Change in The Margins - Bessie Head

Bessie Head's the Collector of Treasures: Change on the Margins
Author(s): Kenneth W. Harrow

Source: Callaloo, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Winter, 1993), pp. 169-179
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2931824
Accessed: 13-04-2020 12:14 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and
extend access to Callaloo
This content downloaded from 122.177.141.44 on Mon, 13 Apr 2020 12:14:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
BESSIE HEAD'S THE COLLECTOR OF TREASURES
Change on the Margins
By Kenneth W. Harrow
The 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 con-
tinuous concern with abuse of women, a concern voiced in the miserabilist school of
Sembene's Voltaique or Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood, or presented in more chau-
vinistic 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 wom-
en'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 as-
pect. They appear for an episode or two in which the point of their appearance is
established and the question of their fate determined. The lines of their lives are re-
duced, brought into focus, and purified. The 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 Chris-
tian 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 be-
cause 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 indepen-
dence, as with Life, Dikeledi, and Mma-Mabele. The 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 ad-
amant drives grounded in desire and refusal.
The 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
Callaloo 16.1 (1993) 169-179
CALLALOO
choice and not historical movement. Even death takes on significance in this way, as
though ultimate forces were contained in each individual fate.
However, along this larger allegorical vista, one finds the particular features of the
present time in which the conflict over social roles has become exacerbated by his-
torical change. The strategy of representing this conflict as one involving boundaries,
with the transgression of accepted frontiers of action and the protection of conven-
tional space, permits the joining of allegorical and historical time. It also suggests the
broader meaning inscribed in larger divisions of power, as Mernissi (1987) has pos-
tulated in the more obvious case of Morocco: "The institutionalized boundaries di-
viding the parts of society express the recognition of power in one part at the expense
of the other. Any transgression of the boundaries is a danger to the social order be-
cause it is an attack on the acknowledged allocation of power. The link between bound-
aries and power is particularly salient in a society's sexual patterns" (137). We can see
this in the story, "Heaven Is Not Closed," and especially in the blank spaces sur-
rounding Ralokae's first wife.
"Ralokae had been married for nearly a year when his young wife died in childbirth.
She died when the crops of the season were being harvested, and for a year Ralokae
imposed on himself the traditional restraints and disciplines of boswagadi or mourn-
ing for the deceased" (The Collector of Treasures, 8). What is the name of Ralokae's first
wife? Why is she called only "Ralokae's first wife," whereas Ralokae's brother, Modise,
is identified by name? Twice at the outset of the narration there are references to "the
old man, Modise" (7, 8). He is also the narrator, and when the narrative setting is
placed within the context of Modise's story, Modise passes back into the conventional
anonymity of the third person omniscient narrator. He is empowered by his special
relationship with the reader, has access to the hidden truth, and shares it with us, as
with his grandchildren who constitute his immediate audience. He is the focus of their
attention-they look at him as he addresses them. He creates the mood, and the chil-
dren's reactions are orchestrated into a single response: "A gust of astonished laughter
shook his family out of the solemn mood of mourning that had fallen upon them and
they all turned eagerly toward their grandfather, sensing that he had a story to tell."
We wait with them in anticipation for the beginning of the telling: "'As you know,'
the old man said wisely, 'Ralokae was my brother. . .' " (98).
If one can speak of the power to represent things, as well as the compulsion of
inherited literary paradigms, with their structures that always already engender a set
of reader expectations and responses, then one should also be able to speak of the
resistance of these forces. Within "Heaven Is Not Closed," the point of departure for
that resistance is provided by the unnamed first wife of Ralokae whose untold story
is centered on a single clue, her death which came "when the crops of the season were
being harvested."
To enter the text through the opening in the story that occurs with this young
woman is to write her/story on a series of blank slates. We are not told a number of
things about her which are essential to our understanding of the relationship she had
with Ralokae. Who was she? Who was her family? What kind of marriage was it?
Ralokae, we are told, was a man who scorned the new European/Christian way, and
who adhered to the traditional customs. This did not mean he was conservative. To
170
CALLALOO
the contrary, he was something of a rebel in this regard. Her position is unknown. If
he chose her because she, too, ignored the new Christian way, then all we can say is
that her image is gained through the reflection cast by her husband, by Ralokae, whose
name is clearly of significance to the storyteller.
