SOURCE: Lewis, Desiree. “The Cardinals and Bessie Head's Allegories of Self.” World Literature Today 70, no. 1 (winter 1996): 73–77.

In the following essay, Lewis analyzes Head's concept of identity in The Cardinals in light of the author's mixed heritage and the racial laws of 1960s South Africa.

The taboo against interracial sex—officially expressed in the Immorality Act of 1927 and its amendment in 1950¹—has roused the fictional imagination of a range of South African writers. In God's Stepchildren (1924) Sarah Gertrude Millin explores interracial unions to prophesy against “miscegenation” while affirming the ideal of racial purity. Novels like William Plomer's Turbott Wolfe (1926) and Alan Paton's Too Late the Phalarope (1953) deal with aborted relationships between white and black South Africans, their protest against race laws revolving around the deviant acts of individuals and deriving from a South African liberal tradition. Two years after the repeal of the infamous Act, the theme is revisited...