Writing Community: Bessie Head and the Politics of Narrative

Abstract

t is virtually impossible and assuredly inadvisable to think about South Africa without thinking about politics. The power of apartheid as a racist policy and as a hegemonic distortion of society is equaled by its power as a symbol both of what man has done to man, and of a world subdivided and classified by surface distinctions. The power of politics in South Africa is such that the stru c t u re of the politics itself, and apartheid in part i c u l a r, is duplicated in the very distinctions made between political writers and apolitical writers, between writers committed to the cause and those who have abandoned the cause. B e f o re discussing how this politics bar becomes an instrument of exclu- sion, I need to make clear just how important politics are to South African l i t e r a t u re. In Ta sks and Masks: Themes and Styles of African Literature, Lewis Nkosi sums up the effect politics has had on literature in South Africa: . . . (W)ith very few exceptions the literature of Southern Africa is wholly concerned with the theme of struggle and conflict . . . In p a rt i c u l a r, if South African literature seems unable to contemplate any kind of human action without first attempting to locate it with- in a precise social framework of racial conflict it is merely because v e ry often colour diff e rences provide the ultimate symbols which stand for those larger antagonisms which Southern African writers have always considered it their proper business to explain . . . . (T)he literature of Southern Africa is committed to the notion that c e rtain 'tasks' are the legitimate function of socially re s p o n s i b l e

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