HELEN COOPER

Bessie Head and Buchi Emecheta: Voyagers

This paper considers the voyages of two women writers: South African Bessie Head's exile in 1964 to where she lived as a stateless person for fifteen years and died in 1986; and Nigerian Buchi Emecheta's journey in 1962 to where she still lives. Both women's writing careers began after these voyages. There is also my own voyage, that of an English feminist critic, immi• grant to the United States in 1969, seeking to engage "the responsibilities of working through the complex historical relations between and among structures of domination and oppression."l In so doing, I also seek to avoid neo-colonial ethnographic gazing, or what the Zimbabwean novelist, Chenjerai Hove, calls "critical tourism,,,2 that "theoretical tourism ... where the margin becomes a lin• guistic or critical vacation, a new poetics of the exotic.,,3 In what follows I at• tempt to find an affinity with writers constructed by, yet very differently posi• tioned in relation to, the colonial history that constructed me, growing up in England. The "imagined community" that I share with Head and Emecheta is firstly the English language. Head used English because "I do not calculate on an audience, I'm not directing my work at black nationalists or the black skin,>4 and "it's eas• ier for me to communicate with people in English ... 1 haven't a grounding in any African language" (BRA, 7-8). Emecheta claims she writes in English because it ... does not belong to the English alone anymore. It is a world language [ ... J In , we have some 239 languages and English is still the lingua franca [ ... J I

1 Biddy Martin/Chandra Talpede Mohanty: "Feminist Politics: What's Home Got to Do With It?". Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis. (Bloomington, Ind., 1986) p.199. 2 Conference, The Commonwealth Institute, London. 1991 3 Caren Kaplan: "Deterritorializations." The Nature and Context ofMinority Discourse, eds. Abdul R. JanMohamed/David Lloyd. (New York, Oxford, 1990), p.361. 4 "Bessie Head in Australia." Interviewed by Andrew Peek in Launceston, 14th March, 1984. New Literature Review, 14 (1985). p.ll. (BHA). 72 HELEN COOPER want my' books to be read by everybody and the only way to do so is to write in English. 5 "Everybody," however, is here an exclusive tenn. Secondly, I share the English education system for girls - however variously it was taught to Bessie Head in the Mission School in Pietennaritzburg (from 1950- 55), to me in the Perse School for Girls, Cambridge, (from 1950-60), and to Emecheta in the Methodist Girls' High School in Lagos (from 1955-62). Our teachers were variations on Emecheta's: "the types of Miss Davies from Wales, Miss Osborne from Scotland, Miss Verney and Miss Humble from England, Miss Walker from Australia.'.6 As we studied in our school unifonns, variations of Emecheta's "khaki school unifonn und school beret," (HAW, 38) we all partook of that education in English Literature ideologically initiated by Macaulay in India in 1835. He argued for educating Indians in English Literature and Science rather than in Arabic or Sanskrit, stating: We must ... do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, opinion, in morals, and in intellect? I am under no illusions as to the complicity of white women in England's imperial project and in the racist ideology which both fuelled it and resulted from it. I do, however, identify Macaulay's "us" here to be white English men, who deter• mined what should be "interpreted" between themselves and the millions whom they govern - be those millions English women or selected Indians, Africans, West Indians. I am interested here mainly in published interviews with Head and Emecheta and also in A Woman Alone, an edited and posthumously published collection of Head's autobiographical essays,S and Head Above Water (1986) Emecheta's autobiography - autobiographical works that reverse the gaze of the ethnographic travel literature which infonned the relations between their countries and England, as they construct themselves both as writing subjects, initiated by their study of English Literature, and also as voyagers. Head and Emecheta produced very different narratives, however: I will argue that Head constructs a journey that rewrites the romance geme to accommodate her racialized origins in , where Emecheta appropriates the travel geme both to gaze on the English

5 Daphne Topouzis: "Buchl Emecheta: An African Story-Teller." Africa Report, May-June, 1990. p.70. (AR). 6 Buchl Emecheta: Head Above Water. (London: Fontana, 1986), p.18. (HAW) 7 Thomas Babington Macaulay: "Indian Education" (1835) rpt. Selected Prose and Poetry, ed. G.M. Young. (London:, 1952). p.729. 8 Bessie Head: A Woman Alone: Autobiographical Writings, sel. & ed. Craig MacKenzie. (Oxford: , 1990).