THE TROPE OF THE ABSENT FATHER IN BESSIE HEAD’S STORIES LIFE AND THE COLLECTOR OF TREASURES

Abstract

This paper explores the notions of masculinity, paternity, and parentage in Bessie Head’s short stories, Life and The Collector of Treasures. Our claim is that since all three terms and the way they relate to each other are historically produced, they imbricate in the stories to yield a Tswana father-figure that is at once profoundly appealing and disconcerting. The father-figure in the stories is appealing because he resonates with the reader’s instinctive empathy with Bessie Head’s early childhood as a child of an unknown father. But the figure of the father that comes across in these stories also instils dread. The attributes conventionally accepted as hallmarks of manhood in Botswana society which they embody in the stories, lead men to perform behaviours that make them unlikely choices by anyone desiring a father figure. The displaced, disinherited, and excluded female characters’ unrequited unconscious yearning for a father figure in the stories, of course, can be read as reflecting what has been described as the female writer’s culturally conditioned timidity about self-dramatization and dread of the patriarchal authority of literature. However, the paper uses a combination of Lacan’s psychoanalysis and Fredric Jameson’s critique of late capitalism, to also relate the protagonists’ unrequited desire for a father figure to the broader issues of the articulation of power and the circulation of commodities under late capitalism. It reads the absent father in the stories as a metaphor of the subconscious lack that populist nationalism and mass production stoke and manipulate to perpetuate themselves even in the context of a postcolonial rural backwater depicted in the stories.