Beyond the Scope of Storytelling

Beyond the Scope of Storytelling: Madness and Silence in

Bessie Head’s A Question of Power

Kristin Cornberg

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Carrol Clarkson

Faculty of Humanities

University of Amsterdam

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree Master of English Literature and Culture (Literary Studies)

This document is written by Kristin Cornberg who declares to take full responsibility for the contents of this document.

I declare that the text and the work presented in this document are original and that no

sources other than those mentioned in the text and its references have been used in creating it. The Faculty of Humanities is responsible solely for the supervision of completion of the work, not for the contents.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank my family and friends for their constant support throughout this period. To those who proof-read, had hour-long conversations with me about content, and to those with I shared endless nights with at the library. I am forever indebted.

Thank you to my supervisor Carrol Clarkson, who has not only shared her own South African experience with me, but for her guidance and expertise in shaping my thesis to what it is today.

Lastly, to Bessie Head, whose spirit and voice lives on in her writing and in the people, who continuously fight to be heard.

Abstract

This thesis explores the themes of exile and madness in Bessie Head’s A Question of Power. This study opens onto broader debates in psychoanalytic and postcolonial theory, more specifically, the relationship between the two. These themes are found within the exilic journey of the novel, focusing on Southern African refugees, specifically, the plight of South African refugees during the height of apartheid. The refugee in question is Bessie Head’s protagonist Elizabeth. Madness is questioned as rooted in the society it is found within and as a result of an exilic experience. In the guise of nightmarish dreams, Elizabeth’s madness presents itself alongside various figures that inflict mental harm upon her psyche. They negate her sexuality and racial inferiority complex as a mixed-race woman in search of a new home. Within this theme of madness, I explore moments of silence that occur as a result of said madness and as an occurrence of exile. Feeding off of her insecurities, the inhabitants of her mind aim to produce a woman completely detached from reality, self-fulfilment, and growth, forcing her into these moments of silence.

Social theorist Michel Foucault provides a classical exploration into to the theme of madness and provides a definition for madness that can be applied to the one Elizabeth endures. Psychiatrist and decolonial thought theorist Frantz Fanon, however, allows for a postcolonial psychoanalysis on the theme of madness and its relationship to colonialism. Steve Biko, Zoë Wicomb, and Homi Bhabha connect these theories back to a South African context, providing a commentary on the politics of race and identity, alongside questions of exile.

The ostracism as a mixed-race person in a society that revels in the othering of the unfamiliar, when faced with exile, portrays the power of the subconscious and the

internalised hatred that makes its way through the inner corners of one’s mind. Therefore, the relationship between exile and madness ultimately highlights the manner in which questions of power are able to venture beyond the natural world. In so doing, this thesis contributes to postcolonial theory by exploring how madness exists as one of the effects of exile.

Table of Content

2. A Study on Madness____________________________________________________________________________20

2.1. Good vs. Evil____________________________________________________________________________________25

3. The Shame in Being Coloured________________________________________________________________29 4. Moments of Silence_____________________________________________________________________________38

4.1. Mental Escape__________________________________________________________________________________42

Conclusion__________________________________________________________________________________________45 Bibliography________________________________________________________________________________________46

Introduction

Bessie Head’s A Question of Power, a semi-autobiographical novel, follows the protagonist Elizabeth on a journey into the soul. Her journey into the soul is a complex one. Born and raised in apartheid South Africa, Elizabeth discovers that she is the product of an illegal affair. Apartheid was a policy devised and implemented in South Africa from the onset of gaining independence from British colonial rule from 1948 to 1994. It is essentially a legislation formed to institutionalise racial discrimination and segregation alongside the institutionalisation of white dominance. As this form of compartmentalisation ensues, various other laws and rules accompany it. Not only were people segregated by skin colour, forced into communities and areas with like hues, banned from voting, or owning land, it was also unlawful under the Immorality Amendment Act of 1957 for interracial relations to occur. It is here where Elizabeth’s story begins. Born from a white mother and a black father, Elizabeth, like Head is born a crime1_{. Due to the circumstances of her birth and the displaced upbringing}

she endured, considered neither white nor black, Elizabeth journeys onto a path of self-discovery. In an attempt to start anew, Elizabeth takes her son and leaves South Africa on the basis of an exit permit with the promise to never return and moves to the fictional town of Motabeng in Botswana, a country less oppressed by colonial rule. The protagonist's reality is plagued by nightmarish dreams and spiritual hallucinations that eventually drive her into a state of madness and psychotic rage. This madness is driven by her past in South Africa and its teachings and presents itself in the form of nightmare figures who infect Elizabeth’s mind and inferiority complex of being a mixed-race woman in search of a lost home. The novel tackles issues of alienation and oppression that occur in ‘colonised’ homes and the fact that alienation can lead to insanity, and very often, eventually does. Elizabeth’s future thus predetermined carries an air of rebellion to fight that prescribed future. The novel essentially follows the protagonist “from a state of alienation and silence to a world of community and language” (Tucker 170). Head, therefore, invites readers into her mind in this tale of a woman’s journey into the soul.

This thesis explores the themes of madness and exile in Bessie Head’s A Question of Power. Through the discussion of these themes, my study opens up onto greater debates on the connection between psychoanalytic theory and postcolonial thought and what they represent in Head’s novel, when these two themes are found to be interrelated. These themes 1 A nod to Trevor Noah’s memoir entitled Born a Crime.

and theories are explored by analysing Southern African journeys of exile. Specifically, the journey of Elizabeth, from a state of displacement to statelessness. Madness is questioned as rooted within an oppressive society and as an eventual result of an exilic experience.

