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A Question of Power
In the village of Motabeng, Botswana - the place of sand - Elizabeth and her son have made their new home, far away from their old life in South Africa. But the past cannot be conveniently left behind at the border. Even though she may be free to reinvent herself in this new country, Elizabeth's mixed racial heritage and urban ways mark her as an outsider. A mind-bending novel that takes the reader in and out of sanity, this semi-autobiographical work tracks Elizabeth's struggle to emerge from the oppressive social situation in which she finds herself and from the nightmares and hallucinations that torment her.
200 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1973
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About the author
Bessie Head
49 books199 followersBessie Emery Head, though born in South Africa, is usually considered Botswana's most influential writer.
Bessie Emery Head was born in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, the child of a wealthy white South African woman and a black servant when interracial relationships were illegal in South Africa. It was claimed that her mother was mentally ill so that she could be sent to a quiet location to give birth to Bessie without the neighbours knowing. However, the exact circumstances are disputed, and some of Bessie Head's comments, though often quoted as straight autobiography, are in fact from fictionalized settings.
In the 1950s and '60s she was a teacher, then a journalist for the South African magazine Drum. In 1964 she moved to Botswana (then still the Bechuanaland Protectorate) as a refugee, having been peripherally involved with Pan-African politics. It would take 15 years for Head to obtain Botswana citizenship. Head settled in Serowe, the largest of Botswana's "villages" (i.e. traditional settlements as opposed to settler towns). Serowe was famous both for its historical importance, as capital of the Bamangwato people, and for the experimental Swaneng school of Patrick van Rensburg. The deposed chief of the Bamangwato, Seretse Khama, was soon to become the first President of independent Botswana.
Her early death in 1986 (aged 48) from hepatitis came just at the point where she was starting to achieve recognition as a writer and was no longer so desperately poor.
Bessie Emery Head was born in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, the child of a wealthy white South African woman and a black servant when interracial relationships were illegal in South Africa. It was claimed that her mother was mentally ill so that she could be sent to a quiet location to give birth to Bessie without the neighbours knowing. However, the exact circumstances are disputed, and some of Bessie Head's comments, though often quoted as straight autobiography, are in fact from fictionalized settings.
In the 1950s and '60s she was a teacher, then a journalist for the South African magazine Drum. In 1964 she moved to Botswana (then still the Bechuanaland Protectorate) as a refugee, having been peripherally involved with Pan-African politics. It would take 15 years for Head to obtain Botswana citizenship. Head settled in Serowe, the largest of Botswana's "villages" (i.e. traditional settlements as opposed to settler towns). Serowe was famous both for its historical importance, as capital of the Bamangwato people, and for the experimental Swaneng school of Patrick van Rensburg. The deposed chief of the Bamangwato, Seretse Khama, was soon to become the first President of independent Botswana.
Her early death in 1986 (aged 48) from hepatitis came just at the point where she was starting to achieve recognition as a writer and was no longer so desperately poor.
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December 8, 2014
This is Bessie Head. She died at the tragically young age of 48 just as she was starting to receive the recognition she deserved as a writer. Much of her work is still in print, though it remains under-read outside of the Academy (or so I have been informed by a good friend who teaches in this area).
"....You must be very careful. Your mother was insane. If you're not careful you'll get insane just like your mother. Your mother was a white woman. They had to lock her up, as she was having a child by the stable boy, who was a native."
We are situated in the realm of the explicitly autobiographical (as the above is true for both Bessie and Elizabeth, as is much else in this novel) but the text also speaks from the perspective of madness, of a consciousness unable to discriminate between illusion and reality, between nightmare and daydream. This makes the text "difficult".
A woman of colour, existing at an epicenter of power - patriarchy, racism, colonialism...Under such pressures madness is inevitable. For Head the forces ranged against her include rejection by Black Culture - for as a woman of mixed-race, exiled to Botswana from South Africa, she is Other to all, and truly alone.
“Do you think I can bear the stigma of insanity alone? Share it with me”
As a white man, true sharing is impossible for me. But I can listen, I can recognize, I can be humbled by it, be reminded of the need for constant vigilance. I think we are meant to read Tom as, in part, an example - to be there, to ask how best we can help and to accept the legitimacy of the anger we are met with.
" She had seen two large, familiar black hands move towards her head. They had opened her skull. He’d bent his mouth towards the cavity and talked right into the exposed area. His harsh, grating voice unintelligible. It just said: “Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrraaaaaaaaa.” It had shot through her body with the pain of knife wounds. She’d pulled and pulled, struggling to free herself of the hands holding her head. She’d awoken gasping for breath. "
What is interesting is that for Head, madness is not weakness, it is resistance. It is enabling. It has a power. Madness and Spirituality are closely intertwined. And sometimes it is the only way open to fight back. The dynamics of Power force themselves into and onto her, and her insanity allows her to spit them back out. To form them into illusions she can face.
"The victim is really the most flexible, the most free person on earth. He doesn't have to think up endless laws and endless falsehoods. His jailer does that. His jailer creates the chains and the oppression. He is merely presented with it. He is presented with a thousand and one hells to live through, and he usually lives through them all."
Thankfully there is much on the internet already about this book, for those of you interested, and enough reviews on here to give you a good idea as sadly I don't have time today to give this book the detailed treatment it deserves.
For any of you interested in issues of gender, race and colonialism (which really should be all of you), this is essential reading.
December 16, 2015
It was a life…with its own slow, weaving, gentle pattern.
Think you know her? She is a mother who fears motherhood, or what she could do to her child, so she refers to her son as "the small boy." Still, her fear is not unfounded, so you think you know her, this school worker and all.
We are doubtful of your sanity, and request that you submit to us a certificate of sanity from the medical officer within fourteen days of receipt of this notice.
She's an enigma, this woman who lives in death, who conquers darkness through the "soul-talk" she has with two men. Elizabeth exists in a world of "metaphysical profundities" that makes it difficult to reach her, to examine her thoughts, a world that makes this narrative a difficult one to thread.
Think you know her story because she is a single mother leaving a husband who sleeps with anyone who crosses his path (literally)? Her mother was an insane, white, English-woman living in South Africa, who slept with the black "stable boy" and was locked up in an asylum, so you know her story of biracial strife and abandonment? She flees to Botswana, to Motabeng, a little town of mud huts and sand, so maybe it's possible you can take a guess at her story, right? Try and you'll realize you've never encountered anything so psychologically disturbing and so uniquely literary. You don't know her, and you never will, for even she doesn't know herself; you will never truly understand the presences of Sello, Dan, and Medusa.
She was like a person driven out of her own house while demons rampaged within, turning everything upside down.
Call it magical realism, call it psychological horror, or call it whatever you may. This is fiction bound in the sort of African (and worldly, I must add) realism you don't read, or hear discussed often. It is brutally bewildering and fragmented in its insight. Interwoven throughout the narrative are educational tidbits about Botswana, South Africa, post-colonialism, and all of the physical and psychological madness that comes with socio-economic change.
Her loud wail had only the logic of her inner torment, but it was the same thing; the evils overwhelming her were beginning to sound like South Africa from which she had fled.
