In Conversation with Bessie Head

Mary S. Lederer

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501351419
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria africana

In Conversation with Bessie Head shows how reading the novels and letters of Botswana's most influential writer, Bessie Head, fosters an ongoing conversation between reader and writer and is in fact a very personal undertaking. Each chapter tackles two parallel threads, the first regarding Mary S. Lederer's own history of reading Head-from her first purchase of Maru, through completing a Ph.D. on Head's trilogy, through living in Botswana and connecting with various aspects of Head's life, to examining how reading Head has affected her own development as a human being. This history then ties each chapter into discussion of how Head develops her own vision of the "brotherhood of man." Alongside critically informed discussion, Head's vision is examined through the prism of specific questions. Why is madness not a useful concept for understanding Head's ideas? Why did Head say she was not a feminist, and what is the significance of "male" and "female" in her novels? What is the relationship between individual, race, and community? How can the nature of God be a clear expression of love but also an indistinct force for both good and evil? Head's novels present opportunities for personal growth, and through these "conversations" with her, we become different readers.

1

Reading Bessie Head

I have only two themes . . . that love is really good . . . and . . . that it is important to be an ordinary person.

Betty Fradkin, “Conversations with Bessie” 433

The face of Zoë Wicomb gazed mutely at me.¹ I was standing in the book center in Maseru, Lesotho, in early 1987. Her photograph took up the whole cover of Maru, by Bessie Head. I’d never read an African novel before, having just completed a master’s degree in German. I was a Peace Corps volunteer, teaching high-school mathematics at a Catholic girls’ school, and I was looking for something “relevant” to read.

Since I had done German women’s writing for my master’s, I was looking for an African woman writer, preferably Southern African. Head’s novel was the only one on the shelf, and it was short (and therefore relatively inexpensive, an important consideration for a Peace Corps volunteer). So I bought it, took it with me back to my village home, and read it. Two years later I started an MA and then a PhD program in African literature, in order to study Bessie Head. Who was this woman who changed the course of my intellectual and spiritual life?

In 1964, Bessie Head accepted permanent exile from South Africa to take a teaching post in Botswana, where she lived until her death in 1986. In his introduction to A Gesture of Belonging, Randolph Vigne wrote about her,

The product of a deeply disturbing, insecure childhood, tortured by her status as a “Coloured” (while belonging to no community designated by that term in the evil system of apartheid), constantly brooding on the story of her mother’s mental illness and her own conception, she was haunted by an abiding sense of alienation and aloneness, the fear of madness and the sense of a coming early death. (6)

For someone with this sort of background to write that “love is really good” takes an enormous strength of will, a will that jumped out from the pages of Maru. For Bessie Head the writer, love was an important concept, but for Bessie Head the human being, it must also have seemed very elusive. I was only just beginning to learn not to scoff at love, so Maru, though a hard read, was a gripping one. Bessie’s will pulled me into the pages, and I wanted more.

Two days after I turned in my PhD dissertation, I received a copy of Bessie Head’s biography, Gillian Stead Eilersen’s Bessie Head: Thunder behind Her Ears. Her Life and Writing, that a friend had been able to find in South Africa. It is very thorough and well documented. Her life story was intriguing and also—for someone like me—depressing. For all that my parents (predictably) drove me crazy,² they were a huge, important, and supportive part of my life. What would I have done if, like Bessie, I had been so alone?

The short version of Head’s life can be given fairly quickly: she was born in 1937 in a psychiatric hospital in Pietermaritzburg to a white mother; her father was unknown.³ She was returned by the first foster family she was placed with because she was developing black physical characteristics. She was then placed with a “Coloured”⁴ family in Pietermaritzburg and raised by them until she was placed in a mission boarding school, where she discovered her true origins. She worked as a journalist for a period, married and had a son, dabbled in politics, and then, as her marriage failed and she became disillusioned with opposition politics, moved to permanent exile in Botswana, where she worked as a teacher, typist, and gardener—and writer—to support herself and her son. She died in Serowe in 1986.