Therefore, insanity finds itself at the forefront of the exilic experience, where the search for a home and an identity is not readily received.

I turn to Foucault and his study on culture and madness as a means of connecting Head’s work to classical psychoanalytical studies. Foucault argues that “madness begins in the act which gives a value of truth to the image” (94). In terms of dreams, Foucault argues that dreams are complex figures of image and sleep and is present in the definition of madness (94). Madness, thus, takes its original nature from the dream, where the dark of the night is liberated and carries on into reality. Within Motabeng, the scene of Elizabeth’s mental collapse, Elizabeth is confronted with aspects of the spiritual world and figures who act as representations of her reality. Her dark, nightmarish dreams are exposed in her everyday life. Her dreams take hold of her mind to the point where she cannot distinguish between her dream world and reality. She gives value and attention to the images she is confronted with. Foucault also argues that madness is an expression of the limits of an individual’s freedom and the mad person expresses these restrictions through a “dialogue of delirium” (261). A significant portion of Elizabeth’s world exists in her mind. Due to her mental aberrations, it is difficult for her to distinguish between what is real and what is imagined2_{. Therefore, she is constantly in a state of confusion and exists within a blurred}

reality. Essentially, an enslavement of the mind is what haunts Elizabeth’s passage into Botswana.

I argue however that Head simultaneously, challenges Foucault’s classical study on madness by situating this case of madness within postcolonial studies. Head moves within the narrative of the exiled as imposed by apartheid and aims to express the ways in which

societies have psychological ramifications to the Southern African female mind. She does so as a means of not only simply expressing societal limitations, but as an illumination of a system of oppression that needs to be overcome. This is done by simultaneously recognising the evils that persist in one’s own mind. Jacqueline Rose argues that Head challenges one of the prevailing myths of colonisation. One which states that the African women do not possess the level of self-awareness to go mad (404). In so doing, the novel violates common rules and 2 Imagined does a disservice to her agency. I challenge the word by attempting to maintain her very real struggles with madness. Her mental impairment forms the basis of the scope of storytelling being investigated, and should not be disillusioned as a disregard to her agency or her very real emotions and experiences.

stereotypes as Head turns a few questions of power to reflect madness. Elizabeth’s journey from a state of fragmentation to wholeness is a complicated one. “One would go stark, raving mad if a deep and endless endurance of suffering such as one would encounter in Southern Africa, were really brought to the surface” (84). Margeret Tucker states that the oppression suffered when forced to the surface causes Elizabeth to go insane and internalise her

suffering. She re-inquiries into herself and the root of her madness. Tucker implies that there exist two instances of re-surfacing. The first, is one of recognition. Recognising and

identifying the oppression that has caused her insanity, this journey is complete when the novel begins (171). The second encompasses one of naming, as well as one which dispels the horrors that have occurred and are ingrained in her subconscious (171). This second journey is where we meet Elizabeth as she is now worried about figuring out what to do now that the oppression has been identified. In her refusal to remain an object, Elizabeth is on a journey to become a subject, as an act of refusal to succumb to the ever present other that has been inscribed on her life.

A question of power makes itself known in the racial inferiority complex Elizabeth is afflicted with. Elizabeth’s past in South Africa has joined her on her passage into exile. For Bhabha, South African authors produce “documents of society divided by the effects of apartheid that enjoin the international intellectual community to mediate on the unequal, asymmetrical worlds that exist elsewhere” (5). It is ultimately in her dreams that

manifestations of her own self-hatred make themselves known. Within the story of South Africa, a country laden with colonial overtones, finds itself inhabited by people who do not fit the ‘common’ binary structures of society. Coloured people, native to Southern Africa, are people of mixed-race descent who find their heritage amongst a variety of ethnicities3_.

Considered neither white nor black, the coloured person finds themselves in a constant state of displacement in a society set on the ideology of compartmentalisation. Elizabeth portrays the apartheid ideology in the most disparaging sense, she is a victim of internalised racism. In order to understand Elizabeth’s madness, I investigate the role of the Southern African coloured within African society and the implications race imposes, especially when the concept of shame is attached to certain races. Zoe Wicomb’s study on the shame that is attached to the coloured race, in terms of both sexual depravity and miscegenation, highlights the manner in which shame is affiliated with the coloured classification. The classification 3 If the coloured person were to trace their heritage back far enough, they would find that they are descended from some form of a combination of white European, Khoisan, Xhosa (/Bantu), East African, and/or South (-East) Asian.

carries generational weight and marks of othering. In so doing, the marks of officialdom do not apply to the coloured person within both a colonial setting and an African one. I attach the characterisation of Elizabeth to the shame attached to the coloured person, as she, herself, has internalised these marks of othering, which in turn has affected her state of insanity.

