Earl G. Ingersoll, SUNY College at Brockport
The aim of my project will be to examine several stories by Bessie Head from her collection The Collector of Treasures as the basis for a discussion of the universality of tragedy. At issue here are such questions as these: Is it legitimate to maintain our belief that tragedy is universal? Or is it necessary to acknowledge that tragedy merely represents a cultural construct which, in an expression of a cultural imperialism, the “West” has attempted to universalize? To frame this discussion, it will be useful to draw upon the insights of several writers, among them Jacqueline Rose, Fredric Jameson, Edmond and Marie-Cécile Ortigues, and Charles Mauron.
The writing of Bessie Head offers a number of rich texts for this discussion of the universality of tragedy because she was one of many writers in the postcolonial context who wrote in English, even though she was not part of Anglo–North American culture. Head’s biography is important to an understanding of her work because she grew up among those racially classified as “colored” in South Africa. Indeed, she assumed that the woman who raised her was her mother until at twelve she was summoned to the principal’s office and informed without preamble that she was adopted.[1] She was told that her natural mother had died in an insane asylum, where she was confined by her white family when they discovered that she had been impregnated by a black servant. In 1964 Elizabeth, or Bessie, moved to Bechuanaland, just two years before it achieved its independence as the nation of Botswana. Just as she felt displaced in South Africa because of her racial background, she was disappointed once again not to be welcomed by the black community. This same lack of belonging contributed to Head’s importance as a writer because it allowed her to draw upon more than one cultural tradition.
The work of Jacqueline Rose offers a valuable starting point for the framing of these issues because she is modeling many of our concerns as “Western” thinkers when we examine the implications of issues, for instance, of “madness” in other cultural contexts. In a recent essay from her collection States of Fantasy (1996), Rose explores the “universality” of madness in Bessie Head’s novel A Question of Power (1973). Rose encloses the word universality in what she calls “scare quotes” because of its problematic implications for the literary critic. Uppermost among those implications are the questions raised by terms such as “universality” and “madness.” Can we avoid, in her words, “reproducing the epistemological privilege of the West” in examining the writing of authors outside the West? “Might the claim that ‘universality’ is always Western privilege in fact generate the very exclusion it is designed to contest?”[2] Rose’s concerns with “universality” and “madness” in Bessie Head’s writing provide the impetus for the present examination of her short fiction as representations of what might be thought of as yet another Western construct—“tragedy.” In many ways, the construct of tragedy, along with the notion of “Western” culture, deserves those English “scare quotes” at least as much as Rose’s terms in order to acknowledge its patently problematic associations. On the model of Rose’s interest in the universality of madness, it might be useful to examine several of Bessie Head’s short stories as they are framed by the Western construct of the tragic.
Examinations of tragedy have traditionally begun with Aristotle’s Poetics. Even those who have never studied the Poetics are liable to ground their theorizing about tragedy in Aristotle’s concepts. What is curious, however, is the tendency of those who have drawn upon Aristotle’s views of tragedy to reduce ancient Greek drama to a single model for the structure of tragedy. Even though Aristotle drew his examples of tragic representation from any number of Greek plays, the single paradigm for tragedy that most modern readers recall is Oedipus Rex. If, in fact, this first play in the Oedipus cycle of Sophocles has provided such a dominant paradigm for tragedy, it is difficult to resist asking the following central question: Is it the content or the form of Oedipus Rex that has made the play so central to our understanding of tragedy? In other words, is it tragedy as a dramatic construct (i.e., the dramatic constellation which centers on an inescapable conflict) that is universal, or is it the Oedipus story (i.e., the dreadful fate that leaves Oedipus blinded) that we have come to associate so strongly with classical tragedy that we have misrecognized tragedy as universal?