Head herself told the following story in her introduction to the story “Witchcraft,” published in Ms. magazine in November 1975:

I was born on the sixth of July, 1937, in the Pietermaritzburg Mental Hospital . . . The reason for my peculiar birthplace was that my mother was white, and she had acquired me from a black man. She was judged insane, and committed to the mental hospital while pregnant. Her name was Bessie Emery and I consider it the only honor South Africans ever did me—naming me after this unknown, lovely, and unpredictable woman. (72)

In the years since Head’s death, much more information about her life has come to light, and more critical attention devoted to examining how Head created a life story that suited her needs, looking in particular at the relationship between her life, her published work, and her letters.⁵ Although Head herself certainly knew the bare facts—about her place of birth and the circumstances of her upbringing—she only knew a fraction of what we now know. At the time of her death, she had been contracted to write an autobiography, but she became ill and died before she could begin working on it.

About a year after I got my degree, a lecturer position opened up at the University of Botswana. I applied, was hired, and arrived in Gaborone in September 1997. I was here. Only 400 kilometers from Bessie Head’s home in Serowe. In the twenty years that I have lived here, I have been carrying on a conversation—a back-and-forth relationship of sorts—with Bessie, with colleagues, with family and friends, with critics, about her writing, about Botswana, about myself. Of course I didn’t realize it then, but the conversation really began when I started thinking about prophecy and deity during the work on my dissertation. I didn’t want to believe in God (I had, about five years earlier, confidently declared myself a Marxist atheist), but I think I wanted to believe in something. Bessie showed me that my lack of belief was based largely on ignorance. And that I had to sort that problem out for myself. Reading her, reading about her life, and thinking about my life seems a good place to start.

Bessie Head drew very heavily on her own life for material to write about. Her own narration of the story of her life resembles the details she gave to her character Elizabeth in A Question of Power: daughter of a white woman, born in a psychiatric hospital, shunned by her mother’s family and shunted around and ostracized because of her background, finally landing in Botswana with a young son, and experiencing episodes of mental breakdown. What A Question of Power represents, however, is less a representation of Head’s life—although it is certainly autobiographical—than a fictionalization of her life placed in the context of a worldview she began to develop very early in her writing, including in her voluminous correspondence.⁶ Some of her earliest short pieces raise questions that would, nearly twenty years later, become cornerstones of her philosophy; the imagery of the following passage, for example, suggests seven heavenly virtues, seven deadly sins, the honesty that she would strive for in her relationships with others, the unity of souls, the omnipresence of God, the nature of love, and contradiction:

All my seven faces of deceit and pretence I had put down. Only my nameless face was there because the earth was breathing, and the air was still and quiet. Then I was trapped too, like the rain clouds. I had no time to find my seven faces, for you came to me silently, and when I looked up you were there; also with your nameless face . . . A thousand differing contradictions pour out to conceal the underground stream that is the same always, flowing, continuous. Now I am plunged in head-to-toe; amazed that my whole self flows outward into you, yet back to me again in a current of deep peace without beginning or ending. (“Earth and Everything” 139–40)

Her philosophy covers love, community, faith, and the nature of good and evil in the human being. This book will trace the development of that philosophy in her writing from When Rain Clouds Gather through Maru to A Question of Power, in the context of much of her other writing, but because Bessie Head draws her readers into that context, and because we draw on our own lives when we read her, this discussion will also offer a somewhat personal perspective—mine.⁷

* * *

[R];eading can also be a form of dialogue which does not simply validate stereotypes, rigid preconceptions or brittle political and academic theories through texts, but truly recognizes writing as a communicative act. The ideal of reciprocal dialogues was central for Bessie Head, and they functioned in her fiction as a trope for all liberating relationships. Her prolific letter-writing also revealed a passionate belief about communicating through writing, especially communicating across boundaries, and with an ardent faith in the human need to share ideals, pleasures and challenges, while also acknowledging the “strangeness” of others’ views. (“Bessie Head’s Freedoms”)

