SOURCE: Harrow, Kenneth W. “Bessie Head's The Collector of Treasures: Change on the Margins.” Callaloo 16, no. 1 (winter 1993): 169–79.

[In the following essay, Harrow views boundaries—maintaining and overcoming them—as the major thematic concern in Head's short fiction.]

The subject of Bessie Head's stories is change itself, and specifically the threshold where change takes place. Change has become the issue of women's writing since independence—change and not simply rights or equality. Though there has been continuous concern with abuse of women, a concern voiced in the miserabilist school of Sembène's Voltaïque or Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood, or presented in more chauvinistic terms in Jagua Nana, it is in the stories of Bessie Head, Mariama Ba, Buchi Emecheta, and Ama Ata Aidoo that the very boundaries between men and women, between past and present roles, those that are set in place in the constitution of women's identities, are called into question. With Bessie Head, in fact, boundaries, the forces that maintain and perpetuate them, and those forces that dissolve them, could be said to be the focus of and key to her work.¹

Especially in the short stories of Bessie Head we find qualities that support this approach. One frequently finds there characters who are sketched, and whose one or two dominant traits assume such proportions as to give the stories an allegorical aspect. They appear for an episode or two in which the point of their appearance is established and the question of their fate determined. The lines of their lives are reduced, brought into focus, and purified. The crossing of lines forms the quintessential action.

With Bessie Head an ironic fatalism governs these women's lives, seen in the gap between the narrative point of view and those of the characters. Galethebege's Christian faith, in “Heaven Is Not Closed,” is described as sincere and heartfelt by a narrator whose sympathies are closer to Galethebege's non-Christian, skeptical husband. More often the irony stems from the internal gap inherent in the position of the women themselves: caught in a network of social custom and constraint, the women in Head's stories experience moments of transition, blasphemy, violence and death, either because of the strength of their desire, as with Galethebege, Life, or Rankwana in “The Deep River,” or because of their insistence upon preserving integrity and independence, as with Life, Dikeledi, and Mma-Mabele. The conflicts often occur within the characters themselves, even when external constraint is brought to bear. What emerges is a pattern of struggle between powerful, repressive forces and equally adamant drives grounded in desire and refusal.

The passage across this landscape of combat does not lead to a new vision of history, does not pave a path through history, but rather traces magical lines and horizons that set off one time and place from another. Dawn, nightfall, cusps of existence where existential decisions are made—these are boundaries given meaning by personal choice and not historical movement. Even death takes on significance in this way, as though ultimate forces were contained in each individual fate.

However, along this larger allegorical vista, one finds the particular features of the present time in which the conflict over social roles has become exacerbated by historical change. The strategy of representing this conflict as one involving boundaries, with the transgression of accepted frontiers of action and the protection of conventional space, permits the joining of allegorical and historical time. It also suggests the broader meaning inscribed in larger divisions of power, as Mernissi (1987) has postulated in the more obvious case of Morocco: “The institutionalized boundaries dividing the parts of society express the recognition of power in one part at the expense of the other. Any transgression of the boundaries is a danger to the social order because it is an attack on the acknowledged allocation of power. The link between boundaries and power is particularly salient in a society's sexual patterns” (137). We can see this in the story, “Heaven Is Not Closed,” and especially in the blank spaces surrounding Ralokae's first wife.

“Ralokae had been married for nearly a year when his young wife died in childbirth. She died when the crops of the season were being harvested, and for a year Ralokae imposed on himself the traditional restraints and disciplines of boswagadi or mourning for the deceased” (The Collector of Treasures, 8). What is the name of Ralokae's first wife? Why is she called only “Ralokae's first wife,” whereas Ralokae's brother, Modise, is identified by name? Twice at the outset of the narration there are references to “the old man, Modise” (7, 8). He is also the narrator, and when the narrative setting is placed within the context of Modise's story, Modise passes back into the conventional anonymity of the third person omniscient narrator. He is empowered by his special relationship with the reader, has access to the hidden truth, and shares it with us, as with his grandchildren who constitute his immediate audience. He is the focus of their attention—they look at him as he addresses them. He creates the mood, and the children's reactions are orchestrated into a single response: “A gust of astonished laughter shook his family out of the solemn mood of mourning that had fallen upon them and they all turned eagerly toward their grandfather, sensing that he had a story to tell.” We wait with them in anticipation for the beginning of the telling: “‘As you know,’ the old man said wisely, ‘Ralokae was my brother …’” (98).

