Celebrating Bessie Head – (A Review of Maru)

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Apartheid, Bessie Head, Botswana, colonialism, Maru, Serowe, South Africa

“I am building a stairway to the stars. I have the authority to take the whole of mankind up there with me. That is why I write.” – Bessie Head

Title: Maru

Author: Bessie Head

Binding: Paperback

Genre:  Fiction

Publisher: Heinemann

This Edition: Pearson Educational  Limited (Heinemann AWS Classics-2008)

Pages: 103
First Publication Date:  1971 by Victor Gollancz Limited

Reason for reading: To Celebrate Bessie Head; and as part of my African Reads

 

 

 Maru

Two best friends, more like blood brothers, Maru and Moleka become fast and sworn enemies over the love of one woman, Margaret Cadmore, a Masarwa who has come to the village of Dilepe to take up a teaching position.

Born by the roadside (of all places, perhaps to reinforce her insignificance as person of the Masarwa tribe) Margaret is adopted by a white wife of a missionary, Margaret Cadmore, whose name young Margaret bears. She rises above intense racial discrimination to become a teacher in Dilepe. And that is where she becomes the subject of much interest, intrigue, hatred plots and counter plots  to run her out-of-town because the ‘authorities’ can just not stand their children being taught by a lowly slave.

The racial prejudice is very palpable and Margret’s discovery that her own Masarwa people in this remote Botswana village are treated as outcasts only sets her more determined to stand up proudly and affirm her heritage. And she does this in her quiet and unassuming way so that her loneliness even while basking in the  friendship offered by Dikeledi, the daughter of the Chief of Dilepe, only adds to the mystery surrounding her being.

The complicated love story and intrigue perpetuated by Maru, Dikeledi’s brother and Moleke, Dikeledi’s boyfriend who does not requite her love serves as a backdrop against which the more poignant themes of racial hatred and categories, traditional caste systems and the effects of colonialism on the African people are highlighted.

Margaret also serves as catalyst for change in Dilepe. Moleka wants to marry Margaret, but is fearful of going against the prejudices in his village. Maru, the man with vision, sees that marriage with Margaret is an opportunity to change the prejudices and racial divisions among the people in Botswana.

Maru is one big flashback without chapters and this makes for an easy and fast read. There is a bit of mysticism and or surrealism involved here; but for me that makes the novel more African than anything since Africa is a whole big mystery.

Having said that I must say that though I admired the character of Maru, I did not endorse his ‘caveman tactics’ of how he eventually got Margaret to marry him. But then that could be debatable.

It is significant to mention that when Maru was published in 1971, Bessie Head was seriously ill with depression and delusions and she snapped.

Maru comes highly recommended for all overs of African literature and lovers of brilliant blend of complicated plot, surrealism and intrigue.

The Woman Bessie Head

Bessie Head would have turned 76 on the 6th of July 2013. In celebrating her life and works, Kinna Reads is hosting this special event on her blog from July 6 to 12. Kindly do a hop over for more.

Brief Life History

Bessie Amelia Head (nee Emery) never knew her real parents: she was born in a psychiatric hospital in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, to a wealthy but unstable white woman and a black servant at a time when interracial relationships were illegal in South Africa. Her maternal family had Bessie Head’s mother declared mentally ill in order to remove her pregnant mother from apartheid white society. Bessie was given up for adoption as an infant then at age 13, taken to an orphanage. By age 18, she’d been subjected to humiliation, cruelty, racial segregation and gender discrimination by racist white society and its affiliated institutions. She also had to worry about her own “delicate nervous balance”.

Bessie left apartheid South Africa in 1964, and never returned to the land of her birth. She settled in Serowe, Botswana where she lived the rest of her life. For most part, Bessie Head suffered from mental illness and was frequently hospitalized for bouts of depression. Her life was a traumatic one and she drew heavily upon her own personal experiences for her novels. At the time of her death in 1986,  she had become a famous writer known all around the world.

