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Bessie Head
The pleasant, almost placid rhythm of life in the new society and its rural, even “backwater”, quality is soon disrupted by the demons that emerge from within the woman’s unconsciousness: (“... her life began to pitch over from an even keel” (21)) — much as Head’s own adaptation to Botswana society was fraught with the apparently inexplicable nervous friction that led to a series of “breakdowns”: “A darkness of immense dimensions had fallen upon her life” (53). In the case of Head’s protagonist (Elizabeth), her anxiety about possible rejection (being African, yet neither black nor Tswana-speaking) emerges first in terrifying dreams in which an imagined, saintly Tswana man whom she had thought of as her spiritual ally and support suddenly “wilts” to release two other personae: one a sort of cruel parody of the aforementioned, and the other, especially frightening one, a pitch-black, hugely powerful woman who constantly taunts Elizabeth with her supposed un-Africanness and her lack of sex appeal. Because of the nightmares and the fears these figures induce, Elizabeth is afraid to sleep and in turn the sleeplessness intensifies her string-taut anxiety until she bursts out in fury, hitting out verbally at a completely innocuous and anonymous shop clerk. She picks on him for his mere Tswananess, denying him his human dignity as she imagines has been done to her. Taken to the hospital, Elizabeth makes (or seems to make) a remarkably quick recovery, partly because she wants to be with her son. Having lost her school-teaching job, she turns to another ex-South African, the benign Eugene, who allows her to join one of his developmental projects as a vegetable grower. “It is impossible to become a vegetable gardener”, writes Head, “without at the same time coming into contact with the wonderful strangeness of human nature” (72). It must be evident at this point that Head’s account of a great spiritual ordeal has something of the pattern of a quest narrative. What sets her text off from other examples of the genre, though, are the terrifying immediacy of the self-undermining experiences she imagines, and the fact that there is no certainty or finality in the recovery — for she lapses into a second and even more awful period of anguish after the initial improvement (in Part Two of the text). The chief, terrible lesson she has to learn is that the notion of an all-powerful God as a refuge and a protector from persecution for those who suffer, is an “abyss” and a lie; “that the title God, in its absolute all-powerful form, is a disaster to its holder” (37). She also discovers (even more disquietingly) that the very “roots of evil” are not a distant, “outside” force, but “had become as close as her own breathing” (85-86). Resentment of oppression all too easily flips over into a desire for “wild, savage vengeance” (98), Elizabeth finds, and hence evil can “invade and destroy” even its victims. The next stage of Elizabeth’s ordeal leads her to imagine an initially romantic male partner-figure — a more insidious humiliation and castigation than before, since “he” turns around and taunts her (in her dreams and visions) with further demonstrations of her supposed racial and sexual inadequacies, and her “weakness”. He, too, is a glamorous power-figure and all the more oppressive for that. Elizabeth is suffering, it seems, the twisted reincarnations of her South African background — the novel is a complex exploration of a type of post-traumatic stress disorder and its partial healing. She recovers with the support of several caring and cheering relationships — with her independent-minded little boy, with Eugene (the other ex-South African), with Kenosi, her fellow-gardener, and with Tom, the American volunteer worker, as well as with some others. She heals also through her rediscovery of a single, central moral tenet: that the “ordinary” people of the world are its only true growth principle. Because she’s “learning internally”, says Elizabeth, she cannot accept the idea of a “Black-Power heaven, that exist[s] for a few individuals alone” (133). The greatest danger the world contains, from her new perspective, is not located in any particular race or person, but in that “arrogance of the soul, ... its overwhelming lust for dominance and prestige” (135) which is a deep kernel in all human beings. Such spiritual insights do not save Elizabeth from “the tormented hell of her inner world” (157). The predominance of a sense of gloating cruelty in the mental images torturing her sends her over the edge into insanity, and she is institutionalised after savagely attacking an old white woman. Yet she recovers by desiring to return to her son and her friends and to the vegetable garden she helped develop. Her “soul-death” is over, she feels, when her friend Tom reminds her of how she had shown him her generous affection not only for people, but for growing vegetables. It is Tom’s kind of love for and trust in her that give her back her sense of selfhood as well as her insight that “ordinariness” in people is the world’s most precious commodity — “the normal, the human, the friendly soft kind glow about the eyes” (196). As Elizabeth concludes her extraordinary narrative, she does so with no sense of final knowledge: “… she left the story like that, unresolved” (201). She discards the pills she was supplied with in the psychiatric hospital. Relinquishing any struggle to be accepted, she discovers without conscious thought or even words that she has at last accepted her new society: “As she fell asleep, she placed one soft hand over her land. It was a gesture of belonging” (206). These are the (now famous) last words of the novel. A question of power is a strange book. It is a very African text — “African” in its sense of the southern part of the continent, both geographically and socio-politically. Disconcerting and even harrowing to read, it faces with great courage some of most serious issues of our time and place. It is a text one finds oneself returning to for its hard-won insights. All Head’s writings — letters, essays, short stories, novels, histories — are memorable works and can be considered some of the great cultural treasures of our region. Among them, this, her most difficult text, is perhaps her most important work. |
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Readers of this strange text often confess how reading it drains them, how this account of a traumatic period in a woman’s life leaves them feeling traumatised themselves. Yet Head’s compelling narrative has a quite mundane context: it is an account of the resettlement in Botswana of a young South African woman who has left her unfaithful husband and taken a teaching job in the neighbouring country. She is accompanied by her small son, Shorty, whose ready acceptance by others in the new country, and whose joyous acceptance of them, contrasts tellingly with the intense difficulties and evident maladjustments discernible in her own situation.