SOURCE: Ingersoll, Earl G. “Sexuality in the Stories of Bessie Head.” CLA Journal 39, no. 4 (June 1996): 458–67.

In the following essay, Ingersoll explores Head's treatment of sexuality in her short fiction, particularly her perceptions of female sexuality.

Bessie Head's tragically early death in 1986, at the age of 49, may seem to have silenced a powerful voice for sanity and sensitivity in the discourse on human sexuality and relations between women and men. On the other hand, her voice has not really been silenced, for, as Susan Beard has remarked, recent years have witnessed a “remarkable Bessie Head renaissance,” signaled perhaps by Alice Walker's singling her out among her “favorite uncelebrated foreign writers … whose work deserves more attention in this country.”¹ In the remarks to follow, I will focus on selected stories from her collection The Collector of Treasures and Other Botswana Village Tales (1977),² in an attempt to demonstrate that Head is...