In an attempt to take the theme of madness beyond the obvious tropes of insanity and its repercussions on the psyche, this thesis also explores the theme of silence. In so doing, I explore certain moments of silence that are effects of said madness. Moments of silence I argue, pertain to varying degrees of language politics. This question into silence also goes beyond the rationale of language and exists as an allusion to the unspoken voice. Therefore, the language structure used focuses on that which is not directly spoken, spoken on behalf of the protagonist, and as existing within her subconscious. These moments of silence are found within Elizabeth’s position as an exilic being, an oppressed other, and within body politics. Any study pertaining to utterance, reserves a space for a discussion on conventional

language. Therefore, the language I explore touches upon Zoe Wicomb’s analysis of

translation and transformation as found in the cultures of postcolonial homes. Here language is weaponized and used as a form of resistance - a classical trope when positioned within a postcolonial context and within feminist discourse studies, especially when attached to the coloured woman. The act of storytelling thus takes a new form where the protagonist is spoken for and the articulation of her story are not her own but are inflicted upon her. Alongside the search for identity, comes the search for a voice. Hence, in this novel, silence accommodates the madness and vice versa. They exist as a pair and speak(s) volumes of both the society that Elizabeth is surrounded in and in her search for a home and an identity. Frantz Fanon in his essay on “The Black Man and Language” states that to speak a language, to engage within conversation, to grasp the morphology of a language, means to “assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilisation” (8). For the colonised people, language holds great power. The death and burial of one’s culture brings forth an inferiority complex and alongside that a new language and a denouncement of one’s blackness (9). In the case of the black person, to subsume a language also means to turn away from one’s culture and

heritage. Elizabeth arrives in Motabeng ready to denounce her South African past and has to embrace a new culture that is not necessarily ready to accept her.

In her search to be understood and gain a sense of agency, she encounters questions that ponder the concepts of good and evil. This battle between good and evil arises and displays itself in the power relations that accompany her nightmare figures that persist in her mind. Notions of duality that exist (language/silence, slave/master, good/evil) drive the

narrative to showcase these various power relations. It is in the understanding of these questions of power that Elizabeth is able to free herself of past oppressions and internal constraints.

Chapter one of this thesis explores definitions of exile and nativism. The role of the native, as theorised by Frantz Fanon and Steve Biko highlights the position of the native when faced with ideologies of difference and compartmentalisation. The relationship between Southern African countries South Africa and Botswana is also investigated, respectively, as the sight of an exilic experience and a mental collapse. What this chapter ultimately provides is historical insight into exile. Chapter two provides an exploration into the main topic of this thesis. Madness is studied through Michel Foucault’s psychoanalytic theory of madness and culture and applied to Head’s narrative. This chapter highlights the varying degrees of the madness the novel tackles, such as blurred realities and the overarching concepts of good and evil. Chapter three is an exploration of the role of the coloured person in apartheid South Africa. This chapter analyses the shame that is associated with the coloured race and culture and is argued to have been internalised by Elizabeth and externalised as fits of psychotic rage. Chapter four discusses the moments of silence that exists as an effect of madness and exile. This chapter discusses the varying degrees of language politics and the position of the unspoken voice. This opens up a question of a voice and the conditions of madness when confronted with an exilic experience.

1. A Question of Exile

“She was forced to take out an exit permit, which, like her marriage, held the ‘never return’ clause.” Bessie Head, A Question of Power

The connection between psychoanalytical and postcolonial thought can be explored through the experiences of exile. The exilic being in question and her state of madness is analysed in this chapter through historical contexts of her new and past homes, and how these differing homes have affected her state of madness.

1.1.

The Native

Frantz Fanon’s study of the native in The Wretched of the Earth highlights the position of the native in a colonised home. To place Elizabeth within this context, I question and analyse the position of the native in a post-colonised turned apartheid home. Fanon’s thesis is also analysed in conjunction with Steve Biko’s I Write What I Like, as a means of situating Fanon’s teachings and philosophies within a South African context. Fanon’s study is therefore, taken and implemented on the premise of the position of the native after

colonisation and the power dynamics that continues to be challenged. The native, within a South African discourse, is explored as anyone who has been exploited and oppressed in the arrival and in the time of white minority rule.

According to Fanon, the native is ultimately in search of “autonomy and ownership of the self and land” (34). The land is the basis of all things colonial. The land provides

sustenance for the native and is a representation of human life and ownership. The colonisers break through and cry “Discovery!”, and simultaneously eradicates the native’s freedom and ownership to said land. The transition from native to colonised native elicits division. The native is dehumanised, and a mutual exclusion exists as compartmentalisation ensues. The colonised country is compartmentalised into two separate worlds, inhabited by two different species (30). Apartheid is a form of this compartmentalisation.

The native exists as the absolute evil, the very embodiment of the negation of values (32), and therefore needs to be held at a distance from the Western values the colonists attempt to uphold. Western ideals, according to the native, pertain to violence and the native laughs in the face of such falsehoods (33). They refuse to be subjugated by people whose first

line of introduction was violence. The land, once again, represents ownership and life, but also dignity. Dignity acts as means to silence the oppressor’s defiance, a reprisal on the violence exuded (34). However, a question exists of what happens if the colonists stay long after the day of independence? More specifically, what happens if the colonist stays in a position of power after decolonisation? In the case of South Africa, one cannot simply ask these questions of native versus settler, for the settler and his children have been in South Africa for generations, proposing the question of how long does it take for settler to become native? However, this does not discern from the fact that the white minority in South Africa have held and exploited the highest positions of power since the arrival of the Dutch in the late 1600s till 1994. Steve Biko highlights the nature in which “the Anglo-Boer culture had all the trappings of a colonist culture and therefore were heavily equipped for conquest” (41). Therefore, the compartmentalisation that ensues throughout apartheid mirrors the mentality and teachings of turbulent colonial times in a different light. As such, compartmentalisation is taken to the extreme where it is no longer merely a separation of native and settler, but native and native. An example being the existence of the Bantustans4 _{or the creation of the Cape}

Flats5_{. As Biko states:}

“they built up tribal cocoons, thereby hoping to increase inter-cultural ill-feeling and to divert the energies of the black people towards attaining false prescribed freedoms [...] it was hoped that black people could be

effectively contained in these various cocoons of repression.”

