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BESSIE HEAD - INTELLECTUAL SKETCH |
| In a Letter to the Editor of Transition in 1964, Bessie Head expressed could be taken as her political outlook and aesthetic beliefs: “ I am enclosing a subscription slip. To me, at least, Transition is a kind of home. It seems to be fighting neither for communism or capitalism. I am rather out of things and slick slogans and I do not feel, as a communist has to, that I could have all the solutions to end starvation and fix the world right---nor as a capitalist, who feels pretty wonderful and secure with a million dollars . . . We who want to be writers just cannot let the politicians subdue us so. Politics (today) seems to have nothing to do with anyone and yet is powerful enough to destroy human life. I really do not despair for the future. It seems as though world-wide awareness of struggle and suffering cannot help but lead to a sense of idealism in those who rule. We cannot go back to the dark ages” (“Letter”, vol. 4 no. 17, November-December 1964). In many ways this Letter expressed perspectives which many exiled Sophiatown Renaissance writers, intellectuals and artists would not have disagreed with. Indeed, Transition was a home for many exile South African writers; principally for Ezekiel Mphahlele who was between 1963 and 1966 a lecturer at the University of Nairobi. There are many essays and articles by him in these years as well as are pertinent critical interventions. Even for a few years after he left Nairobi for the University of Colorado in Denver in 1966 there was still a stream of contributions. Lewis Nkosi, Alfred Hutchinson, Alex La Guma and Bloke Modisane found a home in Transition in the form of short stories. Modisane now and then also intervened with essays. The bulk of Lewis Nkosi’s essays at this time were published in African Report as well as in The New African (both based in London), of which he was the literary editor. Bessie Head was also correct in perceptively observing that it was the non-alignment of Transtion with neither the East or the West during the Cold War Era that made it cultural desirable to exiled South Africans, besides its high intellectual attainments which provoked the admiration of Lionel Trilling: “Dear Rajat Neogy: I must tell you that no magazine I can ever remember reading---except maybe the Dial of my youth---has ever told me so much about matters I did not know about. This, of course, can be taken to be only the measure of my ignorance; that would be quite reasonable. But ignorance does not surrender easily, and so it must be the virtue of the magazine that is being measured. It really is remarkably intelligent . . . ” (“Lionel on Transition”, vol. 4 no. 17, November-December 1964). With her observations Bessie Head was indicating that Sophiatown Renaissance writers were neither enamored to socialism nor to liberalism, but rather, had a great desire for African Nationalism. There can be little doubt that Bloke Modisane, Bessie Head herself, Ezekiel Mphahlele were more sympathetic to the black nationalism of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) rather to the muliculturalism of the African National Congess (ANC). Lewis Nkosi is much more difficult to characterize at this time because in the late 1950s in Johannesburg he had worked for Liberal Party’s newspaper Contact, besides being on the staff of the Golden City Post (the sister newspaper to Drum magazine). Despite these political alignments or identifications, Bessie Head was fundamentally correct in understanding her cohorts of the Sophiatown Renaissance cultural movement as unwaveringly committed to the autonomy of artistic expression. What is remarkable about these observations is that although Bessie Head was marginalized from the major portions of the historical experience of the Sophiatown Renaissance, both inside the country and in exile, she perhaps had as much understanding of the innards of its historical form as its other major figures, be it Ezekiel Mphahlele or Lewis Nkosi. It is because of her isolation during the exile period, historically, artistically and geographically, from her intellectual peers that facilitated her attainments of greatness as a writer. The fact of the matter is that Bessie Head is the one great writer of the Sophiatown Renaissance. Her first novel, published posthumously, The Cardinals (1998), written in complete isolation in Serowe (Botswana), was the prefiguration of the extraordinary work that was to follow since it was a deep rooted search for the form of the African novel in modernity. From this unprecedented engagement with literary form as achieved by European modernism in the early part of the twentieth-century to the remarkable power of Maru (1971) is a short but complicated distance. Given this practically unequalled literary achievement within the Sophiatown Renaissance, it is difficult to understand why Bessie Head has not been given her deserved recognition as one of the central figures of this cultural movement. Inside the country before she went into exile in 196?, there were two reasons for this lack of recognition or lack of acknowledgement: until recently Bessie Head had always been located at the margins of our historical sensibility or consciousness when in fact she is in many ways its center. The reason white still inside the country for her isolation or marginalization is that she was closely associated as a reporter with the Golden City Post rather than with more reputable Drum magazine; and complicating matters is that she was at