Bessie Head's the Collector of Treasures: Change on the Margins

Abstract

subject of Bessie Head's stories is change itself, and specifically the threshold where change takes place. Change has become the issue of women's writing since independence-change and not simply rights or equality. Though there has been continuous concern with abuse of women, a concern voiced in the miserabilist school of Sembene's Voltaique or Emecheta's Joys of Motherhood, or presented in more chauvinistic terms in Jagua Nana, it is in the stories of Bessie Head, Mariama Ba, Buchi Emecheta, and Ama Ata Aidoo that the very boundaries between men and women, between past and present roles, those that are set in place in the constitution of women's identities, are called into question. With Bessie Head, in fact, boundaries, the forces that maintain and perpetuate them, and those forces that dissolve them, could be said to be the focus of and key to her work.' Especially in the short stories of Bessie Head we find qualities that support this approach. One frequently finds there characters who are sketched, and whose one or two dominant traits assume such proportions as to give the stories an allegorical aspect. They appear for an episode or two in which the point of their appearance is established and the question of their fate determined. lines of their lives are reduced, brought into focus, and purified. crossing of lines forms the quintessential action. With Bessie Head an ironic fatalism governs these women's lives, seen in the gap between the narrative point of view and those of the characters. Galethebege's Christian faith, in Heaven Is Not Closed, is described as sincere and heartfelt by a narrator whose sympathies are closer to Galethebege's non-Christian, skeptical husband. More often the irony stems from the internal gap inherent in the position of the women themselves: caught in a network of social custom and constraint, the women in Head's stories experience moments of transition, blasphemy, violence and death, either because of the strength of their desire, as with Galethebege, Life, or Rankwana in The Deep River, or because of their insistence upon preserving integrity and independence, as with Life, Dikeledi, and Mma-Mabele. conflicts often occur within the characters themselves, even when external constraint is brought to bear. What emerges is a pattern of struggle between powerful, repressive forces and equally adamant drives grounded in desire and refusal. passage across this landscape of combat does not lead to a new vision of history, does not pave a path through history, but rather traces magical lines and horizons that set off one time and place from another. Dawn, nightfall, cusps of existence where existential decisions are made - these are boundaries given meaning by personal