PROFESSOR AND STUDENT COLLEAGUES WORK TO BRING
AFRICAN WRITER'S CORRESPONDENCE TO LIGHT

Before Associate Professor Linda-Susan Beard returned from Botswana's Khama III Memorial Museum last August, she shipped two large cartons of documents back to Bryn Mawr — photocopies of more than 2,000 letters written by and to the African writer Bessie Head. Beard had read the correspondence on a previous trip to Botswana, but decided that she wanted to make the correspondence available to the reading public, rather than simply quoting it in her work.

Beard needed help sorting through the letters and readying them for publication. It was work that required mature judgment and familiarity with issues in African literature, and she knew she could find some Bryn Mawr undergraduates who were equal to the challenge.

"It's not so much that it's a huge volume of work and I needed help," Beard explains, "although that is true. I asked for assistance from students primarily because I wanted fresh perspectives. I've been studying Bessie for about 30 years; this gives me an enormous intimacy with her work, but also blinders of a sort. I knew that the students would see things I might miss."

From left: Kim Wells '06, Laine Edwards '06, Muska Nassery '06, Emily J. Madsen '06 and Linda-Susan Beard

Beard sent a broadcast e-mail to Bryn Mawr English majors asking for volunteers. From those who responded, she chose five student assistants, a senior and four juniors who had significant academic experience with African literature and had read Head's work. Laine Edwards '06, Emily J. Madsen '06, Muska Nassery '06, Kim Wells '06 and Sarah Sterling '07 began to work with Beard on two book projects: Shifting Sandscapes, the title under which Head's correspondence will be published, and A Cloud of Witnesses: Bessie, Woman of Serowe, which will collect reminiscences of Head — in the form of interviews or essays — from people who knew her.

Each of the students involved with the project will contribute an essay to A Cloud of Witnesses, Beard says. "There are only about 30 people in the world who have seen these letters," she observes, "and the students have read them very meticulously. At this point, few people know as much about Bessie as they do."

Head's letters played an unusually important role in her life, notes Wells: "She conducted a lot of her personal life mainly through correspondence. For much of her writing life, she lived in a village in Botswana where she didn't speak the local language, so she was isolated. Mail kept her in touch with the world — her publishers, other writers, readers, students of literature — and she was a very faithful correspondent. I was surprised at how much effort she put into writing to complete strangers; she'd continue to write to them as long as they wrote to her. And she sometimes chided her correspondents for not writing often enough."

Throughout the fall semester, the students met regularly with Beard to discuss issues that arose from the letters. "Professor Beard has given us the freedom to approach this the way we wanted," Madsen says. "We're all reading the letters and comparing notes." This spring, Madsen and Nassery will concentrate on the letters, while Edwards and Wells focus on collecting material for A Cloud of Witnesses.

"As we read through the letters, everyone in the group made suggestions about which correspondents we might want to contact for the volume of reminiscences and what questions we might want to ask," Wells reports.

Edwards says she is keenly aware of the effect the group's work is likely to have on the world's understanding of Head and her work.

"We're struggling with some difficult questions," she says. "Should we talk only with people who had affectionate relationships with Bessie? She had very tumultuous relationships with some people, and she wrote harsh things in some of her letters. The people we choose to interview, the letters we choose to publish — that will determine what side of Bessie is presented to the world."

The students' consciousness of the role they will play in Head's presentation to the world is perhaps heightened by the fact that they have undertaken the project as a group. "It's surprising how much our opinions about what is interesting or important varied," Edwards says. "If any one of us were doing the project alone, Bessie Head would end up looking very different. It has really given me a profound understanding of the role scholars play in the reputations of writers."

Beard concurs, giving an example: "There's a voluminous correspondence between Bessie and her publishers. Most of us found this really tedious to read through, but one of the students, who is doing a concentration in creative writing, was fascinated by it."

That student writer, Muska Nassery, says that she was "overjoyed to be able to learn, through these letters, what the everyday life of a writer is like, and how the profession extends beyond the actual writing of books. Bessie also corresponded at length with readers who wrote to her. Those letters are really interesting because they show how she conceived of her own relationship with her readers."

"I'm so glad we had Muska's perspective," Beard says. "She helped us see that the correspondence with publishers offers valuable insight into what happens to an artist's work when an industry takes over." That kind of diversity of opinion, of course, was precisely what Beard was seeking when she invited the students to join the project.

Professor and students have both found the collaboration tremendously beneficial. Nevertheless, such collaborations are rare, as the students learned when Edwards, Nadsen, Nassery, Wells and Beard (Sterling is taking a break from the project while she completes her senior thesis) presented their project as part of a panel on undergraduate-faculty collaborations at the 24th Annual Lilly Conference on College Teaching at Miami University of Ohio in late November. The four students were the only undergraduates present at the conference, and some of the professors who saw their presentation were astounded that Beard would trust undergraduates with such a project.

"The students aren't just doing clerical work or discrete tasks that I had outlined for them," Beard explained. "They are being asked to think with me, to help me answer very important questions about how the material should be presented. Faculty members from other institutions considered those collegial questions. But one of the advantages of teaching at a small liberal-arts college like Bryn Mawr is that students really do become junior colleagues."

"It's a privilege to work with such smart, eager, insightful, reflective, earnest young scholars," Beard concludes.

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