Re-reading, Rewriting: Olive Schreiner and Bessie Head

Various critics have spoken of similarities between Olive Schreiner and Bessie Head, and Head herself was pleased to find herself called Schreiner’s “reincarnation,” however startling this may seem (to some) in face of their racial difference. She also insisted, again surprisingly, that if she were indeed to be compared with Schreiner, she should be called the “Schreiner of South Africa,” not “of Botswana.” Her direct acquaintance with Schreiner was limited to The Story of an African Farm (1883) and a selection from her writings compiled by Uys Krige in 1968, and this only after Head had published her first three novels. Nonetheless, in an earlier essay on their relation, I explore a virtual connection between Schreiner’s From Man to Man (1926) and Head’s second published novel Maru (1971), arguing that the former text represents an act of dreaming “passed on” from an older to a younger generation, and even specifically from a storyteller identifying as “white” to one identifying as “black,” and that this storyteller reappears in the latter text. If we allow ourselves to see Schreiner’s writing as a precursor to Head’s, we may then see an interactive line between the two writers, running back and forth, as it were, in both directions: “passing it on” segues, crucially, into the younger writer’s unconscious “writing back” but also invokes a reassessment of Schreiner: does she “pass” over the test of social responsibility, ignoring it where she should have responded to it? Drawing from this earlier essay, though focusing far more on Head than on Schreiner, the present essay rehearses some of Head’s comments on the felt similarities and differences between herself and Schreiner, but now does so in order to scrutinise more closely the younger writer’s redefinition of “blackness” and her reincarnative relation to place, a relation strongly informed by her self-identification as “black” rather than “coloured” or “white.” Re-reading Schreiner through Head invites us to ponder how each writer conceptualises these categories and the extent to which their writing takes account of or ignores the specific material histories that typically divide “black” and “white.”