SOURCE: Thomas, H. Nigel. “Narrative Strategies in Bessie Head's Stories.” In The Tragic Life: Bessie Head and Literature in Southern Africa, edited by Cecil Abrahams, pp. 93–104. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press Inc., 1990.

In the following essay, Thomas discusses Head's narrative technique in her short fiction.

Today one almost feels the need to apologize for analyzing the works of writers like Bessie Head, Chinua Achebe, Buchi Emecheta, Ngugi Wa Thiongo, and most other African writers. For if one is to follow recent trends in criticism, one should not be looking at how fiction conveys truths lost in the diffuseness of reality, rather one should be hypothesizing about metafiction and postmodernism, that is to say, preoccupying one's self with finding critical theories to account for the literature created by those whom we are told are at the “cutting edge” of literary creation because they manage to unsay everything they have...