We don't know if they had children-merely that she dies in childbirth. If there
were children, then the tie to their mother's family should continue to weigh in
Ralokae's life, and, more important, they would now be raised by Galethebege. Al-
though it is her grandchildren who listen to Modise, we are not told whether those
grandchildren include any offspring of the first wife. Indeed, the listeners are also
described as Modise's children and his grandchildren, although he himself never took
Galethebege as his wife. If the description is intended to be generic-the old man is
generally called "grandfather" out of respect-the narrative does not present it in this
fashion. This might appear insignificant were it not for the unique detail which we
are provided about Ralokae's first wife, the time of her death. When she passed away,
at a time that corresponded to her coming to full fruition (a year of her marriage had
passed, she was about to give birth), the crops were being harvested. The child was
to be the harvest. She died in childbirth, and left no other visible trace than her ab-
sence, her death, the time of her dying. Without children and name she faced the
worst of fates customarily reserved for the childless and dispossessed, oblivion. In
Modise's telling of her story she is completely unobtrusive, except for the key opening
her absence provides for Galethebege.
"He was young and impatient to be married again and no one could bring back the
dead" (9). Death brings irreversible change. A one-way passage across the threshold
that is visible to us from only one side, it culminates the movement towards quietude,
like thermodynamic flow, a linear movement in contrast to the seasonal cycle of re-
newal. Like her life, Ralokae's wife's death is recorded in the dossier of Ralokae's life.
Following her death, Ralokae observed the traditional custom of mourning, a "dis-
cipline" which Head identifies as boswagadi. There seems to be no reason to identify
this custom by its Setswana name, but for the fact that Ralokae is a traditionalist and
strictly observes the "traditional restraints" which one must assume include sexual
continence -a detail that ironically outweighs the importance to the narrator of nam-
ing or discussing the woman whose death was the cause of the boswagadi. Upon the
end of the period of mourning, Ralokae "take[s] note of the life of Galethebege" (9)
and begins to court her. Despite their differences in belief- she is a devout Christian
and he an averred traditionalist-he overcomes her reservations and convinces her to
marry him. They marry, after he tells her "firmly": "I took my first wife according to
the old customs. I am going to take my second wife according to the old customs too"
(9).
Ralokae's firmness is set in contrast with Galethebege's "uncertainty" which marks
her declaration to Ralokae about her Christian faith. She must inform the "missionary"
of her decision to marry a man who is set in "Setswana custom," thus engendering
the story's principal conflict, the antagonism between Christianity and traditional
"custom."
Ironically, it is the discipline imposed by boswagadi which causes Ralokae to take
note of Galethebege: "It was the unexpectedness of the tragic event and the discipline
171
CALLALOO
it imposed on him, that made Ralokae take note of the life of Galethebege" (9). Her
quietly ordered life, one which had been too insignificant for him before, is now what
attracts him. As her faith in the "will of God" is what gives her existence its special
quality for him, one has to assume Ralokae's first wife was a different sort of woman,
had a different set of qualities. And it is, perhaps, the contrast, the appeal of differ-
ence, which the absence and the discipline awakened.
The direction taken by the narration moves away from these ironies. Even Ralokae
fades into the background as Galethebege finds herself caught between Christian and
Setswana custom, between the missionary and Ralokae. Although her husband does
not insist that she give up her faith, he refuses to convert; and the missionary refuses
to marry her to an "unbeliever," going so far as to announce that heaven is closed to
Ralokae. Although this situation might not have been unique to the community, it is
presented by Modise as though it were special, as though the conflict it engendered,
always potentially there in the presence of the two antagonistic communities, were
realized in the story of Galethebege, causing a considerable commotion. There is no
indication that Ralokae faced this with his first wife, and every indication that an im-
portant decision was being made by Galethebege. She is thus placed between two
forces for the first time.
However, the nature of the conflict is not as evident as it might appear. At first, we
learn that the matter of her Christian faith and his insistence upon tradition stood
between them "like a fearful sword." The conventional phrasing of this phallic image
serves to trivialize her uncertainties and would more naturally seem to suggest the
firmness of Ralokae, the unswerving male. This conventionality is immediately de-
constructed by Galethebege's passion. Blood pounds in this quiet Christian woman's
fingers, and when she commits herself to Ralokae, "the sword quivered like a fearful
thing between them" (9). Clearly desire takes priority in this struggle, a struggle begun
with the discipline of abstinence, the control of desire. The sword which lies between
lovers, like Tristan's fidelity to his monarch, soon becomes identified with the instru-
ment of desire itself.