October 22, 2013
This book is about Elizabeth, a South African mother who has migrated to small town of Motabeng in Botswana. Her uprooting makes her mentally unstable and the harsh surroundings perpetuated her illness. She loses the love of her domineering husband, gets entangled with a handsome lover and makes her view the world like everything is falling into pieces until the rescue comes in the end.
What makes this book worth reading is the scary way Head captures the mind of a woman who, in her isolation, plays the claustrophobic world in her mind. There are many scenes in the narration that do not actually happen. Sometimes, it is hard to tell which ones belong to the reality, which ones do not. The beautiful narration was mesmerizing and there were times that I thought I was seeing the real action because of the way Head captured the scenic African setting.
Reading the first page of the book that is about Bessie Head gives one the idea that this book is based on her real life. I think very few of my Goodreads friends know her. But she is also, like her protagonist Elizabeth, born in South Africa and had a teaching post in Botswana. She was born in 1937 (same year as my late father), got a Botswanan citizenship in 1979 and died in 1986 when she was just 49.
She wrote this book in 1973 when she was just 36.
What makes this book worth reading is the scary way Head captures the mind of a woman who, in her isolation, plays the claustrophobic world in her mind. There are many scenes in the narration that do not actually happen. Sometimes, it is hard to tell which ones belong to the reality, which ones do not. The beautiful narration was mesmerizing and there were times that I thought I was seeing the real action because of the way Head captured the scenic African setting.
Reading the first page of the book that is about Bessie Head gives one the idea that this book is based on her real life. I think very few of my Goodreads friends know her. But she is also, like her protagonist Elizabeth, born in South Africa and had a teaching post in Botswana. She was born in 1937 (same year as my late father), got a Botswanan citizenship in 1979 and died in 1986 when she was just 49.
She wrote this book in 1973 when she was just 36.
April 14, 2023
Like Trevor Noah, the author of this book, Bessie Head, was ‘born a crime’ - having a white mother and a black father in South Africa in 1937. Her mother, hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital when Bessie was born, remained there until her death when Bessie was still a young child.
Until Bessie was 12 she was raised by a ‘coloured’ family, believing they were her biological family. She was then removed from the woman she believed to be her mother and sent to what was then St. Monica's Diocesan Home for Coloured Girls. She spent six years there, where she discovered books. At 13 she was abruptly told that she was the child of an 'insane' white woman and an unknown 'native' man and never allowed to return home. Her resulting struggle with issues of identity were lifelong, exacerbated by the racism in South Africa where, at one point, she was arrested in association with the anti-apartheid struggle. Not black, not white and later not really Batswana, in her adopted country, not a real member of any tribe, she lived a life marked by loneliness.
This is a difficult novel, admittedly autobiographical, tracing our protagonist Elizabeth’s miserable descent (or sideways slide?) into schizophrenia, or perhaps psychotic depression. Her hallucinations are orchestrated, narrated, driven by 2 men (Sello and Dan) seemingly fashioned on real men in her community. Maybe. She may have met them briefly. Sello, sometimes referred to as the monk, discusses religion, often Buddhist, occasionally Hindu and Islamic references, and may represent the complicated struggle for good:
“He always moved three paces behind, calmly, unhurriedly, the collector of the details.”
Dan is pure evil. Why they were the directors of her insanity is never clear. Do they represent some patriarchal power?
In her head they have demonic, obscene, horrendous, perverted manifestations, controlling her dreams, her nightmares, and leaving her very paranoid.
Eventually her waking behavior becomes that of a classic simple schizophrenic screaming at the world the rest of us can’t see, complete with grandiosity:
“In this state, he talked through her. They were hisses of hate. They were anything he pleased to say about people, anything he wished done. There was nothing in her to check the onrush of hell. And all the while the dirty little bastard moved around the village of Motabeng, grinning. Why, he and Sello had the performance of their lives. They operated the affairs of the universe in secret behind the scenes, but he, Dan, intended coming out top dog. The prophecies had to be smashed…”
I don’t want to assume “crazy” when I read a book outside of my cultural reference point (see “the Danes” below). How much would we miss of the Yoruba if we read Tutuola that way? Or the magic Candomble in Amado? Easy to take Lightning Bolts as metaphor, but what if we don’t? What if they’re real? A real part of the story? How would Thor, or Zeus, have treated us? I’d rather start out believing.
And there really is a fine line between schizophrenia and genius.
But this became overwhelming, exhausting. I did not enjoy reading the ongoing, accelerating, torture of her hallucinations that made up the majority of the book.
“Not anything was alive in her except her body.”
Our protagonist is eventually hospitalized and treated. She improves. She heals. Sort of?
Even at the end, when it’s over, she’s still chatting with Sello. But now from a place of peace and “power”. They agree:
“...the source of human suffering was God itself, personalities in possession of powers or energies of the soul. Ordinary people never mucked up the universe. They don’t have that kind of power, wild and flaring out of proportion. They have been the victims of it…”
So I wonder: isn’t this just her manic phase? Or is Sello real and conducting a magical drama that drove her mad for a while? Was this work that needed doing? Like on a higher level…One Love?
Was I right that this wasn’t madness, this was the Bush of Ghosts and we all missed it?
One delightful vignette as Elizabeth describes how the Black youth who join the project are seen by a group of Danes running the Youth Development Work Groups in the Botswana village, and how she views the Danes:
“The only requirement for joining… was a slight acquaintance with English. Otherwise genius would arise overnight… They spent all their sunset hours of leisure denigrating their pupils. Apparently they had a high standard of culture and civilization in Denmark.”
Later, the Danes are speaking amongst themselves about Danish literature:
“There’s a whole lot of novelists no one can understand. Their minds reflect the complexity of our culture.
...It never occurred to her that these authors had ceased to be of any value whatsoever to their society - or was it really true that an extreme height of culture and the incomprehensible went hand in hand?”
Until Bessie was 12 she was raised by a ‘coloured’ family, believing they were her biological family. She was then removed from the woman she believed to be her mother and sent to what was then St. Monica's Diocesan Home for Coloured Girls. She spent six years there, where she discovered books. At 13 she was abruptly told that she was the child of an 'insane' white woman and an unknown 'native' man and never allowed to return home. Her resulting struggle with issues of identity were lifelong, exacerbated by the racism in South Africa where, at one point, she was arrested in association with the anti-apartheid struggle. Not black, not white and later not really Batswana, in her adopted country, not a real member of any tribe, she lived a life marked by loneliness.
This is a difficult novel, admittedly autobiographical, tracing our protagonist Elizabeth’s miserable descent (or sideways slide?) into schizophrenia, or perhaps psychotic depression. Her hallucinations are orchestrated, narrated, driven by 2 men (Sello and Dan) seemingly fashioned on real men in her community. Maybe. She may have met them briefly. Sello, sometimes referred to as the monk, discusses religion, often Buddhist, occasionally Hindu and Islamic references, and may represent the complicated struggle for good:
“He always moved three paces behind, calmly, unhurriedly, the collector of the details.”
