Semiautobiographical details

Women character : Strength and weaknesses

A Question Of Power

Bessie Head
About the Author
Biographical details:
Bessie Emery Head (born July 6, 1937, Pietermaritzburg, S.Af.—died April 17, 1986, Serowe, Botswana) was
an African writer who described the contradictions and shortcomings of pre- and postcolonial African
society in morally didactic novels and stories.
Head was born of an illegal union between her white mother (who was placed in a mental asylum during
her pregnancy) and black father (who then mysteriously disappeared). She suffered rejection and
alienation at an early age. After moving from foster parents to an orphanage school to an early marriage,
she abandoned her homeland, her teaching job, and her husband and took her small son to Botswana,
seeking personal asylum and tranquility in simple village life.
The South Africa that Head was born into was fragmented into Black and White, Afrikaner and British,
African and Coloured. Afrikaner distention over South Africa’s involvement in World War II and strong
alliances between Dutch Afrikaner political strategies and Nazi political strategies led to the official policy
of apartheid. The year 1948 witnessed the white majority, the Afrikaner-led National Party, officially
legislating apartheid without the Supreme Court weighing it against the Atlantic Charter (Beck 2000: 123-
124). Intensification of racial stratification and oppression were in store for all non-white South Africans.
Title Significance
The book’s title, A Question of Power, signals its most pressing concern: the way in which power is used,
especially abused. Elizabeth is a person in perpetual crisis hailing from the circumstances of her birth as a
“coloured,” or mixed race, woman in apartheid South Africa. Her mother was a white woman pregnant by
a black man and consequently placed in a mental institution where she gave birth to Elizabeth. Several
years later the mother would commit suicide in this institution. That scenario exposes the problem of
oppressive power. A person without the power to protect herself from an abusive system founded upon
racism and sexism is consequently sacrificed. This extreme injustice extends as well to her innocent infant.
The baby is placed in foster care, but the white community is not willing to care for her because she “did
not look white” (Question 17). Elizabeth’s treatment as a helpless infant and her mother’s treatment as a
deviant female are potent examples of the injustice that a racist and oppressive society foists on
individuals who in some way challenge the society’s scaffolding of order and control.
The introduction presents the paradox that pervades the novel: Lack of power leads to oppression, yet
exercises of power are intrinsically evil.This paradox poses a problem for feminists who propose
readjusting the balance of power between men and women as the ultimate goal of the women's
movement. Head's primary focus on the spiritual growth of the individual woman is surely feminist, yet it
may undermine the politics of feminism as an exercise of group power.
Elizabeth ignores the question of power when she fixates on universal, soul-wide conflicts between what
she perceives to be the forces of good and evil. She need not come to the conclusion that good and evil do
not exist, but she must realize eventually that the more broadly she defines these two concepts, the
greater the power needed to mediate them.As she reveals in a conversation with Tom, she is beginning to
realize that anybody with enough power-and everyone in her own mind has an unlimited amount of
power-can be both God and Satan.
Sello summarizes what she has already guessed about the nature of power: "You will never know our
power. I will never let you see it because I know what power does. If the things of the soul are really a
question of power, then anyone in possession of power of the spirit could be Lucifer." As for the future of
the brotherhood of man: "She left the story like that, unresolved."
 Semi-Autobiographical features
A Question of Power (1973) is a frankly autobiographical account of disorientation and paranoia in which
the heroine survives by sheer force of will.
A Question Power, believing it to be the most significant work of Head. Craig Mackenzie is convinced that
the novel is “pivotal to any examination of her life and work”
Sarvan, P among numerous critics, calls A Question of Power “a strongly autobiographical work”
In this novel, Bessie Head explores via her protagonist her own psyche, and in so doing her dreams and
fantasies.
Bessie Head's A Question of Power is all the more interesting because the quest she gave to her
protagonist has been; Eilsersen posits “in some respects her own quest” . For this reason her writings are
closely interrelated: they are inspired by the different phases of psychological growth Head went through
as she confronts the absurd realities of her life.
In words of Bessie Head:
‘’My third novel, A Question of Power, had such an intensely personal and private dialogue that I can
hardly place it in the context of the more social and outward-looking work I had done. It was a private
philosophical journey to the sources of evil. I argued that people and nations do not realize the point at
which they become evil: but once trapped in its net, evil has a powerful propelling motion into a terrible
abyss of destruction. I argue that its form, design, and plan could be clearly outlined and that it was little
understood as a force in the affairs of mankind.’’
Bessie Head herself acknowledged that:
The African experience of slavery, colonialism and exploitation arouses feelings of in tense anguish and
there was a fear in me that monsters would merely change roles, that black faces would simply replace
white faces of cruelty, hate and greed and that the people would bleed forever. It was as though, in an
internal and private way, I perceived the ease with which one could become evil and I associated evil in my
mind with the acquisition of power. This terror of power and an examination of its stark horrors created
a long period of anguish in my life and forced out of me some strange novels that I had not anticipated
writing. It was almost as though the books wrote themselves, propelled into existence by the need to create
a reverence for human life in an environment and historical circumstances that seem to me a howling
inferno.
