ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that when we think of African writers, particularly African women writers, who boldly engage with, or articulate the discourse of subjectivity, then, we logically come to the work of Bessie Head, a South African writer in exile. We do not only come to her work, but also bear witness to her life experience of suffering, her tears, her de-humanisation, her troubling extension of life in transit from South Africa to Botswana, her restless search for a new life, a new identity in a new space known as Botswana, her melancholia of a ruptured past and the possibility of an unknown future in her place of exile. Head’s work is classed as literature of oppression which shows the open wound of trauma in Southern African fiction.
