45

Born an illegitimate mixed-raced child in a South African psychiatric hospital, Bessie Head was marked early on by the violence of apartheid, which forced her parents apart and then deprived her of both family and country. This article examines the life and work of this paradoxically famous and yet marginalized writer. It emphasizes the long-hidden political dimension of her autobiographical and fictional writings. These writings reflect the violence experienced intimately by their author and can be read as works of combat, similarly to her first posthumous novel The Cardinals. At the heart of this strange fiction, incest symbolizes the perversion of love and the mutilation of the family provoked by the cruel and iniquitous system of apartheid.