Dan is pure evil. Why they were the directors of her insanity is never clear. Do they represent some patriarchal power?
In her head they have demonic, obscene, horrendous, perverted manifestations, controlling her dreams, her nightmares, and leaving her very paranoid.
Eventually her waking behavior becomes that of a classic simple schizophrenic screaming at the world the rest of us can’t see, complete with grandiosity:
“In this state, he talked through her. They were hisses of hate. They were anything he pleased to say about people, anything he wished done. There was nothing in her to check the onrush of hell. And all the while the dirty little bastard moved around the village of Motabeng, grinning. Why, he and Sello had the performance of their lives. They operated the affairs of the universe in secret behind the scenes, but he, Dan, intended coming out top dog. The prophecies had to be smashed…”
I don’t want to assume “crazy” when I read a book outside of my cultural reference point (see “the Danes” below). How much would we miss of the Yoruba if we read Tutuola that way? Or the magic Candomble in Amado? Easy to take Lightning Bolts as metaphor, but what if we don’t? What if they’re real? A real part of the story? How would Thor, or Zeus, have treated us? I’d rather start out believing.
And there really is a fine line between schizophrenia and genius.
But this became overwhelming, exhausting. I did not enjoy reading the ongoing, accelerating, torture of her hallucinations that made up the majority of the book.
“Not anything was alive in her except her body.”
Our protagonist is eventually hospitalized and treated. She improves. She heals. Sort of?
Even at the end, when it’s over, she’s still chatting with Sello. But now from a place of peace and “power”. They agree:
“...the source of human suffering was God itself, personalities in possession of powers or energies of the soul. Ordinary people never mucked up the universe. They don’t have that kind of power, wild and flaring out of proportion. They have been the victims of it…”
So I wonder: isn’t this just her manic phase? Or is Sello real and conducting a magical drama that drove her mad for a while? Was this work that needed doing? Like on a higher level…One Love?
Was I right that this wasn’t madness, this was the Bush of Ghosts and we all missed it?
One delightful vignette as Elizabeth describes how the Black youth who join the project are seen by a group of Danes running the Youth Development Work Groups in the Botswana village, and how she views the Danes:
“The only requirement for joining… was a slight acquaintance with English. Otherwise genius would arise overnight… They spent all their sunset hours of leisure denigrating their pupils. Apparently they had a high standard of culture and civilization in Denmark.”
Later, the Danes are speaking amongst themselves about Danish literature:
“There’s a whole lot of novelists no one can understand. Their minds reflect the complexity of our culture.
...It never occurred to her that these authors had ceased to be of any value whatsoever to their society - or was it really true that an extreme height of culture and the incomprehensible went hand in hand?”
April 19, 2019
This one is about a woman who has a mental illness. At the current moment she has moved from her home country (which was in Africa) to another in Africa, and is struggling to adapt to the displacement and the different way of living.
What I really liked about this book is that it really shows how even when you are moving within the same continent, and within cultures where some things may be done the way you would at home, there can be startling differences which still make it very hard to adapt. I liked seeing that struggle and how the main character handled it.
But at the same time, I was so, so confused. The way the metal illness was portrayed left me not knowing what was happening at times, or what was real and what wasn't real. But at the same time, I think it was /meant/ to do that. Because the main character herself is also struggling to determine what is and isn't real. The reader feels her confusion and wants to break free from it too. It also goes to show how people can help and reach her at times, and at other times there is no helping her at all. It was scary, and uncomfortable, and just as intense as a mental illness like this could be (I presume, as I do not know from a firsthand experience.)
So while it didn't make for the easiest or more enjoyable reading experience, I feel like the book accomplishes what it sets out to do.
I liked Elizabeth. I liked the portrayal of children. I thought the themes of heaven and hell, and good and bad, were very interesting. It definitely got me thinking although it was quite hard to process while trying to understand what was going on at the same time.
Surprisingly, the end of the book filled me with happiness. I think it was because of the characters development, what Elizabeth went through and the conclusions she reached? I'm not even certain. But the book definitely did leave me with a happy feeling at the end of it.
It's a fictional book, but because of how intense and the way it is written, it felt like reading autobiographical fictional. I haven't done my research so I am not entirely sure what Bessie Head experienced in her life... but I'm more so talking from the way it felt.
Read for university.
What I really liked about this book is that it really shows how even when you are moving within the same continent, and within cultures where some things may be done the way you would at home, there can be startling differences which still make it very hard to adapt. I liked seeing that struggle and how the main character handled it.
But at the same time, I was so, so confused. The way the metal illness was portrayed left me not knowing what was happening at times, or what was real and what wasn't real. But at the same time, I think it was /meant/ to do that. Because the main character herself is also struggling to determine what is and isn't real. The reader feels her confusion and wants to break free from it too. It also goes to show how people can help and reach her at times, and at other times there is no helping her at all. It was scary, and uncomfortable, and just as intense as a mental illness like this could be (I presume, as I do not know from a firsthand experience.)
So while it didn't make for the easiest or more enjoyable reading experience, I feel like the book accomplishes what it sets out to do.
I liked Elizabeth. I liked the portrayal of children. I thought the themes of heaven and hell, and good and bad, were very interesting. It definitely got me thinking although it was quite hard to process while trying to understand what was going on at the same time.
Surprisingly, the end of the book filled me with happiness. I think it was because of the characters development, what Elizabeth went through and the conclusions she reached? I'm not even certain. But the book definitely did leave me with a happy feeling at the end of it.
It's a fictional book, but because of how intense and the way it is written, it felt like reading autobiographical fictional. I haven't done my research so I am not entirely sure what Bessie Head experienced in her life... but I'm more so talking from the way it felt.
Read for university.
Read
October 7, 2024“Love isn't like that. Love is two people mutually feeding each other, not one living on the soul of another, like a ghoul.”
My first encounter with Bessie Head happened when I was in high school, even though I wouldn’t read her—a good thing retrospectively, until some years ago. My English and Literature teacher, Mrs. Dhulo, sensing my appetite for books—probably with the way I engaged with the curriculum’s set books, and aware that my familial circumstances didn’t furnish me with any (conservative christian evangelical upbringing skeptical of and rejecting anything unrelated to biblical text), in a kind gesture that I haven’t forgotten since, gave my father a list of books he was supposed to buy me during a teacher-parent conference day. The books were all fiction books by major African writers: Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Chinua Achebe, Mariama Ba, Bessie Head, Wole Soyinka, Buchi Emecheta. In those years, Nairobi’s literary scene hadn’t blossomed to what it has become today. There were few bookshops selling fiction, and they didn't really have many books by African writers (or at least didn’t when my father went to buy the books), so that while I got to read Achebe and Thiong’o (both wonderful writers), it wasn’t until years later through delightful and unexpected discoveries in local libraries, the bookshelves of friends, and later with more bookshops centered on African writers emerging in the city, that I got to read Bessie Head and the other African writers that weren’t Achebe or Ngugi. It was love at first read with Bessie Head (unfortunately there’s still hardly any bookshops selling her work in Nairobi).