the Post for a relatively short period when already many of the Sophiatown Renaissance writers were already heading for exile or already in exile. Related to this is that her creative work in the form of short stories hardly appeared in the more prestigious review before going into exile. The second reason is that like James Matthews, Richard Rive, Alex La Guma she was situated at the intersection of the District Six writers located in Cape Town and the Drum writers in Sophiatown. When she was in exile other factors or reasons account for her marginalization from her centrality in the Sophiatown Renaissance. Geographically, while most of the Sophiatown writers in the 1960s were largely exiled in Europe and United States, Bessie Head remained in Africa, specifically in Botswana, throughout her exile period until her death in 1986. Ezekiel Mphahlele moved in and out of Africa in the 1960s, and not necessarily out of choice; and Lewis Nkosi was largely based in London in the 1960s, and only in the early 1980s taking a permanent post at the University of Zimbabwe, thereafter in the late 1980s moving to the University of Warsaw, later still in the early 1990s taking a position at the University of Wyoming at Laramie, and last year in 1999 moving to Switzerland; Bloke Modisane ramained permanently in Europe (moving from London to Rome to Dortmund). The only other member of the Sophiatown Renaissance who resided permanently in Africa like Bessie Head was Alfred Hutchinson. It would seem that this geographical residence in Africa gave Bessie Head a unique historical vision on the question of modernity in Africa. Historically, rejecting a teleological perspective by refusing to believe in the absolute goodness of progrees, Bessie Head was more engaged by the manichean struggle between tradition and modernity, than in the belief in the inevitable triumph of modernity, as was the case with Lewis Nkosi, Bloke Modisane, and complicatedly Mphahlele (Down Second Avenue [1959] configures a different take on modernity, whereas his later critical writings are a ‘celebration’ of its triumph). The novel Maru is a brilliant engagement with the complex dialectic of tradition and modernity. In this Bessie Head’s work evinces deeper parallels with Solomon T. Plaatje’s historical novel Mhudi (1930). It would not be too farfetched to view Bessie Head as a protégé of Plaatje. In a Foreword to a later edition of Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa (1916), expresses her great admiration for the great Tswana (barolong) intellectual: “But Native Life is wide and deep in its historical reach. A full portrait of the times emerges and we are presented with a view of history reaching back nearly five hundred years and up to a period of change and transition as it affected the lives of black people . . . Native Life does not fail as a book of flaming power and energy, astonishingly crowded with data of the day-to-day life of a busy man who assumed great sorrows and great responsibilities, who felt himself fully representative of a silent, oppressed people and by sheer grandeur of personality, honoured that obligation. Most black South Africans suffer from a very broken sense of history. Native Life provides an essential link. The book may have failed to appeal to human justice in its time, but there is in its tears, anguish and humility, an appeal to a day of retribution” (“Foreword”, Native Life in South Africa, Introduction Brian Willan, Ohio University Press, Athens, 1991). Dealing with ‘a period of change and transition’, Maru borrows its metaphysics of history from Plaatje’s historical imagination of cultural politics. In contrast to H. I. E. Dhlomo (great essays in Ilanga lase Natal in the 1940s and in the 1950s) and R. V. Selope Thema (seminal essays in Umteteli wa Bantu in the 1920s), in the earlier phase of the New African Movement, who were celebrants of modernity, Plaatje was profoundly troubled by the entrance of European modernity into African history which unleashed a spiritual crisis in African tradition(s). Similarly within the Sophiatown Renaissance, whereas Bloke Modisane (in the autobiography Blame Me On History, 1963) and Lewis Nkosi (in the exquisite and elegant critical essays assembled in Tasks and Masks, 1980), are unabashedly on the side of modernity, Bessie Head continuously and everlastingly hesitates between tradition and modernity. Much of this hesitation explains her complexity. Given these geographical and historical factors, artistically Bessie Head preoccupied herself with poetic form in the novel as well as the role of realism in the portrayal of history as perhaps no other Sophiatown Renaissance writer had or has been able to. What Fredric Jameson writes of Georg Lukacs’ The Historical Novel gives us an excellent purview towards understanding the achievement and complexity of Bessie Head: “For Lukacs here, the elements of a solution are given in the coordination between an emergent new form, the historical novel, and an emergent new type of consciousness: a new sense of history and a new experience of historicity” (Fredric Jameson, “Introduction”, The Historical Novel, translation by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, 1983 [1937], italics in the original). The type of consciousness Bessie Head brought to an understanding of the dialectic between tradition and modernity and the new sensibility of poetic form she realized in Maru is what defines the uniqueness of this extraordinay woman in South African literary history, or for that matter, in our cultural history. | |