PLOT:
Head’s protagonist has her inner being disturbed and shattered by different causes: difficulty of
adaptation, racial and class prejudices, traumatic memories, repressed feelings and unconventional
philosophical or religious beliefs. The aim of her protagonist is to lessen her inner alienation as she revolts
against the hostile environment of her existence.
The narrative structure of A Question Of Power accentuates as it mirrors the exchanges between these
racially demarcated categories. Not entirely linear, the novel follows the main character Elizabeth through
her childhood, her education, and into exile from South Africa along with her son. After she arrives in
Motabeng, her adopted Botswanan home, she takes a teaching job and then has a nervous breakdown
typical of the nervous breakdowns South African refugees suffered after leaving the apartheid regime. Her
salvation comes in the form of the international community she finds in the agricultural project she joins.
In this novel all relationships between people - good or evil, natural or perverse, real or fictional, sane or
Insane - are mediated by narrative. Although the discourse of the outward circumstances of apartheid and
racism shapes these narratives, they are more complex than simple reflections. Head uses narratives to
construct a discourse of domination, like those of Sello, Dan and the school principal’s story of Elizabeth’s
mother’s insanity, but also to establish the process of healing, which Elizabeth eventually achieves in the
garden project. The concentration on narrative implies that the most important changes inflicted by
apartheid and racism are fictional, because they are visions created by Elizabeth’s own schizophrenic
personality. By contrast, fiction plays a part in Elizabeth’s healing process, because fictional narratives of
oppression and distortion are counteracted in her mind by narratives of goodness and benignity, such as
those expressed by the white doctor and Kenosi. Like a number of African novels, A Question of Power is
thus structured on an alternation of narratives and counter-narratives.
Writing Style
Head masterfully uses allegorical figures, such as Medusa, to deconstruct the myth of man’s fall from and
return to God, in other words the myth of polarity. In this respect Sello and Medusa, together with Dan,
may be viewed as allegorical figures who represent the polarities of good and evil accompanying Elizabeth
on her nightmarish journey towards and out of her mental breakdown. Elizabeth, however, succeeds in her
quest to liberate herself from this bondage. Linda Beard (1979:268) observes that in this novel the
“fundamental absolute to be dismantled ... is the myth of polarity”. Head’s dismantling of the myth also
rests on the use of dreams, imaginings and phantasmagorical musing in which myth and allegory merge.

Psychoanalysis:
In A Question of Power, Bessie Head uses the psychoanalysts’ delimitation of the human mind into the
conscious, the sub-conscious, and the un-conscious articulated by Freud to portray the totality of her
protagonist’s experience. According to Freud, opined Gay Peter, “childhood traumas and past experiences
are at the origin of many psychological disorders” . Therefore, the past has to be replayed and analysed.
The novel is concerned with, not so much Motabeng where the bulk of the action takes place, but with the
protagonist’s mental retention of her South African experience. In Bessie Head’s novel, her protagonist has
painful memories she must accept and cope with. Apartheid, racism and the experience of being a source
of social shame and evidence of sexual depravity are some of the recurrent memories which disturb the
mental equilibrium her major character. The problems surrounding the half-caste child begin even before
conception. To compound Bessie’s protagonist, she is predisposed to madness supposedly inherited from a
mother believed to be insane, and who committed the insane crime of suicide in a mental institution.
Bessie Head’s protagonist undermines this assertion of hereditary insanity by exposing the society’s
prejudicial treatment of Elizabeth, and by emphasizing the social background to Elizabeth’s mother’s
supposed insanity. Sexuality and repression, as enunciated by Freud , Freud’s interest in neuroses and
hysteria is also very pertinent for this study because according to Gay, “Elizabeth’s behaviour is
characterized by the symptoms of such illnesses” . Finally, Freud draws an interesting analogy from Gay,
“between the author’s creations and his/ her dreams and fantasies”
Bessie Head structures Elizabeth’s madness along the lines of basic Existential Psychoanalysis. The
characters Sello, Medusa, and Dan are not the real human characters of conventional literature; rather
they are aspects of Elizabeth’s mind, concretized in her fertile imagination. These ghoulish characters,
visible only to Elizabeth, are the personified equivalent of her inner being; the subconscious, and the
unconscious. The character Elizabeth who is critical of the evils of South African life is the conscious self.
‘Sello the monk’ is her subconscious, close to her and sharing her belief in goodness. ‘Dan’ is her
unconscious reflecting the South African collective unconscious pervaded by the forces of evil. ‘Sello in the
brown suit’ and ‘Medusa’ are according to Pearse “the derivatives of her subconscious” . Elizabeth’s
nightmarish ‘journeys into the soul’ begin with a dialogue with her subconscious ‘Sello the monk’. ‘Sello’
encourages her to proceed on her inquiry with the argument that “Everything was evil until I broke down
and cried. It is when you cry, in the blackest hour of despair, that you stumble on a source of goodness” .
