Louise Erdrich Bessie Head Jean Rhys
For many years I taught modern literature at the University of London. One of my favourite courses, taught at Birkbeck College, was called Exile and Belonging: Cross Cultural Women's Literature.
Some thoughts on the work of Louise Erdrich:
Louise Erdrich is a short story writer, poet and novelist. She draws on personal, autobiographical material in her fiction. On her mother’s side she is of Chippewa or Ojibwa (Anishinabe) Native American descent. On her father’s side, she's of German American descent. She grew up in North Dakota, the setting for her North Dakota novel cycle. Her maternal grandfather was Tribal Chair of Turtle Mountain Reservation in that part of the US. Both of Erdrich's parents worked in the Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school.
In much of her fiction, and particularly in the North Dakota novel cycle, Erdrich employs a very individual and experimental narrative form and style of writing. She uses no main plotline and no chronological progression. The narratives continuously circle back upon themselves, and the structure of each novel is held together through recurring patterns and recurring themes and motifs, rather than through any actual plot.
Erdrich has claimed that in using this narrative structure she has been directly influenced by the Native American art of storytelling, where each incident will lead into another and then another, creating a sequence of narratives. Just as each of the novels in the North Dakota sequence is made up of stories within stories, all told within a multi-faceted, many-layered narrative, so all the novels together make up a much larger story. The community described in all these novels is as much a protagonist as any of the characters, and the cycle of novels as a whole create a far larger and deeper view of the community she is portraying. The same events and the same set of characters recur in each novel, but in a different form, giving us a new perspective. Giving the reader ever more knowledge and understanding, yet a new point of view on each retelling, each reworking of a theme.
The overall effect of this on the reader is to make the world of the novel cycle and the community Erdrich is portraying ever more familiar. It’s as if we, the readers, are ourselves become a part of that community. I find it impressive and extraordinary that she succeeds in avoiding making the recurring events and stories tedious or boring. In fact quite the opposite – I think the more we learn and uncover, the more interesting her work becomes. For one thing, it makes every re-reading of the earlier novels a new and exciting experience, as we are reading them from a different and wider perspective. With each novel she opens up our vision more fully of the community she’s portraying, opening up new doors, new vistas, and our understanding becomes clearer. Things that we suspected, or even just sensed, in the early novels, we uncover again with new understanding, as our view is expanded and deepened, e.g. both the first novel, Love Medicine, and the fifth novel, Tales of Burning Love, begin with the same sequence of events – the last day in the life of June Morrissey. June is one of the most haunting figures in the novel cycle, a troubled, tragic character - both damaged and damaging to others: since she dies at the very beginning of the first novel, our view of her is always as a ghost, seen through the memory of others.
Erdrich’s North Dakota novels can all be seen as playing out variations on a set of central themes, and in each novel she treats these themes anew, afresh, transforming them, giving us a new vision and a deeper understanding. Erdrich, herself, has described the North Dakota novels as “one long convoluted story”.
Erdrich has described herself as someone who has always been “on the edge”. She writes from the margins, from the boundaries of two different, and often conflicting, cultures, writing from the borders - from both inside and outside the wider, dominant Euro American society.
She has defined herself as a citizen of two nations and her work certainly draws upon both her cultural heritages.
It is interesting that she frequently employs the traditional Ojibwa figure of the trickster, Nanabush, or Nanabohzo. This figure can be seen as an archetype and is certainly not just unique to the Ojibwa culture - the trickster is commonly found. These figures are significant because they are primarily boundary-crossers, messengers, rule-breakers; always ambiguous ambivalent characters, containing contradiction, paradox, doubleness, duplicity, and they’re always jokers, story-tellers. They’re not necessarily always positive figures – while they can be creators, heroes, saviours of their community, they can also be deceivers, they can be malicious. In Erdrich’s novel cycle we can find several characters that fit the idea of the Nanabozho. And, of course, Erdrich herself as the storyteller also belongs within this tradition, as well as employing it deliberately in her art. The storyteller, and one of the central narrators in Tracks, is an old man, Nanapush, who’s actually been named for the trickster.
