Critical Essay | Critical Review by Charles Larson

Critical Review by Charles Larson

SOURCE: Larson, Charles. “Bessie Head, Storyteller in Exile.” Washington Post Book World 21, no. 7 (17 February 1991): 4.

In the following review, Larson provides a mixed assessment of Tales of Tenderness and Power.

Bessie Head's achievement at the time of her death in 1986 was honorific: black Africa's preeminent female writer of fiction, a title that can only be taken ironically. Classified as Coloured in the country of her birth (South Africa), she fled to Botswana in 1964. The safe haven she had expected to find there became the terrain for her subsequent mental breakdown. Stateless and suicidal as an exile in an unfamiliar environment, she nevertheless came to be regarded by the people of her adopted country as their most famous writer. Yet if the inner peace Bessie Head had sought all her life was largely illusory, she wrote stories (at least in the final years of her...
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