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Critical Essays on Bessie Head, and: Emerging

Perspectives on Bessie Head (review)

Article  in  Africa · January 2007

DOI: 10.1353/afr.2007.0027

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Africa 77 (2), 2007

REVIEWS OF BOOKS
MAXINE SAMPLE (ed.). Critical Essays on Bessie Head. Westport CT and London:
Praeger Publishers (hb $66.95, £37.99 - 0 31331 557 4). 2003, 150 pp.

HUMA IBRAHIM (ed.). Emerging Perspectives on Bessie Head. Trenton NJ and

Asmara, Eritrea: Africa World Press (pb $24.95, £13.99 - 1 59221 074 0)
2004, 222 pp.

During the twenty years after Bessie Head's death on 17 April 1986, an entire
academic industry, centred on the late author, emerged. Today this industry
encompasses a diversity of multilayered enterprises, including the development
of awards, such as the Bessie Head Writers' Fellowship; the production of
cultural sites; the establishment of non-profit organizations, notably the Bessie
Head Heritage Trust; and an amalgamation of scholarly knowledge. These
collections represent the ever-evolving field of Head scholarship that continues
to examine the genius and tragedy of a great African author whose life and work
is consistently appropriated in order to support various ideological agendas.
These two volumes demonstrate the ways in which Head has been
appropriated, in both productive and unproductive ways, but they also signal an
imaginative rediscovery of Head's work. Divided into eight chapters. Sample's
collection includes six critical pieces which are strategically placed between
the editor's extensive contexualization of Head's life and work and her
concluding bibliographic essay. These contributions are essential in setting
the tone for the collection as a whole, gesturing towards a departure from Head
scholarship that overuses her life to inform her work. Although the amount
of biographical information supplied in the six critical essays varies. Sample's
contexualization, 'Artist in Exile', opens the collection, encouraging the reader
(and writers) to move beyond the obvious and redundant analytic connections
between Head's life and work. Sample's concluding contribution serves as
an acknowledgement of the extensive biographical recovery and analysis that
focuses on Head, but also marks Sample's desire to move away from these kinds
of works. Nonetheless, despite Sample's gestures, several essays that follow her
contextualization are bogged down by Head biography.
Maureen Fielding, Helen Kapstein and Loretta Stec are all guilty of
collapsing Head's work and life. Fielding's and Stec's essays use Head's
biography in order to inform their analysis of her work. These connections are
not appropriately problematized and, therefore, are largely counter-productive
to the authors' works. Kapstein's essay, on the other hand, consistently uses
Head and her A Question of Power protagonist, Elizabeth, interchangeably.
For instance, Kapstein uses an excerpt from Head's fictional, albeit at times
autobiographical, novel in order to describe Head's childhood. Fielding
supports her description of Head with an excerpt from the writer's fictional
novel, A Question of Power. There is no doubt that Head and her fictional
character, Elizabeth, share similarities, but they are hardly the same. Arlene
A. Elder makes this distinction between Head and her characters very clear
in Ibrahim's collection: 'Bessie Head is always more insightful, politically-
aware, artistic, and analytical than her protagonists' (p. 13). Yet, in spite of
Kapstein's significant oversight, her exploration of A Question of Power as 'a
kind of trespassing', which reverberates with the recently published collection
of Head's letters. Imaginative Trespasser (2005), is indeed productive in the
ways in which it deconstructs madness, ultimately affirming Head's creativity
as a writer, and not as a potential schizophrenic.
 BOOK REVIEWS 285

