Elemental Humanity in Bessie Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather

Abstract In this essay I read Bessie Head’s novel When Rain Clouds Gather from a broadly eco-materialist perspective, arguing that the social transformation of the protagonist, Makhaya Maseko, is fundamentally bound up with the text’s nuanced descriptions of the physical environment. Charting Maseko’s departure from the toxic milieu of apartheid South Africa, and his gradual process of settling into a new lifeworld in the village of Golema Mmidi, I argue that his familiarization with the material grounds of life in a new clime provides an elemental coherence that enables the structuring of his personal narrative into a meaningful system. Through a series of close readings, I demonstrate that the novel’s expression of a composite ecological being is also reflected in the stylistic idiosyncrasies of Head’s writing. Throughout, I draw on Head’s correspondence, and on biographical aspects of her life, to situate Makhaya’s journey against a larger theme of struggling to make a home in the face of social alienation and the bureaucratic indifference of the nation-state. Reference to the work of anthropologists like Tim Ingold and Hannah Knox situates my argument in the context of a larger ontological move in debates around the relationship between nature and culture.