(62)

Hence, the first thing the native learns is limitations: where to stay, and not to go beyond his limits (Fanon, 40). As a result, the native manifests this hostility, which has begrudgingly made its way into his subconscious, against his community (Fanon, 40). The apartheid regime furthers upon the teachings of colonisation and not only promotes division but campaigns for individualism. A society of individuals is voiced as essential to societal growth. The settler evokes ideas of individual wealth and subjectivity (Fanon, 36). The notion of ‘look out for yourself’ does not work amongst the colonised and it is until the native embraces the idea of community and words such as ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ are not seen as immoral (Fanon, 36). It is a communal struggle; therefore, a community is needed in order to combat it. The notion of community is reiterated by Biko. He states that the philosophy of 4 The homelands existed as a means of concentrating designated black ethnic groups within certain territories, in the hope of creating autonomous, homogenous areas, separate to the urban areas in South Africa.

5 The Cape Flats was an area that became home to people considered to be non-white. Referred to as apartheid’s dumping ground, many people defined as black, coloured, or Indian were forcibly removed from central urban areas designated for white people and placed there.

Black Consciousness is grounded in group pride and the importance attached to Man (41). For Biko, there is no such thing as just two friends, the society demands for a sense of

community and laughs in the face of individualism (43). Elizabeth does not belong to any one community. Constantly on the border of a community, it may appear that Elizabeth’s fight is an isolated one. However, Head’s writing aligns Elizabeth’s journey and discourse to extend to include the oppression of a whole society (Johnson, 199). Transformation is at the core of the main discourse. The search for a guiding philosophy is widened to give meaning to her own life in comparison to a society attempting to define its ambitions.

At certain points in the native’s life and along the timeline of colonisation, an

epiphanic moment occurs where the native “discovers that his breath and beating heart are of equal worth to that of the settler” (35). The native journeys onto a path of self-discovery where his place in the world is secure and exists separate to that of the settler:

“For if, in fact, my life is worth as much as the settler’s, his glance no longer shrivels me up nor freezes me, and his voice no longer turns me to stone. I am no longer on tenterhooks in his presence;

in fact, I don’t give a damn for him”

(35).

Head’s protagonist borders on this epiphanic moment, where she recognises the falsehood of the oppressors and condemns their position of power and so-called values, yet she is still in need of that self-worth realisation. The inhabitants of her nightmares, to some respect, represent settlers who hinder her mental escape out of exile.

Frantz Fanon’s study on the native illustrates that eroticism and sexualisation of the native is imposed upon them by the settlers. Cultural rituals in the forms of dance and song aligns the native in a position which the coloniser does not comprehend. Their movements deemed wild and sexualised to fit the narrative of carnal and barbaric other - a prevalent theme in A Question of Power. Bessie Head provides a unique storytelling experience through the subtheme of sexual negation. The native, historically, has been subjugated to the sexual desires of the oppressor, and it is no different in Head’s case. Black and coloured men of South Africa were stripped of their humanity, manhood denied in the name of homosexuality and cultural practices. People are not granted the luxury of being a human with a personality, they are instead classified by race, and rigidly so. Of the certain coloured men Elizabeth encountered, in District Six, Elizabeth’s previous neighbourhood, held the reputation of being homosexual and the stigma attached to it quickly ensued. Elizabeth internalises their pain as

she has nightmares of their social and physical demise, as these men were societally seen as diseased, many would either inflict self-harm or endure slow deaths. A conversation Head has with a black man describes how the nature in which they are belittled has an immense effect on a man’s life:

“How can a man be a man when he is called a boy? I can barely retain my own manhood. I was walking down the road the other with my girl, and the Boer policeman said to me: “Hey boy, where’s your pass?” Am I man to

my girl who a boy? Another man addresses me as boy. How do you think I feel?”

(41)

The naming of boy bears the weight of not only patronisation but the internalised projection of self-deprecation. These boys are of very little importance to the South African apartheid name and these feelings of disdain towards them were not shied away from. Peculiarly, this man has no problem attaching the word girl to his partner, indicating that a lesser version of womanhood or adulthood is acceptable when associated with a woman, in comparison to the masculine validation that he has been deprived of. A debased sexuality can be viewed as an exilic experience. A common trope within postcolonial theory. Elizabeth herself, is viewed as a sexual pawn towards the masculine figures who cloud her mental space. They cheapen her sexuality by verbally attacking her body and negating her femininity. Constantly othered, she is never enough. Elizabeth’s exilic journey is further explored in the next section.

