“That’s What Happens When Two Worlds Collide”: An Intersectional Reading of Bessie Head’s Short Stories, The Collector of Treasures and Other Botswana Village Tales

Gender and feminist theory are often deployed in the literary analysis of Bessie Head’s work which defies easy categorisation and evaluation. While recognising the value of this work, in this chapter, I draw on Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality to interrogate complex interactions between Earth, gender, race, class, and religious identity that confer privilege and marginalisation in Head’s short stories. In so doing, I make three key arguments. First, I argue that an intersectional approach to her work highlights the extent to which gender is not at the apex of social difference in the lifeworld that Bessie Head creates but is instead embedded within, and shaped, by intersecting identities. Additionally, an eco-feminist reading of Head’s short stories deepens the intersectional focus on exploring the relationship between women and the land, and, of women as territory themselves. Second, I turn my attention to Head herself. Building on arguments which identify the migrant woman as the ‘quintessential intersectional subject’, I explore elements of her identity as part coloniser and part colonised and the internal conflict of privilege/power and powerlessness which is echoed in her auto-fiction. Third, my focus on Head’s short stories is instructive, partly, as these have received less scholarly attention than her longer texts. In thinking through the connections between intersectionality, eco-feminism, and oral storytelling genres, which mimic the oral narratives of Africa, I explore the potential for indigenous storytelling to function as a mechanism for decolonising knowledge.