The trickster figures represent survival since they’re continuers of their cultural tradition, it’s through their flexibility, through their transforming energy that they guarantee the preservation and the survival of their cultural heritage. The trickster is a joker, one who relies on humour to survive, and for Erdrich the concept of “survival humour” is formative in her work. In many published interviews she claims that survival humour offers people an ironic perspective that helps them endure and survive the harsh realities of their lives. She has suggested that humour offers a form of redemption, a means of realising what she calls a “life worth living”. She sees this kind of “survival humour” as essential to the Native American response to their political and cultural situation - according to Erdrich, the employment of this special kind of dark, ironic humour helps Native Americans to preserve their culture and their communities.
Thinking about the work of women writing from the borders of different cultures, from both inside and outside the wider, dominant society, it’s interesting to look at Louise Erdrich's first novel, Love Medicine, (pub. 1984: Flamingo). This is the first of her cycle of novels about a particular community (the North Dakota novel sequence). Many of the same characters occur throughout these inter-connected novels. In these books, she is drawing on the Native American oral story-telling tradition, and she usually narrates each chapter from a particular character's point of view, giving us a different slant and perspective on the same events. There are two points to bear in mind here: first, this structure reflects the Native American world view of the interconnection of all life; secondly, it challenges the traditional white, western world view that there is one truth, one reality, one true perspective on events. It also challenges the traditional literary novel and the convention of the omniscient narrator who tells the reader what to think - here that authoratorial tradition is overthrown. Throughout the novel we are continuously being made to question what we have already read, and having to rethink what we know so far. E.g. look at the relationship between Lulu and Nector at the end of the novel.
The whole novel is about love and about family - about trying to belong, both within the family, the immediate community, and the wider society. The majority of the characters have lost, or never knew, one or both their parents, e.g. Albertine, her father, p 10, June, her mother, Lulu, her mother, Lipsha, his mother. If you list even some of them and the way they inter-relate, you begin to see the interconnections and patterns in the novel.
Characters also gain mothers throughout the text - Marie and Rushes Bear, Lipsha and Marie.
After her marriage to Nector Kashpaw, Marie increasingly identifies as Native American. Although they were both in love with Nector, there is a strange alliance forged between her and Lulu at the end.
In Love Medicine, it’s these two older women characters, Lulu and Marie, who become the custodians of the traditional culture, and powerful tribal elders in a true sense.
None of the younger characters ever seem to achieve the stature of Marie and Lulu. This may be because in a traditionally matrifocal culture, these two women have a role which carries great significance for the whole community. At the end they seem to cross over the borders of the two families. Look at Marie and Lyman, pp322-324, and at Lulu and Lipsha, pp333-337.
Survival is an important concept in Erdrich's writing - a central theme. She not only emphasises that the survival of Native American culture depends upon integrating past and present, but also on integrating masculine and feminine. She portrays the dangers to her characters of being trapped in gender-based roles; any culture can only survive successfully in the modern world when stereotypically masculine traits, such as power, are integrated with feminine traits, like nurturing.
Her portrayal of the Native American community is particularly interesting since she is representing a culture where the male role of hunter has been largely rendered obsolete. The female characters are usually stronger and more confident, partly for this reason. The male Native American protagonists are always most successful when they’ve remained true to their culture, but also managed to assimilate with that culture certain modern white American values; when they can employ their traditional shrewdness and survival instincts to make use of the Euro-American bureaucratic culture. E.g. Lyman Lamartine and his dream of a casino palace. In her novels, the masculine hunter/warrior tradition fails when it isn't integrated with present-day realities, and it survives when it is combined with a modern North American political sensibility.
Her novels depict the sordid circumstances of Native Americans' lives in present day US society, but also envision a means of transcending these circumstances through spiritual values and the careful integration of old traditions and ways of life with present-day reality. The most important phrase here being 'careful integration' - Erdrich is realistic in her assessment of traditional Native American culture.