If one can speak of the power to represent things, as well as the compulsion of inherited literary paradigms, with their structures that always already engender a set of reader expectations and responses, then one should also be able to speak of the resistance of these forces. Within “Heaven Is Not Closed,” the point of departure for that resistance is provided by the unnamed first wife of Ralokae whose untold story is centered on a single clue, her death which came “when the crops of the season were being harvested.”

To enter the text through the opening in the story that occurs with this young woman is to write her/story on a series of blank slates. We are not told a number of things about her which are essential to our understanding of the relationship she had with Ralokae. Who was she? Who was her family? What kind of marriage was it? Ralokae, we are told, was a man who scorned the new European/Christian way, and who adhered to the traditional customs. This did not mean he was conservative. To the contrary, he was something of a rebel in this regard. Her position is unknown. If he chose her because she, too, ignored the new Christian way, then all we can say is that her image is gained through the reflection cast by her husband, by Ralokae, whose name is clearly of significance to the storyteller.

We don't know if they had children—merely that she dies in childbirth. If there were children, then the tie to their mother's family should continue to weigh in Ralokae's life, and, more important, they would now be raised by Galethebege. Although it is her grandchildren who listen to Modise, we are not told whether those grandchildren include any offspring of the first wife. Indeed, the listeners are also described as Modise's children and his grandchildren, although he himself never took Galethebege as his wife. If the description is intended to be generic—the old man is generally called “grandfather” out of respect—the narrative does not present it in this fashion. This might appear insignificant were it not for the unique detail which we are provided about Ralokae's first wife, the time of her death. When she passed away, at a time that corresponded to her coming to full fruition (a year of her marriage had passed, she was about to give birth), the crops were being harvested. The child was to be the harvest. She died in childbirth, and left no other visible trace than her absence, her death, the time of her dying. Without children and name she faced the worst of fates customarily reserved for the childless and dispossessed, oblivion. In Modise's telling of her story she is completely unobtrusive, except for the key opening her absence provides for Galethebege.

“He was young and impatient to be married again and no one could bring back the dead” (9). Death brings irreversible change. A one-way passage across the threshold that is visible to us from only one side, it culminates the movement towards quietude, like thermodynamic flow, a linear movement in contrast to the seasonal cycle of renewal. Like her life, Ralokae's wife's death is recorded in the dossier of Ralokae's life.

Following her death, Ralokae observed the traditional custom of mourning, a “discipline” which Head identifies as boswagadi. There seems to be no reason to identify this custom by its Setswana name, but for the fact that Ralokae is a traditionalist and strictly observes the “traditional restraints” which one must assume include sexual continence—a detail that ironically outweighs the importance to the narrator of naming or discussing the woman whose death was the cause of the boswagadi. Upon the end of the period of mourning, Ralokae “take[s] note of the life of Galethebege” (9) and begins to court her. Despite their differences in belief—she is a devout Christian and he an averred traditionalist—he overcomes her reservations and convinces her to marry him. They marry, after he tells her “firmly”: “I took my first wife according to the old customs. I am going to take my second wife according to the old customs too” (9).

Ralokae's firmness is set in contrast with Galethebege's “uncertainty” which marks her declaration to Ralokae about her Christian faith. She must inform the “missionary” of her decision to marry a man who is set in “Setswana custom,” thus engendering the story's principal conflict, the antagonism between Christianity and traditional “custom.”

Ironically, it is the discipline imposed by boswagadi which causes Ralokae to take note of Galethebege: “It was the unexpectedness of the tragic event and the discipline it imposed on him, that made Ralokae take note of the life of Galethebege” (9). Her quietly ordered life, one which had been too insignificant for him before, is now what attracts him. As her faith in the “will of God” is what gives her existence its special quality for him, one has to assume Ralokae's first wife was a different sort of woman, had a different set of qualities. And it is, perhaps, the contrast, the appeal of difference, which the absence and the discipline awakened.