Between Ralokae and Galethebege desire and passion replace the discipline of bos-
wagadi and the quietude of Christianity. For Galethebege the conflict remains, but the
tension it produces is displaced onto her desire. Thus when she tells the missionary
of her fiance's Setswana custom, sexuality and traditional beliefs are conflated and
condemned when viewed from the distance of foreign eyes: "sexual malpractices were
associated with the traditional marriage ceremony (and shudder!), they draped the
stinking intestinal bag of the ox around their necks" (10).
Galethebege's interviews with the missionary were intended to bridge the gap be-
tween the two men, the two customs. Instead, she finds herself trapped between the
missionary's interdictions and her husband's adamancy. She had hoped to permit the
passage of love through her to overcome the conflict between the two men-to mend
the rift between the institutions with their two sets of customs. She sought to achieve
a "compromise of tenderness," but instead of permitting the flow of love, thus re-
solving the people's "cry for love" engendered by the foreign intrusion of colonialism,
she becomes herself the occasion for hatred. Seeking to unite, she is excluded. The
missionary's "rage and hatred were directed at Ralokae, and the only way in which
172
-___ CALLALOO
he could inflict punishment was to banish Galethebege from the Church. If it hurt
anyone at all, it was Galethebege" (11).
The missionary's reaction to the Setswana custom of uniting the couple under the
yoke of the cow's intestines conforms directly to Mernissi's assertion that the setting
of boundaries, and their transgression, reflect the distribution of power within society,
and that it is especially in respect to sexual relations that this relationship between
boundaries and power emerges. The act of allegiance is represented here as a joining-
the intestines yoke the couple under the aegis of Setswana custom, just as the choice
of Christianity was to "embrace the Gospel" (8). The missionary's exclusion of Galethe-
bege from the church, and his hatred for a man he did not know, erected impermeable
barriers; the struggle for control over the power to join becomes visible in his discourse
about the closing of heaven to the unbeliever.
As a result, Galethebege failed as mediator, as a semi-permeable membrane or as
hymen, and instead became the trembling sword of desire. Before the missionary's
anger her reaction was to "tremble," and her trembling gave alarm to the missionary.
Despite his fulminations and banishment, in the end it is he who is excluded from the
story while our attention is turned to the effects of the struggle for power upon the
would-be mediator, the woman.
The ultimate irony is that Galethebege suffers the missionary's wrath because of
her faith, her quietness grounded in the certainty of God's will which she conveyed
to Ralokae. What wins her Ralokae also earns her the missionary's harsh judgment.
Her trembling, both passion and conflict, signals not only the impossibility of medi-
ation as they are viewed from one intransigent side, but the emplacement of the
woman between two competing, intransigent males. She becomes the boundary. In-
stead of permitting the flow of understanding, instead of fructifying the community,
she serves as the occasion for positions to harden, forming an absolute barrier between
them. If death will not restore Ralokae's first wife, neither will Galethebege restore
wholeness to the community. The irony condemns the mediator to the role of divider.
The unnamed woman Galethebege replaces died at harvest time, and a year later,
again at harvest time, Galethebege takes this woman's place in Ralokae's attentions.
Woman, whose first role was simply to bear the fruit at harvest, becomes, in the person
of her successor, an instrument of desire as well as of division. Condemned to a trem-
bling quietude, Galethebege assumes the very tension implicit in her role, transform-
ing the failure of mediation and the need to please two incompatible orders into the
form of desire. Although the vocabulary of Galethebege's acts is co-opted by another's
testimony, it ironically turns on its original speaker. Modise never sees beyond the
dimensions of the male conflict, and the community is set to laugh at Galethebege's
continued acts of prayer and faith. But the laughter acknowledges the triumph of
desire, as the prayers become, in their minds, appeals to open the doors of heaven to
Ralokae-that the desire might empower Galethebege's words to achieve the act of
ultimate penetration.