Sello’s positive influence, with the figure of the Buddha playing a prominent role, does not last long,
however, before the negative derivatives of the subconscious, ‘Sello in the brown suit, and the wild-eyed
Medusa’, take over her subconscious. The images of evil and corruption which these present in Elizabeth’s
mind are only surpassed by ‘Dan’, Elizabeth’s unconscious who may be called the anti -Christ figure in the
novel. The ‘wild-eyed Medusa’ is boastful, aggressive, depraved and power-drunk. Like the power maniacs
of South Africa, ‘Medusa’ and ‘Sello in the brown suit’ are narrow-minded dictators who feel insecure in a
flexible universe. No one is good or right but themselves. They are all powerful and allknowing - everyone
else is insignificant. In their attempt to negate Elizabeth, ‘Sello in the brown suit’ and ‘Medusa’ accuse
Elizabeth of sexual inadequacy.While ‘Sello in the brown suit’ and ‘Medusa’ are openly hostile to Elizabeth,
and openly declare their lust for power, ‘Dan’ uses subtler methods to achieve the same ends. ‘Dan’
promises to love and protect Elizabeth. He feigns humility and tries to win her trust by it. ‘Dan’’s declared
innocence proves to be a deception. His method of perpetrating evil is similar to that of the mythical
trickster god who appears to men in a medley of forms setting people against one another and leaving
death and destruction in his trail. ‘Dan’’s appeal for trust is designed to unarm her, so that her
consciousness may be more easily assailed with ‘a ruthless concentration on the obscene’. ‘Dan’’s assault
takes the form of flagrant images of corrupting, of child molestation and rape, of homosexuality, bestiality,
incest and death.
Being Elizabeth’s unconscious, ‘Dan’s power over Elizabeth is more profound than that of ‘Sello in the
brown suit’ and ‘Medusa’, both aspects of the subconscious. ‘Dan’ goes to the roots of her being, and it is
from this fundamental level that he launches his attack. ‘Dan’’s strategy is to destroy any sense of love or
respect Elizabeth may have for herself, and thereby destroy her love and respect for others. A great
debaucher, ‘Dan’ is symbolized by a giant phallus. The terrible orgiastic scenes he orchestrates with a
gallery of seventy-one women illustrate that exploitative power. This “king of sex” and “king of women”
enacts his copulative dramas in front of Elizabeth as a way of asserting her inferiority both as a woman and
as a Coloured South African. ‘Dan’ operates a metaphoric phonograph and a cinema which strive to
reinforce inferiority in Elizabeth’s own mind. His final assault is an attempt to coax her into psycho-sexual
self-destruction and physical suicide. His “was not a creative function. It was death” .
Madness and Trauma
Elizabeth as the daughter of a white woman and a black man comes to know about her parentage, for the
first time, at the age of thirteen in the mission school where the principal says to her: We have a full
docket on you. You must be very careful. Your mother was insane. If you’re not careful you’ll gate insane
just like your mother. Your mother was a white woman. They had to lock her up, as she having a child by a
stable boy, who was a native. (Head, 1974, p. 16) Obviously, it is the power apparatus anticipating and,
subsequently, jeopardizing Elizabeth’s life with the permanent fear of possible insanity; the fear of being
locked up and committing suicide “like her mother.” This traumatic event is so shocking that she keeps
recalling throughout her adulthood. She is inculcated to believe in her natural aptitude for lunacy. In this
respect, her mental problems come close to what Freud considers as “trauma.” It is pertaining both to the
moment of the traumatic event itself as well as to the moment of recalling such an event. Trauma is due to
the excessive excitation of stimuli with which the body’s psychic processes are unable to deal…. However,
the traumatic event does not necessarily retain its original form in the process of re-transcription during
recall…. The traumatic event may be traced to the saga of familial relationships (from the oedipal complex
and the so-called castration anxiety through to the emotional interruptions of care giving either due to
separation, physical or psychological incapacitation, or death; Quayson, 2004, pp. 842-843)
In the case of Elizabeth, her nightmares recur her traumatic bitter past in symbolic and metaphoric ways. In
her dreams the trauma shows itself in forms of her lack of vagina, beheaded or mutilated women,
occupation of her bedroom with intruders, dead people, and sexually perverted huge men.
