"She says American writers are very strange. One came to visit her and also brought along numerous pictures of herself. In America, I told her, the women writers need pictures to remind everyone they exist.
"This she termed a typically American, childish, trivial pursuit. 'If your work exists, you exist,' she huffed. 'Ask God.'
"Last summer at the women's crafts festival in Vermont I bought two beautiful woolen tie-dyed shawls. One is red, with a yellow sun; the other, brown, with an orange-and-purple one. I gave the brown one to her, for 'chilly' London. I can just imagine her there, an ordinary colored woman from the colonies, to the people who notice her in the street. But what a writer! How else would we know all that we know about the psyche of South Africa? About the sexism of Africa? About the Bush people of the Kalahari? About Botswana? It is only because Bessie Head sits there in the desert, in her little hut, writing, that we have knowledge of a way of life that flowed for thousands of years, which would otherwise be missing from human record. This is no small thing!"
It wasn't. And yet, for just a moment, Suwelo wanted it to be. He wanted American history, the stuff he taught, to forever be the center of everyone's attention. What a few white men wanted, thought, and did. For he liked the way he could sneak in some black men's faces later on down the line. And then trace those backward until they appeared even before Columbus. It was like a backstitch in knitting, he imagined, the kind of history teaching that he did, knitting all the pieces, parts, and colors that had been omitted from the original design. But now to have to consider African women writers and Kalahari Bushmen! It seemed a bit much.
"Ola drove Ms. Head to the airport himself," Fanny continued. "As she was getting into the car I told her I had a confession to make: Though I had loved all her stories, and especially Maru, I had not really understood her fattest book, A Question of Power.