In "Life," "Snapshots at a Wedding," and "The Collector of Treasures," Head moves
to the question of exclusion and resistance, with the triumphant position emerging
with the ambivalent return of the excluded term. Even with Galethebege we have a
foreshadowing of this theme: "It was the first time love had come her way and it made
173
CALLALOO
the blood pound fiercely through her whole body till she could feel its very throbbing
at the tips of her fingers. It turned her thoughts from God a bit, to this new magic life
was offering her" ("Heaven Is Not Closed" [9]). With love, Bessie head suggests an
alternative to the restrictions associated with institutions and their power. She sug-
gests an alternative life to that confined and hedged by the force of social convention
and phallocratic rule, and debased by its association with human cruelty. Her universe
is that manichean, that absolute in its judgments about people, that rigorous in the
demands placed upon life to fulfill the need for happiness. Love frees its guest to
experience life, frees its guest from the oppressive side of existence and all its petty
beliefs. Love takes its guest to the limits allowed by life, where magic begins.
In "Life," the protagonist, herself named Life, is a victim of the harsh and implacable
enforcement of limits upon her conduct. The time and setting for this story are the
most precise of those in all Bessie Head's stories. She tells us in 1963 the borders were
first set up between South Africa and Botswana, and pending the independence of
Botswana in 1966 all Botswana nationals were obliged to return home. Ironically it is
the end of colonialism in the British territory that accounts for the expulsion of the
migrants and the rigorous enforcement of borders; during the prior period the move-
ment of migrant laborers was unimpeded.
The return of Life, a smart "city girl," to her parents' home village was greeted by
her women neighbors with the expectation of a new brightness: "She is going to bring
us a little light" (38). Again there is irony here since it was Life's free and easy way of
living in South Africa that sets her at odds with the solid, respectable members of the
Botswana community. The only ones who follow in her path are the beer-brewing
women, "a gay and lovable crowd who had emancipated themselves some time ago"
(39). Free to drink and have babies on their own, they elevated Life to the status of
their Queen, and enjoyed carousing in her compound where "food and drink flowed
like milk and honey" (40).
At the end of the story, "Life" has been killed by "Death." Life is attracted to her
opposite, Lesego, death -a straight and determined man who refuses to compromise.
She must adhere to the lines he draws around her, or else be killed. Ironically, she
sees in him the hi-life excitement of the Jo-burg gangster and he sees in her the fresh-
ness of the new spirit. But whereas both Life and Death share a higher agenda than
that defined by social convention, their subtextual opposition is what prevails-she
is killed by him, and he is imprisoned because of her.
In a sense, they clash and destroy each other because of a misreading. Instead of
complementing each other, they attacked the other's weakness: he attempted to end
her freedom, and thus her "Life"; she refused him his right to possessiveness, he, a
wealthy and generous cattle man. Each saw the beauty in the other and was blinded
to the ugliness, the potential menace in the commitment.
Life is represented as a figure of freedom who refuses to accept the constraints of
boundaries. She is trapped in an ironic fate: her return to the village is forced upon
her by the state's imposition of national borders, and on her return the village installs
Life in her dilapidated family compound, following the conventional social patterns.
Thus her living space is defined for her, and not in a malicious fashion. Her women
neighbors help restore the compound to a livable state, and the community effort takes
174
__ __ _ __ _CALLALOO
on the air of a community celebration. However, the village is as much governed by

its own authorities, with their normative set of limits and confines, as by the state.
Power flows through the ruling males in public and social institutions, conveyed
through public actions, attitudes and gestures, all of which are condensed into the
laconic command Lesego issues to Life when he first meets her in a bar: "Come here"
(41).
Life's motto was to live fast and die young: "All this was said with the bold, free
joy of a woman who had broken all the social taboos" (40). The brief account of her
story traces the tragic consequence of repression, the demise of the unconventional
spirit. It details the acts of men who conspire to stifle "Life" through their desires,
possessiveness, and judgments. Concupiscence is set against warmth, possessiveness
against freedom, and judgment, the ultimate expression of power, against the magic
whose "dizzying heights" offer the only escape from society's confinement and con-
demnation.
However, even within the men's circles, questions about freedom and magic per-
sist. Lesego's friend, Sianana, attributes the tragedy of Lesego's incarceration to the
crossing of boundaries: "Lesego, . . . why did you kill that fuck-about? You had the
legs to walk away. Are you trying to show us that rivers never cross here?" (46). The
story ends with the question unanswered.