My feeling of kinship for the exiled and dispossessed aside, her work, which was turned to the inside in an effort to examine human nature, as opposed to what some of her African male peers were doing (equally important work) of turning outside themselves in an effort to be representative and offer cultural reference for and of post-independent Africa, fascinated and appealed to me.
In this particular book, Bessie Head goes to the interiors of the human mind and heart in even greater depth. Elizabeth, the protagonist, shares many similarities with the writer Bessie Head. She’s a South African exile in Botswana, is the daughter of a white woman and a Black man and is categorized as colored (different racial structure from either Black or white in South Africa), has a small son, and is ill. Much of this book is madness with few moments of lucidity; hallucinations that are disturbing, repelling, repulsive, repetitive, disjointed, and unceasing, and goes on to the point of Elizabeth being admitted to a horrible mental institution. Elizabeth tries to find ways to bring harmony within herself by attempting to arrange her outside world; she makes and arranges her small house with neatness and care, and learns vegetable gardening.
“If such a beauty and harmony built up in her outward circumstances it was at total odds with the tormented hell of her inner world.”
At the same time, Elizabeth struggles to find definitions of goodness, reconciling the evils of racism and oppression and harming others to the nature of human beings, and discovering the ways in which, even in periods of harmony and order, goodness in the outside world doesn’t necessarily translate to harmony in the interior world within.
“Elizabeth was never to regain a sense of security or stability on the question of how patterns of goodness were too soft, too indefinable to counter the tumultuous roar of evil. Why else was that whole year lost to her, when so much of life around her unfolded with beautiful harmony?”
There were moments reading this that I wanted Elizabeth to get better, not for any reason but so that the narrative could become clearer. My expectations of prose to elucidate have always been such that I have a difficult time with books that are disorienting, and this was undoubtedly my most disorienting reading experience: a book meant to reproduce the disorienting nature of mental upheaval. I can’t honestly say that I enjoyed reading this book, but it has broadened my understanding of what prose can do and made me question my expectations of prose in that way. Maru remains my favorite Bessie Head novel, but I appreciate the significance of this book, both in its time of publication and now, and even think that this might be Head’s best work in the way she stretches and defies certain conventions of the (African) novel.
April 22, 2025
Humility, which is a platitude of saints and recommended for the good life, could be acquired far too drastically in Africa.It's never a good feeling when your personal average rating for an author drops from a 4.5 to a 3.6. Of course, lord knows I'm not in the best state for the difficult or the international reading, enough of a damned if you do, sure glad make money off this I don't for my current stamina levels. Indeed, my lack of stability is why I've veered towards revisiting women of color that I have unread works of on my shelves, of which Head is one I had been dabbling in with success since 2017. It was just my luck that this third work of hers was the one I dove in the most willy nilly, as not only does it have the baggage of being a 1001 BBYD work, it was also written after Head's major psychotic episode of 1969 and, from all appearances, her most autobiographical.
It doesn't take an English professor to deem that such a piece would benefit from far more accompanying contextual material than Achebe's pithy introduction to the entire publishing imprint, but with the continued state of the Anglo publishing market's relationship with Botswanan or any African literature that hasn't been granted a Nobel Prize for Lit, I have my doubts such an edition exists even fifty years after this work's publication. I did put some digital search engine effort into understanding the morass of homophobia forming a cornerstone to the main character's geist of evil and trauma, but I needed something more than a vague hand waving at an entire continent during the latter half of the 20th c., especially with a text so unremittingly and repetitively tortured. I get that that's the point, but when such a piece is one of the few works by an African woman included in the 1001, one has to wonder at the initiating priorities and the consequent first impressions.
For all that, I've been spared the worst due to this being my third by Head rather than my first, as I've sustained my interest in reading her, with a revisit of Maru looking increasingly attractive. All in all, in the midst of this was a story of gardening and politics and growth, but given the hate surging full throttle today, I'm not in the mood to endear myself to reading that would prove my downfall in court any more than my critical literacy behooves me to.
It is impossible to become a vegetable gardener without at the same time coming into contact with the wonderful strangeness of human nature.
August 8, 2008
This book is difficult to follow but I liked it much. it disorients you with its narrative style and then fills you with images and emotions that linger and drift away like a dream you can't let go.
June 22, 2010
Stunning and hypnotic. You really feel like you are riding on the crazy train with her.
August 1, 2021
DNF - 27%
São muitos sonhos, delírios e alucinações para o meu gosto!
43/198 – Botswana
São muitos sonhos, delírios e alucinações para o meu gosto!
43/198 – Botswana
September 20, 2022
3.5 stars. A challenging, original novel about the agonies raging in the mind of a black woman who moves from South Africa to Botswana. The protagonist, Elizabeth, is a black woman whose father was white. Elizabeth is mentally unstable. She was a school teacher but leaves her job after she loses control of herself in a classroom. She has a son and is tormented by two men, Dan and Sello. Sello is a monk like figure and Dan, a sadistic seducer. The author never allows the reader to know whether these figures are supernatural apparitions of ancient souls or the figments of a disordered mind.
The book is semi autobiographical.
This novel was first published in 1974.
The book is semi autobiographical.
This novel was first published in 1974.
March 13, 2009
This is a very disturbing book. The narrator is suffering from mental illness, and her narration, obviously, conflates "reality" with her hallucinations (not sure that is the proper medical term). I found quite a bit of the symbolism of her dreams/delusions hard to sort out. However, the narrator, Elizabeth, is a mixed race woman from South Africa who has moved to a village in Botswana. She feels alienated and alone due to her racial and ethnic differences from the local people, many of whom ignore her. In addition, she feels gender oppression as well. It is a difficult book, but certain passages clearly express the frustration of a person without a means of communicating with people around her. One clearly feels her fear and sense of disorientation.
May 6, 2012
The language used to describe the protagonist's bouts of insanity blows the mind. I re-read passages every now and then just to get a fix.
March 16, 2013
I honestly hated the entire first half of this novel, but once I started, along with Elizabeth, making sense of her nightmares and hallucinations, I discovered the beauty of what Bessie Head is doing with this text. Elizabeth is a Faust-like character in that she figuratively exchanges her sanity and soul for madness and martyrdom. After experiencing three brutal years of mind control at the hands of the fictitious Sello and Dan (who represent both God and the Devil at once in Elizabeth's mind), Elizabeth embraces her suffering, because she sees it as having advanced humanity, and more specifically the town of Motabeng, Botswana, where she goes to escape the brutalities she was experiencing in her native South Africa because of racism. For a woman to suffer such delusions and be so convinced that she will, at an appointed time, commit suicide and leave her young son behind, yet somehow view her suffering as a beautiful lesson, is a remarkable message that Head leaves us at the end. The relationship she develops with the American character Tom is another aspect of this story that I really loved. Half the time, I didn't even know what I had just read, but by the end, Head's intentions were so clear to me that I raced to finish. A truly captivating story about what can happen if you're seen as an outsider in southern Africa because of your mixed race, but also about the redeeming and cleansing places you can go as a result of this marginality.