One helpful guide in such an investigation of tragedy, the Oedipus story, and the question of universality may be found in Fredric Jameson’s long essay “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan: Marxism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Problem of the Subject.” In this essay Jameson attempts to bridge the gap between the interest of Marxism in the collective or transpersonal and the concern of modern psychoanalysis to focus upon the individual within the matrix of the family. Jameson examines an alternative to the conventional notion of character in fiction, which he found in a text that he applauds as a “remarkable and neglected work of Charles Mauron, Psychocritique du genre comique.” Mauron’s psychoanalytic criticism of the comedies of Aristophanes interests Jameson because it legitimates a crucial shift of focus from the personal to the collective within textual representation. Mauron argues that in the oldest expressions of Greek comedy the function of one member of the dramatis personae is subsumed by the “polis,” or community. In Jameson’s translation, Mauron asserts that “the place of the love object of Oedipal rivalry is … taken … by the polis itself, that is by an entity that dialectically transcends any individual experience. Aristophanic comedy thus reflects a moment of social and psychic development which precedes the constitution of the family as a homogeneous unit, a moment in which libidinal impulses still valorize the larger collective structures of the city or the tribe as a whole.”[3] Next, Jameson moves on from Mauron’s notion of the polis, which replaces the Oedipal mother in the Freudian paradigm, in search of further material for his bridging of the gap between Marxism and psychoanalysis in the work of Marie-Cécile and Edmond Ortigues, who have studied traditional African society in relation to the Oedipus complex.
In their work entitled Oedipe africain, the Ortigueses argue that the “Oedipus complex cannot be reduced to a description of the child’s attitudes towards his or her father and mother.… The principal distinction [between the manifestation of the Oedipal problem in Senegalese and European society] lies in the form taken by guilt. Guilt does not appear as such; in other words, as the absence of depression and of any delirium of self-denunciation testifies, it does not appear as a splitting of the ego, but rather under the form of an anxiety of being abandoned by the group.…”[4] Accordingly, in Senegalese society, “it is the collectivity which takes the death of the father upon itself. From the outset traditional Senegalese society announces that the place of each individual in the community is marked by reference to an ancestor, the father of the lineage.” Society, then, by re-presenting “the law of the fathers, thus in a sense neutralizes the diachronic series of generations. In effect the death fantasies of the young Oedipal subject are deflected onto his collaterals, his brothers or his contemporaries.”[5] Basing his project of mediating between the polar opposites of Marxism and psychoanalysis upon the insights of Mauron and the Ortigueses, Jameson points to “the merit of freeing the psychoanalytic model from its dependency on the classical Western family, with its ideology of individualism and its categories of the subject and (in matters of literary representation) of the character.”[6]
Jameson’s efforts at reconstructing the “psychoanalytic model” in the context of the collective prove useful in exploring texts of writers, including Bessie Head, who work at least partly outside “Western” traditions. The collection of her short fiction on which this discussion will focus, namely The Collector of Treasures and Other Botswana Village Tales, clearly demonstrates Head’s implication in the postcolonial condition. As she has reminded her interviewers, her material is Botswanan; indeed, in some of these tales she functions as a village griot, recording the often tragic histories of her adopted homeland. What we find are uncanny echoes of the revisionary sense of tragedy toward which Edmund and Marie-Cécile Ortigues were working: a tragedy growing out of an “anxiety of being abandoned by the group.” Yet, she writes in English and, more to the point, she offers several stories in which she seems intent upon framing postcolonial experience within the context of classical Western tragedy. In their grounding in both traditional notions of the tragic, as well as Jameson’s revisionary concept of the implication of the collective in tragedy, these stories as a group force the reader to rethink constructs such as “tragedy” and “universality.”
Much as it is tempting to begin by looking at the first story in The Collector of Treasures, we would do well to focus upon the story “Life” and its representation of traditional “Western” notions of tragedy. First, Head alerts her readers to the tragic implications of her tale by naming the young woman who becomes the viewpoint character “Life.” As the opening paragraphs make clear, the tragedy of Life grows out of the political situation in which many southern Africans, like Life, were forced to move when the Union of South Africa closed its border with Bechuanaland in 1964 in anticipation of Botswana’s independence. As Botswanan-born immigrants in South Africa had to return to their homeland, the Western culture they had assimilated was accepted, if appropriate, or rejected, when it ran counter to Botswana’s more traditional culture. We are told in the last sentence of the opening paragraph that “the murder of Life had this complicated undertone of rejection.”[7] At this point, before we have any sense of who or what “Life” is, we know that Life is dead and, furthermore, that the murder of Life can be historicized as a representation of her rejection by a variety of “imaginary homelands.”
