ABSTRACT
Bessie Head (1937-1986) was a South African writer with a mixed racial background. Born to a white mother in a mental hospital, she was raised in a foster family until she was thirteen and later was placed in a missionary orphanage. Her mother died in the mental hospital in 1947 and she never knew her father. She trained as a primary school teacher and worked as a journalist. In the 1960s, when Apartheid legislation was being implemented in South Africa, she migrated to Botswana on an exit visa to take up a post as a teacher. Her third novel, A Question of Power (1973), tells the story of Elizabeth, a single mother with a similar background. The novel describes Elizabeth’s struggle to become part of her new community in a foreign country and the simultaneous deterioration in her mental health that eventually leads to a breakdown and the loss of her job. She becomes a gardener in a local development project, suffers another breakdown and is placed in a mental hospital. Her madness has two distinctive phases, the description of which form the two parts of the novel. Each part is named after a male molester. These men are personifications of men in the village and represent different types of gendered and racial violence: Sello forces her to witness a number of atrocities in human history, while Dan’s violence is primarily sexual. Depending on the interpretative framework, the men themselves can be read as hallucinations and thus as symptoms of mental illness; as metaphoric embodiments of cultural violence; or, in the vein of post-colonial theorizations, as ancestral presences. This is why Elizabeth’s state of mind is here referred to as madness. Although Head was not considered a political writer by her contemporaries, this chapter addresses her novel and the madness it describes as a meaningful intervention in the social reality Elizabeth is living in, and discusses the multiple forms of violence that the text presents. The various types and forms of violence include the actual, physical violence that happens between characters in the text; the violence that occurs in Elizabeth’s mind, that is, her inner states of violence; and the gendered, sexualized and racialized societal violence that this, in turn, reflects. In the colonial setting, each interpersonal encounter is imbued with complex political power relations that have wider repercussions than the actual encounter, as my reading of the invasion of Elizabeth’s home will show. Through the depiction of the racial and gendered violence of Elizabeth’s abusers,
Head points to the impossibility of Elizabeth, as a mixed race person, to belong: she is caught in a hybrid position in a culture that only recognizes singular identities. I will also address textual and discursive violence: the characters abuse each other verbally and the narrative techniques employed in the novel establish a violent relation with the reader. Finally, the chapter takes up academic interpretations of Elizabeth’s condition and seeks to unravel the historical and discursive burdens and possible epistemic violence that the various ways of interpreting Elizabeth’s troubled state carry within themselves. Elizabeth’s complicated racial, ethnic and national identity, and her positions as a refugee and a single mother, a writer, a gardener and a madwoman call for a multifaceted, intersectional (Crenshaw, 1991) reading of violence that addresses the simultaneous existence and operation of multiple subject positions (Brah & Phoenix 2004). Here, the notion of intersectionality is used to recognize the simultaneous presence and interdependence of especially gender and race in Elizabeth’s inner state of madness in Southern Africa of the early 1970s. As the analysis will show, these mutually constitutive subject positions are entwined and interlink with other axes, such as sexuality, ethnicity and religion. They all inform Elizabeth’s madness and its possible interpretations. As Nira YuvalDavis has argued, “There is no separate concrete meaning of any facet of these social categories, as they are mutually constitutive in any concrete historical moment” (Yuval-Davis 2011: 7). The following analysis seeks to unravel the different ways in which these differences operate within the space of Elizabeth’s madness.