1.2. South Africa vs. Botswana

Botswana’s role as Elizabeth’s new home and as a neighbouring country, begs the question of what role it played in the apartheid regime and the nature in which location can act as an identifier. Immediately upon an attempt to compare these two southern African countries, it becomes apparent that the social dynamics of race relations is of minimal value within the conversation. In South Africa colour boundaries have become somewhat blurred, especially within the coloured community. As people were separated by skin tones, they were

subsequently segregated by tribes, culture, and ancestry. Therefore, the distinctions of difference reign high and force significant rifts between the nation’s people. Elizabeth, a woman on the border of not only a colour problem but a cultural one, is in search of the ultimate exilic question: who am I and where do I fit in? Botswana has, and is, quite

homogenous in terms of its ethnicity and its continuous non-white government. The Batswana government has maintained the only uninterrupted democracy in Africa (Holm, 198). Therefore, the common inquiry into whether Botswana lives in the shadow of apartheid does not particularly take root.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century Botswana became a British protectorate retaining internal autonomy on matters relating to Tswana laws (Robertson et al., 95). Colonial intervention remained distant due to the supposed lack of resources (Robertson et al., 96). Due to the underdevelopment of the nation, Botswana relied heavily on South Africa and its resources, many received an education in South Africa and many were sent over as migrant labourers. As a result of this close connection, Botswana was deeply influenced by the South African political developments. Between the early 1950s-1960s many South Africans fled to Botswana in search of refuge from the apartheid government, including Bessie Head herself (Robertson et al., 96). The presence of helpless South Africans encouraged Tswana nationalism and a growing demand for independence from the British and along with it, the growing demand to rid the country of white people (Robertson et al., 97). The first general elections were held in 1965, led by the Bechuanaland Democratic Party (Robertson et al., 97), and it has since been the only ruling party to date since independence.

South Africa and Botswana in their relationship to an exilic culture is a unique one. According to Rob Nixon exile pertains to the culture of a return, and within a South African context, the culture of a re-entry. The South African diasporic experience carries with it the uncertainty of a return, as well as wounded expectations that are attached to memory (112). What Nixon imposes is that the word ‘return’ amongst the South African diaspora holds a certain weight of expectations that conditions have scarcely began to satisfy. “‘Return emanates associations with reclamation and restitution” (111). What this also implies, like with any anti-colonial struggle, an emotional and economic claim to land. South Africa’s road to a return and repatriation has taken a detour through a “blood-stained amnesty replete with cynical military efforts to foster violence and deepen inter-ethnic rifts” (111). Steve Biko on the other hand, argues that within a South African context, a culture of a return does not exist. To him, the white minority have placed themselves on a path of no return:

“So blatantly exploitative in terms of the mind and body is the practice of white racism that one wonders if the interests of blacks and whites are so mutually exclusive as to exclude the possibility of there

being ‘room for all of us at the rendezvous victory.’”

Therefore, according to Biko, the intensity and passion of racism is so high that he believes the country and its various constituencies can never fully heal from its destruction. He stresses that the infamous anti-colonial hope for approaching liberation and deliverance as coined by Aimé Césaire (the rendezvous of victory), is not necessarily possible if apartheid were ever to end. Particularly, any sort of kinship between white and non-white people could never ensue due to the unrelenting hardships that would be needed to be forgiven.

Accordingly, Salman Rushdie in his essay “Imaginary Homelands” expounds that the word translation, etymologically, is of Latin origin to mean ‘bearing across’ and that “having been born across the world, we are translated men.” (17). Nixon transcends this by stating that “the arrival of translated person reminds us that words like banishment, uprootedness, loss and yearning cannot contain the state of the exiled” (112). Exile can perhaps be viewed not only as a deadening condition but as a possibility to be a creative one. Exile encourages and forces people to achieve complex, often imaginatively provisional ways of beings (112). Writers in exile hold a unique position in their expression of their relationship to the past and future. They rely on that displaced rift to guide their writing and relationship as a stateless person. Nixon argues that the present is the more insubstantial of the tenses, where time lived is of greater importance, in a loop of backward and forward projections (112). These

projections move in various directions amongst a desperate jumbling of the past and the future (122). In this sense, ‘back home’, does not serve as a time guaranteed but as a realm of choice (112). The choice to re-enter may offer release, however, it may also aggravate, in the same instance, an outpouring of trepidation (112). The return represents prospects of an imaginary rebirth.

Does Elizabeth exilic experience allude to a rebirth? Is Elizabeth’s exile a unique one? She does not wish to return to South Africa, nor holds any sort of affection towards it. In an interview in 1982, Head claimed that South Africa was never truly her land, she never had any real feeling of sentiment towards it. According to Head, the country had been so

successfully seized by white people that there was no place for her amongst the tyranny (Beard, 44). The presence of British colonial rule in Botswana was quite significant but barely visible, which led to a very different experience to that of her South African one. The black presence was extremely compelling and historically, the British were present without a disruption of the old, traditional ways of life (Beard, 44). Overall, what Head was in search of a society that accommodated her black South African background without any of the

The move from South Africa to Botswana proposed a new hope and future, however, exclusions of nation and race endured in Serowe. Ethnically, quite homogenous, the

inhabitants of Botswana defined themselves through ethnically nationalist terms as Batswana, and individually as Motswana. With this nationalist identity followed the rejection of those that threatened that sense of nationalism. The San, an indigenous people to Southern Africa who reside in the deserts of the Kalahari, held a special place of disdain amongst the

Batswana, warranting them the name of “Maswara” - a defamatory term relating to someone of lighter skin and of bushmen origin6 _{(Nixon, 118). Associating Elizabeth with the word}

bushmen could bring a sense of familiarity to Elizabeth as one of the many Afrikaner racial slurs towards coloured people was ‘bushman’ (Nixon, 118). The constant strain of rejection and the continuous position as the other, Head, the exile, is vilified in racial terms. Head aimed to remake herself outside of that which excluded her. The circumstances of her birth beg for a detachment from familial history (Nixon, 122). A Question of Power challenges this ostracism through an exploration of the self, extrinsic to the effects of external strains, especially the teachings and pain instilled by South Africa:

“She was forced to take out an exit permit, which, like her marriage, held the ‘never return’ clause. She did not care. She hated the country. In spite of her inability to like or to understand political ideologies, she had also

lived the back-breaking like of all black people in South Africa.”

