Connecting the spheres: The home front and the public domain in Bessie Head\u27s fiction

This dissertation positions South African colored author Bessie Head as a political novelist. The dissertation also explores the nature of Head\u27s art-form and content situating her achievements in the context of African traditions. The dissertation further highlights elements which distinguish Head as a political writer who both participates in and resists male-defined political discourse. Head\u27s work appears to be an exploration of the possibility of defining a new code of honour which all nations can abide by. This venture, which she seems to approach from an original angle in every text, leads her to embrace a redemptive kind of politics which is not readily recognizable as political writing because of its reliance on African spirituality. A Question of Power in particular, as this dissertation proposes, reveals what I have named the concept of consciousness-invasion, a notion which seems to be informed by African spirituality. Additionally, the thesis analyzes the critical reception accorded Head in the last two decades. It explains two discoveries: that, in general the attempts of Headian scholars to articulate the author\u27s novelistic vision has yielded limited results because they have not seen her work as primarily political; that the view of Head\u27s texts as political exposes the complexity of her canon as represented by her ability to simultaneously depict, with a fine balance, colonialism, racism, sexism, tribalism, and the self-interest which lies in every character who champions these oppression devices. In its redefinition of political writing the dissertation further argues that Head\u27s novels exhibit the power dynamics of macropolitics in relation to those apparent in micropolitics and in metapolitics . ( Macropolitics and micropolitics are terms adopted from the work of linguist Robin Tolmach Lakoff while metapolitics is my own coinage.