Erdrich deliberately sets out to challenge the romantic, white, liberal view of Native Americans as doomed victims, as well as the more extreme racist view of them as degenerate and primitive. She portrays a culture that isn't dying but is surviving and moving forward.
The Beet Queen (Flamingo), was first published in 1986, and it is the second in her cycle of North Dakota novels. However this one is singular in that it focuses more closely on the white American community in the town of Argus, co-existing beside the Native American Reservation, while most of the other novels are primarily concerned with the people living on the Reservation, e.g. the first, third and fourth novels are primarily concerned with the people living on the Reservation.
The fifth is different again, covering a wide range of characters from both Argus and the Reservation.
The characters of Fleur Pillager, Eli, Russell, June, who are all highly important in the other novels, do make an appearance in The Beet Queen too. Fleur especially, although she only makes two appearances, is a highly important character – just as she is in the other novels in the series. Her first appearance is near the beginning of the novel when she saves the life of an injured boy, Karl Adare. Erdrich always portrays Fleur as a woman with immense power, closely in tune with the old traditions of her culture. A skilled medicine woman.
The typical Erdrich narrative structure of this novel, emphasises the sense of dislocated characters in search of identity. The characters are mainly very rootless and alienated – loss of parents, loss of family, loss of culture and community.
The whole of The Beet Queen is about unrequited love - unsatisfied desire for another human being. The frustrations of love that is denied or not returned in the way we want. If you list even some of them you begin to see the interconnections and patterns in the novel:
Karl - Giles
Mary – Russell – p69
Russell – Sita – p72
Wallace - Karl
Karl – Celestine
Dot – other children, pp183, 215.
Erdrich herself draws heavily on her own experiences of family and community in her writing. Much of the background material in her fiction is drawn directly from her own family – and from both sides of her cultural heritage, e.g. her paternal grandparents’ butcher’s shop, in which Erdrich worked as a schoolgirl, features in more than one of the novels, and is central to The Beet Queen.
In this novel, possibly more than any of her others, the fragmented narrative structure also emphasises the sense of the many dislocated characters in search of identity. The characters are mainly very rootless and alienated – they all experience loss of parents, loss of family, loss of culture and community, loss of home.
Home and homecoming are one of Erdrich’s recurring themes and one that is often linked to the theme of land.
Land and the connection to the land is a vital theme in all the novels, but one that’s particularly central to Tracks. It’s the way the characters relate to their ancestral lands and the uses they want to make of it, that guarantees or fails to guarantee their survival. This is because the land is vital to the health and survival of the whole community, and as the community is the central focus of all the novels, the preservation of the land is also a central theme.
The deeply flawed, although charismatic, male character, Jack Mauser, e.g., lacks this connection at the beginning of Tales of Burning Love, he’s willing to exploit the land for buildings that are ultimately worthless. This is also expressed through his attitude to hunting – he hunts for sport, not to eat, and at one point nearly accidentally kills his third wife in the process. He lacks the real relationship with the animals, with the wilderness, that we find in many of the Native American characters, particularly Fleur Pillager, Eli Kashpaw and June Morrissey who, ironically, becomes Jack’s first wife, marrying him in a bar on the very last day of her life.
Of all Erdrich’s characters, Fleur Pillager is the only one who fully realises the vital necessity of the land to the survival of the community. She loses and then wins back her own family’s ancestral land at two points in the novel cycle.
The Native American characters’ ability to survive is directly linked to their connection to the land, the community, and to their ability to connect with their ancestral past and their shared history and memories.
