Nhw:Head, Bessie Pb

Out of her experiences as a woman stigmatised in apartheid South Africa for not being white enough, and marginalised in Botswana for not being African enough, Bessie Head (1937-1986) created a body of work sometimes exhilarated, sometimes anguished, always bold.

In this critical study, Dorothy Diver discusses the way Head's writings - novels, short stories, letters, sketches, essays, reviews - address the ethical and spiritual difficulties of life in societies riven in one way or another by social divisions and hierarchies that held people back from achieving their full humanity.

Head's spirited and uniquely personal critique of what it means to be `African' and `female' in a postcolonial world is shown to engage with the possibilities for moving beyond such categories.

To Head, writing became a powerfully creative means of re-formulating self and world.