Landscape in Bessie Head's "Collector of Treasures"
Rachel Solomon
211532694
16 October 2014
South African Literature and Landscape
Honours, ENGL 706
Essay Assignment
I affirm that this work is my own and that all authors and works used have been referenced.
Bessie Head has been widely acclaimed as one of South Africa’s best women writers. Her stories (both fictional and historical) reflect her personal experiences of dislocation, rootlessness and exile, and in doing so offer pithy observations into a society that was changing drastically. In this essay I will explore the construction of spatial discourses as they inform gendered, racial and other ideologically policed senses of cultural identity. The prescribed statement; “The questions of home, land, language and cultural expression are central to the constitution of identity, much as awareness of issues of gender, race, class and national identity are integral to the creative construction of liberating postcolonial subjects” will be investigated through four stories from her short story collection, The Collector of Treasures (1992). The stories that will be looked at are The Deep River: A Story of Ancient Tribal Migration, Jacob: The Story of a Faith-Healing Priest, Life and The Wind and a Boy. Each story will be looked at in terms of societal changes; character displacement and exile themes; the clash between encroaching modernism and capitalism (brought about by colonialism - and arguably - neocolonialism) and tribal traditionalism; and dualities which reveal this clash of value as well as centers relating to control and gender. Because of the nature of her personal life and the themes with which she deals, each story will also be looked at in terms of borders: symbolic, topographic and temporal. Borders, by definition, keep things in as well as keep things out, and so these raise the questions of space, place and belonging. For this reason, it becomes a postcolonial concern to envisage Head’s fictional stories as textual landscapes by which
211532694
16 October 2014
South African Literature and Landscape
Honours, ENGL 706
Essay Assignment
I affirm that this work is my own and that all authors and works used have been referenced.
Bessie Head has been widely acclaimed as one of South Africa’s best women writers. Her stories (both fictional and historical) reflect her personal experiences of dislocation, rootlessness and exile, and in doing so offer pithy observations into a society that was changing drastically. In this essay I will explore the construction of spatial discourses as they inform gendered, racial and other ideologically policed senses of cultural identity. The prescribed statement; “The questions of home, land, language and cultural expression are central to the constitution of identity, much as awareness of issues of gender, race, class and national identity are integral to the creative construction of liberating postcolonial subjects” will be investigated through four stories from her short story collection, The Collector of Treasures (1992). The stories that will be looked at are The Deep River: A Story of Ancient Tribal Migration, Jacob: The Story of a Faith-Healing Priest, Life and The Wind and a Boy. Each story will be looked at in terms of societal changes; character displacement and exile themes; the clash between encroaching modernism and capitalism (brought about by colonialism - and arguably - neocolonialism) and tribal traditionalism; and dualities which reveal this clash of value as well as centers relating to control and gender. Because of the nature of her personal life and the themes with which she deals, each story will also be looked at in terms of borders: symbolic, topographic and temporal. Borders, by definition, keep things in as well as keep things out, and so these raise the questions of space, place and belonging. For this reason, it becomes a postcolonial concern to envisage Head’s fictional stories as textual landscapes by which
References: Darian-Smith, Kate, Gunner, Liz & Nuttall, Sarah. 1996. Introduction. Text, Theory, Space: Land, Literature and history in South Africa and Australia. London: Routledge, 1 - 20. Head, Bessie. (1977) 1992. The Collector of Treasures and other Botswana Village tales. Oxford: Heinemann. Nixon, Rob. 1996. Rural transnationalism: Bessie Head’s southern spaces. In: Kate Darian-Smith, Liz Gunner & Sarah Nuttall, eds. Text, Theory, Space: Land, Literature and history in South Africa and Australia. London: Routledge, 243 - 254. Sample, Maxine. 1991. Landscape and Spatial Metaphor in Bessie Head’s The Collector of Treasures. Studies in Short Fiction Vol. 28(3), 311 - 319. Schimanski, Johan. 2007. The Postcolonial Border: Bessie Head’s ‘The Wind and a Boy’. In: AH Ronning and L Johannessen, eds. Transcultural Identities and Masks. (in press).