(12)

This lays the basis for A Question of Power and the welcome Elizabeth receives. Head’s own sense of a detached relationship to an identity, coupled with the familial sense of racial estrangement can be compounded to the fact that she was denied the stability and structure of nationality until the age of 42 (Nixon, 117). This could be in part due to South Africa’s imperial designs which placed pressure on Botswana and their willingness to grant sanctuary to South Africans in the hope of escaping apartheid (Nixon, 117). Traveling on an exit permit and an UN refugee travel document - she was thus denied both an identity and a nationality. This sense of a detached relationship to South Africa could imply Head’s relationship to being cast aside as the other, as the nature of the apartheid regime thrives on the alienation of difference, which in itself reflects back to South Africa as an alienation of itself.

6 Historically, the San, a nomadic character, opted as a threat to both the white colonial and the Batswana against their claim to ownership of the land.

Elizabeth has difficulty reading the story of Botswana (Tucker, 174). Upon her arrival, she is automatically deemed “an out-and-out outsider” (20) and would never be a part of their community. “It became clear to Elizabeth that they knew something, that they were following a story with a logical outline, much as she was. This story kept coming out in bits” (21). She is constantly in a state of confusion where the story of Botswana is understood and interpreted by all, she, however, in her state of madness, can barely discern from reality. Additionally, she finds herself in a state of constant questioning and paranoia due to the locals’ reactions to her otherness. This argumentation on racism and exclusion warrants an escape and the need to start over. Therefore, Huma Ibrahim theorizes that the exilic person carries with them a concept known as exilic consciousness.

Exilic consciousness refers to “an escape from systems of oppression that give rise to desires which encompass the sphere of belonging not to your own people but to another people” (2). There are anxieties and passions which foreground Head’s desires and mirror this definition of exilic consciousness. With any exiled person comes the need and awareness to belong. It is this awareness that anchors the basis of Ibrahim’s study. Elizabeth is very aware and very vocal (internally) about her need to belong. Ibrahim states that in A Question of Power “the conditions of which exiles are subject to were channelled through the rigors of a disturbed emotional economy, where a “sense of belonging” was sought above all else in Africa where the protagonist does not belong linguistically or socially” (8). The displaced space Elizabeth finds herself in, coupled with the rejection of nationality, is the ultimate exilic existence. The power relations as found in the novel, for Ibrahim, are informed by the exiled identities who aim to overthrow the social and individual institutions of the nations (3). Bessie Head through this exilic trope has achieved a narrative that eradicates the silence that exist been colonial and feminist discourses (3), through writing a female character that overcomes and takes back the names imposed on her through sexuality and race by enforcing a voice previously repressed. This opens up a greater discussion to be had in which we question what effect these imposed names have upon the receiver. The following chapter thus explores the implications of exile on the oppressed female’s mind, connecting these theories of postcolonial thought and questions of exile to psychoanalytic theories.

2. A Study on Madness

“‘Oh God,’ she said, softly. ‘May I never contribute to creating dead worlds, only new worlds.’”

Bessie Head, A Question of Power

The theme of madness in A Question of Power transcends the scope of storytelling where the narrative at hand follows various causes of madness that take root in the protagonist’s mind. The madness acts as a voice and inclination towards a greater scheme of identity politics. The emphasis of the narrative is on the psychological, which pertains to the social factors

responsible for the protagonist’s psychology, which are made subsidiary to the effect they produce on the mind. Elizabeth, as previously stated, is a by-product of an oppressive regime and has carried the burden of its teachings internally, thus, forming the mental aberrations she tackles in her dreams. Elizabeth’s nightmarish dreams are imposed by figures who represent the collective South African subconscious. “Sello in the brown suit”, Dan, and Medusa epitomise self-destruction and internal loathing. They act as a voice for her inner struggles of lost identity and exilic suffering. The root of Elizabeth’s madness lies in the internalised racism, sexism, and sexual negation she is faced with as a mixed-race person confronted with binarism in a society preaching its importance. Consequently, her skin colour, sexuality, and womanhood all come into question when she cannot be aligned to the societal norm. As the main argument at hand aims to focus on the societal ramifications that impacted Elizabeth’s madness, in order to understand the protagonist’s insanity, it is crucial to understand the society that partially contributed to its composition. Born to a white mother, and black father, Elizabeth’s birth was deemed immoral and a crime under the Immorality Amendment Act of 1957. This law restricted any sort of union between races and allowed for the hospitalisation of her mother. Her mother was deemed insane due to the degradation of having a child with a native man. Her mother’s hospitalization and time spent in a mental institute, supposedly foreshadows Elizabeth’s eventual collapse into madness. Elizabeth’s future thus

predetermined.