Another important recurring theme in Erdrich’s writing is that of motherhood. Her novels contain many mother figures who abandon or reject their children for different reasons. Also many who adopt and nurture other women’s children. In the work of many contemporary women writers from post-colonial cultural backgrounds, we find this significant and resonant use of mother figures. The mother often becomes symbolic of the colonised and abused mother culture. Once again, Fleur Pillager is a clear example, since she sends her daughter, Lulu, away to the government boarding school for Lulu’s own safety, when Fleur is forced to face the loss of her land because of her inability to pay the taxes to the government agent. June is a second, more disturbing example. She attempts to drown her baby son, Lipsha, who was fathered by Lulu’s eldest son, Gerry Nanapush. Lipsha survives, apparently because he is the inheritor of both the Pillager and the Nanapush traditional spiritual powers.
As well as motherhood, family is also an important theme for Erdrich. All her novels deal with issues about love and about family - about trying to belong, both within the family, the immediate community, and the wider society. As I said above, the majority of her characters have lost, or never knew, one or both their parents.
But characters also gain surrogate mothers and fathers throughout the texts – Nanapush the storyteller in Tracks becomes a redemptive father figure to both Fleur and her daughter, Lulu, Lipsha is adopted by Marie Kashpaw who had previously tried to adopt and heal his abused and orphaned mother, June.
The windigo, like Nanabozho, is another traditional Ojibwa figure who appears in Erdrich’s work. She usually employs this image in relation to deeply disturbed, isolated, and damaged characters. A windigo in Ojibwa mythology, is a huge cannibalistic spirit who can never be satisfied, since the more he devours the larger and hungrier and emptier he grows. Sister Leopolda is portrayed as a windigo, as deranged and as deeply unhappy – a very disturbed and very destructive character.
It’s a good example of Erdrich’s use of humour and irony that in the fifth book, Tales of Burning Love, where Sister Leopolda is over 100 years of age, after her death it’s claimed she is a saint – has been the cause of miracles. She is reclaimed by the Native American reservation community, and made use of – Lyman Lamartine soon sees the chance to exploit this idea of her as a miracle-working saint in order to attract tourists and pilgrims who will bring money to the reservation community.
Erdrich has pointed out the significant common elements shared by Catholicism and traditional Native American belief systems: the strong awareness of the spiritual world; the sense of real interactions between the living and their dead loved-ones (e.g. in Tracks, Fleur going into domain of the dead in order to gamble with the spirits for the life of her baby); the acceptance and acknowledgement of the marvellous, of miracles and wonders, as a part of the everyday and the familiar.
To recap: the major themes and motifs that recur throughout Erdrich’s fiction:
Survival – “survival humour” - according to Erdrich, the employment of this special kind of dark, ironic humour helps Native Americans to preserve their culture and their communities
Motherhood
Homecoming
Family
Community
Power – political power – also the spiritual conflict between ancient, traditional, magical power versus the power of white, European American, Christian culture
Ojibwa traditional beliefs and customs, including:
Gambling – notions of luck and chance – also intervening in destiny – in Tracks the dead spending their time gambling for the fate of the living
Interconnectedness of all things – including world of living and world of dead – and including the novels too: a tapestry, interwoven narratives and stories
Ghosts – both figurative and literal – haunt the texts
Hunting - use of hunting metaphors
Land – relationship to the land
* * *
Here are some thoughts on two of my best-loved writers, Bessie Head and Jean Rhys:
A discussion of two short stories, "Life" by Bessie Head and “Let Them Call It Jazz” by Jean Rhys.
While these two short stories are clearly very different in many ways, they do share some important qualities in common. The elements they share can be seen to reflect similarities in the cultures of South Africa and Dominica in the Caribbean, within which Bessie Head and Jean Rhys spent their early lives. Societies which were both divided into many different ethnic and cultural groups - ethnic groups which rarely mixed socially and were usually mistrustful, suspicious, and hostile towards each other. In both the short stories we can see a profound and complex awareness of the processes of social prejudice and stereotyping, and of the way human beings perceive difference in others.
However, one of the most important rules for the literary analysis of fiction is to be sure to distinguish between the author and the authorial voice in a text, from the characters and the narrative. This distinction is very clear in both these short stories, since there are many obvious differences between the character, Life, and the author, Bessie Head, as well as between the character Selina and Jean Rhys. Even more importantly, the use of language and narrative voice within both these stories are adopted by the writers as a conscious manipulative strategy on their part in the creation and construction of these works of fiction.
