Parenting & Family Quote by Bessie Head

Normalcy is doing quiet, unglamorous labor for the benefit of a society that may not even want you in it. Bessie Head opens by sketching the almost invisible machinery of stability: work, child-rearing, routine. It reads like a tribute, but it’s also a measuring stick she knows she’s been denied. The “order and sanity” she attributes to most people isn’t romantic; it’s social permission, the right to belong without having to narrate your right to exist.

Then she pivots, brutally, to the “outer disorder and insanity” of her own life. That “outer” matters. Head isn’t confessing some private chaos; she’s indicting a world that renders her life legible only as trouble. The word “victim” lands with uncomfortable precision: not as a melodramatic identity, but as a legal and bureaucratic condition produced by borders, paperwork, and the capriciousness of states.

The final line strips the passage down to its engine: “they won’t give us citizenship here.” Suddenly the earlier calm domestic scene becomes political. Citizenship isn’t just a passport; it’s the quiet background radiation that allows people to be “uncomplicated.” Head, a South African-born writer who lived in Botswana after apartheid-era displacement, exposes the cruel trick of statelessness: you can do everything a society asks of you - work, raise children, keep going - and still be treated as a temporary problem.

Her intent isn’t self-pity. It’s to show how nations manufacture “insanity” around certain lives, then blame those lives for being unlivable.