

Subjects

  • Women’s History

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