If magic has its positive side in Life's frenzied pace and in love, it has its dark side
as well, a demonic counterpart to the impossible joy of "dizzying heights." Like magic,
Witchcraft is set against the confines of Christianity and its fixed values of good and
evil. In "Witchcraft," Mma-Mabele regards herself as a faithful Christian, and so was
provided, as were all other believers, with "some mental leverage to sort out the true
from a mysterious invasion of some magical, destructive force." Although she closes
herself in, shutting the door and barring the window, the "hideous unknown presence
... invade[s] her life during the night" (51). Obviously the actions of this presence
know no limits or barriers. Like Life's joy, it springs from sources that lie beyond the
coldly rational universe over which men have their dominion. Its powers to do harm
are more than physical or psychological; they suggest the root of Head's deepest ap-
prehensions.
In all of Bessie Head's short fiction, there is one overarching concern that returns
to haunt us, and that is the fear of exclusion. In general, the conventions of Setswana
society are viewed with misgivings because they oppress the free or kind spirit, op-
posing any resistance to their narrow bounds. But this borderline rebellion merely
masks the deeper struggle where the darker, hideous features of total exclusion act to
destroy the spirit of plenitude given the evocative name of Mother of Corn-Mma
Mabele. Exclusion is the flip side of extinction for the woman victimized by the greed
and power of male relatives or chiefs. In "The Special One," a woman is cheated out
of her inheritance by her brothers. "I lost it," laments Ms. Maleboge, "because women
are just dogs in this society" (81).
However, the same women can destroy men through their own dark and "dirty"
powers. "Many women have killed men by sleeping with them during that time,"
says Ms. Maleboge's friend, in reference to the period of menstruation. The great
illuminating powers of awakening are more than matched by the profound, impen-
175
CALLALOO
etrable night of despair. Bessie Head is a manichean Romantic when she gets done
with the business of social criticism. The earth, the sun, the night, demonic and angelic
forces haunt the ordinary lives that people lead in the village. Always there is a margin
at which exile, exclusion, and the threat of death is felt.
Correspondingly, the margin is also the key feature in the awakening conscious-
ness, expressed more poetically than in the image of dawn in "Snapshots of a Wed-
ding." Here the line that separates two temporal zones expands to cosmic dimensions:
"Wedding days always started at the haunting, magical hour of early dawn when there
was only a pale crack of light on the horizon. For those who were awake, it took the
earth hours to adjust to daylight" (76). The wedding guests emerge from the haze like
disembodied spirits, and slowly we enter a world in which the ascendance of the new,
coarsely materialistic bride, named appropriately Neo, is set off, as expected, by her
open-handed rival, Mathata. Their one-sided struggle for the hand of the well-to-do
bridegroom, Kegoletile, pales before the movement of the larger forces of light and
darkness, of water and earth, of life and death, all of which meet at the pale crack of
dawn when the force of magic works best on the human players. "The cool and damp
of the night slowly rose in the shimmering waves like water and even the forms of
the people who bestirred themselves at this unearthly hour were disturbed in the haze;
they appeared to be dancers in slow motion, with fluid, watery forms" (76).
At the end, Neo's strong-willed aunt pounds the earth at the wedding in her de-
mand that this ill-bred scion of the younger generation turn to more solid ways: "Be
a good wife! Be a good wife!" (80). This is the point at which the self-assertive will and
the pressures exerted by society have the potential to clash. From the aunts' point of
view, "Be a good wife" means remember the respect due us. To Life, this would entail
submission and self-rejection, and to Dikeledi it ultimately signifies prison and iso-
lation. "Be a good wife" thus leads us from the victory of a disrespectful and insensitive
"modern" woman to the depths of exclusion for those who are vibrantly alive and
sensitive.
To understand how Bessie Head treats woman as the excluded term, we turn to
Birago Diop's short story, "Les Mamelles," where conventional marriage practice led
to exclusion and resistance. There, too, the cry of the narrative voice might well have
been, "Be a good wife!" Khary is Momor's first wife, and she is a curmudgeon, not
unlike the classical shrew, Dame Van Winkle. The story of Khary, as undoubtedly she
herself would not have told it, is of an ill-tempered person who, as a child, failed to
accept a disfiguring hump on her back. Often she fought with other children who
taunted her about her "baby." As an adult, married to Momor, Khary's self-conscious-
ness prevents her from successfully fulfilling her marital obligations. Fear of ridicule
keeps her from going out to help him in the fields or to bring him a hot meal. At night
her bad temper alienates him, and so as to relieve her burdens he takes a second wife,
Koumba, who has still a larger hump. Koumba is good tempered, eager to help her
husband, and even willing to assist Khary in her chores, but Khary's spitefulness is
only exacerbated. When Koumba finally succeeds in ridding herself of her hump, thus
becoming as beautiful in form as in spirit, Khary faints in envy.
