).
Bessie does portray some men of decency and nobility. Paul Thebolo in ‘The Collector of Treasures’ is one who possesses ‘the power to create himself anew’ (p. 93). His relationship with his wife is happy and fulfilled; their yard is always overflowing with visitors seeking out their company; and through them Dikeledi's life is enriched. The final story, ‘Hunting,’ depicts another such man, Tholo; like Paul, he has a marriage relationship ‘where the whole rhythm and happiness of their lives was tied up in their work and their involvements in the needs of people’ (p. 108). Thus Bessie is able to round off her collection on a note of balanced optimism. Paul Thebolo and Tholo are added to her group of noble male figures that also includes Makhaya, Gilbert, Maru, Khama the Great, Tshekedi Khama and Patrick van Rensburg. Tholo expresses Bessie's acceptance of the unfathomable complexity of human relationships in one of the final sentences of the story: ‘Nothing could sort out the world. It would always be a painful muddle’ (p. 109).
1974 had been a productive year for Bessie. In early May she had sent off the typescript of Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind, and before the year was up, she had her Botswana Village Tales packed and posted off to Giles Gordon in London.
Head, 1991, p. 174. In Benton, Naomi Mitchison, 1990, there is no mention of NM's friendship with Bessie Head.
SOURCE: Gagiano, Annie. “Finding Foundations for Change in Bessie Head's The Cardinals.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 31, no. 2 (fall 1996): 47–60.
The chief character in the novel, a young woman known as Mouse, is even near the end of the work described as “a shambles of unfocused atoms” by Johnny, the man who loves her (p. 127). From my descriptions above, it may seem that his expression is equally applicable to the novel as a whole, which could thus only be judged a naïve attempt at novel-writing rather than a finished achievement. What I shall be arguing in this [essay] is that the roughness of this work, its lack of “finish” (in several senses of the word) is a strength worthy of careful reading—this roughness is exactly appropriate to the notion of aspiration (as a lifestyle) that seems to be its hidden theme.
South Africa made white people rich and comfortable, but their ownership of the country is ugly and repellent. They talk about South Africa in tourist language all the time: “This grand and sunny land,” they say. The cheap, glaring, paltry trash of a people who are living it up for themselves alone dominates everything, infiltrates everywhere. If one is a part of it, through being born there, how does one communicate with the horrible? That is why South Africa has no great writer: no one can create harmony out of cheap discord.
It is impossible to guess how the revolution will come one day in South Africa. But in a world where all ordinary people are insisting on their rights, it is inevitable. It is to be hoped that great leaders will arise there who remember the suffering of racial hatred and out of it formulate a common language of human love for all people.
Yet The Cardinals is one of those works implicitly illustrating the case for story-tellers and dreamers to be considered freedom fighters rather than romantic escapists. The feature of the novel that indicates this is the perpetual engagement of both Johnny and Mouse, not only with each other, but with the place and circumstances in, by and out of which they live. Encountering each other, they in fact intensify their scrutiny of their land and their articulation of its meaning—parallelling the process by which Head demonstrates to the reader that loving involves politics down to the furthest recesses of the psyche and that (conversely) political force frights the intimate moments of individual encounters. Erecting distinctions between private and public spheres is shown in this novel to be the mark of the hypocrite8—nor are such tidy fences respected in this narrative, which moves constantly in and out of descriptions of Johnny and Mouse's feelings for each other and of encounters indicative of the politically constituted society in which they live. In the “sequencing” in chapter 8 (pp. 77-85) Head's style itself constantly transgresses these barriers. The narrative moves from the “snugly” ensconced Mouse in her private bedroom to Johnny's entrance and account of the life of his sister, a prostitute at ten to help keep their family, and then to his generalizing distinction between “rules” of society and “suffering.” This is followed by PK's arrival with the news of a rural township “riot” to which he, James and Johnny travel, Johnny's existential distinction between political commitment and his type of “uncommittedness” (p. 82), and finally his return home and first declaration to Mouse of his love for her, the chapter concluding with the paradoxical juxtaposition of Johnny's insistence on irrevocable “commitment” in love with the declaration that he lives “without a code or a law.” The way the novel intertwines “private” and “public” is evident even in such a bald summary.
It is their capacity for passion which—openly in the flamboyant Johnny and in a hidden fashion in Mouse—sets these two off from those around them. In them, passion is “responsibility.” The rareness, the felt riskiness of responsibility, is emphasized by a fringe figure in the novel, the unnamed stranger with whom Mouse strikes up a friendship. He says of “[r]esponsibility” that “[m]ost people fear it” and he refers sardonically to “[t]his other man, that everybody hopes will bear the responsibility for them, [who] just isn't there most of the time” (p. 36). The “wild man” Johnny employs the term in his fiercest condemnations—“PK is responsible for this mess” (p. 64)—and in his later injunction to Mouse: “It is a great responsibility to be a writer at this time” (p. 72).
Political force, conversely, is identified as inevitably irresponsible, just as it requires the relinquishing of individual responsibility for its hold on people's lives. For this reason, power in such an autocracy as the South African system must attempt the control of passion. The Cardinals is, then, a document demonstrating that “private” passion is one of the strongest and most important forms of opposition to political control. The piece of South African legislation known as the Immorality Act (of 1927, amended in 1957), banning sexual relationships or marriages between members of “different races,” is the master narrative against which Head tells the constellation of stories that she calls The Cardinals. The sorts of “stories” (as newspaper reports are appropriately referred to in the novel) that make it into daily print are some of these and are set off against many other accounts of life in South Africa at this time—especially as witnessed and told by both Johnny and Mouse.
Head's novel is preceded by her note to readers that “The Cardinals, in the astrological sense, are those who serve as the base or foundation for change” (unnumbered page facing p. 1). This piece of authorial information is probably the strongest clue to the direction taken by this unusual novel and to the importance Head attaches to the work. It claims for both Mouse and Johnny the status of initiators or pioneers. It cautions us not to mistake the novel for simple realism, unconscious autobiography, sociological portrayal of earlier apartheid conditions in the Cape, or erotic/neurotic wish fulfilment by its author. Like Head's other novels, then, The Cardinals has the dimensions of a parable.
It was a large area of tin shacks, bounded on the one side by a mile-long graveyard and on the other by the city refuse dump and the sea. A national road separated the slum from the refuse dump.
This wry, blunt style of writing is characteristic of the whole work. It insists on the stark ordinariness of the bleak scene, taken for granted by most of those who drive by on the “national road”—to whom the location of such a slum between dump, graveyard and sea no doubt seems appropriate. The passage is of course imbued with that social vision which the work as a whole conveys. It is the strange placing of the opening word—“It”—that draws attention to the environment as if it were a character or a force in its own right. Its function is to make us see why the novelist does not bother to show or name politicians or a party in her portrayal of apartheid society. The system has become a place, a non-community of victims, and the words “bounded” and “separated” indicate the compartmentalizing thought process referred to above as a false tidiness—for the slum is also chaos, the sign of irresponsibility, a dump for thrown-away people. It is easy enough to sense the resonances and ironies of the word “national” (attached to “road”) as a reference to a ruling political party which perverts precisely its national duty by creating or allowing such ugliness, “separat[ing]” and scattering people. It is out of this ugly cess, this non-community10 that Mouse struggles onto the little ledge represented by African Beat—The Paper of the People, of whose “emptiness and bold vulgarity” (p. 12) she is all too well aware.
It is in the newspaper office