Critical Essays on Bessie Head Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies: Contemporary Black Poets

Through narrative and rhetorical strategies that subvert genre and challenge the discourse of race and gender, black South African woman writer Bessie Head creates alternative healing spaces that empower and ennoble the marginalized, provide potential for transcendence and self-creation, and render ineffective the power of language to subjugate.

This book features new critical material on her life and works and explores the techniques she uses to inscribe an idealistic vision in response to the psychic fragmentation and rootlessness she experienced as an exile. Included are discussions of When Rain Clouds Gather, Maru, A Question of Power, The Cardinals, and The Collector of Treasures.