The direction taken by the narration moves away from these ironies. Even Ralokae fades into the background as Galethebege finds herself caught between Christian and Setswana custom, between the missionary and Ralokae. Although her husband does not insist that she give up her faith, he refuses to convert; and the missionary refuses to marry her to an “unbeliever,” going so far as to announce that heaven is closed to Ralokae. Although this situation might not have been unique to the community, it is presented by Modise as though it were special, as though the conflict it engendered, always potentially there in the presence of the two antagonistic communities, were realized in the story of Galethebege, causing a considerable commotion. There is no indication that Ralokae faced this with his first wife, and every indication that an important decision was being made by Galethebege. She is thus placed between two forces for the first time.

However, the nature of the conflict is not as evident as it might appear. At first, we learn that the matter of her Christian faith and his insistence upon tradition stood between them “like a fearful sword.” The conventional phrasing of this phallic image serves to trivialize her uncertainties and would more naturally seem to suggest the firmness of Ralokae, the unswerving male. This conventionality is immediately deconstructed by Galethebege's passion. Blood pounds in this quiet Christian woman's fingers, and when she commits herself to Ralokae, “the sword quivered like a fearful thing between them” (9). Clearly desire takes priority in this struggle, a struggle begun with the discipline of abstinence, the control of desire. The sword which lies between lovers, like Tristan's fidelity to his monarch, soon becomes identified with the instrument of desire itself.

Between Ralokae and Galethebege desire and passion replace the discipline of boswagadi and the quietude of Christianity. For Galethebege the conflict remains, but the tension it produces is displaced onto her desire. Thus when she tells the missionary of her fiance's Setswana custom, sexuality and traditional beliefs are conflated and condemned when viewed from the distance of foreign eyes: “sexual malpractices were associated with the traditional marriage ceremony (and shudder!), they draped the stinking intestinal bag of the ox around their necks” (10).

Galethebege's interviews with the missionary were intended to bridge the gap between the two men, the two customs. Instead, she finds herself trapped between the missionary's interdictions and her husband's adamancy. She had hoped to permit the passage of love through her to overcome the conflict between the two men—to mend the rift between the institutions with their two sets of customs. She sought to achieve a “compromise of tenderness,” but instead of permitting the flow of love, thus resolving the people's “cry for love” engendered by the foreign intrusion of colonialism, she becomes herself the occasion for hatred. Seeking to unite, she is excluded. The missionary's “rage and hatred were directed at Ralokae, and the only way in which he could inflict punishment was to banish Galethebege from the Church. If it hurt anyone at all, it was Galethebege” (11).

The missionary's reaction to the Setswana custom of uniting the couple under the yoke of the cow's intestines conforms directly to Mernissi's assertion that the setting of boundaries, and their transgression, reflect the distribution of power within society, and that it is especially in respect to sexual relations that this relationship between boundaries and power emerges. The act of allegiance is represented here as a joining—the intestines yoke the couple under the aegis of Setswana custom, just as the choice of Christianity was to “embrace the Gospel” (8). The missionary's exclusion of Galethebege from the church, and his hatred for a man he did not know, erected impermeable barriers; the struggle for control over the power to join becomes visible in his discourse about the closing of heaven to the unbeliever.

As a result, Galethebege failed as mediator, as a semi-permeable membrane or as hymen, and instead became the trembling sword of desire. Before the missionary's anger her reaction was to “tremble,” and her trembling gave alarm to the missionary. Despite his fulminations and banishment, in the end it is he who is excluded from the story while our attention is turned to the effects of the struggle for power upon the would-be mediator, the woman.

The ultimate irony is that Galethebege suffers the missionary's wrath because of her faith, her quietness grounded in the certainty of God's will which she conveyed to Ralokae. What wins her Ralokae also earns her the missionary's harsh judgment. Her trembling, both passion and conflict, signals not only the impossibility of mediation as they are viewed from one intransigent side, but the emplacement of the woman between two competing, intransigent males. She becomes the boundary. Instead of permitting the flow of understanding, instead of fructifying the community, she serves as the occasion for positions to harden, forming an absolute barrier between them. If death will not restore Ralokae's first wife, neither will Galethebege restore wholeness to the community. The irony condemns the mediator to the role of divider.

