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Thesis Submitted for the Degree of Phd THE UNIVERSITY OF HULL Enduring Archetypes in the Writing of Bessie Head being a Thesis submitted for the Degree of PhD in the University of Hull by Coreen Brown BA, MA July 1998 CONTENTS Acknowledgements Introduction I 1 The Literary Context of Head's Writing 1 2 2 The Cardinals 37 3 When Rain Clouds Gather 53 4 Maru 76 5 A Question ofPower 99 6 The Collector afTreasures 129 7 Serowe: Village ofthe Rain Wind 151 8 A Bewitched Crossroad 167 Appendix - a selection of Bessie Head's personal letters- as yet unpublished. 187 Select Bibliography 244 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the researchers at the National English Literary Museum in Grahamstown for their regular update on Bessie Head material. I am grateful to the staff at the Khama III Memorial Museum in Serowe for their hospitality and co-operatio~ and to Howard Head for his introduction to Serowe town. Thanks are also due to the Philip Reckitt Educational Trust for their grant towards the cost of travel to Botswana. However, I owe my greatest debt to Dr James Booth of the University of Hull for the benefit of his knowledge, his patience and encouragement. INTRODUCTION Bessie Head was a coloured South African, whose books, with the exception of The Cardinals, were written during her self-imposed exile in Botswana. It was here that she died in 1986. She lived, for most of her adult life, the solitary existence of a single mother, struggling for financial survival in a country whose language she never mastered. The fact that for many years she was refused citizenship of Botswana also caused her considerable anxiety. And her sense of identity was surely marked by the knowledge that her white mother, from whom she was separated at birth, had died in the mental institution to which she had been committed, because, as Head wrote in a letter, 'the ultimate horror had been committed, ....... a white woman had had sex with a black man' (Appendix p.22S). Thus, as a victim of racial discrimination in South Africa, Head was ideally placed to present a postcolonial critique of that society. Her personal letters often reflect on the extreme deprivation confronting the black man or woman in white South Africa, the sense 'that even the birds and trees belong to the white man' (Appendix p.211). Her novels present a powerful expose of this racism. And, as a woman struggling to survive alone in a tribal culture, she also experienced the hardships of a patriarchal hierarchy. She wrote in a letter, 'This partiCUlar society is VERY dangerous. It is male dominated. A man has no faults. They move straight towards a woman and would kill her' (Appendix pp.221-2). A Question of Power and The Collector of Treasures examine this issue. However, the overwhelming impetus of Head's writing is to transcend these problems. The protagonists in her novels, both male and female, struggle to survive the vicissitudes of their lives, and in so doing create their own individualistic, egalitarian utopias. Early critics of Head's work saw this artistic realisation as evidence of Head's experience of exile in Botswana, arguing that she 'exults at having been given the opportunity to dig her roots into the sands of the semi-arid land' (Ogungbesan 103). However, Randolph Vigne's publication, in 1991, of the letters that Head had written to him during her early years in Botswana, portrays a vastly different experience of exile. Reading these descriptions of loneliness, isolation and even ostracism, it becomes clear that the utopian, romantic resolution that closes When Rain Clouds Gather was a reaction against, rather than a response to, Head's early experience of Botswanan exile. Indeed it is Head's letters to Vigne that help to explain the evolution of A Question ofPower. This novel, although autobiographical, and deeply personal in its portrayal of mental illness, is elliptical and enigmatic in its depiction of the actual origin of, or reasons for, Elizabeth's breakdown. For, although Head describes in detail both Elizabeth's ability to relate appropriately to reality, and her awful experience of her delusions, this clear separation, between Elizabeth as subject of her consciousness and Elizabeth as object of her unconscious, is not in process at a crucial juncture of the novel - that part which explains Elizabeth's conscious feelings for the real Sello in Motabeng village. It is Head's letters to Vigne that provide a clue to the strange drama that she was conducting in Serowe, one which concerns her relationship with a 'VIP' and the hostility that she felt this attracted from the local people. This hostility seems to have little effect on Elizabeth in A Question of Power, and yet her aggressive, unprovoked attack against the black assistant in the post office suggests the presence of feelings of dislike and resentment, hitherto suppressed. It is Head's letters to Vigne, rather than the narrative of A Question ofPower, that shed light on the author's relationship with the local people. The desire to make sense out of madness is strong. And it seemed possible to me that access to Head's unpublished personal papers might provide further clues to issues that are 2 veiled, or simply omitted from her literary output. It also seemed that they might provide a deeper understanding of A Question of Power and thereby help to explain the whole force of Head's artistic resolution. So in 1995 I travelled to Serowe and staying in the accommodation provided at the Khama III Memorial Museum read for three weeks through the Bessie Head Papers. Total immersion in these letters moves the reader into a world that is less controlled, more arbitrary, than the greater part of her fictional writing. Her feelings move between anger and love, joy and despair. Desperate poverty compels her to plead with literary agents for payments of royalties that she feels are outstanding; she haggles over book advances that will pay for repairs to a leaking roof or worn out plumbing. There are angry outbursts to correspondents whom she feels have criticised her or her writing, and there are passionate avowals of love and everlasting friendship. Many letters reflect the insecurity and emotional instability from which she always sutTered, her fears of being used by those in possession of powerful academic positions. Other letters record her attempts to find an alternative country in which to settle. But there is also her courageous attempt to make light of her isolation: 'I have lived here for 18 years and those are the only three black people known to me. I seek no one ... I have a big international world. The whole world has boUght my books and the whole world walks to my door' (Appendix p.220). Letter writing, and the contact it provided with an outside world, became an immensely important part of her life. The effusive gratitude she expresses at the gift of a copy of Mhudi (Appendix p.212) is also a heartfelt response to the overtures of friendship that the gift signifies. And it was to friends whom she had never met, but who had contacted her on reading one of her journal articles, that Head disclosed the nature of her fantasies and delusions. 3 One of these letters (the second letter reproduced in the Appendix p.194) was written at a time which Head later describes as 'three years or more' of 'a strange journey into hell and darkness'. In the later letter she explains that 'it was the darkness [she] did not grasp because at the same time [she] saw the light' and believed that 'an inner heaven could make a heaven on earth' (Appendix p.198). The context of this 'inner heaven' is the fantasy she creates surrounding her relationship with an important figure in Serowe. It is clear from the scenario described in this earlier letter, that Head is expressing, in an unmediated form, the , nature of the delusions that were to be turned into the material of A Question ofPower: It has taken me thirty-one years to know who I am. It has taken my God 47 years. The two of us only finally knew each other in these past four or five weeks, though when he was born in Botswana a number of prophesies were made about him. I was included in them because the two of us have always been a team together. (Appendix p.194) She later revealed the identity of this man, ' he was Seretse Khama, the first president of Botswana' (Appendix p.221). That Head should have fantasised in such a way is indeed evidence that at one period of her life she held only a tenuous grasp on reality - and her early letters, like A Question of Power, reflect her belief that as the soulmate of a powerful figure she has a momentous destiny to fulfil. Although Head was cured of her mental breakdown, nonetheless, the resolution in her literary writing always depends upon the achievements of a dominant protagonist, one who embodies the characteristics of the hero of her early delusions. And it is Head's individualistic creation of the 'hero' that ensures that her egalitarian 'brotherhood of man' can only be brought into being by the most 4 masculine, most explicitly male heroes - archetypal figures with the power to redress the wrongs of society. The origin and significance of fantasies or hallucinations has long been contested. They have been seen as derangement or as prophetic wisdom, as the result of inherited genes, or as acquired cognitive experience.
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