The characters exchange on these issues and deliver monologues that give the reader access to their minds, revealing what they are thinking and how their minds work.

Characters in the novel intensively reflect upon the construction, contradictions and unfairness of their social world: “Head employs the schizophrenic construct and the figure of irony in the representation of ambiguities, polyphonies, binaries, and the misrecognition of the manifest and the concealed in a post-colonial Botswana setting” (Olaogun, “Irony” 73).

1 In Botswana, the Bushmen, also called the Masarwa, were kept as slaves, and considered the lowest o (.)Ģ Maru is the novel that features the most extensive representations of inner and outer life.

Her literary works put “growing stress on the psychic arena, on the struggle for human soul by contending forces” (Mackenzie 19). Her three first novels – When Rain Clouds Gather, Maru, and A Question of Power – “share a basic quest pattern, which moves in a suggestive direction” (Wilhem 8). Two orientations mark her literary output: first, we have “inwardly-directed” novels, later to be followed by “socially-oriented” works (Mackenzie 19). Her experience of racism and social rejection is shared by the main figures of her books. Coloureds and Blacks were marginalized by the racist regime which progressively transformed South Africa into a place where people were, according to Head, “living with permanent nervous tension” ( A Question of Power 19).

As a person of mixed ancestry, a “Coloured” according to the racial terminology used under apartheid, Head stood at the crossroads of two populations, Blacks and Whites, who remained at loggerheads for the duration of apartheid. The novel as a whole is a phenomenon multiform in style and variform in speech and voice.ġThe life story of Bessie Head reads like an epitome of South Africa’s history.

Maru by bessie head summary