July 5, 2017
This book was a challenge owing to its subject matter of mental illness in the context of a post-colonial setting in Botswana, and also in the context of racial identity and issues of belonging. Though Head wrote more or less a straight narrative, she weaved from the every "normal" existence of the main character to her bouts of intense nightmares that lasted for about one and half years including a whole year of sleeplessness and trips to the mental hospital. Once I was able to discern the pattern, the book became more sensible to me. The nightmares have meaning, which Head resolves at the end of the text. While Head walked us through the main character's ordeal, it was difficult to grasp the greater and larger meaning of those nightmares. Were they allegories dealing with the struggle between good and evil that resides in each of us? Or was it more on the macro-level and societal and structural level? It was, and still is, difficult to digest. One thing, though: Head succeeded in creating a main character, a bi-racial woman, that causes the reader to empathize with her struggles inwardly and outwardly.
February 6, 2016
Bessie Head as usual did not disappoint. I'm an avid fan of her work and I enjoyed "A Question of Power" thoroughly.
It is one of those books you have to chew on bite by bite lest you miss out on the good parts. I like how Bessie tackles heavy topics such as racism, poverty, inequality, religion and sex. She uses her style of writing to discuss fundamental issues that are serious underlying societal issues in a very creative and narrative way. Through her characters she is able to explore the relationship of men with God, the function of the soul in a human's life, the existence of another world parallel to the one we live in, the wealth of the earth, economic development,tribalism, xenophobia, etc etc...
This book is rich, I recommend it not just to a lover of books but to thinkers and to all those that like challenging the status quo
It is one of those books you have to chew on bite by bite lest you miss out on the good parts. I like how Bessie tackles heavy topics such as racism, poverty, inequality, religion and sex. She uses her style of writing to discuss fundamental issues that are serious underlying societal issues in a very creative and narrative way. Through her characters she is able to explore the relationship of men with God, the function of the soul in a human's life, the existence of another world parallel to the one we live in, the wealth of the earth, economic development,tribalism, xenophobia, etc etc...
This book is rich, I recommend it not just to a lover of books but to thinkers and to all those that like challenging the status quo
March 30, 2019
Misschien heb ik het gewoon niet zo voor boeken die vanuit het standpunt van iemand die waanzinnig wordt/is geschreven zijn. Ik vind het enkel maar de moeite, denk ik, als ik op het einde merk dat het de inspanning waard geweest is: als het worstelen door onleesbare stukken geleid heeft tot een inzicht of een bepaald gevoel.
Tussen de waanzin door bevat dit boek enkele krachtige stukken over de Afrikaanse identiteit. Voor mensen die meer zin en tijd hebben dan ik om dit boek te doorgronden, valt hier zeker wat te rapen.
Ikzelf ben vooral blij dat het uit is.
Tussen de waanzin door bevat dit boek enkele krachtige stukken over de Afrikaanse identiteit. Voor mensen die meer zin en tijd hebben dan ik om dit boek te doorgronden, valt hier zeker wat te rapen.
Ikzelf ben vooral blij dat het uit is.
July 10, 2016
A complex book describing the madness of Elizabeth, a half caste who has moved from South Africa to a village. She experiences various characters - part God/part human as she internalizes her sense of not belonging to either the white or black world, South African or Botswanian world, her sexuality and the evil of mankind.
It is quite a difficult read where the genius of the writer shines through.
It is quite a difficult read where the genius of the writer shines through.
January 23, 2018
This book portrays how hard it is to live with a mental illness so well. The main character, Elizabeth, is a mixed race woman who has recently moved to Botswana with her son. She hallucinates, and talks to people who don't really exist, but they become a very important part of her life. I felt confused when Elizabeth did, and clear in what was going on when she did, and that made this such a powerful book.
June 5, 2019
Very interesting story...thought it was a great, confusing story about a woman battling mental health in the middle of apartheid in South Africa. Difficult to read but quite a few enlightening ideas if you can find them
August 21, 2014
The protagonist narrator was insane and the story thus matched her mind on the blurred boundary between dreams and reality. Interesting and confusing.
February 4, 2022
A profound, complex ode to humanism through the lens of injustice and insanity. There is no other book like it.
January 18, 2017
"We have a full docket on you. You must be very careful. Your mother was insane. If you're not careful you'll get insane just like your mother. Your mother was a white woman. They had to lock her up, as she was having a child by the stable boy, who was a native."
Bessie Head (1937-1986) was born in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, the product of a relationship between a wealthy white woman and an unknown black man, who was believed to be a farm hand on the family ranch where her mother, Bessie Amelia ("Toby") Emery, lived. Toby was committed to a local mental hospital after her parents learned of her pregnancy, which was taboo in that segregated country. She gave birth to Bessie in this hospital, and as she was deemed to be too mentally ill to raise the child Bessie was sent to live with a white family, who subsequently disowned her after they discovered that she was a "Coloured" (mixed race) girl. Her mother committed suicide after Bessie was taken away from her, so she was placed in a foster care with a black family until she was 13, and then sent to live in a mission orphanage in Durban.
After she earned a teaching certificate she left the orphanage and taught briefly in Durban before she moved to Johannesburg to become a journalist. Her career was marred by racism and sexism, as she was the only female journalist for the publication she worked for. However, her career allowed her to meet members of the Pan Africanist Congress in the early 1960s, who sought the removal of the apartheid system in South Africa and a return to self government by black Africans. She was introduced to her future husband, Harold Head, an anti-apartheid activist, who she married in 1961 and subsequently divorced three years later. She joined the Pan Africanist Congress, and her activities led to her arrest and imprisonment. She sought asylum and left South Africa for neighboring Botswana with her son in 1964. She was accepted as an alien refugee there, on the condition that she would never attempt to return to her home country.
Bessie Head taught and became an agricultural worker in Botswana, but was very lonely and was ostracized in her new surroundings, which led to a nervous breakdown and hospitalization in a mental health facility. She began to write after her release from hospital and slowly gained recognition for her short stories and novels, which allowed her to escape crushing poverty that resulted from her loss of work. Just as she was becoming an acclaimed writer she contracted hepatitis, which led to her premature death at the age of 48.
A Question of Power, which was published in 1973, is a semi-autobiographical novel whose protagonist, Elizabeth, is a mixed race South African who fled to the Botswanan village of Motabeng, where she became a schoolteacher. Elizabeth, like her creator, struggled to fit into Botswanan society, and slowly descended into madness. The narrative features her unusual relationship with two mysterious men, who may or may not be real, and her hallucinatory fantasies are interspersed with her brief lucid periods. The novel can also be viewed as a metaphor for the disturbed state of apartheid South Africa, as well as the effects that this system had on its Black and Coloured residents.
A Question of Power was a disturbing and difficult book to read, as I had a hard time following Elizabeth's schizophrenic thoughts. It is a powerful and inspired work of literature, though, and I do intend to read more of Bessie Head's books, particularly her autobiography A Woman Alone, in the near future.