If Khary is not a good wife, if she is the classical "bad wife," it is because of her
failure to give of herself, to overcome vulnerability and pain which are venomously
176
L___ _ __ _CALLALOO
turned against others. Her flaws separate her from others; defensiveness turns to ag-
gression against the very ones with whom she would be close. Excluded because of
her failure to please, because of the pleasure she takes in inflicting pain on her tor-
mentors, on her rivals, she becomes a victim of the pleasure enjoyed by Momor and
Koumba. At the outset of the tale, we are told that in the matter of wives, two is not
a good number. The proper number is one or three, and as spite and Khary become
third wheels, it is the monogamous couple who appear suited and suitable, while
Khary, wedded to her disposition, acquires the further burden of Koumba's large
hump as well as her own.
In the final scene of "Les Mamelles," Khary assumes fully the role of excluded term.
She flees the happy twosome and seeks to drown herself in the ocean. However, the
humps refuse to be submerged and are transformed into "Les Mamelles," the marginal
outposts of Africa formed into two hills lying off the west coast of Cape Verde- sign-
posts of the extreme western limit of Africa, and, as they appear in the story, boundary
markers designating the borders of black Africa.
Amadou Koumba's conventional wisdom is that the humps are signs of warning
against the unsocial comportment of a "Bad wife." However, they are also signs of
refusal: the two "mamelles" of Khary "refused" submersion, refusing exclusion. They
return after the conventional reading condemns the bad wife, after the pleasure we
share with Momor and Koumba in excluding her is turned by the recognition that this
is no different from the taunts of her playmates, from the very spite that justifies our
own spiteful rejection of Khary. In short, we are trapped by our self-righteous appeal
to a moral or ethical value when it is that value that denies our right to take pleasure
in the pain of others.
When Khary's "malveillance" is described, it is likened to the bitterness of tamarind
juice. Ironically, it is the magic of the spirit found in the tamarind tree that helps
Koumba to disburden herself of her hump, and that causes Khary's final frustration.
Just as Khary's spirit of refusal cannot be submerged, emerging transvaluated from
the water in the end, so, too, is the very symbol of her bitter rejection ambiguously
linked to the one whose power and knowledge cure Koumba of her hump. In the end
the disobliging wife is discarded, but her more forceful demands are recast into the
indomitable boundaries of her world, signposts of the irrepressible spirit of rebellion,
of the far limits to which women may be forced to go. As "mamelles" the islets con-
serve something of the womanist essence writ large on the landscape; but as trans-
formations of babies into breasts, they proclaim the refusal of submission to fixed roles
of wife and motherhood, and further, of submission to fate, to essentialized wom-
anhood altogether. The boundary is a warning of the dangers of refusal, but also a
refusal of that warning.
Bessie Head takes us to those same limits in the story of the excluded wife, Dikeledi,
in "The Collector of Treasures." She, too, refuses to accept her husband's insistence
that she be a "good wife," that she prepare him his meals and bath, and serve him in
bed, regardless of his own conduct and relationships with other women. Like Khary,
Dikeledi pushes her refusal to the limits, and in the process attacks phallocracy at its
root, sexual domination, again reminding us of Mernissi's statement that the sexual
patterns of a society reflect the link between boundaries and power. Until her death,
177
CALLALOO
Khary fails to separate herself from her two humps, her "children" who stay on her
back. Symbolically, she fails to make the transition achieved by Koumba from wife as
mother to wife as lover, to complete the act of parturition with the severance that
comes at the end of the term of nursing. Thus she fails to place Momor's needs before
hers or her children's. Although presented as the aggrieved party, Dikeledi does the
same; and when Garesego attempts to assert his prior claims, he is killed.