In this way, the opening paragraphs voice the aspiration of this story of Life to move toward tragedy in the classical Western sense by confirming the inevitability of Life’s death at the story’s conclusion. As in traditional tragic representation, there is no hope; regardless of what this woman might try to do, there is no alternative to the death sentence the text passes down upon her as a kind of narratological “fate.” Resigned, then, to the doom hanging over Life, the reader begins this story, prepared to focus upon what it was that made it impossible for Life to go on. Life is welcomed back by the village seventeen years after she moved with her parents to Johannesburg at the age of ten. In fact, the women in Life’s neighborhood are “impressed with the smartness of this city girl” and expect her to bring them “a little light” (38). When they have finished the two weeks of work they volunteered to do in order to get Life’s yard in shape, the women are saddened by the end of the festivities Life paid for with unstinting generosity. At the same time, they are uneasy because they assume that a young woman cannot be both well off and good in the big city. Even in their village, the women see that “one could not be honest and rich at the same time” (39). They predict that Life will eventually settle down and find a job in the post office, apparently one of the few jobs for “intelligent girls.”
Life, however, is used to other options offered to black women in Johannesburg. “She had been a singer, beauty queen, advertising model, and prostitute” (39). This casually offered résumé of her “varied career” indicates that the value of Life in a capitalist, consumer culture defines her as one who feeds male appetites in a variety of forms. The narrative presents us with further analysis of female output in the village economy: with education, a woman can be a skilled worker such as a nurse, teacher, or clerk; without it, she must content herself with farming or housework. Obviously, the village lacks opportunities to support Life as a “singer, beauty queeen, or advertising model”; just as obviously, Life lacks the training as well as the inclination to farm or keep house, and it seems only logical that she should return to her former means of supporting herself. The structure of tragedy is grounded in reduced economic options and increasingly narrowed choices for Life to earn a living.
Interestingly, the narrative further contextualizes Life’s tragedy by exploring the sexual mores of the community. As Life begins to commodify sexuality outside marriage, she alienates the more conservative women of the village, not so much, we are quickly assured, because she asks for money for sex but because the women’s husbands are becoming Life’s clients. What is upsetting the community, then, is Life’s importation of a Western notion of turning into a business venture that which had been a less organized and makeshift arrangement of men and women making impromptu “deals.” The narrative indicates: “People’s attitude to sex was broad and generous—it was recognized as a necessary part of human life, that it ought to be available whenever possible like food and water, or else one’s life would be extinguished or one would get dreadfully ill. To prevent these catastrophes from happening, men and women generally had quite a lot of sex but on a respectable and human level, with financial considerations coming in as an afterthought” (39). The passage is crucial to Head’s contextualizing of Life’s tragedy, for it stresses that this Prodigal Daughter is not stigmatized as a carrier of Western civilization’s “evil” into a “pure,” traditional culture. Head makes clear that Life’s village has no sexual inhibitions and recognizes that sexuality will not always find expression within marriage. Instead, Life offers a reproduction of relationships between men and women forced upon the more traditional village culture by larger political forces outside their small community.
If Life has been the “carrier” of anything, it can only be Western individuality. Life is no longer willing to abide by the mores of the community, as she might have continued to do had she not come of age in Johannesburg. Like everything else, unfortunately, this individuality is two-edged: it urges Life to deal with how she will fulfill herself, especially as her options become increasingly narrow and tragically constricted, and it also influences her to buy into the cash nexus at the foundation of Western consumer culture. Without any other obvious mode of production, Life “chooses” to commodify her own body as the site of male consumers’ desire. Interestingly, the men of the village seem drawn to this paradigm of consumer culture—the manufacturing of needs they had not recognized earlier. Once again, as the passage cited above makes clear, men and women had been enjoying sex as an everyday appetite before Life returned. What Life offers is not only an overt packaging of sexual exchange but also a public consumption—“men started turning up in an unending stream”—suggesting the need that men have to perform their desire for others’ eyes and to enjoy the pleasure of a desire that violates conventional restraints upon desire.
The village may be no Johannesburg, but there is no mistaking the effects of Western culture that have been accruing for some time. Even before Life’s homecoming, the “beer-brewing women,” who suddenly become attracted to her modeling of individuality, have shed any pretense of subscribing to traditional definitions of their roles as women. These women have already taken the first steps down the road toward liberation. “Boyfriends, yes. Husbands, uh, uh, no. Do this! Do that! We want to rule ourselves,” they proclaim. For these women, Life is an uncrowned “Queen”: “they never attempted to extract money from the constant stream of men [who usually depart when informed they have to pay their share of household expenses] because they did not know how” (40). Thus, for a time, Life becomes a Queen of Misrule, enjoying the adulation of these liberated women representing Western culture’s celebration of individuality.