“Life”, The Collector of Treasures, (Heinemann, 1st pub 1977).
This story is partly a fable or allegory. Life’s name, for example. And Lesego, the man who becomes her husband and eventually murders her, is described as “death” walking into the bar.
Life is represented through images of light, brightness – even her suitcases are shining when she arrives in the village from the city! The village in contrast is described with images of shadow and shade – restful, protective, safe. Life is welcomed as a child of the village come home, but from the very beginning this contrasting imagery of light and shade underlines the cultural differences between Life and the villagers.
Life doesn’t belong here. She has grown up in a world where danger and violence are always present, always a probability. This is what she’s used to, what she knows. She’s developed ways of surviving – and surviving successfully – in that kind of volatile, dangerous environment. She doesn’t belong in the village, she belongs in the city. She wants adventure, excitement, even danger. This is why she’s so attracted to Lesego. She finds the village life dull, empty, narrow, suffocating. She isn’t able to appreciate the positive aspects of such a community.
The narrator makes no moral judgements here. Unlike Bessie Head’s autobiographical essays, the style of writing in this story is objective, detached, unemotional. Her writing is very personal in A Woman Alone and she often seems angry, but here the expression is very cool, controlled.
Use of language is an important theme in the story – Lesego gains power, status, respect, social control and authority through his ability to manipulate language and articulate his ideas. It’s the source of his power. This contrasts strongly with all the other characters, e.g. Sianana.
Language has been a preoccupation for writers throughout western societies in the twentieth century, because of the recognition that there's a complex connection between social concepts of thought and language. In any culture, power, identity and language are all closely connected.
It’s significant that the women characters develop languages of their own that carry no weight in the public sphere of powerful social institutions, but do allow communication and expression in their own way. The ‘beer-brewing women’ are the most sympathetically represented of the characters in this story.
“Let Them Call It Jazz,” Tigers Are Better-Looking, (Penguin Books, 1st pub 1973).
The use of language in the Jean Rhys short story is equally as significant, although this story is written in a slower, more developed, more detailed style than Bessie Head's fable. Rhys creates a narrative voice in the dialect language of Dominica – this gives Selina, the narrator, a clear identity as an outsider. Recently arrived in the UK, she is alone in London, vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. The narrative is frequently confused, incoherent, dreamlike, and there is a strong sense of unreality, confusion. This reflects Selina’s state of mind – her displacement, and also her lack of food and her drinking. Alcohol, like many substances that people abuse or depend upon emotionally, heightens certain sensory perceptions and blurs others – her perception of the garden, of the poppies, the trees, etc. Her dancing. That conviction of the song being her best, and then waking up the next day unable to remember it - very typical of the effects of alcohol. However, Selina is no victim - she is a fighter although this gets her into trouble, and eventually in prison.
Selina, like Life, is denied the power of publicly effective language. Language, and particularly the discourse of authority and of institutions of power, are used to oppress her, especially when she is arrested and on trial.
In both these stories, the central female character comes into a community from outside, and both are soon regarded as transgressive. They threaten the social conventions and regulating norms of the society in which they are strangers and incomers. A crucial aspect of their perceived transgression lies in their sexuality. With Life it isn’t that she’s sexually active, but that she turns sex into a commercial transaction. Life’s use of her sexuality has given her some power, some control – it’s through using her sexuality as a marketable commodity that she’s survived, made a good living, has food and drink to give away so generously to her friends. Just as Lesego uses language to gain power and influence, Life has used her sexuality.
Selina, the woman narrator in “Let Them Call It Jazz”, is perceived as promiscuous – but mainly because of racist attitudes, she doesn’t actually appear to be sexually active at all.
But, as we’ve said, like Life, Selina is equally denied the power of language. The song is so significant because it allows her a way to express herself at last – and in a communal context – the song gives a voice to all the women prisoners and even the warders can’t silence it. The song enables her to survive.