Bessie Head (1937-1986) was born in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, the product of a relationship between a wealthy white woman and an unknown black man, who was believed to be a farm hand on the family ranch where her mother, Bessie Amelia ("Toby") Emery, lived. Toby was committed to a local mental hospital after her parents learned of her pregnancy, which was taboo in that segregated country. She gave birth to Bessie in this hospital, and as she was deemed to be too mentally ill to raise the child Bessie was sent to live with a white family, who subsequently disowned her after they discovered that she was a "Coloured" (mixed race) girl. Her mother committed suicide after Bessie was taken away from her, so she was placed in a foster care with a black family until she was 13, and then sent to live in a mission orphanage in Durban.
After she earned a teaching certificate she left the orphanage and taught briefly in Durban before she moved to Johannesburg to become a journalist. Her career was marred by racism and sexism, as she was the only female journalist for the publication she worked for. However, her career allowed her to meet members of the Pan Africanist Congress in the early 1960s, who sought the removal of the apartheid system in South Africa and a return to self government by black Africans. She was introduced to her future husband, Harold Head, an anti-apartheid activist, who she married in 1961 and subsequently divorced three years later. She joined the Pan Africanist Congress, and her activities led to her arrest and imprisonment. She sought asylum and left South Africa for neighboring Botswana with her son in 1964. She was accepted as an alien refugee there, on the condition that she would never attempt to return to her home country.
Bessie Head taught and became an agricultural worker in Botswana, but was very lonely and was ostracized in her new surroundings, which led to a nervous breakdown and hospitalization in a mental health facility. She began to write after her release from hospital and slowly gained recognition for her short stories and novels, which allowed her to escape crushing poverty that resulted from her loss of work. Just as she was becoming an acclaimed writer she contracted hepatitis, which led to her premature death at the age of 48.
A Question of Power, which was published in 1973, is a semi-autobiographical novel whose protagonist, Elizabeth, is a mixed race South African who fled to the Botswanan village of Motabeng, where she became a schoolteacher. Elizabeth, like her creator, struggled to fit into Botswanan society, and slowly descended into madness. The narrative features her unusual relationship with two mysterious men, who may or may not be real, and her hallucinatory fantasies are interspersed with her brief lucid periods. The novel can also be viewed as a metaphor for the disturbed state of apartheid South Africa, as well as the effects that this system had on its Black and Coloured residents.
A Question of Power was a disturbing and difficult book to read, as I had a hard time following Elizabeth's schizophrenic thoughts. It is a powerful and inspired work of literature, though, and I do intend to read more of Bessie Head's books, particularly her autobiography A Woman Alone, in the near future.
October 25, 2013
This is one of the most difficult books I have ever read. At times, I was utterly lost. Even when I was not lost, reading often was like holding on to a railing against a flood, trying to retain hold on the plot, on where the main character is, on what is real and what is not, and on what truth lies in the delusions. Without reservation, though, I will say it is a book worth reading. The novel tells the story of Elizabeth, a South African woman living in Botswana with her son. Her mother was mentally ill and Elizabeth suffers from a mental illness, as well. At the same time, she lives with psychological strain caused by external forces: isolation from her home country (she lives in permanent exile from South Africa), from her family, from the local power sources in her village and from the country under colonial rule. Head has thoroughly explored the descent and reemergence of a woman from a complete psychological breakdown caused by these internal and external forces that alienate and isolate her. The novel (which is semi-autobiographical) is a deconstruction of Elizabeth's self as she fragments, falls apart, emerges, falls again. Head provides us no solace or guidance. For the length of the book, we see and think from Elizabeth's eyes. We do not have the luxury of watching what happens to her from a safe distance. As a result, you're reading and suddenly are in her delusion; or out of it. Reality bends and blurs, the writing because fragmented, or worse--sometimes it all seems ground in reality until it becomes obvious that there has been no reality for a paragraph, a page, a chapter. And, at the same time, it is a deeply philosophical, thoughtful book. It pulls apart the dynamics of pre-independence Botswana, the way in which colonialism can be internalized and mentally destructive on a person--and specifically a woman in exile, a woman left to straddle two countries and two races. It is an incredibly ambitious and brave book, all the more so for realizing that it is semi-autobiographical in nature; in writing this, Head must have had to relive her own breakdown.
It is a book that cries out to be read, even though--perhaps because--it is so very difficult to get through. I'd recommend diving in, but with patience--both with the book, and with yourself as you read it. Again: its worth it.
It is a book that cries out to be read, even though--perhaps because--it is so very difficult to get through. I'd recommend diving in, but with patience--both with the book, and with yourself as you read it. Again: its worth it.
December 13, 2016
Well, I can't say I enjoyed that, really. The first thirty pages of Bessie Head's 'A Question of Power' are arguably some of the hardest first pages I've read so far. Written from the viewpoint of the mentally unstable Elizabeth, born in South-Africa to a white mother and a black father, Head's novel is quite difficult to interpret. Elizabeth keeps seeing visions, has dark nightmares about men named Sello and Dan, who seem to represent God and the Devil, and sometimes, when she's not getting lost in postcolonial nightmare town, she also grows tomatoes and berries in a communal vegetable garden. In Botswana. Not quite your average HBO-show, is it?
I don't wish to imply that this is a bad book. A decent analysis will unearth a lot of interesting narrative strands, and will further explain why Dan seems to have an ever-gyrating penis and Sello is linked to Buddha, becomes an owl and dies several times over throughout the book. I don't wish to imply that Head has written an incoherent book, or that there is no meaning to the chaos.
All I'm saying is that the chaos within this book makes it virtually impermeable as an actual novel. As an object of study, I'm sure 'A Question of Power' makes an interesting document. But as a story, it's all just a bit estranging and disorienting. It didn't have to be this demanding, any way.
So, recap - do read this book if insanity or postcolonialism is really your jam. I, for one, never really do like dream sequences and 'insanity narratives' in novels all that much. Perhaps my sanity makes me too boring to appreciate them. Who will tell. For now, though, I can't say I recommend Head's book to just about anyone. It's there, though, for those who like a challenge - I guess the reward will be as big as the effort you put into it.
I don't wish to imply that this is a bad book. A decent analysis will unearth a lot of interesting narrative strands, and will further explain why Dan seems to have an ever-gyrating penis and Sello is linked to Buddha, becomes an owl and dies several times over throughout the book. I don't wish to imply that Head has written an incoherent book, or that there is no meaning to the chaos.
All I'm saying is that the chaos within this book makes it virtually impermeable as an actual novel. As an object of study, I'm sure 'A Question of Power' makes an interesting document. But as a story, it's all just a bit estranging and disorienting. It didn't have to be this demanding, any way.
So, recap - do read this book if insanity or postcolonialism is really your jam. I, for one, never really do like dream sequences and 'insanity narratives' in novels all that much. Perhaps my sanity makes me too boring to appreciate them. Who will tell. For now, though, I can't say I recommend Head's book to just about anyone. It's there, though, for those who like a challenge - I guess the reward will be as big as the effort you put into it.
February 18, 2023
here is my copy-pasted reading response from a class. I wrote it at 2am and I was drunk when I did, but I'm really proud of my reading, think I did a good job tracking some really difficult threads, and hope someone gets something from it lol. One of the toughest books I've read.