Her Final Days

The following words culled from Kinna’s moving tribute sums up Bessie’s last days:

Sometime in 1985, suddenly, came murmurings of a woman writer, living in Botswana and struggling to survive.  She was on the verge of bankruptcy, she was sick, she was estranged from her family, she was brilliant, she was Bessie Head.  To my young mind, the entry of Bessie Head into my life was marked with alarm, dismay, panic and pain.  The murmuring rose to a crescendo.  Then in early 1986, just as suddenly, came the announcement of her death. It’s hard to express the effect, on me, of finding Bessie Head in the circumstance which I did and losing her so suddenly.  After all I never met her. But the fact of Bessie Head’s death, and the circumstances surrounding her last years in Botswana, has always unsettled me.

In 2003 Bessie was awarded posthumously the South African “Order of Ikhamanga in Gold” for her “exceptional contribution to literature and the struggle for social change, freedom and peace. This is the woman we celebrate this week, a great woman, even if a troubled one. She lived in troubled times, to say the least. Thanks to Kinna for bringing her legacy alive. for more on her life please visit  here

Short Story Review – The Woman From America By Bessie Head

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Africa, African American, Bessie Head, Democracy, Descriptive observations, Freedom

I should have posted this review yesterday for the Short Story Tuesday slot; however, I had more than a full day and so could not write the review. Instead, what I did was to swap today’s slot of poetry for yesterday and so here I am posting a review of The Woman From America, one of Bessie Head’s collection from her anthology Tales of Tenderness and Power. 

To write about The Woman From America is to expound on a period in Bessie Head’s life when she went through so much hardship living in a mud hut in an enormous village, Serowe, Bechuanaland (Now Botswana). Desperately poor, she and her only son lived on help from international refugee organisations. (Introduction: P 12) However, Bessie did not allow her situation to daunt her; she retained her wits, sense of humour and her creative skill came to the fore when she wrote this short descriptive observations of a Black American woman, who hailed from somewhere near California (p 56) and who had descended on the village of Serowe like an avalanche to marry one of the villagers.

Published in 1966 by the New Statesman, The Woman From America is told in the first person narrative with the usual dry humour that is characteristic of Bessie Head’s stories. The first person narrative also gives the story its non-fiction quality as author recounted the tentative friendship between the two women which later blossomed into a closeness fueled by Bessie’s natural sense of curiosity and affection.

“It was inevitable thought that this woman and I should be friends. I have an overwhelming curiosity that I cannot  keep within bounds.” p 57

Through the friendship, Bessie Head gained a wealth of knowledge documented in short hand written notes all over her small mud hut. She kept these because,

“they are a statement of human generosity, and the wide carefree laugh of a woman who is as busy as women the world over, about things women always entangle themselves in – man, children, a home” (p 57)

The poor writer living on the dredges of life and the woman from America come down because of love, bonded in ways that defied the understanding of the villagers who could not comprehend how and why a beautiful woman could leave America to marry a man living in a dirt-filled village where all one ate was ground millet and a little piece of meat. They thus viewed her with some sort of fear, fascination and yes, envy.

“The terrible thing is that those who fear are always in the majority. This woman and her husband and children have to be sufficient to themselves because everything they do is not the way people here do it. Most terrible of all is the fact that they really love each other and the husband effortlessly and naturally keeps his eye on his wife alone. In this achievement, he is 70 years ahead of all the men here.” P 56

Bessie Head did not belabour the point of interracial marriage in this story. Her concerns were with the wealth of knowledge she gained through her friendship with this nameless woman; from mundane ailments of children; DPT, (Diphtheria, pertussis, Tetanus) to industrial use of electronics, atomic energy, automation and the Scientific Revolution within a blend of two cultures. “Here’s C P Snow. Read him, dammit! And dispel a bit of that fog in thy cranium.” P 59. She also drew a comparison between Black Americans who came to Africa out of a genuine love for the people and who easily assimilated, and the Black Americans from the State Department who though sociable and jovial clamped up at the most innocent questions with such mutterings as “we can’t talk about the government, that is politics.” P 59. The author seemed to question why they bothered to come at all if they were afraid of what the American government would think about their utterances. To her that was a waste of the resources of the State Department and travesty of the touting of freedom and democracy by the American government.