But the song is still appropriated at the end. Life is murdered, robbed of her life; Selina is robbed of her song and of the royalties she should have earned from it.
Are these unsatisfactory or ambivalent endings?
Consider the importance of ending with the beer-brewing women in “Life”. “Self-emancipated” women.
Although Selina appears on the surface to be more of a victim than Life, she actually survives better. Possibly because she’s less transgressive of social norms, less recklessly challenging of convention. In a real sense, Life is self-destructive, she seems to deliberately court death.
Both women are orphaned – literally “unmothered”.
It maybe because Selina has had some mothering from her grandmother and has some real sense of homeland, although it is lost to her, that she is able to survive in the end when Life doesn’t. Her story is more directly autobiographical - Jean Rhys was arrested for being drunk and disorderly and spent a short time in Holloway prison.
Virginia Woolf and Alice Walker both claimed that women writers need mothers – a female literary tradition to look back to. Bessie Head was doubly unmothered, losing both her real mother and her motherland. This can be applied to Jean Rhys as well, who was also a writer who always felt displaced, never belonging, and whose writing style often reflects this sense of displacement and consequent fragmentation of identity. There are some useful essays on both these writers in the collection edited by Susheila Nasta, Motherlands: Black Women's Writing from Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia, (The Women's Press, 1991), pp88-98.
I particularly recommend the essay by Elaine Savory Fido on p.330, “Mother/lands: Self and Separation in the work of Buchi Emecheta, Bessie Head and Jean Rhys”, where she explores the parallel between separation from the mother and separation from the motherland in these women writers’ fiction, and the way it’s reflected in their use of language in their work. Also look at the essay by Laura Niesen de Abruna, “Family Connections: Mother and Mother Country in the Fiction of Jean Rhys and Jamaica Kincaid”, on p257.
Some more thoughts on Bessie Head:
All Bessie Head’s work is profoundly concerned with issues of identity.
Throughout her life she was struggling with her identity as a mixed-race woman and in her fiction, such as her autobiographical novel, A Question of Power, (Heinemann; African Writers Series), (first pub. 1974), her characters are faced with finding answers to the sorts of problems Head had to confront for herself:
Where does she belong? Who is she?
While these conflicts of identity began in her childhood and early adult life in S. Africa, the deep insecurities and self-contempt she had experienced there inevitably accompanied her to Botswana, where she felt the Botswanans despised her for not being African, and she was also surrounded by the racism of the white ex-patriots and volunteers. A Question of Power gives a dramatic portrayal of her journey through mental breakdown which was partly a search for identity - a loss and recovery of the self, or rather a recognition of her previous loss of self and a crisis of grief and reconstruction.
A Question of Power, (Heinemann; African Writers Series):
This novel treats vast and profound philosophical, moral and political issues. It can be compared with the Book of Job in the Bible, confronting the questions of human suffering, the existence of evil, the problem of why suffering and evil seem more powerful forces in human life than the forces of goodness.
Structure - very daring – Bessie Head takes huge risks in the opening of the novel, taking us straight into Elizabeth’s mental crisis with no introduction or preparation. At first the reader is unable to tell what is real and what is happening only in Elizabeth’s mind.
Elizabeth is tormented by both her own traumatic past experiences - her childhood traumas and her suffering in South Africa - and by her sense of being contaminated or tainted by her racist background and heritage. She's also forced to confront the imperfections of the social state in Botswana - extreme poverty, lack of education, witchcraft.
And she’s tormented by the sense of her own potential for evil. Read p119. Elizabeth is agonised by the knowledge that the most innocent of people are capable of evil, “all was evil”, p120.
Bessie Head herself described this novel as autobiographical. In A Woman Alone, (Heinemann, 1990), on p69, she has written, 'It was a private philosophical journey to the sources of evil. I argued that people and nations do not realise 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.' In A Question of Power, on p199, we read: '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.'
