Passing It On: Olive Schreiner and Bessie Head

Alongside its nascent critique of whiteness, Olive Schreiner’s From Man to Man (1926) stands back in the presence of the black foster-child character’s alternative dreams. Bessie Head’s novel Maru (1971), which portrays a comparable relation between foster-mother and child, serendipitously opens with a scene that recalls an episode in Schreiner’s life, where she assisted in a dark-skinned baby’s roadside birth. Head’s novel also deals with the aporia of the unconscious and the ‘crisis of representation’ as dreams become real. Head referred in interviews to the relation between herself and Schreiner as if she were, indeed, her metaphorical ‘reincarnation’. The question of ‘afterlife’ leads to the question of how a literary ‘tradition’ is formed: how writing (and its meaning) is transmitted from one generation to the next. Furthermore, re-reading Head after Schreiner not only poses questions about how Head is to be positioned in a literary tradition already partially developed by Schreiner-Head critics; it also invites us to re-read Schreiner herself, and – crucially – to do so as if through Head’s (imagined) eyes. The latter practice alerts us to the deepest of readerly contingencies, destabilising any notion of a final ‘truth’ in the act of reading.