Bourdieusian Reading of Bessie Head’s Short Story “Let Me Tell a Story Now…”

The objective of this study is to examine "Let Me Tell a Story Now..." by Bessie Head, specifically focusing on the social field and habitus that the Colored characters in the story experience through the method of close reading. A working-class family, Ma and her unnamed husband are the main characters in the story. Their brief vacation planned to Durban, populated by Black Africans, exposes their anxiety regarding their identity and sense of belonging. Thus, they focus on the distinction between the interconnected forms of capital that shape their identities and those of people in Durban. It becomes a test when they start to worry about how they will interact with people from different socioeconomic backgrounds with distinct habits, lifestyles, dispositions, languages, and emotions. All the characters in the story feel that venturing beyond their social circle is a certain path to their own downfall, so none of them ever dares to exit. Based on this, I argue that the characters' subjective experiences in a social field, along with the specific quantity and type of capital supplied to them, basically form their habitus and affect their sense of identity and belonging. It is because the characters' ability to survive depends on the particular type and quantity of capital they encounter in their social standing to the point where they develop attachments to and associations with those forms of capital, which ultimately become ingrained in their identities, thoughts, and emotions. Consequently, in this study, I build on Pierre Bourdieu's concept of field and habitus by using close reading techniques to investigate the characters’ experiences of leaving their social spheres.