Elizabeth is alone: orphaned, stateless, raceless, sexless, without marriage and without love, and debilitated by mental illness. She can't create her identity in the normal ways, with the normal labels. Head's novel is concerned with where we turn for salvation in our loneliness. She offers and rejects a couple of different options. Religion, the nation, institutionalized love, race, and others.
But first is religion. There is a clear religious and spiritual system in the book, seen in her hallucinations, based on a melding of world religions. Buddhism is the most important, but Chrisitianity and others appear. Sello, sometimes Father Time, is apparently the "Einstein" and orchestrator of all religion, and variably appears as the Buddha, Krishna, Rama, and Osiris (probably others). Gods are people.
Two of the novel's most important images comes from Buddhism: reincarnation and the bodhisattva. Elizabeth, Bridgit, Tom, and maybe Kenosi are helpful to think of with the bodhisattva in mind. Boddhisattvas are people who have achieved Nirvana but stay on earth to help others towards the same peace, voluntarily forgetting their past lives. In Buddhism, Boddhisattvas are characterized by acting without thinking, like the way you shift your pillow in your sleep. Fascinatingly, both Tom and Bridgit, and later Elizabeth, are characterized in exactly this way! Their goodness comes from instinct, they act and speak without thinking, and their future and past lives are often referred to. Bridgit is tasked to save Elizabeth in a future life. Tom's gaze is frequently described as "ancient" and they both are driven by mysterious instincts to help others. Consider the "celestial boddhisatvas" of Mahayana Buddhism, the importance of their clothes, and the vesture garments. At one point, Tom, Kenosi, and Elizabeth rest together under the "shade-trees," which I thought was a strange phrase until I thought of the Bodhi tree.
Also important is Christianity. Elizabeth is explicitly being tortured by Satan, "Say, Dan," who shows her the images of all her past lives, which were all "perfect" and "golden." Maybe this is reading too deep, but I got the sense her godhood and bodhisattva goodness were being tested, like Job. In the logic of her delusions, she is an incarnation of Godhood that counts "the Father" (of Christianity) as a "comrade," (she may also have been the Buddha itself, as it says early on). She and Sello are stripped of her vesture garments, symbols of Godhood and power, and tested. "Turn the other cheek" is taken to extremes when part two says that "if your enemy stabs you in the back, die."
I have lots more to say about religion but don't want to waste too much space. Statelessness haunts the novel and is the subject of the last sentence, and I would really want to hear people talk about it.
Head is also critical of love, especially as it's institutionalized. The narrative of exclusive love is a killer and a lie. Marriage sucks, and both Bridgit and Kenosi have given up on it. Elizabeth can't find meaning or purpose in love.
Tom and Sello say she is not a woman, and Dan says over and over that she has no vagina. She can't find solidarity in womanhood.
What is the fire? What is "fire-washed?" Does her pain give her perspective? If anyone else has read "Ethical Loneliness" I'd really like to talk about that. Why does she think that insights from philosophers under the Bodhi tree mean nothing without suffering?
Two traditions stick out to me: tea and elaborate greeting rituals. What's different between the support of Mrs. Jones and Tom? One is motivated by an external moral code, Christianity, and one is intrinsically motivated. Ritual is disconnected from spirituality and goodness. Head says that goodness has to come from you, not from rules.
Head is interested in the evolution of the human spirit, not in the evolution of social organization. The Danish civilization represents the end of a societal evolution, but is clearly flawed. (anti Hegel vibes). Head wants the individual soul to evolve, not groups and norms. She's critical of the traditions of organized religion, nationalism, and tribalism. She wants people to be proud of the work they do with their hands, not the groups they belong to. But why do, according to Sello, so many gods come from white countries?
There is also the purely psychological reading as a different approach to the book. The apparition of Dan shows that she is afraid of wanton sexuality, which reflects her upbringing in a brothel. She fears homosexuality, which traces back to her first husband who had a "boy-friend." Things are, strangely, described as "Al Capone" a couple times-- I wonder if that is referring to her gangster husband or if that phrase was just cool at the time. A psychoanalytic reading would not be hard at all, with penis fixation, an Elektra complex through Medusa, and many many fathers to replace her own absent parents. Even in the modern day, many people in mental health crises (horrible generalization) fixate on Eastern philosophy and religion. Do we have any proof that the peace she feels at the end is permanent? She had many manic happy episodes before that.
But I prefer the reading that treats this more as fantasy, and takes the intricate system of gods seriously. In class I want to be critical of the god Sello. He used her as an experiment and a tool. What was up with him "killing" women?
I saw in this novel a fight between two models of perfect personhood: the "Superman" and the ordinary. Elizabeth and the bodhisattvas are an experiment in goodness spread through the ordinary, while Sello uses symbols and pawns like Krishna, Rama, Buddha, Jesus, etc. to motivate people towards goodness. The novel is quite explicitly in dialogue with literature and philosophy outside of Africa, and even though it is a little embarrassing, it would maybe?? be important and relevant to talk about Nietzche, the power that humans suddenly have when faith in gods disappears, and his ideas of evolution into the superman.
Interested and curious about why everything was so European and Indian. Why did someone have a "Puck-like" grin? Why so much of the Bible? Who was Head writing for? She succeeds and shows a full knowledge of other cultures, but why? I think it's really important to think about Heinemann publishing group when you read this book.
Elizabeth is alone: orphaned, stateless, raceless, sexless, without marriage and without love, and debilitated by mental illness. She can't create her identity in the normal ways, with the normal labels. Head's novel is concerned with where we turn for salvation in our loneliness. She offers and rejects a couple of different options. Religion, the nation, institutionalized love, race, and others.
But first is religion. There is a clear religious and spiritual system in the book, seen in her hallucinations, based on a melding of world religions. Buddhism is the most important, but Chrisitianity and others appear. Sello, sometimes Father Time, is apparently the "Einstein" and orchestrator of all religion, and variably appears as the Buddha, Krishna, Rama, and Osiris (probably others). Gods are people.
Two of the novel's most important images comes from Buddhism: reincarnation and the bodhisattva. Elizabeth, Bridgit, Tom, and maybe Kenosi are helpful to think of with the bodhisattva in mind. Boddhisattvas are people who have achieved Nirvana but stay on earth to help others towards the same peace, voluntarily forgetting their past lives. In Buddhism, Boddhisattvas are characterized by acting without thinking, like the way you shift your pillow in your sleep. Fascinatingly, both Tom and Bridgit, and later Elizabeth, are characterized in exactly this way! Their goodness comes from instinct, they act and speak without thinking, and their future and past lives are often referred to. Bridgit is tasked to save Elizabeth in a future life. Tom's gaze is frequently described as "ancient" and they both are driven by mysterious instincts to help others. Consider the "celestial boddhisatvas" of Mahayana Buddhism, the importance of their clothes, and the vesture garments. At one point, Tom, Kenosi, and Elizabeth rest together under the "shade-trees," which I thought was a strange phrase until I thought of the Bodhi tree.