Tragedy, the other side of that coin of individuality, approaches with an ominous hush of death, as one further site of Western culture gets duplicated in the community: the village’s first pub. Life parts company with the beer-brewing women in whose adulation she has basked when she alone sets foot in the bar. If tragedy seems imminent, it is in part because Life begins to perform one of the attributes of the tragic subject: she becomes a tragic overreacher, one who seems self-consciously to make demands on her cultural context in order to point out that her world is too small for someone with the magnitude of her desire for fulfillment. Alternatively perhaps, Life has discovered what others have before her: one has only to slip away from the embrace of community life to discover a void opening up within existence, a void in which the human subject must continually seek new modes of self-construction. In her own case, Life’s construction of herself as a radically independent woman in a traditionally male-dominated culture is a self-conscious act of defiance for which she must know she will pay with her life. Much as we may be drawn to Life, we sense this tragedy is moving into its final acts when the narrative introduces a new character, Lesego, with dramatic abruptness: “one evening death walked quietly into the bar. It was Lesego, the cattle-man” (41).
In some ways, the love of Lesego and Life with its tragic consequences seems to be replaying the Liebestod implicit in countless Western tragedies from classic duos like Othello and Desdemona to contemporary lovers like Frankie and Johnny. Life astounds her followers by announcing that she will shed her old ways and become a “woman” by marrying Lesego. Similarly, the cattleman confounds his buddies by proposing to marry a prostitute; they do their best to dissuade him: “You can’t marry that woman. She’s a terrible fuck-about” (42), many of them presumably knowing first-hand the truth of which they speak. Thus, Lesego has been positioned in an intolerably narrow either/or stricture, like those we have come to expect in tragedy. He must command Life’s absolute fidelity or he will lose his male authority: either she will remain “faithful” or he “must” murder her. Life has chosen an even more constricted position: risk death by testing Lesego’s fatal resolve, or embrace it more slowly in the suffocating domesticity which is becoming more each day like a death sentence. Because not even the beer-brewing women seem to understand the “physical pain” of her boredom, Life comes to see that she is going to have to serve her life sentence in solitary confinement.
The tragic movement of Life toward her death is performed with such a sense of inevitability that it seems impossible to imagine any other outcome. Lesego must leave to tend his cattle. He must remind Life of her vows of fidelity. Life must turn him into the instrument of her tragic release. At the same time, the circumstances are reminiscent of a bedroom farce—as tragedy’s final acts so often are. One has only to recall Othello’s silly obsession with that handkerchief to approach the scene of Lesego’s return. Life, who has returned to her old ways, offers him tea, then tells him he must wait while she shops for the sugar. She must know that he will trace her steps when he discovers the sugar canister is full and fulfill his threat to punish adultery with death. These last scenes have a kind of slow-motion effect as we watch in powerless horror the execution of Life.
Sianana, the friend who had especially attempted to dissuade Lesego from marrying a woman he calls a “fuck-about,” moves into the role of tragic chorus. He asks Lesego why he could not have simply walked away from Life. He continues: “Are you trying to show us that rivers never cross here?” (46). That sentiment, the narrator adds, comes right out of a song by Jim Reeves that the beer-brewing women like to sing. The song is “That’s What Happens When Two Worlds Collide.” In this way, Head confirms the potential for traditional tragic representation in a most Western—in this case, American—expression of popular culture, the “country-western” ballad of star-crossed lovers.
