Perspective

The author of A Woman Alone is Bessie Amelia Head and the title of the book helps to explain her perspective. Head is "alone" because she grows up without a family. The only family she knows she is taken away from at an early age. Since she is interracial she does not have a clear home anywhere in South Africa and she has to endure the severe oppression of the apartheid regime. Further, when she decides to leave, the only way that the South African government will allow her to leave is for her to accept exile. Everything in her early life produces a profound sense of being both oppressed and harassed on the one hand and ignored and rejected on the other.

Head takes her sense of rage to Botswana where the ancient, relaxed culture helps to calm her. However, she always acknowledges that the oppression she...