Bessie Head
The joy of discovering a new author—new, that is, to the reader; she can be long dead but you had never heard of her—it makes you feel young again, as if it is not too late for you to become an explorer.
In the lovely small journal Slightly Foxed—an obscure British quarterly of only sixty-some small pages—there was a short essay on Bessie Head, an author from Botswana. Head’s first novel, When Rain Clouds Gather, was published in 1968. Born in South Africa, Head lived most of her life in Botswana, a landlocked country north of South Africa, east of Namibia, and southwest of Zimbabwe. In this little essay in a little journal I learned not only of Head and of this novel but that this novel was included in “The Big Jubilee Read” of seventy books published during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. I found that the Dallas public library had a copy available, and once I turned to read it, it hooked me. How could I never have known of this? How wonderful to learn of it!
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The plot centers on a man who, as the novel opens, is escaping into Botswana from South Africa, where he has just been released from prison. Violence, of unspecified sort, is in his past and in his heart. He settles in a small village—we learn of how the people live, poor, close to the ground. There is a British fellow who has settled there too; he brings modern agricultural knowledge and is trying to figure out (because somehow he has come to love these people) how to change their practices to ones that will be better for the soil, and for their lives. To do so he must come to understand how they see things, which is to say, become less of an outsider. We note that the white man is neither an enemy nor a native, though the book ruminates much on the evils of apartheid in South Africa and the myriad dehumanizations, large and small and all over the world, of African folk. There is an old woman who reads her Bible, who sees their local story as having its place in the Old Testament narrative. The man who is the center of the narrative has his own, anti-biblical thoughts.
Bessie Head puts all this together in a story that threatens catastrophe at various points—and there is great sadness at death from disease, and the vultures consuming cattle that died of hunger, and much more. Nonetheless, although I feared it repeatedly, nothing worse happened. The books ends with no simple message. The village has survived, its people if anything more interconnected than before. Evil has been dealt with by solidarity and not violence. And that solidarity is put as divine vengeance! God deals with a character who had intended revenge against God and his purposes. God plans revenge: “He would so much entangle this stupid young man with marriage and babies and children that he would always have to think, not twice but several hundred times, before he came to knocking anyone down.”
That “stupid young man” is the center of this remarkable novel. Reading it makes me feel like a new explorer, meeting people and moving into a world freshly strange. I am considering it for the book seminar next year, but perhaps you will go ahead and read it now?
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Out & About: This Sunday, August 4, I will be preaching at St. Francis in the Fields in Louisville, Ky., and offering a Sunday morning class: “Praising God for Creation: Reflections on Walking the Camino de Santiago.”
The next week, August 11, I am to preach at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas, where the services are at 9 and 11:15 a.m.
The Good Books & Good Talk seminar is to resume on Sunday, September 22, on Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Subsequent fall discussions: October 13 on Russell Kirk’s Old House of Fear and November 10 on Marly Youmans’s Charis in the World of Wonders—all in Garrett Hall at St. Matthew’s in Dallas, from 5 to 6:30 p.m.
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On the Web. August 6 is the feast of the Transfiguration, which celebrates the revelation of Jesus as the luminous Son of God to chosen disciples. I have written about this shining; I wonder whether the shining indicates simply the light of God, or if it might (also?) point to the light of true humanity. Visit: https://humanlifereview.com/the-shining/