Also important is Christianity. Elizabeth is explicitly being tortured by Satan, "Say, Dan," who shows her the images of all her past lives, which were all "perfect" and "golden." Maybe this is reading too deep, but I got the sense her godhood and bodhisattva goodness were being tested, like Job. In the logic of her delusions, she is an incarnation of Godhood that counts "the Father" (of Christianity) as a "comrade," (she may also have been the Buddha itself, as it says early on). She and Sello are stripped of her vesture garments, symbols of Godhood and power, and tested. "Turn the other cheek" is taken to extremes when part two says that "if your enemy stabs you in the back, die."
I have lots more to say about religion but don't want to waste too much space. Statelessness haunts the novel and is the subject of the last sentence, and I would really want to hear people talk about it.
Head is also critical of love, especially as it's institutionalized. The narrative of exclusive love is a killer and a lie. Marriage sucks, and both Bridgit and Kenosi have given up on it. Elizabeth can't find meaning or purpose in love.
Tom and Sello say she is not a woman, and Dan says over and over that she has no vagina. She can't find solidarity in womanhood.
What is the fire? What is "fire-washed?" Does her pain give her perspective? If anyone else has read "Ethical Loneliness" I'd really like to talk about that. Why does she think that insights from philosophers under the Bodhi tree mean nothing without suffering?
Two traditions stick out to me: tea and elaborate greeting rituals. What's different between the support of Mrs. Jones and Tom? One is motivated by an external moral code, Christianity, and one is intrinsically motivated. Ritual is disconnected from spirituality and goodness. Head says that goodness has to come from you, not from rules.
Head is interested in the evolution of the human spirit, not in the evolution of social organization. The Danish civilization represents the end of a societal evolution, but is clearly flawed. (anti Hegel vibes). Head wants the individual soul to evolve, not groups and norms. She's critical of the traditions of organized religion, nationalism, and tribalism. She wants people to be proud of the work they do with their hands, not the groups they belong to. But why do, according to Sello, so many gods come from white countries?
There is also the purely psychological reading as a different approach to the book. The apparition of Dan shows that she is afraid of wanton sexuality, which reflects her upbringing in a brothel. She fears homosexuality, which traces back to her first husband who had a "boy-friend." Things are, strangely, described as "Al Capone" a couple times-- I wonder if that is referring to her gangster husband or if that phrase was just cool at the time. A psychoanalytic reading would not be hard at all, with penis fixation, an Elektra complex through Medusa, and many many fathers to replace her own absent parents. Even in the modern day, many people in mental health crises (horrible generalization) fixate on Eastern philosophy and religion. Do we have any proof that the peace she feels at the end is permanent? She had many manic happy episodes before that.
But I prefer the reading that treats this more as fantasy, and takes the intricate system of gods seriously. In class I want to be critical of the god Sello. He used her as an experiment and a tool. What was up with him "killing" women?
I saw in this novel a fight between two models of perfect personhood: the "Superman" and the ordinary. Elizabeth and the bodhisattvas are an experiment in goodness spread through the ordinary, while Sello uses symbols and pawns like Krishna, Rama, Buddha, Jesus, etc. to motivate people towards goodness. The novel is quite explicitly in dialogue with literature and philosophy outside of Africa, and even though it is a little embarrassing, it would maybe?? be important and relevant to talk about Nietzche, the power that humans suddenly have when faith in gods disappears, and his ideas of evolution into the superman.
Interested and curious about why everything was so European and Indian. Why did someone have a "Puck-like" grin? Why so much of the Bible? Who was Head writing for? She succeeds and shows a full knowledge of other cultures, but why? I think it's really important to think about Heinemann publishing group when you read this book.
February 19, 2014
A Question of Power: http://readwithstyle.wordpress.com/20...
In this semi-biographical novel Bessie Head follows the gradual breakdown of Elizabeth – the child of a white woman of a position and a black servant in South Africa. Similarly to Head, Elizabeth’s mother is mentally ill and unable to take care of her chid. After a series of foster homes and an unfortunate relationship with a man, Elizabeth is driven away from Apartheid torn South Africa. Together with her son, she takes refugee in the small village of Motabeng in Botswana, hoping to build a different life for herself.
However, Elizabeth’s mixed race doesn’t get accepted neither in South Africa nor in her newly adopted country. She remains isolated, misunderstood and unhappy. Trying to make sense of gender and racial issues, Elizabeth’s sanity slowly deteriorates. As she loses her job and her fragile position in the village’s society. the woman becomes more and more entangled into her inner demons. Structured in two parts, A Question of Power follows the torture two illusionary men impose on Elizabeth. Sello (widely regarded as God) subjects her to the atrocity of human nature, while Dan (the Devil) imposes on her sexual harassment and violence. As Elizabeth is attempting to distinguish between reality and imagination, so was I.
Read more: http://readwithstyle.wordpress.com/20...
In this semi-biographical novel Bessie Head follows the gradual breakdown of Elizabeth – the child of a white woman of a position and a black servant in South Africa. Similarly to Head, Elizabeth’s mother is mentally ill and unable to take care of her chid. After a series of foster homes and an unfortunate relationship with a man, Elizabeth is driven away from Apartheid torn South Africa. Together with her son, she takes refugee in the small village of Motabeng in Botswana, hoping to build a different life for herself.
However, Elizabeth’s mixed race doesn’t get accepted neither in South Africa nor in her newly adopted country. She remains isolated, misunderstood and unhappy. Trying to make sense of gender and racial issues, Elizabeth’s sanity slowly deteriorates. As she loses her job and her fragile position in the village’s society. the woman becomes more and more entangled into her inner demons. Structured in two parts, A Question of Power follows the torture two illusionary men impose on Elizabeth. Sello (widely regarded as God) subjects her to the atrocity of human nature, while Dan (the Devil) imposes on her sexual harassment and violence. As Elizabeth is attempting to distinguish between reality and imagination, so was I.
Read more: http://readwithstyle.wordpress.com/20...
July 4, 2017
Interesting to read a novel by a Botswanan author, and especially interesting because it deals with mental illness (I don't have the DSM to hand, but I'd call it psychosis in laymen's terms). It's a bit confusing to start off, because the action internal to the protagonist and action external mixes, but that same confusion is what she goes through, so it fits wonderfully well.
Not sure I understood the philosophy of the thing, but it's well worth reading.
No reflection on the story, but shame the edition I ordered from Amazon has the feel of a cheap print-to-order book. This work deserves to be available in a properly published form.
Not sure I understood the philosophy of the thing, but it's well worth reading.
No reflection on the story, but shame the edition I ordered from Amazon has the feel of a cheap print-to-order book. This work deserves to be available in a properly published form.
December 9, 2018
This book was like falling face first into insanity, and by the time I stood up, there was international aid workers and vegetable gardening. So for me, really the ideal book. A Question of Power looks at race and the difference between good and evil from the point of view of a refugee from apartheid South Africa to Botswana as she loses her grip on reality. Thoroughly enjoyed this book!
Reading the World - Botswana 🇧🇼
Reading the World - Botswana 🇧🇼
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