The unnamed woman Galethebege replaces died at harvest time, and a year later, again at harvest time, Galethebege takes this woman's place in Ralokae's attentions. Woman, whose first role was simply to bear the fruit at harvest, becomes, in the person of her successor, an instrument of desire as well as of division. Condemned to a trembling quietude, Galethebege assumes the very tension implicit in her role, transforming the failure of mediation and the need to please two incompatible orders into the form of desire. Although the vocabulary of Galethebege's acts is co-opted by another's testimony, it ironically turns on its original speaker. Modise never sees beyond the dimensions of the male conflict, and the community is set to laugh at Galethebege's continued acts of prayer and faith. But the laughter acknowledges the triumph of desire, as the prayers become, in their minds, appeals to open the doors of heaven to Ralokae—that the desire might empower Galethebege's words to achieve the act of ultimate penetration.

In “Life,” “Snapshots of a Wedding,” and “The Collector of Treasures,” Head moves to the question of exclusion and resistance, with the triumphant position emerging with the ambivalent return of the excluded term. Even with Galethebege we have a foreshadowing of this theme: “It was the first time love had come her way and it made the blood pound fiercely through her whole body till she could feel its very throbbing at the tips of her fingers. It turned her thoughts from God a bit, to this new magic life was offering her” (“Heaven Is Not Closed” [9]). With love, Bessie head suggests an alternative to the restrictions associated with institutions and their power. She suggests an alternative life to that confined and hedged by the force of social convention and phallocratic rule, and debased by its association with human cruelty. Her universe is that manichean, that absolute in its judgments about people, that rigorous in the demands placed upon life to fulfill the need for happiness. Love frees its guest to experience life, frees its guest from the oppressive side of existence and all its petty beliefs. Love takes its guest to the limits allowed by life, where magic begins.

In “Life,” the protagonist, herself named Life, is a victim of the harsh and implacable enforcement of limits upon her conduct. The time and setting for this story are the most precise of those in all Bessie Head's stories. She tells us in 1963 the borders were first set up between South Africa and Botswana, and pending the independence of Botswana in 1966 all Botswana nationals were obliged to return home. Ironically it is the end of colonialism in the British territory that accounts for the expulsion of the migrants and the rigorous enforcement of borders; during the prior period the movement of migrant laborers was unimpeded.

The return of Life, a smart “city girl,” to her parents' home village was greeted by her women neighbors with the expectation of a new brightness: “She is going to bring us a little light” (38). Again there is irony here since it was Life's free and easy way of living in South Africa that sets her at odds with the solid, respectable members of the Botswana community. The only ones who follow in her path are the beer-brewing women, “a gay and lovable crowd who had emancipated themselves some time ago” (39). Free to drink and have babies on their own, they elevated Life to the status of their Queen, and enjoyed carousing in her compound where “food and drink flowed like milk and honey” (40).

At the end of the story, “Life” has been killed by “Death.” Life is attracted to her opposite, Lesego, death—a straight and determined man who refuses to compromise. She must adhere to the lines he draws around her, or else be killed. Ironically, she sees in him the hi-life excitement of the Jo-burg gangster and he sees in her the freshness of the new spirit. But whereas both Life and Death share a higher agenda than that defined by social convention, their subtextual opposition is what prevails—she is killed by him, and he is imprisoned because of her.

In a sense, they clash and destroy each other because of a misreading. Instead of complementing each other, they attacked the other's weakness: he attempted to end her freedom, and thus her “Life”; she refused him his right to possessiveness, he, a wealthy and generous cattle man. Each saw the beauty in the other and was blinded to the ugliness, the potential menace in the commitment.

Life is represented as a figure of freedom who refuses to accept the constraints of boundaries. She is trapped in an ironic fate: her return to the village is forced upon her by the state's imposition of national borders, and on her return the village installs Life in her dilapidated family compound, following the conventional social patterns. Thus her living space is defined for her, and not in a malicious fashion. Her women neighbors help restore the compound to a livable state, and the community effort takes on the air of a community celebration. However, the village is as much governed by its own authorities, with their normative set of limits and confines, as by the state. Power flows through the ruling males in public and social institutions, conveyed through public actions, attitudes and gestures, all of which are condensed into the laconic command Lesego issues to Life when he first meets her in a bar: “Come here” (41).

