Incestuous Relations in Bessie Head and Sindiwe Magona
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Apartheid and the migrant labour system affected the residential stability of black South African families in terms of wife-husband and father-child relations. The control exerted by apartheid laws made it impossible for generations of fathers for over one and a half centuries to raise their children (Wilson, 2006), affecting their personal and social behaviour. This article contends that in their use of literature as a political tool, writers Sindiwe Magona and Bessie Head offered a similar vision about the father-daughter relationship. Magona’s short story “It was Easter Sunday the day I went to Netreg” (1991) and Head’s short story “The Cardinals” (1995) portray a daughter and a father who do not know each other and who, years later and unknowingly, establish a sexual relation. This article will claim these incestuous relationships can be interpreted as the writers’ representation of the use and abuse the state exerted on its black citizens.
DOI: 10.6018/ijes.575391
Author: Isabel Gil-Naveira
Institution: Universidad de Oviedo
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4406250759