According to Adetokunbo Pearse: “Head’s narrator undermines the argument of hereditary insanity by exposing the society’s prejudicial treatment of Elizabeth and emphasising the social background of Elizabeth’s mother’s supposed insanity” (82). The narrator argues for societal ramifications and institutional projections of trauma and oppression that has resulted in the protagonist's state of insanity. The stigmatisation of an irrational mother, coupled with the stigmatisation of engaging with someone of a differing race, identifies both Elizabeth and her mother as immoral criminals, and as examples of “social shame and sexual depravity” (83). However, it is important to discern that it is never clinically proven whether her mother actually suffered from any sort of mental illness. The

commencement of her mother’s supposed insanity is deemed as such due to her union with a native. We can thus assume that madness, in this particular case, can be defined as breaking the Immorality Amendment Act of 1957.

Rejected at the onset of birth, Elizabeth journeys through life experiencing filial and social rejection, developing a contorted view of her place in society. As an illegitimate child born out of criminality, Elizabeth stands as a threat to the compartmentalised structure of apartheid. As an individual who does not fit into the structured cultural regulations in a society that prioritises the classification of skin colour as opposed to their intrinsic nature (83), her psychosis internalises all of these rigid barriers found in society and fashions her mental state. Therefore, attaching Head’s story of madness to a classical psychoanalytical study such as the one theorised by Michel Foucault allows for definitions of madness and why the causes of Elizabeth’s madness are the root of said madness.

Michel Foucault’s study on Madness and Civilisation theorizes that a person’s voyage into madness develops “across a half-real, half-imaginary geography, the madman’s liminal position of the horizon” (11). This liminal position acts as an identity which Head’s

protagonist adopts. The liminal position acts as both a space in which Elizabeth’s madness takes root and as an indication towards a state of confusion. Within the madman’s mind “things become so burdened with attributes, signs, and allusions that they usually lose their own form” where “meaning is no longer read in an immediate perception, the figure no longer speaks for itself; between the knowledge which animates it and the form into which it is transposed” (18). This leads to the widening of a gap which opens up a space free for the dream to take form. Within this dream form, the images presented are laden with ancillary meanings and are forced to express them, thus, the dreams and other forms of madness slip into an excess of meaning (19). This excess of meaning becomes extremely overwhelming and the symbolic figures rapidly and easily become “nightmare silhouettes” (19). The subject and the object of the temptation presented, the nightmarish composition which “fascinates the gaze of the ascetic” (19) welcomes this transformation of nightmare silhouettes and falls prisoner to its force. Foucault states that “madness fascinates because it is knowledge” (21). All of these nonsensical figures “are in reality elements of difficult, hermetic, esoteric learnings” (21). True when we turn to the macabre figures of Sello, Dan, Medusa, and various other symbolic spiritual figures who present elements that require a deeper understanding of her exilic experience: the consciousness of Africa, the patriarchy, the apartheid regime and many more. There exists a curiosity to what these figures offer. For Elizabeth, they offer a deeper understanding of her own internalised self-hate as it trickles out

into the peripheral landscape of her everyday life. Furthermore, Foucault makes it clear that madness and imagination are not the same. A person is deemed mad only “when the mind binds itself to this arbitrariness and becomes a prisoner of this apparent liberty” (93). When Elizabeth succumbs to the nature of her dreams to the extent where they carry over into her daily life, reaffirms that she is clearly suffering from something external to reality:

“She was not sure if she were awake or asleep, and often after that dividing line between dream perceptions and waking reality was to become confused. She was to find out that something would startle her like this and quiet down to an apparent normality, only to find that she had really been shaken up into accepting

an entirely unnatural situation and adapting it into the flow of life.”

(15)

In this passage, we are able to witness the way in which Elizabeth is constantly questioning her state of mind. She realises that there exists a parallel between reality and the dream yet is often caught up in hallucinatory situations where it is painful to discern between the two worlds. Elizabeth is confronted with a blurred reality. There are instances which exist where her dreams and reality intertwine. To Elizabeth, what is presented to her is so vividly alive (17). As Foucault states “madness occurs when the images, which are so close to the dream, receive affirmation or negation that constitutes error” (104), we witness how Elizabeth affirms her dreams to be true with the arrival of those images within reality. Consequently, the novel can be hard to follow because of this blurred reality. What this could imply is a narrative technique which encourages reader empathy. Readers place themselves within Elizabeth’s mental distortions, as they themselves, are unable to discern between dream and reality. What this also proposes is the awareness of Elizabeth’s own self-distrust. She is unable to trust herself and the occurrences of her nightmares and therefore develops an air of scepticism towards her surroundings.

In terms of dreams, Foucault states that dreams and madness are of the same entity. He states that “madness which takes its original nature from the dream and reveals in this kinship that is a liberation of the image in the dark night of reality” (103). The moment the mind alienates itself from the dream and hallucinations, madness separates itself along with it. The moment the mind clings to the dream as truth, madness takes shape. Madness exists, thus beyond imagination, yet is still profoundly rooted in it. Moreover, Foucault stresses that “the act of the madman never oversteps the image presented, but surrenders to its immediacy, and affirms it only insofar as it is enveloped by it” (93). Elizabeth clearly has allowed herself to be enveloped by the image’s immediacy. At the sight of her first mental breakdown, we

witness how Elizabeth attacks a man on the basis of him being a representation of a restricted and exclusive land that has, according to Elizabeth, and the voices in her head, denied her access. Elizabeth feels a sense of inferiority, due to the streak of black in her, towards white people and therefore also feels a sense of superiority, due to the streak of white in her, towards black people (Pearse, 84). Therefore, not wanting to connect to one particular side, for the denial of one would mean the denial of a certain part of her, she decides to suppress both sides and hate both sides. Essentially denying her entire being, for the conflicting relationships she has with both sides would be a rejection of the self (Pearse, 84). The novel therefore, attempts to appease these complexes (Pearse, 84). During this attempt, her

complexes compounded with the contradictory attitude she has towards life, “constitutes the spiritual strivings at the core of the symbolic nightmarish passages of A Question of Power” (Pearse, 84). This is witnessed during the sight of Elizabeth’s first mental breakdown:

