When Rain Clouds Gather

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When Rain Clouds Gather
LC Class
PR9408.B553H4
Followed byMaru 

When Rain Clouds Gather is the first novel by South African-Motswana author Bessie Head, published in 1968.[1][2][3]

Having left South Africa in 1964, Head wrote the novel while in exile in Botswana, completing it in 1967.[4] It was first published in London by Victor Gollancz and subsequently by William Heinemann (1972), and in the US by Simon & Schuster.[5]

Plot

Makehaya escapes

Apartheid South Africa into Botswana. In the village of Golema Mmidi he meets Gilbert, an Englishman who is trying to modernise farming. They join forces to create a utopia but are opposed by the village chief.[5]

Reception

David P. Bargueño wrote that the book emphasises the twin aspects of

nervous breakdown.[6]

Helen Oyeyemi wrote of When Rain Clouds Gather and Head that "Her men […] are intensely perceptive, imbued with a 'feminine sensitivity' that raises them above the level of 'grovelling sex organs' that Head complained African men were traditionally reduced to within their communities.[7]"

Writing in Open Cultural Studies in 2019, Gerd Bayer says that When Rain Clouds Gather "anticipated some of the politics of early twenty-first-century environmental thinking in the postcolonial sphere. The alliance of various marginalized characters who, one way or another, violate against existing hegemonic structures replaces the ideological and cultural conflict over territory."[8]

In 2022, When Rain Clouds Gather was included on the

Queen Elizabeth II's Platinum Jubilee.[9][10]

The novel is referenced in the project When Rain Clouds Gather: Black South African Women Artists, 1940–2000, curated by Portia Malatjie and Nontobeko Ntombela.[11]

References

  1. ^ "When Rain Clouds Gather | Encyclopedia.com". www.encyclopedia.com.
  2. ^ "248. When Rain Clouds Gather by Bessie Head*". ImageNations. 12 July 2013.
  3. ^ Accone, Darryl (6 July 2021). "Why Bessie Head wrote". News24.
  4. ISBN 9781136593970
    – via Google Books.
  5. ^ a b Head, Bessie (22 April 1968). "When Rain Clouds Gather". openpublishing.psu.edu.
  6. ISBN 978-0-19-533473-9
    – via Google Books.
  7. ISBN 9780748125685
    – via Google Books.
  8. S2CID 198490260
    – via www.degruyter.com.
  9. ^ Sherwood, Harriet (18 April 2022). "The God of Small Things to Shuggie Bain: the Queen's jubilee book list". The Guardian.
  10. ^ "BBC Arts - BBC Arts - The Big Jubilee Read: Books from 1962 to 1971". BBC. 17 April 2022.
  11. ^ "'When Rain Clouds Gather: Black South African Women Artists, 1940–2000". ArtForum. October 2022. Retrieved 11 May 2023.
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