Dikeledi's passage is delineated by the same boundary points as are found at the
outset of "Snapshots of a Wedding" -the magical margins to existence at which love,
resistance, or painful exclusion are located. On her way to prison in the police van,
she discovers, like all those driven to the edge, the need to awaken. Her interior land-
scape is projected onto the land in this powerfully evocative scene: "At first, faintly
on the horizon, the orange glow of the city lights of the new independence town of
Gaberone, appeared like an astonishing phantom in the overwhelming darkness of
the bush, until the truck struck tarred roads, neon lights, shops and cinemas, and
made the bush a phantom amidst a blare of light." Here, at the liminal stage where
bush and city exchange a ghostly reality, the harsh journey moves to its conclusion;
a rude arrival and ruder awakening await Dikeledi, prior to her own final transfor-
mation: "All this passed untimed, unwatched by the crumpled prisoner; she did not
stir as the truck finally droned to a halt outside the prison gates. The torchlight struck
the side of her face like an agonizing blow. Thinking she was asleep, the policeman
called out briskly: 'You must awaken now. We have arrived"' (87).
Though she is crumpled in despair, she is not asleep, and has indeed arrived at the
destination, the ultimate outpost of male authority and power, the proper site for her
ultimate refusal. In contrast to the two isolated warning signs that are erected on
Khary's watery tomb, Dikeledi's last stop is to be marked by the community of like-
minded woman who also found the courage to fight back, and who were excluded
and confined under the hegemony of the male judge and warden. There Dikeledi, a
"collector of treasures," finds the place for love, caring, and giving denied her by a
patriarchal society.
Exclusion is transvaluated into fulfillment. The margin turns against the center
again and again, matching love and defilement and love, until the mist swirls over
the lines that would separate them. Without the ugliness or brutality of Garesego,
without his rejection of Dikeledi's legitimate demands, her own struggle would not
have begun, and her own quest for the treasures of life would not have been fulfilled
in prison.
At the end, transformed by the telling, she is no longer a Dikeledi, but a Mma-
Banabatha -both mother of her children and killer of their father. Her story ends with
pointers that indicate where that terrible combination must lead her-exclusion and,
simultaneously, self-fulfillment. As with Mariama Ba's Ramatoulaye, whose hus-
band's death was both tragedy and liberation, Dikeledi and the other struggling
women of Bessie Head's fiction move between two worlds in which the line of change
defines/defies the ultimate borders, a predicament echoed in Ramatoulaye's drama of
death, abandonment, and new life: "I listen to the words that create around me a new
atmosphere in which I move, a stranger and tormented. Death, the tenuous passage
between two opposite worlds, one tumultuous the other still" (So Long a Letter, 2).
178
CALLALOO
Note
1. Boundaries are the subject of Derrida's speculation, especially in "Living On: Border Lines," in
"The Parergon," and in Glas. He extends the concept of semi-permeable membranes and margins
in his discussion by using the figure of the hymen in Dissemination. Culler gives a full treatment
of this issue in his chapter on Derrida in On Deconstruction. The subject of boundaries also relates
to fictional modes, and especially to irony and allegory, and has been discussed by de Man in
Blindness and Insight (see "The Rhetoric of Temporality"). The link between marginality, bound-
aries, power and the space occupied by women is developed by Mernissi in Beyond the Veil.
Works Cited
Ba, Mariama. Une si longue lettre. Dakar: Les nouvelles editions africaines, 1980.
Derrida, Jacques. La dissemenination. Paris: Seuil, 1972.
. Glas. Paris: Editions Galilee, 1974.
" Living On: Border Lines." Deconstruction and Criticism. New York: Continuum Publishing,
1979.
. "The Parergon." October 9 (1979): 3-40.
de Man, Paul. Blindness and Insight. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.
Diop, Birago. Les contes d'Amadou Koumba. Paris: Fasquelle, 1947.
Ekwensi, Cyprian. Jagua Nana. London: Heinemann, 1961.
Emecheta, Buchi. The Joys of Motherhood. New York: Braziller, 1979.
Head, Bessie. The Collector of Treasures. London: Heinemann, 1977.
Mernissi, Fatima. Beyond the Veil. Rev. Ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
Ousmane, Sembene. Voltalque. Paris: Presence africaine, 1962.
179

Change in The Margins - Bessie Head

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Change in The Margins - Bessie Head

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Change in The Margins - Bessie Head

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

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

Author(s): Kenneth W. Harrow

Callaloo 16.1 (1993) 169-179

on the air of a community celebration. However, the village is as much governed by

You might also like