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Parution/ New Publication : 'IMAGINATIVE TRESPASSER' (Bessie Head, Patrick & Wendy Cullinan)Imaginative Trespasser
Letters between Bessie Head, Patrick and Wendy Cullinan 1963-1977
Compiled by Patrick Cullinan, with a personal memoir.
Johannesburg, Wits University Press & Trenton/Asmara, Africa World Press, Inc., 2005, 268p.
Excerpts/ Extraits
Something terrible is happening to Africa. It's being swept from North to South by a gigantic, ovewhelming wave of hatred. [...]The more I see the logic of this hatred the more I am driven to seek tenderness and love and there is no way I can find it except in myself. God help me to support a cause in which there is no reward. I am flung out and alone to myself and that is my only precarious reality. The white people who hate and fear is [sic] distort everything to their end. So do we now. Where will it end? Some, a very few are the good guys and all the bad guys, traitors (possibly I), stooges are going to be butchered up by the good guys.(p. 32)
Bessie Head, 3 January 1965
What a hell it is to live with an internal commotion. I may quit Africa now but I won't be able to think straight about it because I have only felt rejection. [...]I'm not really African in the sense of belonging.
Someone said to me : Oh, you are writing about Africa? You haven't the traditional background. You're a coloured. You only talk English - therefore you identify yourself with the whites. You must be writing nauseating little books about Africans.
What I felt was : how could I explain myself?
[...]I think I should leave Africa well alone. I am not a beggar after any crumbs - because I can prove myself good and not like the white man who is supposed to make up one half of my skin colour - then Africa will maybe like me a little bit. Oh no. I don't like it. I have damn nothing to prove to anyone and I cannot accept such terms. Everybody's society must be a dreadful appalling little hell of petty prejudice.(p.80-81)
Bessie Head, 3 October 1965
I so hate myself to be pinned down. My mind is always leaping ahead. People sense this. They resent it. Their little bit of truth is enough. Their life stops on their doorstep... I'd like to get a head start. I'd like to be a confederator in this new world. I've long outgrown my small little one. They have the signs up all over - trespassers will be prosecuted - but I am an imaginative trespasser. There are no real barriers then.(p. 82)
22/02/2006
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ISSN 1776-3150
Copyright © 2005-2010 Lianes (Priscilla R. Appama) |
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