Jain 1

Ayushi Jain

Armeen Kaur Ahuja

B.A. (Hons.) English [2018ENG1064]

Postcolonial Literature

30 March, 2021

Female body and its struggle for spatial inclusion

1)In the story “The Collector of Treasures”, Bessie Head moves beyond the boundaries

created by people to hinder human movement, the boundaries of race, class and historical

background. Her works deal with issues of discrimination, isolation, abandonment, racism and

poverty, connected to the psychological dismemberment inherent in racially separated South

Africa.

The primary focal point of Bessie Head's "The Collector of Treasures" is on the depiction

of difficulties of ladies in the town life of African custom traversing from the colonial to the

post-colonial period frame. In her accounts, Head overwhelmingly follows the life journey of

people of color notwithstanding the still alive harsh arrangement of sexism. It raises a myriad of

issues, but most explore good and evil and the mistreatment of women, explicitly their body. The

story explores how female body is treated. Her writing is a clear attempt to write women into

history, from whence they have been unflinchingly and customarily avoided.

In “The Collector of Treasures,” Bessie Head, through the life of the protagonist,

Dikeledi Mokopi, reveals the experiences of other women in the country side. Dikeledi is raised

by her remorseless uncle after the passing of her parents. He abuses her as though she were a

worker or sub-human and denies her of education. As she grows up, she is hitched to Garesego

Mokopi. It's anything but a marriage in the genuine sense, yet an agreement among Garesego and
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her uncle. As husband, Garesego takes interest in her body, not in the whole being. He leaves her

with three children to look after to seek sexual gratification with other women. The narrator

describes, Garesego is a man who “imagined he was the only penis in the world and that there

had to be a scramble for it” (Head 91). He is like the ones who “make babies like machines and

turn their backs upon the poor women” (Ojo-Ade 83). As a womanizer, he needs a different

woman every night in order to satiate his lust. “He sees sex as a display of masculine power,

domination and the oppression of women” (Head 98).

Garesego, after eight years of the marriage, abandons Dikeledi with the burden of three

sons to rear and educate them on her own. Though she faces pecuniary and other hardships, she

never asks her husband for financial assistance or any other support. She earns money by sewing

dresses, knitting jerseys for the village children and making baskets.

One day, Garesego comes to know that Dikeledi is short of Rs 20 to pay the tuition fee of

their elder son. He visits her under the pretext that he wants to help her with the needed money,

but his real purpose of the visit is not to render any monetary assistance. To Dikeledi, he is

“coming home for some sex” (Head 101) with her in lieu of the assistance. Anticipating his

intentions, Dikeledi cuts off her genitals with a knife while he is asleep at night. Aware of all the

consequences of the act, she kills him to stop his sexual abuse of her and of other women in the

village.

The main character, Dikeledi, is expected to be a “good wife” by her dedicated service to

a wayward husband. Dikeledi describes this type of man as sex-driven and almost canine in their

carnal lusts, with the belief that women exist in order to satisfy their sexual needs. This

highlights the position of women/wives as property in Black societies and how the story becomes

a narrative of female body as the body becomes the medium of suppression as well as liberation.
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Napoleon Bonaparte once asserted: “Nature intended women to be our [men’s] slaves.

They are our property; we are not theirs. They belong to us, just as a tree that bears fruit belongs

to the gardener. What a mad idea to demand equality for women! Women are nothing but

machines for producing children.” (Maatz, 1993) Women are supposed to espouse a suitably

uncommunicative tongue and an ethical code of sexual purity and self-sacrifice, and avoid

having strong aspirations and strong judgment, especially in opposition to the men who are

supposed to be their custodians.

Throughout the story, Garesego exercises his male prerogatives and uses marriage and

her body at his disposal as a weapon to terrorize his wife. Head was acutely conscious of the

gender-based cruelty and injustice. This is why she chose to present the tale from the wife’s

point of view. The portrayal of Dikeledi is an indictment of society that sanctions male brutality

towards women. This also illustrates the extent to which male characters use sex as an oppressive

tool where a male character’s power is relative to the number of women with whom he has been

intimate.

A closer examination, however, discloses a complex female world making the collection

a comprehensive study of women’s experience comprising their interaction with society, culture

and traditions. The story acts as a dramatic indicator of the oppressive attitudes of the men in

Dikeledi’s culture and focuses on the unstable position of African women in society as it

explores the idea of the “good wife” (Harrow, “Bessie Head’s: “The Collector of Treasures””

177)

In ‘The Collector of Treasures’, Bessie emphasizes the miserable quandary of women in

the prevailing social milieu. Many of them vividly portray the struggle that Botswana women are

engaged in. They not only share the racial oppression with men but are also required to fight the
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traditional patriarchal set-up that claims superiority over them. ‘The Collector of Treasures’ is

remarkable for the large number of its stories that focus on the deprecating and discounting

women with all their strengths and weaknesses.

