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Download Download s o u A Quarterly of the Volume XVIII, Number 2 April 1999 that my father worked in their stables and took care of Bessie Head* their racehorses. Interviewed by Lee Nichols INTERVIEWER: Bessie was taken from her mother at INTERVIEWER: The writer I'll be talking with on this birth, she told me, and raised by foster parents until she program1 is an extraordinary woman and an extraordinary was thirteen years old. Then she was placed in a mission writer. Bessie Head is a South African refugee who has orphanage. Her mother had asked that some of her own made her home in Botswana. She's one of the first non­ money be set aside for Bessie's education and when the white South African women to become known on the mother died, a sum of money was made available and world literary stage. She's written three major novels­ Bessie got a high school education in the orphanage where When Rain Clouds Gather, Marn and A Question of Power-­ she remf1illed until the age of eighteen. It was while she as well as a number of short stories. Her novels range was growing up in South Africa that the seeds of her from the pastoral life of rural Botswana to one so violent, writing career were planted. so puzzling, that it caused widespread controversy. I visited Bessie Head in her adopted village of Serowe, a two HEAD: I feel that a love of books is a kind of inborn hundred sixty-mile drive from the Botswana capitol of thing, you know, when you've sort of got a fascination Gaborone. She lives in a small house with her son and for having stories told to you and read to you. It's tends a vegetable garden from which she sells produce to something that comes from within. So that even if I supplement her earnings from her writing. I began our didn't havf specific parents to do anything for me I did a interview by asking Mrs. Head to tell me something about lot of reading on my own because I loved that particular her background and how she got started as a writer. world. You open up a book and you learn about something that's much more exciting than your everyday grind, a HEAD: I was born in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, on world of magic beyond your own. And I feel that the the sixth of July, nineteen thirty-seven. I did not have beginnings of writing really start whereby you know that any parents. In fact there is a sort of tragedy attached to when you open a book there's a magical world there. my birth. My mother was a white woman of a very upper class family. Her family were very wealthy and she acquired INTERVIEWER: After leaving the orphanage, Bessie me out of wedlock from a black man. This caused such a Head served as an elementary school teacher in South disturbance in the family they succeeded in getting my Africa for two years. And she worked for Drum, a magazine mother classified insane and by the time I was born she primarily for Africans, and later wrote weekly "true had been committed to the Pietermaritzburg mental romances" for a South African newspaper. But she said hospital where I was born: So really I have been given her first creative writing didn't begin until she'd left South much more detail about my mother, but I was only told Africa. IThis interview was recorded on September 27, 1976 in Serowe, HEAD: You could really say that my writing experience Botswana, for broadcast by the Voice of America. began in Botswana. Everything about the society was Head, Bessie. INTERVIEWER: Tell me how it got published. Born Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, July 6, 1937. Died April HEAD: I was forced to write it, if you can say so. I had 17, 1986. Education: high written an article which was published in the New Statesman school, South Africa; Interna­ and this article was read by an editor who worked for tional Writing Program, Uni­ Simon and Schuster in New York. At that time I had just versity of Iowa. Journalist, teacher. Major works: When got an agent. She [the Simon and Schuster editor] wrote Rain Clouds Gather, Maru, A a letter to my agency and asked if I would write a novel Question of Power, novels; for them. I had indicated in the article that people in The Collector of Treasures, southern Africa were very fascinating and the editor asked short stories; Serowe: The Vil- if I would tell her more in a novel about people in southern lage of the Rain-Wind, non-fiction; and short stories Africa. I'd had various difficulties at that time. I hadn't in a number of magazines in the U. S. and elsewhere. got a teaching job any more. I then indicated to my agent magical to me and the reason I began writing is that I that I neither had writing materials, paper or anything. So wanted to communicate that fascination I felt for the ways the editor at Simon and Schuster sent me eighty dollars of life of the people of this country. It is almost to get on with the basics, at least to acquire paper and impossible for a writer to evoke a similar feeling of magic things like that. So since I had eighty dollars I had to do and wonder about South Africa. It's too despairing. something. And I looked back on my two-year stay in Botswana and there were all these vivid communications INTERVIEWER: Well then, will you tell me how you I'd had with people about the country. So I then got into happened to come to Botswana? typing up that novel which was eventually published by Simon and Schuster in New York. HEAD: I'd been married and after about a year and a half the marriage fell through. So I was sort of stuck. I INTERVIEWER: Mrs. Head said that her first novel When had nothing to do and I had a small baby. There was an Rain Clouds Gather was considered to give such a clear advertisement in a newspaper in South Africa for teachers picture of life in Botswana that it was used in the training in Botswana. So I applied and I got a job. The only of foreign volunteers who carne to that country after its complication that arose out of that was that I was refused independence. She said her second novel, Maru, was a a passport and I came to Botswana on an exit permit, thesis against racialism. which sort of classified me as a stateless person. HEAD: But I didn't use a black-white theme like black INTERVIEWER: Mrs. Head began teaching in Serowe man versus white man. I used my own theme to work and it was there that she wrote her first novel. out what I'd say was a kind of universal thesis on racialism. That's mosdy the base of Maru. It is an examination ·of HEAD: My first book, When Rain Clouds Gather, was a collection of first impressions of the country. I had come here in sixty-four and over a period of sixty-four to sixty­ Resound five there was a terrible drought in which the cattle died. A Quarterly of the And when there is a tragedy, detail and a picture of the Archives of Traditional Music country emerges because people discuss it so much. And Jonathan Cargill, Editor everybody at that time tended to give me a little picture We are pleased to accept conunents, letters, and submissions. of Botswana because there was such an intensity of feeling Please address your correspondence to RESOUND at: at the time about the cattle dying. My book is written with the particular feeling of a black person, who has Archives of Traditional Music Morrison Hall 117 grown up in South Africa, that when you come into a Indiana U ni versity coUntry where black people are free you can do so much Bloomington, IN 47405 more to help yoursel£ But when you come from a country Gloria J. Gibson, Director where black people are not free-if there were a similar Marilyn B. Graf, Archivist Suzanne Mudge, Librarian calamity in: South Africa black people would die. That was the theme I had in my mind. It was an appreciation ISSN 0749-2472 of a country that was experiencing freedom. 2 racial prejudices but I used black against black instead at her with fascination and attention. A cold of white against black. sweat broke out, down her back. ''Yes?'' she asked, unsmiling. INTERVIEWER: Maru is a book, as you said, which The boy shook his head and laughed to depicts racialism but it involves particularly the problems himself. of the Bushmen facing discrimination by their black "I am thinking about a certain matter," he said. compatriots. Where did you get the material for this book? Then he looked direcdy into her face with an I t seems very real and vivid. insolent stare: "Tell me," he said. "Since when is a Bushy a HEAD: A whole portion of it was myself, my African teacher?" background. It's easy for me to put myself in the shoes The room heaved a little and the whole of Basarwa (Bushmen) people, you see. classroom of children blanked out before her. Yet she still stood upright with wide-open eyes. From INTERVIEWER: We'll read a passage from Maru which a distance their voices sounded like a confused shows the attitude of the local people in Bessie Head's roar: novel towards the Bushmen or Basarwa.
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