Elizabeth is shattered by a bitter colonial past which still haunts her and a traumatic experience of
apartheid. Not being able to discard her tormenting past, she cannot find any answer for her current
unreasonable afflictions and the maddening condition, as a result. Freud believes those who suffer from
trauma cannot normally live in the present or future; they are haunted by the traumatic event or its
symbols. Despite living in Botswana6 , Elizabeth cannot get rid of her experience of South Africa where
people who are created to “be hated” are called “dog and filth.” In her mind, the record of “dog, filth, the
African will eat you” with monotonous, repetitious and never ending tone would run incessantly. She takes
refuge in her garden in order to escape from her trauma of racism, loneliness, and orphanage. It is believed
that the traumatic event may be forgotten, whereas it can remain active in the unconscious of the
traumatic person and an event can bring it into the consciousness in the different forms of flashbacks and
intense emotions, such as panic or rage, and nightmares. In the case of Elizabeth, first mental breakdown
occurs when she overhears the radio (i.e. a recording) in the office with a “hissing sound” relating the
Africans are stupid and cannot even ‘figure out the name of the radio’ (Head, 1974, p. 51). This reminds her
of mission school’s principal’s “docket7 ” in which she is recognized as a potential insane for her mother’s
affair with “an African stable boy.” The second event leading to the resurgence of her illness is her
encounter with Miss Jones who constantly talks about Christ, love, and humanity. Her behavior is also
reminiscent of missionaries’ hypocrisy and their cruelty. As mentioned, the principal is the first one who
tells Elizabeth about her origin and mad mother. That is why she hits Miss Jones on the head and runs
away. During the story Elizabeth is continually threatened in her nightmares by Sello and Dan’s
“prophecies” about her death, madness, and even her son’s murder. These prophecies are also related to
her traumatic experience of childhood in the mission school where the principal foresees her insanity and
is always ‘on the alert for Elizabeth’s insanity’ and orders to isolate and lock her as foreshadowing her
future hospitalization in an insane asylum. Fanon, in his Black Skin, White Masks, believes trauma and
mental harassment is the direct outcome of exposition to the opposing world (white or black). When the
Negro makes contact with the white world, a certain sensitizing action takes place. If his psychic structure
is weak, one observes a collapse of the ego. The black person stops behaving as an actional person (Fanon,
1986, p. 154).8 Interestingly, Elizabeth herself is the very outcome of this traumatic encounter. She is the
“offspring” of an illicit union between a socially superior white mother and a subordinate black father, “a
stable boy.” In this respect, she is an heir of a Janus-Faced Madness in Bessie Head’s. . predetermined
insanity.
Fanon believes that colonialism through its hegemonic discourse of white/black division causes serious
psychological disorders in both whites and blacks. The condition for Elizabeth becomes even worse
because she inherits both ‘narcissism’ and ‘inferiority’ (terms used by Fanon to describe the nature of
white/black relationship, respectively). Thus she is rejected not only as a racist by blacks but also as an
inferior race by whites. Therefore, AQP demonstrates that part of the psychological struggle against
domination and prejudice that means coming to terms with the binary divide created by hegemonic
discourses, or to use Fanon's terms, the ‘situational neurosis’ created by colonialism. The protagonist's
journey through “madness” is an exploration of collective images of power that form part of the mental
constructions of apartheid and racial segregation. (Talhaite, 2005, p.150) Foucault in his History of
Madness proclaims that the boundary of reason and unreason is not something inherent and essential but
an artificial demarcation imposed by the power institute of each era. Definition of norm and deviation is
within the frameworks of the discourses of power changing from one archive to another. Sanity or insanity
is a label to exclude the Other:
[Medusa] started shouting in a shrill, high voice: “We don’t want you here. This is my land. These are my
people. We keep our things to ourselves. You keep no secrets . . . .” Why was everything so pointed, so
profound? The wild-eyed Medusa was expressing the surface reality of the African society. (Head, 1974, p.
38) In the course of the story, Elizabeth has to stay in an asylum twice because based on the “standards,”
she is not a “normal” creature. In “The Birth of Asylum,” Foucault argues that asylums are constructed to
collect the deviants, to make the society seem salubrious and homogenous. In these places, the abnormal
people are mentally chastened. They assert a kind of forced “homogeneity”; otherwise, the 140 | RALS,
3(2), Fall 2012 defiant must be silenced. As Elizabeth “had to choke back a rush of words . . . [while there
was no one to unfold] mental drama of torture in Motabeng village” (Head, 1974, p. 58). For Foucault,
asylum functions in accordance with the morality of the society. As a result, in A Question of Power, the
colored protagonist has to be imprisoned under indictment for ignoring the established rules and,
sometimes, even the divine ones. As a colored, she belongs to neither of the good or evil realms of white
or black worlds, respectively.
Madness in the novel is both positive and negative. In its positive concept it can be considered as
deconstructing the meaning and decentering the irrational and oppressive “reason.” Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Gauttari in their book Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia argue that ‘both the political and
the psychological field are permeated by the same form of energy, libido, which has effects on both
political (the class struggle) and individual (délire). Libido and politics interpenetrate’ (Sarup, 1993, p. 93).
They differentiate between paranoia and schizophrenia and consider paranoia as the characteristic of a
fascist society, whereas the latter is related to a revolutionary society. They reject the Freudian idea of
Oedipus complex and believe that the capitalistic society is responsible for mental derangement of people
and force them to behave according to its abnormal norms. In this case Elizabeth’s mental condition is not
only an outcome of her traumatic experience of childhood, but the fascist and closed society of South
Africa under a colonial apartheid regime. They consider schizophrenia as deconstructing and the only sane
response to the insane condition of the society. For a schizoid meaning is not referential but deferential,
arbitrary, and never-ending. The marginalized minority groups, the nomadic people like the exiled and
colored Elizabeth who lives in diaspora can deconstruct and decenter the established binary opposition
and hierarchy constructed by fascist society. In the light of her madness, Elizabeth challenges apartheid’s
closed system. Of course, at first she is a paranoid, a by-product of fascist society that formulates and
territorializes everything. As mentioned in the novel, at first, “She was entirely dependent on what he
(Dan) would do . . . she was in an easily invaded world” (Head, 1974, p. 105). However, as time passes by,
she recognizes her potential power and begins to reject the control of the “soul personalities,” Dan, Sello,
and Medusa that are representatives of different oppressive aspects of Africa. The very concept of her
hybridity and marginalization helps her to be a simultaneous paranoid and schizoid and in this respect a
“transcendental signifier” that can resist. In response to Tom when he asks why she did not find a husband,
Elizabeth replies “It’s not part of my calculations, Tom . . . . I think I ought to live too, like everyone else. I
don’t care to be shoved out of the scheme of things. I want to live the way I am without anyone dictating
to me” (Head, 1974, p. 192).These words are words of Elizabeth as a schizoid. She wants to be a free
“revolutionary” in a fascist colonized society.