What amazed me about this story is its length. Only five (5) pages short, and yet the narrative was excellently packed with so much food for thought. Once again I recommend the anthology Tales of Tenderness and Power to all lovers of African literature, especially celebrating female writers.

The author died tragically early, in 1986, leaving behind her a fine collection of literary works. Tales of Tenderness and Power was the first of her works to be published in 1989 posthumously.

Short Story Tuesday – (Review) The Lovers, by Bessie Head

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Bessie Head, Tales of Tenderness and Power, The Lovers

Today’s short story review is of The Lovers also from the anthology of short stories, Tales of Tenderness and Power, written by Bessie Head, one of Africa’s best known women writers who was born in South Africa in 1937.

The Lovers, a historical tale written in 1977, is Bessie Head’s version of Botswana’s only great love legend about two young people, Keaja and Tselane, who allowed themselves to be carried away by their passions and thus threw their community into chaos. They were expelled from the village and they disappeared altogether. A  terrible fear grew that a hill nearby had opened and swallowed them.

“The love story so haunted me that I could find no peace until I had written my story of it. Sanely, a hill could never open up and swallow people so my story dwells on what happened before the lovers  disappeared so mysteriously.” P 11 (Introduction)

Significantly, in writing about what happened before the disappearance of the two lovers, Bessie Head examines the traditional institution of marriage in Botswana, laying bare the unpleasantness of arranged and forced marriages and ultimately, polygamous marriages. Keaja’s mother is chosen for his father who has no say in the matter and though his parents marriage is fraught with disappointment and resignation, tradition or custom demands that Keaja’s wife is chosen for him. As he tells Tselane on the first day he meets her,

“I don’t think I approve of arranged marriages. My father would never have married my mother had he had his own choice. He was merely presented with her one day by his family and told that they were to be married and there was nothing he could do about it.” P 86

Keaja’s mother also hates her son deeply and bitterly. She vents the frustrations of her loveless marriage on her only son by hitting him at the least provocation, hurling stones at him and scratching him all over his body. Keaja’s response like his father’s is to ignore her and bear this inhuman treatment with stoicism. In contrast, though from a polygamous home, Tselane enjoys a happy relationship with not her mother, but her mother’s rival and the second wife to her father. The two are almost girlish in their affection for each other.

Bessie Head portrays a rigid society that thrives on regulations and taboos applicable to men and women as guidelines on how to live fruitful and productive lives. Initiation rites of passage are performed for both sexes to ensure fruitfulness for the women and productivity for the men. A delicate balance has to be preserved between a woman’s reproductive cycle and the safety of her community. It can therefore be seen that the community has no room for emotions. The dynamics of village life is founded on customs that thrive on logic, order and orderliness even in the sterile relationships between the sexes. Any personal unhappiness is suppressed and smothered, like the unhappiness in the marriage of Keaja’s parents. The same delicate balance that has to be preserved rears its head where Tselane cannot enjoy a normal mother-daughter relationship, but rather finds a listening ear in her mother’s rival who also sees this unique affection as a get-away from a husband whose interest in his wives is limited to his meals.

Against this background Keaja and Tselane’s ‘illicit’ love and the resultant pregnancy challenge the status quo and seeks to destroy all that the people and the customs hold dear. Thus their banishment is greeted by all with a sigh of relief; for now the wrong has been righted.

The Lovers is a short enjoyable read, and serves as an example of Bessie Head’s excellent prowess as a story-teller. I will recommend the anthology to all lovers of African literature, especially celebrating with female writers.

The author died tragically early, in 1986, leaving behind her a fine collection of literary works. Tales of Tenderness and Power was the first of her works to be published in 1989 posthumously.