ABSTRACT
The notion of space/place can be associated with desertscapes of different cultures in different dimensions. It is possible to define such a landscape as a non-place, an anthropological notion taken from Marc Augé (Non lieux: introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité. Seuil, 1992), whose organizing structure warrants neither identity nor relation nor history due to its provisionality. Graciliano Ramos (1892–1953) and Bessie Head (1937–1986), Brazilian and South African writers, wrote novels in which the landscape can be associated with the notion of desert as a metaphor for both inward and outward problems that need solving and redemption. Ramos's novel Vidas secas (1938)—published in English as Barren Lives, in 1965—tells the story of a family of “retirantes” (migrants) led by Fabiano, a simple man, whose job is always dependent on the drought that devastates the region of the “sertão” (backlands) of Alagoas, in the Northeast of Brazil. Underlying the poignant story of this family the novel unveils a cruel political dimension that leads either to destruction and death, or exile (migration) of those caught in the drought industry. Ramos's novel is to be examined in a comparative light with Bessie Head's A Question of Power (1973), a novel that focuses on Elizabeth, a woman newly arrived in the village of Motabeng, in Botswana. Hers is a disorderly psychic world that materializes her inner desert for it reveals her condition as an outsider, a loner, not only in the other's culture but also in herself. Head's novel discusses not only gender, race/ethnicity, and violence issues but also political questions as associated with the collective, fomenting a discussion of hunger and ways to escape from it. The two novels in different ways problematize migration, the dependence on others for subsistence as well as existence.