The image of the rivers never crossing is a reminder of the opening story of this collection, “The Deep River: A Story of Ancient Tribal Migration.” If “Life” offers a good example of Head’s attraction to traditional, Western modes of tragedy, “The Deep River” allows us to see her equally strong attraction to the revisionary notion of tragedy that Jameson is attempting to explain. “The Deep River” is clearly a “village tale” of how the Talaote tribe drew themselves out of the “deep river” of unself-conscious harmony and unity among the Monemapee, the tribe of their ancestor. When Monemapee dies at the beginning of Head’s story, he leaves behind three wives and five sons. (Head doesn’t make it clear that the dead chief started the tribe; perhaps Monemapee is the ancestor whose name each subsequent chief assumes to connect himself with the founding ancestor.) Sebembele, the oldest son and heir apparent, stuns his followers with the announcement that he will marry his father’s third wife, the young and beautiful Rankwana, whose son Makobi is the fruit of their secret love. Concerned that Makobi will supplant them in the succession, the young adult brothers gather enough supporters to confront Sebembele with a bitter and potentially tragic choice: abandon Rankwana and Makobi or renounce his claim to succeed their father as chief.
Head seems to have no interest whatsoever in developing the implications of this blatantly “Oedipal” context of Sebembele taking his father’s wife. Instead, it is the brothers as “collaterals” and their followers who play that role. Head focuses upon what the Ortigueses would presumably point out in this situation: Sebembele is in a quintessentially “tragic” position. The collective is generating that “anxiety of being abandoned by the group” of which they speak. Sebembele’s decision to renounce his claim to become the successor of the ancestor Monemapee threatens him with a tragedy of immense proportions. It is in a sense the tragedy of individualism; that is, to the tribe he leaves behind, Sebembele has “died” to the collective or polis, the greater social order that flows with the “deep river” of timeless harmony and unity. To Head, Sebembele gives birth to himself as an individual in time, as one making personal choices about who will be his family. To counter that anxiety of abandonment, Head turns Sebembele into a new “ancestor” as he, his wife, and child are joined by “collaterals” of the old tribe who choose to throw in their lot with him.
“The Collector of Treasures,” as Bessie Head has made clear, is very much a “Botswana Village Tale.” As Head informed an interviewer, it was the dead man’s family who told her the story. What makes this story “Western” is that Head seems to be constructing it within a framework of traditional Western concepts of tragedy. In the opening paragraphs, the viewpoint character Dikeledi has just begun to serve a life sentence for having killed her husband, Garesego, and we even learn how she did it. In fact, she joins four other women who have also killed their husbands, and at least one admits to having done it in the same fashion—by means of emasculation. Knowing this, the reader is led back through Dikeledi’s life to account for her desperate act. Thus, as in Life’s story, Head eliminates all hope that tragedy can be averted, and we “know” the outcome just as ancient Greek audiences were never in any doubt as to what lay in store for Oedipus.
Dikeledi’s story is prefaced by the generalization that there are two sorts of men in postcolonial Botswana, and Dikeledi has encountered both. The first sort exploit women sexually and refuse to assume responsibility for any children they might produce. Dikeledi’s Garesego is of that ilk, which Head claims is the majority. After impregnating her three times, he has abandoned her and their three sons, aged four, three, and one, for the latest in a string of sexual conquests. Dikeledi is “semi-literate,” and Garesego has discovered that educated women are more “exciting” in these heady days of Botswana’s “independence.” But Dikeledi has also had the good fortune to meet the second sort of man, Paul Thebolo, the husband of her neighbor and friend, Kenalepe. Head describes Paul as “another kind of man in the society with the power to create himself anew. He turned all his resources, both emotional and material, towards his family life and he went on and on with his own quiet rhythm, like a river. He was a poem of tenderness” (93).
The trope of the river that Head uses to introduce Paul is no accidental echo of the river image of the first story in the collection. Indeed, Paul seems a reincarnation of the legendary Sebembele in his rare combination of passionate tenderness as a lover and nurturing love as a father. Furthermore, Paul offers Dikeledi and his own wife intellectual stimulation, when the two women sit at the fringes of his group as Paul and the other men talk politics. This is still an Africa in which the two women cannot participate, but when they are by themselves the next morning, they continue the debates. Contact with Paul’s discussion group has “opened up … a completely new world,” which seems to Dikeledi “impossibly rich and happy” (96). Her aspiration to reconstruct herself in a larger mode echoes Life’s more desperate desire. In addition, Paul seems clearly to be moving toward that older tradition of Sebembele predating the advent of colonization.
