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« Ceux qui crachaient sur ce qu’ils pensaient être inférieur étaient réellement les gens « inférieurs, immondes » de cette terre, parce qu’il est impossible que des gens respectables puissent se comporter ainsi. »
✍🏾Bessie Head
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When Rain Clouds Gather by #BessieHead 1969. #SouthAfrica #Botswana - 90% in, I was growing concerned that all the plot lines had wandered off without a way to bring them back, but she did in the most amazing and satisfying way.
![« Just right now I am very afraid. One half of me feels that there ought to be something holy and infinite somewhere. The other half of me was pulled towards living things as though all the stirrings and wonder, the things that made the earth glow, the loves that moved and created history were to be found in living people. This dominated. I had no control over the images that came towards me, no escape from personal, living entanglements : ‘It’s this road ! It’s this road ! Here we kiss like this with all our mouths and bodies. We eat food. We make children. We are vehemently jealous. And yet, we are humane and tender and humourous PROVIDED if I am a man, no one wants my woman, or if I am a woman, no one wants my man.’ I was baffled and tortured by this because on the one hand I could clearly feel that love wasn’t only sex. It was force, food, life, mystery, heaven, the uni- [...]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:vzic3ilxrr7rkojkhnn7qb3d/bafkreicclncxx4mrpvkzzu4jxyeazhsruphv2wduokyeul25cujrgcg3vq)
« Just right now I am very afraid. One half of me feels that there ought to be something holy and infinite somewhere. The other half of me was pulled towards living things as though all the stirrings and wonder, the things that made the earth glow, the loves that moved and created history were to be found in living people. This dominated. I had no control over the images that came towards me, no escape from personal, living entanglements : ‘It’s this road ! It’s this road ! Here we kiss like this with all our mouths and bodies. We eat food. We make children. We are vehemently jealous. And yet, we are humane and tender and humourous PROVIDED if I am a man, no one wants my woman, or if I am a woman, no one wants my man.’ I was baffled and tortured by this because on the one hand I could clearly feel that love wasn’t only sex. It was force, food, life, mystery, heaven, the uni- [...]
![[...] -verse and wild flowers that unexpectedly grow with the spring rain and out of all that was created the infinite, the eternal AND GOD. So persistent was this theme that I came to follow it with intent concentration. That propelled the breakdown. I was re-living my own inner code, my own inner world, with many ghostly forms of the past. If you tell one person you will love them forever, so do you tell many because that is the base of love as though it will never end. It was to break that theme, the promises, the ties and the toll it took on my health and sanity cannot really be counted up. It was a private struggle that was eventualy forced into the open because the anguish had run too high. No one could understand a word of what I was saying and even today there is a huge joke going the rounds – ‘it doesn’t matter what Bessie says because no one will believe her.’ I was stammering with agony because what had been heaven had another face which was hell. [...]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:vzic3ilxrr7rkojkhnn7qb3d/bafkreigl75ejvfjt5tpv7tv2d4ktxustj52stjyeykslvreanrxmoplnr4)
[...] -verse and wild flowers that unexpectedly grow with the spring rain and out of all that was created the infinite, the eternal AND GOD. So persistent was this theme that I came to follow it with intent concentration. That propelled the breakdown. I was re-living my own inner code, my own inner world, with many ghostly forms of the past. If you tell one person you will love them forever, so do you tell many because that is the base of love as though it will never end. It was to break that theme, the promises, the ties and the toll it took on my health and sanity cannot really be counted up. It was a private struggle that was eventualy forced into the open because the anguish had run too high. No one could understand a word of what I was saying and even today there is a huge joke going the rounds – ‘it doesn’t matter what Bessie says because no one will believe her.’ I was stammering with agony because what had been heaven had another face which was hell. [...]
![[...] Randolph, who understands feelings ? People only read in the newspapers about murders, mostly over who loved whom. I began to understand a little of both sides of love – a heaven of perfection and a hell of degradation. You can’t balance the two side by side, one eliminates the other and then dominates. It was as though that were the crux of the battle and preferably I want to feel that in my own struggle, only heaven was left.
If we have to live with love, in the future, we also have to live with our friends who come in to tea. That was what was being sorted out of me – who were the eternal friends and who was the lover ? The process of sorting this out was basic, violent, down-to-earth, severe, shattering, with blows hurled in all directions. It ought to have remained a secret. Trouble came when I exposed a war that was simplifying the future for everybody. [...]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:vzic3ilxrr7rkojkhnn7qb3d/bafkreiaeusxr2v7rh3n5utdlvp55tt7lltxcuemuvwquefwd34z3c3qlui)
[...] Randolph, who understands feelings ? People only read in the newspapers about murders, mostly over who loved whom. I began to understand a little of both sides of love – a heaven of perfection and a hell of degradation. You can’t balance the two side by side, one eliminates the other and then dominates. It was as though that were the crux of the battle and preferably I want to feel that in my own struggle, only heaven was left. If we have to live with love, in the future, we also have to live with our friends who come in to tea. That was what was being sorted out of me – who were the eternal friends and who was the lover ? The process of sorting this out was basic, violent, down-to-earth, severe, shattering, with blows hurled in all directions. It ought to have remained a secret. Trouble came when I exposed a war that was simplifying the future for everybody. [...]
![[...] I am afraid of the new song : ‘The kingdom of heaven is inside people.’ That kingdom holds greater demands of the person than celibate monks never knew. It is one thing to sit in isolation and say : God, the unseen, I worship you. It is another to say to a living man : God, the seen, I worship you. It is like loving a prickly pear and only the very sane can love like that. »](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:vzic3ilxrr7rkojkhnn7qb3d/bafkreigeizxvqsbl3yinofka2gi7c6cuxrwjh644tkpx52jkdyl5pqpe2m)
[...] I am afraid of the new song : ‘The kingdom of heaven is inside people.’ That kingdom holds greater demands of the person than celibate monks never knew. It is one thing to sit in isolation and say : God, the unseen, I worship you. It is another to say to a living man : God, the seen, I worship you. It is like loving a prickly pear and only the very sane can love like that. »
Bessie Head, Lettre du 13 août 1971 à Randolph Vigne (extrait), in Randolph Vigne (ed.), A Gesture of Belonging : Letters from Bessie Head (1965-1979), Portsmouth / NH (USA) : Heinmann, 1991, pp. 149-151.
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