Life & Wisdom Quote by Bessie Head

Head draws a brutal boundary line: love as nourishment versus love as parasitism. The shock word "ghoul" yanks romance out of the soft-focus zone and into the ethics of survival. A ghoul doesn’t merely take; it feeds on what should be inviolate. By choosing that image, she suggests a relationship can look intimate while functioning like extraction, a private version of colonial logic where one body thrives because another is slowly emptied.

"Mutually feeding" is carefully physical. It’s not the sentimental language of soulmates, but the material reality of care: attention, labor, money, safety, dignity. Head’s phrasing implies that affection isn’t proven by intensity, but by reciprocity. The relationship is judged the way a community might judge an economy: who is producing, who is consuming, who is allowed to be depleted.

Context matters. Head’s work, forged through displacement and hard social scrutiny in southern Africa, often interrogates power disguised as normalcy: gender roles, dependency, the romanticization of suffering. The line reads like a warning against the cultural script that trains especially women to call endurance "love" and to confuse being needed with being valued.

There’s also an implicit standard for agency. Feeding each other requires two people with appetites, boundaries, and the right to refuse. Head isn’t describing love as fusion; she’s describing it as an exchange that keeps both partners alive. The ghoul is the partner who turns intimacy into entitlement.