Quote by Bessie Head: “Love is not fashionable any more, the poets are coming down with reality.”

When the world becomes dominated by harsh practical concerns — survival, politics, material need — there is pressure to dismiss love and beauty as luxuries. Bessie Head is mourning this, noting that poets (the keepers of feeling) are being dragged into a colder, more cynical world. Something important is being lost.

Head wrote this during the mid-1970s while living in exile in the Botswanan village of Serowe. Southern Africa was in a period of liberation struggle, with Mozambique and Angola moving toward independence and South Africa under increasingly brutal apartheid repression. Idealism was under intense pressure from political violence.

Botswanan novelist born in South Africa to a white mother and Black father, whose birth was considered illegal under apartheid law. Her novels, including A Question of Power (1974), draw on her experiences of exile, mental illness, and displacement to explore questions of identity and belonging in postcolonial Africa.