Madness can be also considered as a strategy in the hand of Bessie Head and Elizabeth, to challenge the
normal way of narration and negotiation. Through her madness Elizabeth fuses worlds of reality and dream
and finds answer to her questions through suffering and her quest in companion with the “soul
personalities.” Bessie Head can also challenge the reader’s concept of reality as ideologically constructed
“attitude” through her specific way of narration. The reader is continually perplexed with Elizabeth’s
intermixed worlds and is compelled to read the book with “analytical mind.” Madness helps Head to let the
invisible, the ‘infamous,’ and the silenced speak. In this way, A Question of Power becomes an orchestra of
different voices, a “carnivalesque,” and a “multivocal” novel that resists the monolithic body of
colonization and apartheid. Through Elizabeth’s madness, Head lets different classes and ideas be heard.
The ‘soul personalities,’ the masses of poor that occupy insane Elizabeth’s nightmares, the African,
Afrikaners, women, Coloreds, and blacks all have given their voice through Elizabeth’s madness. Although
Elizabeth’s hybridity is inadvertent (i.e., Elizabeth’s birth to which she has been doomed), A Question of
Power is a deliberate political hybrid of different languages, strategies and ironies.
Through madness, Elizabeth is presented as an unreliable or maybe a highly reliable character. Her words
are highly philosophical and challenging. At the same time, one cannot determine whether they are
“delirious” words of a conventionally “insane” woman or the outcome of a highly conscious “unreason.” If
she is mad why then her “mind struggles with questions” (Head, 1974, p. 173).
Going mad as a refugee in Botswana—and then transforming that madness into writing—Bessie Head
violates more than one colonial stereotype and break a few rules. It was widely believed by colonialists in
Africa that women did not go mad. ‘African women,’ writes Megan Vaughan, ‘were said not to have
reached the level of self-awareness required to go mad’ (Vaugan,1990, p. 22).They lacked ‘interiority’ twice
over, as African and as woman’(Rose, 1994, p. 405).
Clare Counihan in ‘The Hell of Desire: Narrative, Identity and Utopia in A Question of Power’ argues
‘Elizabeth’s postcolonial “madness” results from the cultural and institutional demands of the normative
narratives of racial and national identity available to the subjects of postcolonial nations, and particularly
to black women’
A main reason for Elizabeth’s mental fragility is her sense of orphanage. She cannot think of any origin, or
parent, and history. This lack renders her identity and psychology as shattered and weak. In a description
of her birth, the narrator remarks: ‘Then he (Sello) turned and showed Elizabeth a small, round, deep
opening in the earth from which her soul had emerged. It was a black, shapeless mass with wings’ (Head,
1974, p. 43)
Post-Colonialism
“Bessie Head’s fiction transcends the narrow themes and tropes of postcolonial African fiction—the
victimology of European imperialism. Her narrative is universal and enduring—the human condition,
creatively woven into tales of overcoming personal struggles.” — BioDun Ogundayo, University of
Pittsburgh, Bradford
Bessie Head’s 1973 novel, A Question of Power, establishes a starting point in this trajectory of
decolonization with the exploration of local movement. Head’s novel examines the progression of post-
colonial development in the unique circumstances of twentieth-century South Africa. Head intervenes into
the dense cultural, historical, and national ideology that builds on the tension between dominant and
marginalized countries. The text considers post-WWII South Africa in the wake of gaining freedom from
British rule with the rise of Afrikaner Nationalism (1948) and the birth of an independent nation
established by a white minority of European descendants. The political ramifications of South African
independence, under the white minority, created an environment of systematic segregation (White, Black,
and Asian) that was normalized by governmental legislation and the institutionalization of apartheid. As a
narrative text, A Question of Power is able to analyze and critique South Africa’s dependence on failed
colonial ideology manifested in apartheid. Apartheid ideology judiciously stifled any concept of multi-
ethnic culture based on the bigoted notion that through the isolation of distinct ethnic groups, South
African national identity could be preserved and strengthened. A Question of Power functions as an act of
post-colonial progression through its use of a mulatta protagonist (Elizabeth) who disrupts the standards of
Western hegemony expressed in the skewed ideas of apartheid nationalism and assimilation. Instead,
Head’s narrative encourages new expressions of national culture in South Africa with Elizabeth’s re-
appropriation of her categorization (and rejection) as madwoman and mulatta. A Question of Power’s
incongruent narrative provides a preliminary moment in the trajectory of twentieth-century post-
coloniality. This approach allows for serious questioning of the concepts of national identity, native
ethnicity, and geographic location. This alteration allows for the conception of post-colonial identity that
can move away from the dominance of Western history, and thus, introduces a reinvention of the cultural
politics of decolonization. Bessie Head, as a third-world female author, provides an example of local
movement as connected to the question of nativism in post-colonial South Africa. A Question of Power
undertakes the lengthy task of cataloguing the development of independent South African cultural politics
throughout tumultuous incidents of tyranny, corruption, and industrialization. Head communicates these
themes through the abstract narration of Elizabeth the mulatta protagonist. Head is able to deal with these
complex topics by creating a protagonist with an identity splintered by mental anxiety. A Question of
Power avoids a one-dimensional presentation of a mad protagonist. Instead, Elizabeth’s mental illness
weaves her story into the novel’s portrayal of South Africa’s political history. Elizabeth characterizes South
Africa’s national narrative with two imagined personas, Sello and Dan, to represent different stages in the
country’s growth. The novel artfully layered complications of race, national identity, and modernizing
cultural politics. The text considers the difficulties of moving into an independent South Africa reliant on
apartheid nationality. This political system created a caste system tradition that trickles down onto the
native subject who functions under prejudiced national identity. Head communicates how the pressure of
these factors bear down on Elizabeth’s identity formation.
