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Writing a Life in Epistolic Form: Bessie Head's Letters

Summary In this article Bessie Head's letters – mainly those published in the two collections, Vigne's A Gesture of Belonging (1991) and Cullinan's Imaginative Trespasser (2005) along with extracts from her letters quoted in Eilersen's biography of Head, Thunder Behind Her Ears (1995) – are used to suggest that in these texts we have a broken or intermittent autobiography. As the quotations illustrate, Head's published letters (almost all dating from her Botswana years) demonstrate certain recurrent patterns: particularly her perceptions of social exclusion and the psychic strategy of surmounting these obstacles to make of them her vantage point from which to observe and evaluate the human limitations and possibilities of her time and place – but widely seen, hence the image of living “on an horizon” that she wished to invoke in the autobiography she had intended writing. Because of Head's relative social isolation in Botswana, the letters afford her the opportunity of constituting a self in epistolic representations – a self that is framed by a collectivity with which she often feels herself to be at odds, but in relation to which she nevertheless needs to place herself and define her role. As the letters recall her experiences they become the opportunities to represent and re-imagine these events; to articulate, re-evaluate and shape her own arduously achieved ideas.