The possibility exists for both the Divine and the Demonic in human beings.
So the novel is concerned with the need for owning the potential in all of us for both good and evil. Bessie Head was very aware of her own capacity for violence - expressed in the novel – which had worked as a survival strategy for her as a child, but which made her aware of her alienation from the Botswanans she went to live among. Read A Woman Alone, p47.
A difficult book - it can be helpful to go over the story in a straightforward way to begin with - to map out the events in the novel. What happens to Elizabeth? What do we know about her and her life history?
In A Question of Power, Elizabeth is struggling with her identity as a mixed-race woman, p47. Her visions - these figures called Dan and Medusa - taunt her with not being African, pp104,127, and she is also surrounded by the racism of the white ex-patriots and volunteers. Her journey through mental breakdown is partly a search for identity - a loss and recovery of the self, or, rather, a recognition of her previous loss of self and a crisis of grief and reconstruction.
Her inner voices and what she calls “soul personalities” articulate Elizabeth’s own self-hatred, self-contempt, her fears and her rage, p169.
Elizabeth possesses a strong sense of having played a role in the past – a central historical religious and political role, where she has been caught up in power conflicts, pp40,41,86. Sometimes she speaks as if she is, or has once been, Sello.
There are two major crises during Elizabeth’s mental breakdown and both these crises lead to her hospitalisation. The first begins on p50, the second on p172.
Her psyche becomes a space for the warring forces of good and evil, whose distinctions are not always clear. The distinctions between her inner emotional and mental world and the outer world of actual village life are also not always clear. Sometimes the reader is left wondering what is real and what is delusion, see p93 - what is the effect of this overlapping of boundaries, blurring of distinctions?
The more extreme and disturbed Elizabeth’s mental state becomes, the more she loses any sense of clear boundaries between her inner and outer worlds – the more they seem to blur, see pp140,141.
There are three Sellos in the novel – the real Sello, a respected, leading figure in the village, a successful farmer and businessman, pp28,29, and two Sellos who only exist within Elizabeth’s inner world - Sello in the monk’s robes who appears to represent the human aspiration to goodness, and Sello in the brown suit, an evil figure who is firstly identified with Medusa and then with Dan. Both at the beginning and the end of the novel it is suggested that these two imaginary Sellos are aspects of Elizabeth’s own identity, pp11,40,41,199, representing her own potential for good and for evil. On p145, her acceptance of the evil aspect of Sello appears to be linked to the releasing of her own violent impulses.
Elizabeth is also identified with Medusa on p199. Medusa seems to represent the potential for hatred and violence in Elizabeth.
There are two Dans – the real Dan, a friend of Sello in the village, a cattle millionaire and an African nationalist, pp103,104, and the Dan in Elizabeth’s inner drama who is identified as Satan, p198. The real Dan is distinct from the soul personality, p168.
There is a constant tension in the book between the forces of goodness and the forces of evil. These forces are frequently embodied in people – both in the strange characters that inhabit Elizabeth’s inner world and in the real people she meets in the actual world of the village. Bessie Head uses these characters to create a tenuous balance in the novel between good and evil. In the first part, for example, evil Medusa has a balancing counterpart in the goodness of Kenosi, in Part 2 the evil of Dan is counter-balanced by the good friendship of Tom, p136.
The vegetable garden plays a similar role, a place of virtue and power for good and healing, pp124,142.
Outside Elizabeth’s tormented inner drama, as part of village life, a team of international volunteer workers are helping the local people set up agricultural projects and cottage industries. At the end of the novel Elizabeth manages to re-enter that community - her healing is closely bound up with the garden and her work on the land - both in personal terms, important for her, but also because of her fervent political belief in the importance of feeding people, and overcoming poverty through agriculture. Life in the village provides a relief and a contrast to the mental agony in Elizabeth’s mind, pp157-159.
As well as exploring the processes of mental breakdown, this novel is vitally concerned with the political issues of third-world poverty and the need for food -is tormented with the importance of constructive, respectful international aid.