Bessie Head’s main symbol of cultural progress in A Question of Power is the protagonist Elizabeth.
Elizabeth’s identity functions allegorically as a means of examining both South African citizenship and
South Africa’s identity as a country. She embodies the confrontation between apartheid and multicultural
politics. A Question of Power’s narrative format reflects the protagonist’s experiences of mental
breakdown that splits the novel into sections where Elizabeth breaks from the reality of the novel to
express abstract internal hallucinations representative of the cultural history of South Africa. The novel
centers on the moment that induces Elizabeth’s 10 madness that is the crucial event of Elizabeth’s societal
labeling as mulatta and madwoman. As a South African woman, Elizabeth inherits apartheid’s legacy of
racial discrimination. Head uses the storyline of Elizabeth’s white mother’s act of miscegenation to
exemplify the conflicting tension present in twentieth-century South Africa: “You must be very careful.
Your mother was insane. If you’re not careful you’ll end up insane just like your mother” (Head 16). This
statement expresses Elizabeth’s defining moment, as her identity is both a threat to colonial ideology yet
also symbolic of the phenomenon of post-colonial and post-modern hybridity. Head uses Elizabeth’s
personal story of madness to expose and critique the harmful effects of racial bigotry and South African
apartheid. A Question of Power hinges on the unique perspective given by Elizabeth through her hybridity,
she not only narratives a story of personal identity but also addresses the building of independent South
Africa’s national story. Head’s novel creates a powerful counter-narrative that works to resolve the
repressive ideology first imprinted on South Africa by Western colonialism.
A Question of Power reveals how the oppressive influence of Western ideology functions as an
embedded social practice. The phrase “to be careful” warns Elizabeth that she will “end up just like her
mother,” and indicates an instance of cultural interpellation. As theorist Anissa Talahite explains, “A
Question of Power attempts to redefine ‘illness’ and ‘madness’ as constructions of the ‘other’” (2). Head
purposefully navigates the context of this othering of hybrid/postcolonial subjects. She shows how the
discriminatory misconception of hybridity comes from the ideology reminiscent of previous nineteenth-
century philosophy. As Amar Achieraiou’s explains that the nineteenth-century definition of hybridity is
limited to a “purely biological dimension” and expanded to include “racial degeneration.” Head’s storyline
of a distorted heritage of madness and exile is rooted in historically prejudiced ideas about race and 11
biological hybridity. A Question of Power’s narrative hopes to pivot away from these antiquated ideas and
transition South African culture into new considerations. A Question of Power’s plot alters the definition of
hybridity as Elizabeth seeks to find new identity for herself, and in turn a new understanding of what it
means to be South African. Similar to how Homi Bhabha describes hybridity as “moving away from
singularities of ‘class,’ ‘gender’, etc. as primary conceptual and organizational categories” (Bhabha 2-3), A
Question of Power helps to ground this contemporary shift into the post-modern with an internal
perspective, following the permeating legacy of colonial laws as they erode to form new meanings.
Elizabeth, as the narrator, gives a local representation of the future of South African identity, moving into
an autonomous home space free from apartheid’s obsession with race. A Question of Power focuses on
remedying the status of the native location by using decolonizing politics that can move away from local
movement and grow to include the counter-narrative of the immigrant.