Life's motto was to live fast and die young: “All this was said with the bold, free joy of a woman who had broken all the social taboos” (40). The brief account of her story traces the tragic consequence of repression, the demise of the unconventional spirit. It details the acts of men who conspire to stifle “Life” through their desires, possessiveness, and judgments. Concupiscence is set against warmth, possessiveness against freedom, and judgment, the ultimate expression of power, against the magic whose “dizzying heights” offer the only escape from society's confinement and condemnation.

However, even within the men's circles, questions about freedom and magic persist. Lesego's friend, Sianana, attributes the tragedy of Lesego's incarceration to the crossing of boundaries: “Lesego, … why did you kill that fuck-about? You had the legs to walk away. Are you trying to show us that rivers never cross here?” (46). The story ends with the question unanswered.

If magic has its positive side in Life's frenzied pace and in love, it has its dark side as well, a demonic counterpart to the impossible joy of “dizzying heights.” Like magic, Witchcraft is set against the confines of Christianity and its fixed values of good and evil. In “Witchcraft,” Mma-Mabele regards herself as a faithful Christian, and so was provided, as were all other believers, with “some mental leverage to sort out the true from a mysterious invasion of some magical, destructive force.” Although she closes herself in, shutting the door and barring the window, the “hideous unknown presence … invade[s] her life during the night” (51). Obviously the actions of this presence know no limits or barriers. Like Life's joy, it springs from sources that lie beyond the coldly rational universe over which men have their dominion. Its powers to do harm are more than physical or psychological; they suggest the root of Head's deepest apprehensions.

In all of Bessie Head's short fiction, there is one overarching concern that returns to haunt us, and that is the fear of exclusion. In general, the conventions of Setswana society are viewed with misgivings because they oppress the free or kind spirit, opposing any resistance to their narrow bounds. But this borderline rebellion merely masks the deeper struggle where the darker, hideous features of total exclusion act to destroy the spirit of plenitude given the evocative name of Mother of Corn—Mma Mabele. Exclusion is the flip side of extinction for the woman victimized by the greed and power of male relatives or chiefs. In “The Special One,” a woman is cheated out of her inheritance by her brothers. “I lost it,” laments Ms. Maleboge, “because women are just dogs in this society” (81).

However, the same women can destroy men through their own dark and “dirty” powers. “Many women have killed men by sleeping with them during that time,” says Ms. Maleboge's friend, in reference to the period of menstruation. The great illuminating powers of awakening are more than matched by the profound, impenetrable night of despair. Bessie Head is a manichean Romantic when she gets done with the business of social criticism. The earth, the sun, the night, demonic and angelic forces haunt the ordinary lives that people lead in the village. Always there is a margin at which exile, exclusion, and the threat of death is felt.

Correspondingly, the margin is also the key feature in the awakening consciousness, expressed more poetically than in the image of dawn in “Snapshots of a Wedding.” Here the line that separates two temporal zones expands to cosmic dimensions: “Wedding days always started at the haunting, magical hour of early dawn when there was only a pale crack of light on the horizon. For those who were awake, it took the earth hours to adjust to daylight” (76). The wedding guests emerge from the haze like disembodied spirits, and slowly we enter a world in which the ascendance of the new, coarsely materialistic bride, named appropriately Neo, is set off, as expected, by her open-handed rival, Mathata. Their one-sided struggle for the hand of the well-to-do bridegroom, Kegoletile, pales before the movement of the larger forces of light and darkness, of water and earth, of life and death, all of which meet at the pale crack of dawn when the force of magic works best on the human players. “The cool and damp of the night slowly rose in the shimmering waves like water and even the forms of the people who bestirred themselves at this unearthly hour were disturbed in the haze; they appeared to be dancers in slow motion, with fluid, watery forms” (76).