Eight years later, tragedy beckons Dikeledi when her husband comes back into her life with the same dramatic abruptness of Lesego’s entry on the stage of Life’s world. She is forced to appeal to him for help in paying for their son’s education. Garesego refuses, directing his wife to seek support from Paul: “Everyone knows he’s keeping two homes and that you are his spare” (99). What is worse, in this postcolonial context in which there are only two sorts of men, Garesego can sully Paul’s reputation in public and get away with it. He confronts Paul on the street, accusing him on having sex with Dikeledi, whom he supplies with food: “Men only do that for women they fuck!” Paul is right when he responds: “You defile life, Garesego Mokopi,” for, as Dikeledi noted earlier, “He thinks every man is like himself” (100). Sad to say, many are willing to credit Garesego’s slanders because Paul seems “too good to be true.” Ironically, it is the very masculinity Paul has constructed for himself that renders him vulnerable in a world where it is easier to believe the worst about men. To assert his “rights,” Garesego moves into Dikeledi’s home after refusing to pay for his son’s education, and she puts to use the knife she has been sharpening for his return.
In an important sense, Dikeledi’s tragic experience reproduces Life’s own since her “murder” of Garesego seems the obverse of Life’s “suicide” at the hands of her husband. Dikeledi goes about the affairs of her last hours of freedom like a Medea honing the knives of her vengeance. It is not her sons, of course, whom Dikeledi murders; it is for her sons she murders their father. Indeed, she is in one sense “fathering” her sons by passing them on to Paul’s care, to become their “real” father. Dikeledi calls down upon herself a tragedy outside Western culture by opening herself up to a kind of abandonment by the community, for her husband dies from the emasculation whether she intended to kill him or merely to make her symbolic statement. And yet even the consignment to imprisonment for life has another dimension, for Dikeledi joins a select society of her peers who have demonstrated their belief that men do not have the right to use women as sex objects; rather, men should recognize that sexual relations with women represent a privilege to be exercised responsibly.
More than anything, Dikeledi’s killing of her husband is a tragic gesture toward the restoration of Paul as a variety of “ancestor.” Early in the story, the narrative is suspended for a bit of what the British would call “potted history” of Botswana. Head’s intent is to establish in her readers’ consciousness a notion of a pre-colonial Africa in which the sexuality of a man like Garesego would have been controlled by the collective, embodied in the chief as the current representation of the “ancestor.” The colonial period of British rule in the “Protectorate” disrupted that traditional notion, replacing it with a system in which all African men became “boys.” In postcolonial Botswana women have no independence because there are no restraints upon sexual outlaws like Garesego.
Unlike its counterparts “Life” and “The Deep River,” which pose quite polar notions of tragedy, “The Collector of Treasures” gains much of its energy from its attempts to balance that polarity. Like Life, Dikeledi chooses a path which can lead only to tragedy since the rules of her community insist that as a wife she must submit to her husband’s sexual advances. In choosing her costly expression of freedom, she joins Life in positing an individuality traditionally associated with tragic experience. Dikeledi can also claim descent from Sebembele, like Paul Thebolo, for whom, in part, she kills her husband. Like Sebembele, she chooses to act in such a manner that abandonment by the community is inevitable and yet richly productive of a more genuine future for the community she saves through her tragic choice. Unless men like Paul Thebolo can be saved as future leaders, as sons of their progenitor Sebembele, it will be Garesego and his ilk who will inherit a permanently “postcolonial” world.
NOTES
[1]
The principal may have been acting on a directive from the new regime following
the 1948 election of the Nationalist Party, which ultimately controlled South
Africa for decades. Most of what came to be known as the infamous policy of
apartheid began to be enacted in the late 1940s.
Return to article
[2]
Jacqueline Rose, “On the ‘Universality’ of Madness: Bessie Head’s A Question of Power,” in her collection States of Fantasy (London: Clarendon
Press, 1996) 99.
Return to article
[3]
Fredric Jameson, “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan: Marxism, Psychoanalytic
Criticism, and the Problem of the Subject,” Yale
French Studies 55/56 (1977): 347.
Return to article
[4]
Marie-Cécile and Edmond Ortigues, in Jameson 347–48.
Return to article
[5]
Marie-Cécile and Edmond Ortigues, in Jameson 348.
Return to article
[6]
Jameson 348.
Return to article
[7] Bessie Head, The
Collector of Treasures (London: Heinemann, 1997) 37. Subsequent references
to this text will be included parenthetically.
Return to article