We have a crucial passage in Elizabeth’s speech to Tom, read p131 – p135.
Elizabeth seems to use African identity and African qualities as a yardstick for measuring goodness. The white people she meets are often measured by this yardstick, Eugene p72, Gunner p123.
This is partly because of her insecurities about her own right to be regarded as an African.
She often feels excluded from the village community, pp26,60,90. It is through her involvement in the garden that she gradually begins to find a place in the community, the Cape Gooseberry is used as a symbol of her situation, p153.
The inner psychic battle described in this novel, is also bound up in complicated ways with the pleasures and horrors of sexual desire. - linked in some way to her past experiences of marriage and of the slum culture of South Africa where she grew up.
Intensely powerful portrayal of psychosis, read pp116,117.
Madness for women is often about having their identity and reality denied. In this text, Bessie Head is concerned with her combined identity as an African woman writer and how to reconcile those different and often conflicting identities and experiences. . It’s significant just how often the word “belonging” occurs in Bessie Head’s writing, as on p10. Her childhood had forced on her a sense of alienation, rejection, of being an outcast, in a most extreme and traumatic way.
Adeola James writes, in her study of African woman writers, In Their Own Voices, (Heinemann, 1990):
Bessie Head’s life epitomises the personal convulsions
an African Woman has to undergo to become a writer, to
marshal her life daily, to draw from herself all her powers
to fight the obstacles in the way of her becoming a harbinger
and a frontierswoman for her people. Running through all the
statements and conjectures by our women writers is a strong
affirmation that Africans can take control of their destiny, and
will not always be in a position of weakness. Bessie Head
has summed this up for us beautifully . . .
I think Adeola James’ use of the phrase “personal convulsions” is significant. Immigrant and refugee communities are particularly vulnerable to both experiencing mental crises and to being diagnosed as mentally ill. Also, an equally important point to remember is that women generally are frequently psychiatrised as a result of trauma. And, interestingly, women often become writers as a result of trauma.
Issues of gender in this novel - Elizabeth has been accused of homophobia - people in times of acute stress and chaos often cling on to gender identity as a last certainty - very threatened by any transgression of this apparently stable order, pp44,45 & pp89-91. Elizabeth is acutely insecure about her identity as a woman, she feels unattractive and unlovable, p106. Again, her inner characters articulate her own self-contempt – Dan is constantly telling her she’s inferior to the African women. Partly because of her traumatic childhood, partly because of her husband’s infidelity and rejection, pp18,19.
In her book of short stories, The Collector of Treasures, pub. in UK by Heinemann in 1977, she has written:
The ancestors made so many errors and one of the most
bitter-making things was that they relegated to men a
superior position in the tribe, while women were regarded,
in a congenital sense, as being an inferior form of human
life. To this day, women still suffered from all the calamities
that befall an inferior form of human life.
Throughout the history of women's writing we find women struggling with language that is inadequate to communicate their experience and attempting to reclaim and rework a language that often acts as a constraint on women's search for identity and self-expression. Women writers are always struggling for recognition as women and as writers - sometimes seems impossible to be acknowledged and validated as both, or even to write creatively as both.
So writing, identity, and language are closely connected, and issues of racial, class and gender identity are seen as important in relation to social and political power structures.
Bessie Head felt she had been robbed of her own African culture which she claimed had been totally obliterated in South Africa. This certainly contributed to her inability to write creatively while living in South Africa, or to produce fiction that focused upon South African life after she had gone into exile in Botswana.
When we consider how significantly our sense of cultural identity contributes to our sense of self and the cohesiveness and stability of our personal identity, we can see why her most remarkable novel, A Question of Power, displays a style of writing and use of language that portrays both psychic and social fragmentation and expresses the divisions and conflicts within the central character's mind. It also explains why Bessie Head collected the oral tales and stories told in the village of Serowe in Botswana, where she finally made her home, and why her own short stories draw on that oral tradition.