Bessie Head + a Frameless World

     We take frames for granted.

     By frames, I don't necessarily mean the four-sided structures that house our favorite paintings or photographs on living-room mantelpieces. Rather, I'm referring to the "mental structures that shape the way we see the world" (Lakoff, quoted in Burton  Artists of the Floating World, p.61). These are the structures--or lenses, if you like--that help us to see and understand the world in all its variety and complexity.  For without these structures, we would surely lapse into chaos or anarchy, flailing around without moral bearings or guiding compass-points.

     Most of us inherit these frames, either biologically or culturally.  Nationality, race, gender, class, and religion combine to give us a well-constructed sense of self and the world. It is not until later on in our lives that we come to understand that many of these frames are, in fact, constructions rather than "the natural  and only way to live your life." We have the freedom to stay within these inherited frames or abandon them altogether, replacing them with new structures that may appear more suitable to our new-found sense of self.

     But what if circumstances conspired to ensure that you were born without the comfort of any such frames?  The South African-born writer, Bessie Head, once said, "I just don't fit in and belong anywhere and I tend to pride myself on not fitting in or belonging" (quoted in Burton, p. 63).  Growing up as a child of "mixed" parents in apartheid South Africa, she was never enfranchised as a citizen of her birth-country. She was never allowed to meet her birth-mother (the daughter of a Scottish landowner). In fact, she did not even come to realize--until the age of thirteen--the true circumstances of her conception, a revelation that sent her into a tailspin of madness that would recur periodically throughout the rest of her life. In her final days, she was to look back at her 49 years of troubled life and comment: "I have not a single known relative on earth, no long and ancient family tree to refer to. . . . I have always been just me, with no frame of reference to anything beyond myself" (quoted in Burton, p. 64).    

     Art, particularly, the act of writing, was to become Bessie Head's therapy, her way of making sense of a frameless life.

     Reading a novel or a story by Bessie Head is rather like walking into a movie-house twenty minutes after the start of the film. At first, you feel dislocated, disoriented, displaced. You struggle to find your bearings. But gradually your eyes get used to the dark and you begin to pick up the thread of the story-line unfolding on the screen in front of you. You realize that there is a shape and a pattern to the art-work after all. By the time you leave the theater, you feel that you've had to work a bit harder than usual to "get something" out of the experience, but you don't regret having gone. In fact, you're glad that you were forced to crawl out of your comfort-zone.

     The opening five pages of Bessie Head's second novel, Maru, is a case in point. No establishing shot is provided of the story's physical location. No time-frame is given for an unfolding sequence of events that quickly takes on the appearance of a surrealistic dream. Characters (some with names, others without) come and go, seemingly at random. As if this weren't difficult enough, the writing style seems to be one long exercise in stream-of-consciousness technique (a mix of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf with a little William Burroughs thrown in for good measure).

     What's a reader to do? 

     If we persist, we will be rewarded. The purpose of Bessie Head's art is to allow the reader to experience some of the uncomfortable, disorienting life-struggles that she was forced to endure. If we read her carefully, we can watch her slowly build a frame around her story, as she moves from chaos and "nothingness" to wholeness and a life-affirming embrace.

     It's not surprising that one critic, after reading a Bessie Head novel, commented  "I am not sure that it is possible to read this book without feeling oneself go a little bit mad" (Rose, quoted in Burton, p. 69). That may be something of an exaggeration, but it does suggest that reading Bessie Head is likely to pose one of the biggest challenges to our way of understanding the world,  and particularly to the frames of reference that guide us daily.