Portrayal of Women
Bessie Head in her novel represents a complex picture of women. The novel can be considered as a
criticism of and a satirical comment on nationalistic representation of women. As Loomba argues, in order
to fashion his self the nationalist patriarchy needs to fashion his wife ‘into a fresh subservience.’ Giving
them titles like mother-country, they imply that a good woman is a housewife, an apolitical and docile
being never contributing in ex-kitchen activity; otherwise, she will be an excommunicated prostitute. The
commencement of the novel coincides with Elizabeth’s “remembering” her past memories of her mother’s
suicide due to the rigid nationalistic system of apartheid: ‘Your mother was a white woman. They had to
lock her up, as she having a child by a stable boy, who was a native’ . Ironically, it is the Mother-Africa that
kills Elizabeth’s mother. It is due to the Afrikaners’ racist segregating nationalism that Elizabeth, as a
coloured, loses both her mother and her home. Mother is a protective power that Elizabeth has been both
40 Mary Magdalene or Virgin Mary: Nationalism and the Concept of Woman in Bessie Head’s A Question of
Power literally (i.e. her real mother) and symbolically (i.e. her mother-country) deprived of. Shockingly, the
novel depicts how Mother-Africa protects her children selectively. Using a killer as the Mother-Africa,
Bessie Head not only challenges the patriarchy’s definition of gender roles, but also dismisses the idea of
nation as an idealized safe home, symbolically represented in the form of Medusa’s vagina, for all the
people. In the novel, Mother-Africa is represented in the form of Medusa, as a femme fatale, a Mary
Magdalene ‘with thunderbolts by means of which tortures Elizabeth.’ When Elizabeth enters the black
realm she hopes to be behaved as other oppressed people, she is looking for a place where people live
beside each other while enjoying a sense of belonging; however, Medusa, ‘the surface reality of Africa,’ the
pitiless mother disillusions her. South Africa’s ethnic nationalism has been represented in the form of
Medusa’s ‘abnormally constructed, like seven thousand vaginas in one’ . ‘Seven thousand vaginas in one’
indicates the highly shut-in, closed, fenced, and racist nationalism of both settlers and Africans where
Elizabeth as a miscegenation is not admitted. She is neither allowed to enter the mother’s womb nor has a
vagina or womb to be an ideal woman a good mother and a fertile soil for nationalists: Medusa was
smiling. She had some top secret information to impart to Elizabeth. It was about her vagina…’You haven’t
got anything near that, have you?’… Medusa said: ‘Africa is troubled waters, you know. I’m a powerful
swimmer in troubled waters. You’ll only drown here. You’re not linked up to the people. You don’t know
any African languages’ . As a coloured woman she is deprived of a woman’s most important prerequisite,
motherhood. Furthermore, Elizabeth’s mother with her heinous deed becomes a prostitute and therefore
a symbol of a “bad” woman for Afrikaner’s nationalism.Medusa as the Mother-Africa for Black
Consciousness is a complicit of Dan and Sello representatives of nationalist bourgeoisie . The hybrid
Elizabeth is a victim of both white settler’s nationalistic government and black nationalism of Black
Consciousness. It is mainly, based on this bitter experience that Elizabeth herself also rejects her
womanhood through rejecting her vagina and potentiality of motherhood. Due to having no mother and
mother-land, she rejects the nationalist idea of the role of ideal woman represented as an ideal mother.
Having suffered from the mother-country’s unjust behavior towards her daughter, Elizabeth can see
beneath the surface of the ‘laugh of Medusa’ and see the ugliness of nationalist’s reality. Moreover, being
mothered like being fathered means to be controlled. If the white colonizer uses paternal imagery to
control the immature black man, the black nationalist also uses maternal imagery to ostracize his power
through unifying the nation’s children. In both cases familial imagery dominates the human relationship
and gradates it. While the orphan Elizabeth seeks to find the universal brotherhood and sisterhood of
humankind.
Women have no autonomy of themselves. They cannot be concerned with ‘soul’ issues. Even the highest
of them is a docile follower of her husband.In nationalism, women are defined as ideal housewives or
prostitutes. Dan’s seventy-onenice-time girls are ideal sex objects.
The remarkable point is that these types of women only belong to the realm of incubus and nationalism
while in her everyday life, Elizabeth does not encounter with such kinds of women. The women are all
earning their livings through gardening, teaching, and farming. They work beside their men and even in the
absence of them. Kenosi the silent and brilliant friend of Elizabeth, Camilla (the white snobbish woman),
Mrs. Jones the old woman of the novel, Birgette the lonely girl, all are represented as active, political
(positively or negatively), and productive human beings. The garden becomes a place of solidarity for all
the women. Their cooperative work not only gives them activity and power (both economically and
spiritually), it also deconstructs their roles as passive mother-countries. In this way they become powerful
subjects with autonomous identity. The art-teacher who is a woman uses Elizabeth’s cauliflower as a
model of art, a still-life art. In her real life and gardening, Elizabeth comes across women as ordinary
human beings with multidimensional attributes. Elizabeth by no means is an ideal woman representative of
the nationalistic concept of woman as mother-country.19 She has an analytical mind that is why Dan (the
millionaire nationalist bourgeoisie) attacks her “head’ the way he attacks his girls” “vaginas.” Bessie Head
deliberately disregards the role of woman as a docile follower and passive receiver of the roles. She creates
a woman, who defines her roles and constructs a new society that is by no means nationalistic. Nation
reminds her of ethnic prejudices, exclusion, and marginalization. Elizabeth defies this idea through her
cooperation in the development of the economy of Motabeng and her analytical mind. She refuses to be
Dan’s doll and on her way to realize the true concept of humanity, rejects the essential implication of race
and identity.