Head adept at representing the containment and imprisonment of their female characters

within a social and textual space that stifles and silences them. Restricted movement and

confined locales are the principal topos of the narrative. This dissertation seeks to analyze how

this discrimination and violence exile women from society, physically and emotionally.

According to Ibrahim, “if you belong to a minority you are exiled from national and gender

discourses” (122), and this is what Head explores in her short stories. She deals with women’s

situation as a minority group within their communities, and how their gender determines the

discrimination they suffer.

How colonialism snatched their dignity and made them powerless in their own land.

Racial segregation was a political and sociological entity that ruptured equality between people

of different races and cultures. Head identifies the nature of oppression emphasizing that, for a

woman of color, she is doubly oppressed, both by race and gender. Women, as a group, are the

category of people who were most affected by the society categorized by unequal opportunities.

All women of Southern Africa, be it Blacks, Whites and Colored were oppressed based on the

fact that they were female. Firstly, the white women were in a better position than the women of

color, as they were not oppressed by their race, but were oppressed because of their gender. The

black and colored women, on the other hand, were subject to double oppression – that is

oppression based on both race and gender.

Although they talk about the apartheid in this specific case, the same situation can be

extrapolated to any patriarchal system that regards women as inferior beings to justify their ill
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treatment, to the extent that rape, sexual abuse and the like become tolerated. Through this kind

of violence women are alienated in a brutal way, symbolically, emotionally and physically, by

the mere fact of being women. As a result of this, Head creates a wide range of complex and

traumatized women estranged from their social circles and family units. Her short story “The

Collector of Treasures” explores the ambivalent function of violence. As will be further

developed, it exiles its female characters when they are the victims, but liberates them

emotionally when they become the perpetrators.

Head's female heroes battle to have a place with their social orders and networks in an

unexpected way. Sociologically, home is a reasonable spot for socialization, yet most females

understand that house is one of the chief locales of control and strife for ladies opposing explicit

ways of life as portrayed in "The Collector of Treasures" where Dikeledi is renounced by her

family members since they dread "that since her husband had left her she would become

dependent on them for many things" (Head 93). She is now an outcast from her own family, just

as she is from the society. Dikeledi gets a life sentence. No one argues in her favour for a

reduced sentence based on self-defense or a "crime of passion." The activities of the overall set

of laws are not made noticeable in this story. It is like the female respondent is totally

undetectable to the justice system. It additionally recommends that she has no methods for

admittance to the interpretive framework that awards capacity to the individuals who can control

it. She is a socially silenced subject who is unable to act as an effective moral agent to protect

herself and her children. She shares her experiences with other women realizing that they do not

belong to this society, while finding refuge in each other.

According to Head [1989], all the traditional constraints and prejudices against women

operate against Dikeledi and threaten to reverse the modicum of happiness that she has
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resourcefully gained for herself and her children. Violence acts as yet another exilic force for

women, since it positions them in a place of marginality; in the case of the female convicts, both

as victims and as victimizers. Their commitment of murder turns Dikeledi and her fellow

prisoners into the outcasts of their community. They are carried away from the village life,

marginalized and repudiated by everyone. The prison is “a whole day’s journey away from the

villages of the northern part of the country”, and as they passed the village in the police truck

“[t]he everyday world ... seemed indifferent to the hungry eyes of the prisoner who gazed out at

them” (Head 87). The unsettlement they feel as a consequence of their exilic consciousness—

they realize they do not belong to their societies—makes them struggle between their desire to

belong, and their thriving propensity to rebel. It is clear that sexual egalitarianism is a major goal

on which all feminists agree, gender discrimination is the sole or perhaps the primary locus of

the oppression of third world women.

Marginality is one of the privileged metaphors of postcolonial studies. It is from the

margins of colonial subordination and oppression on the grounds of race, class, gender or

religion that postcolonial writers and theorists claim political and moral authority and struggles

for spatial inclusion.

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Works Cited

Head, Bessie. The Collector of Treasures (1970)

Ncube, Thembelihle Thandi. “A Feminist Analysis of Bessie Head's Oeuvre with Reference to

Migration and Psychoanalysis.” (2001)

Soriano, Mª Pilar Álvarez. “Bessie Head's The Collector of Treasures and Other Botswana

Village Tales: Questioning Gender and Violence.” (2019)

Ingersoll, Ear L G. “Reconstructing Masculinity in the Postcolonial World of Bessie Head.”

Kirton, Teneille. “Racial Exploitation And Double Oppression in Selected Bessie Head and

Doris Lessing Texts.” (2010)

Dr. Somveer. “Reconstruction of Black Female Identity in Bessie Head's “The Collector of

Treasures” and Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place.” (2017)