When Rain Clouds Gather

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When Rain Clouds Gather
When Rain Clouds Gather cover.png
First edition cover
Author Bessie Head
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
Genre Novel
Set inEastern Botswana, 1960s
Publisher Victor Gollancz
Publication date
1968
Media typePrint: hardback octavo
Pages188
ISBN 0435121685
OCLC 251800534
823.914
LC Class PR9408.B553H4
Followed by Maru  

When Rain Clouds Gather is a 1968 novel by South African-Motswana author Bessie Head. [1] [2] [3]

Contents

Head wrote the novel while in exile in Botswana in 1967. [4]

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 hope and despair, and that it depicts love as "a magical force that can overcome insuperable challenges", an idea not present in Head's 1971 work A Question of Power, written after her 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 Big Jubilee Read, a list of 70 books by Commonwealth authors produced to celebrate Queen Elizabeth II's Platinum Jubilee. [9] [10]

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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. Jagne, Siga Fatima; Parekh, Pushpa Naidu (12 November 2012). Postcolonial African Writers: A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Routledge. ISBN   9781136593970 via Google Books.
  5. Head, Bessie (22 April 1968). "When Rain Clouds Gather". openpublishing.psu.edu.
  6. Irele, Abiola (22 April 2010). The Oxford Encyclopedia of African Thought. Oxford University Press. ISBN   978-0-19-533473-9 via Google Books.
  7. Head, Bessie (2 September 2010). When Rain Clouds Gather And Maru. Little, Brown Book Group. ISBN   9780748125685 via Google Books.
  8. Bayer, Gerd (1 January 2019). "When Earth Matters: Bessie Head's When Rain Clouds Gather". Open Cultural Studies. 3 (1): 448–455. doi: 10.1515/culture-2019-0038 . 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.