SOURCE: Harrow, Kenneth W. “Bessie Head's The Collector of Treasures: Change on the Margins.” Callaloo 16, no. 1 (winter 1993): 169–79.

In the following essay, Harrow views boundaries—maintaining and overcoming them—as the major thematic concern in Head's short fiction.

The subject of Bessie Head's stories is change itself, and specifically the threshold where change takes place. Change has become the issue of women's writing since independence—change and not simply rights or equality. Though there has been continuous concern with abuse of women, a concern voiced in the miserabilist school of Sembène's Voltaïque or Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood, or presented in more chauvinistic terms in Jagua Nana, it is in the stories of Bessie Head, Mariama Ba, Buchi Emecheta, and Ama Ata Aidoo that the very boundaries between men and women, between past and present roles, those that are set in place in the constitution of women's...