I begin with this quotation from Desiree Lewis because it captures an essential aspect of the experience of reading Bessie Head: what matters is not only what the books are about, and not only the experience we bring to them, but also what we experience from reading them. This is the communication between reader and writer that Head desires. The tone of her letters seemed to beg for replies, and the letters themselves placed her in a network of communication with people who, in many cases, did not even know each other and some of whom she herself had never met but who had read her books and reached out to her to continue their discussions about her work. Charlotte Bruner wrote to Head that “[y];our letters are generous and reveal things to me about myself as well” (KMM 40 BHP 12,⁸ August 23, 1978). This kind of reading is not easy, nor is it really “over” when one of Head’s novels ends. She grabs her readers by the lapels and hauls them into her work,⁹ and to finish reading it does not often give a sense of satisfaction.

Head’s own needs regarding her life story would have been those of a story-teller as well as philosopher. Much of her material does come from her own life in Serowe. Reading her unpublished letters reveals even more clearly the link between what she published and what she wrote to others.¹⁰ About a forthcoming collection, Linda-Susan Beard writes that Head’s “hybridized experiments in narrative have counterparts and first drafts in one of the largest collections of extant African epistles . . . Bessie [destroyed] almost one thousand letters shortly before her death because of the limitations of space in her tiny Serowe home. Putting aside the poignancy of loss, what we have is a final collection that represents Bessie’s own editorial logic” (“Letter by Letter: Bessie Head’s Epistolary Art” 201). She was someone who loved language: formulations, phrases, words are repeated in letters to different people, almost as if she were testing variations on different people to find out how they sounded, both to herself and to others. In a 1961 letter to Cordelia Guenther, her flat mate in Cape Town, she writes that she will be working late at the library: “This poem is most difficult. I have started and destroyed it again and again” (Bessie Head to Cordelia Guenther, undated, uncatalogued KMM BHP). The “poem” is the lyrics to “Black Coffee”; she must have listened to it over and over in order to get it right. The letter includes her attempt to record the words of the song (and some of them are incorrect). This is the first known illustration of a habit she often followed: handwriting the words of a passage, poem, or song in order to really understand the craft and meaning. In her own writing, she valued feedback, and her correspondence is also an important component in her project of bringing people and readers into conversation with her.

When Head herself was ready to write, she typed out one original and two carbons. She did not, with the exception of the final chapters of When Rain Clouds Gather, rework her material very much. Once the manuscript was done, it was done. She would have had to make any corrections on the original and both carbons, or else type the whole thing over again, an onerous task in pre-word-processing days. She worked in her garden full-time during the day and did most of her writing at night by candlelight.

* * *

Head’s own experiences and those she wrote demonstrate a thorough and personal understanding of the nature of oppression and its human consequences. Her construction of her characters’ experiences and her formulation of positive human communities reflects an awareness of social forces and how they act on individuals. Her comments to Vigne, in a letter of September 24, 1981, regarding public response to her illness also suggest that what she wrote about struck a public chord: “Surprisingly, a number of people pulled out breakdowns in sympathy . . . Nearly every house I walked into had a nervous breakdown in it, mostly women and some astonishing confessions: ‘I’ve been married twice and I’m not happy. Marital problems gave me a breakdown last year.’ Some people simply cooked up nervous troubles as far as I could see!” (A Gesture of Belonging 153). Such public reaction undoubtedly pleased her, but her comments also point to an ability to observe and portray human behavior in a way that makes personal trauma familiar. Head wrote about both personal trauma and social discomfort, about pain and oppression, but also—and for Head these two were clearly related—about remaking God and reshaping the world to be fit for human beings.

Head’s own thinking about the nature of God and the problems of human society and human existence stretched over many broad, different traditions. She was brought up in a Catholic environment (Thunder behind Her Ears 17–25) and attended school at an Anglican mission.¹¹ She read widely in the M. L. Sultan Indian library in Durban,¹² where she encountered texts in the Hindu tradition. It is clear from her writing that she was familiar with the Bible, but she was also familiar with important religious texts from Hindu and Buddhist traditions. A Question of Power in particular incorporates all these, as well as elements of G...