Colette Guldimann's contributions to the collection undertake Sample's

challenge to analyse Head's work without a dependency on the writer's life.
Guldimann's essays are unquestionably the most compelling pieces in the
collection. Indeed, Guldimann's work should be used to inform such bungling
pieces as 'The condition of exile and the negation of commitment' by Percy
Mosieleng, which appears in Huma Ibrahim's collection of Head scholarship.
By far the most inept contribution to Ibrahim's collection, the piece only
succeeds in demonstrating the editor's unbiased commitment to creating a
book that reflects all current debates on Head.
Ibrahim's collection differs from Sample's in that it is more eclectic, drawing
many different kinds of Head scholarship from writers across the globe and
embracing the work of both male and female contributors. Such eclecticism
is particularly evident in Keiko Kusunose's essay which critically narrates her
personal and intellectual discoveries and experiences of becoming a Head
scholar in Japan. In addition,' "That troublemaker"' details Mary S. Lederer's
and Leloba S. Molema's analysis of teaching Head in Botswana, the writer's
adoptive country. The essay provides fellow educators with insights into Head's
reception among university students in Botswana, as well as offering tried and
tested methods of teaching Head's work.
While these essays signal a departure from mainstream Head criticism, Peter
Mwikisa's 'Caliban's Sister' marks a different kind of eclecticism that invokes
the timeless and ever-present Shakespeare. Although Mwikisa markets his
essay as demonstrating how Head's Mam is a 'rewriting of The Tempest', his
analysis is not centred on this (unconvincing) focus. Rather, the critic embarks
on a productive discursive analysis, which inspires intellectual gems, such as,
'[R]acism against a particular social group is authorized by what it is possible
to say about the group in the first instance, i.e. how the group is represented in
discourse' (p. 150). Mwikisa's passionate and simultaneously critical analysis
enables his reader to suspend disbelief long enough to forget the essay's title
and the author's intention to link yet another so-called 'Third World' novel
with Shakespeare.
As a whole, the essays in Ibrahim's collection are more passionate and
politically fierce than those in Critical Essays on Bessie Head (but not as well
edited). This is especially true for the powerful pair of essays that open the
collection by Arlene A. Elder and Isabel Balseiro. The essays are appropriately
prefaced in Ibrahim's introduction: 'These essays are interesting, [because]
Head, of all writers, has been historically typecast as one who dragged her
autobiography into her fictional space' (p. ix). Elder further problematizes
this critical compulsion to collapse Head's life and work, stating that 'the
biographical interest in [Head]... has provoked the popular interpretations of
Elizabeth's madness as being almost a case study of Head's own breakdown' (p.
10). Balseiro reinforces Elder, asking poignant questions - 'Why is the literary
corpus Head left behind not sufficient to merit scholarly attention? . . . Now
that Head can no longer answer our questions, should we not be satisfied to
engage with her through the gift of her fiction?' (pp. 20-1)
The ferocity of Elder's and Balseiro's essays is unmitigated in Desiree Lewis's
and Ibrahim's contributions. Demonstrating her usual brilliance, Lewis analyses
how Head works toward the effacement of reality and the 'order of things',
to borrow from Foucault, in an effort to expand the discourse that confines
and structures our existence. Ibrahim's essay, which closes the collection,
recontextualizes such discursive effacement by calling our attention to Head's
position in literary discourse, as well as her role as signifier in national and
international agendas. Shockingly (at least for this reader), Ibrahim argues
against teaching Head on a more extensively global scale. However, her
286 BOOK REVIEWS

reasoning is not without merit for, as she lucidly writes, 'Head's canonicity is
problematic precisely because a whole host of presuppositions are mobilized to
include and exclude AfHcan writers from Western academic perusal' (p. 214).
Although, like many academics, Ibrahim fails to offer a pragmatic solution to
this mounting problem, she does succeed in redirecting Head scholarship away
from Head's personal life and back into the literary field in which it belongs.
To varying degrees, these collections serve as the first step towards celebrating
and honouring Head as an artist by rediscovering the imagination and creativity
that she infused into her work.
NATASHA HIMMELMAN
Centre for African Studies
University of Cape Town

ONOOKOME OKOME (ed.), Ogun's Children: the literature and politics of

Wok Soyinka since the Nobel. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press (pb
US$29.95 - 0 86543 667 3). 2004, 378 pp.

This collection of 24 essays on Soyinka's post-Nobel works has the great merit
of giving a voice to 17 specialists of Anglophone drama fi-om nine Federal and
State Nigerian universities, besides studies emanating from South Africa and
the US. Most essays are rather short, spanning eight to twelve pages, with the
exception of two longer ones: that of Lindfors on Nigerian newspapers' account
ofthe Rotimi-Soyinka controversy on theatre management, and of Udumukwu
on the subject of nation in Ngugi and Soyinka.
The book, meant to mark Soyinka's sixtieth birthday celebrations, to be
held at the national theatre, Lagos, in June 1994, presents Soyinka's literary
works, his films, essays and cultural theories as a celebration of protest, with
the post-Nobel works constituting a smooth, almost seamless transition from
earlier ones. The choice of works studied offers a multifaceted approach to
Soyinka's writing, blending a great variety of styles and interests akin to the
complexity and eclectism of the writer, his use of visual imagery, sarcasm
and compassion, caustic criticism, comedy, tragedy and social crusade and his
call for memory to bring out the relevance of the past to the present. Isara
(1989) roots him in family history, traditional oral literature and mythology,
recreating an African world in transition and chronicling social history; the six
essays on From Zia with Love (1992), a play inspired by the author's prison
experience and described (p. 152) as Soyinka's graffiti on Nigeria's walls,
illustrate on the other hand his political activism and use of literature as a
weapon of liberation and a plea for a bold reorientation of national goals.
Nigeria's dictatorships ofthe 1980s and early 1990s and their impact on the
political, cultural and literary landscapes loom large in many of the essays,
with Soyinka's imaginative and polemical writings being read as a constant
pillorying of Nigeria's lawlessness and anarchy, a public display of the malaise
of social dislocation and a denunciation of fanaticism and unbridled religious
charlatanism in the pursuit of wealth.
One interesting feature of the book is its taking on board of Soyinka's
commitment to the use of art in the national and political struggle and his
post-Nobel scepticism and disillusionment with the viability of the literary text
to fight for democracy and justice. This led him to move towards a more
popular drama and to experiment with the medium of film and television,
thereby bringing literature to the streets to distance his audience from political
violence. The essays also underline Soyinka's debt to Yoruba traditions, the
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