Despite being an outcast, a minor subaltern who is doomed to be suppressed and to follow the intellectual
elite, we see that, Elizabeth, in this way, dismisses the elite/subaltern hierarchical relationship. Getting
disappointed by the black world of nationalism, Elizabeth goes to her grey world where she disregards
these labels in favor of ordinariness. For her, ordinary people are God-like and powerful. These people are
conscious and effective not the power-maniac elites like Dan and Sello who are unaware of the potentials
of the ordinariness and the ‘unwritten laws.’ The hollow men brought up by colonizers to support their
benefits.
Elizabeth of AQP is an anti-conventional woman who tries to resist the dehabilitating condition of
nationalism. Disregarding woman’s role as a passive symbol of good mother or prostitute, she is in search
of ordinariness when a woman is a human being. Her hybridity helps her to violate the traditional
borderlines of the colonizer and the nationalist’s racist worldviews. She becomes an interstitial who wants
to establish a ‘third space,’ to quote Bhabha, where every human being is a ‘God’ and Elizabeth is his/ her
prophet. Elizabeth in her life in the diaspora of Botswana begins to build a new society based on
communality. Her society is an amalgamation of different races, different sexes where all the people can
cooperate and build an Eden-like garden free from racial, sexual and patriarchal presuppositions.
In both nationalism and colonialism, women are both racially and sexually oppressed. One of the main
reasons for this conduct of the nationalist patriarchy is his wish to rehabilitate his stature in the face of the
colonizing patriarchy. The colonizer unmans the colonized man through seeing him as a ‘boy.’

Symbol of Garden:
The garden in A Question of Power is closely connected to themes of the land and exile in both Bessie
Head's life and work. Head's self-imposed exile in Botswana in the 1960s had a key role in her development
as a writer as it provided a setting in
which to explore the themes of belonging, identity, and roots away from the turmoil of apartheid South
Africa. Her portrayal of Botswana is often that of an idealized land untainted by the effects of colonialism, a
Garden of Eden before the Fall. As she writes, "South Africa, with its sense of ravages and horror, has lost
that image of an Africa, ancient and existing since time immemorial, but in Botswana the presence of the
timeless and immemorial is everywhere - in people, in animals, in everyday life and custom and tradition"
(qtd. in Daymond, Jacobs, and Lenta 278). The description of the landscape reflects Head's Utopian longing
for roots and for a society where one could live at peace with oneself. Head found in the land of Botswana
the emotional distance from which to write about the trauma of apartheid and a sense of roots and
identity that enabled her to write and recreate herself outside the restrictive and uncreative boundaries
erected by racism. In A Question of Power, the garden plays a similar role in acting as a refuge from the
intensity and the trauma of racism and colo- nialism which Elisabeth, the protagonist, experienced before
her exile into Botswana.
Placed in contrast with the mental institution, the garden is presented as a place of healing and
recovery. One of the originalities of the text is its movements between inner reality (Elisabeth's mental
illness) and outer reality (everyday life in the village of Motabeng, which is centred on the garden and the
community's efforts to set up the agricultural project). With no transition at all, the setting moves between
the bed- room where Elisabeth experiences hallucinations and the garden where she connects with
"ordinary" reality. Representing reconciliation and wholeness in the face of the division created by social
systems, this idyllic garden stands in sharp contrast with the Manichaeism embodied in Sello and Dan, two
authoritarian figures who appear during Elisabeth's bouts of psychic delusion and who divide the novel into
two bearing their respective names.
Gardening, thus, becomes in the novel a metaphor for finding a hybrid space for cross-cultural
connections to take place.
n 44). It seems much safer for Elisabeth to retreat into the world of the garden, a microcosm that brings
together a small group of lonely individuals like her rather than a group based on cultural or ethnic modes
of identification. The volunteers represent a challenge to official structures and an example of sustainable
development based on self-help and community support. Mrs. Jones, the left-wing English activist whose
Christian commitment to duty irritates Elisabeth; Tom, the American volunteer with whom she shares
philosophical conversations; Birgette from the Danish team of volunteers who becomes her friend; and
Kenosi, the local Batswana woman whom she regards as a "goddess" are all individuals who represent a
safe haven from group ideologies per- ceived in the novel as exclusive.A place of experimentation and
creativity, the garden stands as a contrast to ster- ile ideologies (whether racialism or nationalism) based
on segregation and separate- ness. It represents the place of "hybridity" par excellence.
What seems to matter is not the actual outcome but the collective process of "planting the seeds," a
symbol for what Head saw as the future of South Africa and the struc- tural reorganization of society that
would eventually follow the end of aparthied.
ns, Head touches on issues that were to become key in contemporary debates on ecology. The
interconnectedness of biodiversity and multiculturalism has increasingly been highlighted by
environmentalists who have attempted to reinter- pret and politicize the ways in which the natural
environment has traditionally been understood
Part of Head's social critique present in the image of the garden is the search for a"space" both literally and
metaphorically. Gina Wisker argues that contemporary South African women's writing tends to be
characterized by such as quest. As she
observes, "at home, exiled in the diaspora, travelling, displaced, and/or returning- space, place and the
people in that social context enable self-definition, the establishment and maintenance of an identity, a
sense of belonging, and a place from which to grow, develop and improve in the imagination, a place from
which to plan and build, create and project forward positive developments and alternatives" . Head's
vegetable garden could be seen as such as space of transition "from which to grow" and project into the
future.