At the end, Neo's strong-willed aunt pounds the earth at the wedding in her demand that this ill-bred scion of the younger generation turn to more solid ways: “Be a good wife! Be a good wife!” (80). This is the point at which the self-assertive will and the pressures exerted by society have the potential to clash. From the aunts' point of view, “Be a good wife” means remember the respect due us. To Life, this would entail submission and self-rejection, and to Dikeledi it ultimately signifies prison and isolation. “Be a good wife” thus leads us from the victory of a disrespectful and insensitive “modern” woman to the depths of exclusion for those who are vibrantly alive and sensitive.

To understand how Bessie Head treats woman as the excluded term, we turn to Birago Diop's short story, “Les Mamelles,” where conventional marriage practice led to exclusion and resistance. There, too, the cry of the narrative voice might well have been, “Be a good wife!” Khary is Momor's first wife, and she is a curmudgeon, not unlike the classical shrew, Dame Van Winkle. The story of Khary, as undoubtedly she herself would not have told it, is of an ill-tempered person who, as a child, failed to accept a disfiguring hump on her back. Often she fought with other children who taunted her about her “baby.” As an adult, married to Momor, Khary's self-consciousness prevents her from successfully fulfilling her marital obligations. Fear of ridicule keeps her from going out to help him in the fields or to bring him a hot meal. At night her bad temper alienates him, and so as to relieve her burdens he takes a second wife, Koumba, who has still a larger hump. Koumba is good tempered, eager to help her husband, and even willing to assist Khary in her chores, but Khary's spitefulness is only exacerbated. When Koumba finally succeeds in ridding herself of her hump, thus becoming as beautiful in form as in spirit, Khary faints in envy.

If Khary is not a good wife, if she is the classical “bad wife,” it is because of her failure to give of herself, to overcome vulnerability and pain which are venomously turned against others. Her flaws separate her from others; defensiveness turns to aggression against the very ones with whom she would be close. Excluded because of her failure to please, because of the pleasure she takes in inflicting pain on her tormentors, on her rivals, she becomes a victim of the pleasure enjoyed by Momor and Koumba. At the outset of the tale, we are told that in the matter of wives, two is not a good number. The proper number is one or three, and as spite and Khary become third wheels, it is the monogamous couple who appear suited and suitable, while Khary, wedded to her disposition, acquires the further burden of Koumba's large hump as well as her own.

In the final scene of “Les Mamelles,” Khary assumes fully the role of excluded term. She flees the happy twosome and seeks to drown herself in the ocean. However, the humps refuse to be submerged and are transformed into “Les Mamelles,” the marginal outposts of Africa formed into two hills lying off the west coast of Cape Verde—signposts of the extreme western limit of Africa, and, as they appear in the story, boundary markers designating the borders of black Africa.

Amadou Koumba's conventional wisdom is that the humps are signs of warning against the unsocial comportment of a “Bad wife.” However, they are also signs of refusal: the two “mamelles” of Khary “refused” submersion, refusing exclusion. They return after the conventional reading condemns the bad wife, after the pleasure we share with Momor and Koumba in excluding her is turned by the recognition that this is no different from the taunts of her playmates, from the very spite that justifies our own spiteful rejection of Khary. In short, we are trapped by our self-righteous appeal to a moral or ethical value when it is that value that denies our right to take pleasure in the pain of others.

When Khary's “malveillance” is described, it is likened to the bitterness of tamarind juice. Ironically, it is the magic of the spirit found in the tamarind tree that helps Koumba to disburden herself of her hump, and that causes Khary's final frustration. Just as Khary's spirit of refusal cannot be submerged, emerging transvaluated from the water in the end, so, too, is the very symbol of her bitter rejection ambiguously linked to the one whose power and knowledge cure Koumba of her hump. In the end the disobliging wife is discarded, but her more forceful demands are recast into the indomitable boundaries of her world, signposts of the irrepressible spirit of rebellion, of the far limits to which women may be forced to go. As “mamelles” the islets conserve something of the womanist essence writ large on the landscape; but as transformations of babies into breasts, they proclaim the refusal of submission to fixed roles of wife and motherhood, and further, of submission to fate, to essentialized womanhood altogether. The boundary is a warning of the dangers of refusal, but also a refusal of that warning.

