SOURCE: Newson, Adele S. Review of The Cardinals, with Meditations and Short Stories, by Bessie Head. World Literature Today 68, no. 4 (autumn 1994): 869–70.

In the following positive review of The Cardinals, with Meditations and Short Stories, Newson asserts that “Head provides something of a poetic rendering of what it means to be a woman and a writer in the male-dominated, racist, and sexist South Africa of her formative years as a writer.”

Bessie Head's novella The Cardinals, assumed to be her first long piece of writing, represents an important literary instance of a woman writer's experience which is both controlled by and represented in the language of the dominant discourse. When viewed as companion pieces, The Cardinals and the meditations and short stories that follow it reveal Head's astounding ability to overcome the limitations of language and masculine experiences of language. The Cardinals is Head's most important work in that...