Bessie Head takes us to those same limits in the story of the excluded wife, Dikeledi, in “The Collector of Treasures.” She, too, refuses to accept her husband's insistence that she be a “good wife,” that she prepare him his meals and bath, and serve him in bed, regardless of his own conduct and relationships with other women. Like Khary, Dikeledi pushes her refusal to the limits, and in the process attacks phallocracy at its root, sexual domination, again reminding us of Mernissi's statement that the sexual patterns of a society reflect the link between boundaries and power. Until her death, Khary fails to separate herself from her two humps, her “children” who stay on her back. Symbolically, she fails to make the transition achieved by Koumba from wife as mother to wife as lover, to complete the act of parturition with the severance that comes at the end of the term of nursing. Thus she fails to place Momor's needs before hers or her children's. Although presented as the aggrieved party, Dikeledi does the same; and when Garesego attempts to assert his prior claims, he is killed.

Dikeledi's passage is delineated by the same boundary points as are found at the outset of “Snapshots of a Wedding”—the magical margins to existence at which love, resistance, or painful exclusion are located. On her way to prison in the police van, she discovers, like all those driven to the edge, the need to awaken. Her interior landscape is projected onto the land in this powerfully evocative scene: “At first, faintly on the horizon, the orange glow of the city lights of the new independence town of Gaberone, appeared like an astonishing phantom in the overwhelming darkness of the bush, until the truck struck tarred roads, neon lights, shops and cinemas, and made the bush a phantom amidst a blare of light.” Here, at the liminal stage where bush and city exchange a ghostly reality, the harsh journey moves to its conclusion; a rude arrival and ruder awakening await Dikeledi, prior to her own final transformation: “All this passed untimed, unwatched by the crumpled prisoner; she did not stir as the truck finally droned to a halt outside the prison gates. The torchlight struck the side of her face like an agonizing blow. Thinking she was asleep, the policeman called out briskly: ‘You must awaken now. We have arrived’” (87).

Though she is crumpled in despair, she is not asleep, and has indeed arrived at the destination, the ultimate outpost of male authority and power, the proper site for her ultimate refusal. In contrast to the two isolated warning signs that are erected on Khary's watery tomb, Dikeledi's last stop is to be marked by the community of like-minded woman who also found the courage to fight back, and who were excluded and confined under the hegemony of the male judge and warden. There Dikeledi, a “collector of treasures,” finds the place for love, caring, and giving denied her by a patriarchal society.

Exclusion is transvaluated into fulfillment. The margin turns against the center again and again, matching love and defilement and love, until the mist swirls over the lines that would separate them. Without the ugliness or brutality of Garesego, without his rejection of Dikeledi's legitimate demands, her own struggle would not have begun, and her own quest for the treasures of life would not have been fulfilled in prison.

At the end, transformed by the telling, she is no longer a Dikeledi, but a Mma-Banabatha—both mother of her children and killer of their father. Her story ends with pointers that indicate where that terrible combination must lead her—exclusion and, simultaneously, self-fulfillment. As with Mariama Ba's Ramatoulaye, whose husband's death was both tragedy and liberation, Dikeledi and the other struggling women of Bessie Head's fiction move between two worlds in which the line of change defines/defies the ultimate borders, a predicament echoed in Ramatoulaye's drama of death, abandonment, and new life: “I listen to the words that create around me a new atmosphere in which I move, a stranger and tormented. Death, the tenuous passage between two opposite worlds, one tumultuous the other still” (So Long a Letter, 2).

Note

1. Boundaries are the subject of Derrida's speculation, especially in “Living On: Border Lines,” in “The Parergon,” and in Glas. He extends the concept of semi-permeable membranes and margins in his discussion by using the figure of the hymen in Dissemination. Culler gives a full treatment of this issue in his chapter on Derrida in On Deconstruction. The subject of boundaries also relates to fictional modes, and especially to irony and allegory, and has been discussed by de Man in Blindness and Insight (see “The Rhetoric of Temporality”). The link between marginality, boundaries, power and the space occupied by women is developed by Mernissi in Beyond the Veil.

Works Cited

Ba, Mariama. Une si longue lettre. Dakar: Les nouvelles editions africaines, 1980.

Derrida, Jacques. La dissemination. Paris: Seuil, 1972.

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