“She entered the office. From the moment her eyes remained riveted to his face and began pitching and heaving mentally in a crescendo of torture. The insistent hiss, hiss or horror swamped her mind: ‘You see,’ it said. ‘You don’t really like Africans. You see his face? It’s vacant and stupid. He’s slow moving. It takes him ages to figure out the brand name of the radio. You never really liked Africans. You only pretend to. You have

no place here. Why don’t you go away…’

(47)

This passage alludes to Medusa, a spiritual, mythical figure that haunts the inner chasms of Elizabeth’s mind, constantly spewing ideologies of hate and destruction. She represents Elizabeth’s internal sufferings and insecurities. A figment brought out of the antagonism of apartheid, Medusa attempts to drive Elizabeth to the furthest and darkest corners of her mind, testing her degree of access before reaching the ultimate tipping point. In the passage above, we are able to witness that point. Elizabeth surrenders to the immediacy of the image represented to her. The voice of Medusa echoes through her subconscious outside of the dream realm and persuades her to act upon her racist feelings. As previously stated, Elizabeth harbours ill feelings towards black people. As a person who is half-black, she internalises her disdain towards the suppression of the black life that she had experienced in South Africa and inflicts it upon herself and others of the same hue. The constant reminder of her otherness subjected her to various forms of torment. Elizabeth cannot help but be arrested by the taunts and philosophies of the images presented to her. Foucault states that both the image and the subject receiving the image are “prisoners of a kind of mirror interrogation, which remains unanswered in a silence inhabited only by the monstrous swarm that

surrounds them” (19). Medusa is the personified version of the feelings Elizabeth internalises about herself and the society she has left behind. The only difference being, Medusa provides a voice for those unspoken emotions.

A consequence of Elizabeth’s surrendering forms a complex of convictions and images which constitute a delirium (Foucault, 97). A delirium implies a sort of violence and an endangerment to the host. According to Foucault, a delirium is always present, it forms an integral part of a manifesting madness. However, a form of delirium exists which is not always manifested. A delirium which is a result of the sufferer seeking to trace the affliction from its origins, seeking to understand and formulate its riddle and truth (98). Elizabeth is aware of her madness and knows the root of it, she nevertheless seeks to understand it. The voices that impose upon Elizabeth’s subconscious clearly inflict harm in the name of self-realisation. Having moved to Botswana in search of refuge and encountering a different black life, one in which she was not wholeheartedly accepted into, has resulted in Elizabeth’s need for isolation and separation from people who run the risk of subjecting her to ill feelings. She is constantly in search of her identity and in doing so is in search of why her mind is the way it is, and why the figures represent who they do.

Bessie Head challenges this classical study on madness by taking it one step further, where postcolonial studies interject itself within the conversation, as previously discussed in Chapter 1. Venegas Caro de la Barrera states that in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon refers to madness as a colonial disease, relating it to a sense of alienation stemming from the experience of colonisation (203). Placing this theory in a South African context in the height of apartheid would attach that sense of alienation felt by Elizabeth to the

experience she had whilst in South Africa.

Foucault’s issue of liminality as an identity also plays a central role in the fiction of Bessie Head and postcolonial studies. Robert Nixon discusses the way in which “Head’s haunting quest for an alternative, improvised grounds for her identity generated an oeuvre that testifies, with single intensity, to the inventiveness of many of the most authoritative social categories - nation, family and race” (107). Venegas Caro de la Barrera furthers upon this by arguing “that the recurrent subject of Head is change itself, the investigation of the boundary” (208). Situated in a position as not only the voice of a South African coloured woman, of mixed-race origins, but also as a person deprived of any sense of nation and family, essentially limited in nature as she searches for a sense of identity. Elizabeth exists as a woman who does not adhere to the normal cultural regulations. Therefore, insanity exists as an affliction belonging to those who do not want to be who they are according to official

discourses (208). This issue of liminality as identity is displayed when we witness how Elizabeth “lives beyond the officialdom of cultural regulations, in the abrasive zone between old and decaying values and the newness of the unknown” (209). As a character whose identity rests in rootlessness and illegitimacy, the novel in its attempt towards self-definition, functions as a central analysis of the possibilities of fashioning cultural hybridisation7 _(208).

The powers at play that allow for her stateless state to exist are used by Head as a commentary on the concepts of good and evil to display the faults of humanity and the injustices that are allowed to reign.

2.1. Good vs. Evil

An important issue that the novel tackles is the concept of good vs. evil. Good and evil exist as polar opposites, expounding upon what Alan Watts refers to as the myth of polarity. The myth of polarity found within relationships that pertain to the reciprocal (xiv). Watts states that the oppositional terms such as good and evil, light and dark can be extended to include issues of the environment and of the self (xiv). Watt’s theory lends itself to the novel as he states that oppositional terms exist as transactional - they only exist in conjunction with one another (xv). Watts points to the behaviour of “images, and especially mythological images” of expressing a relationship “more adequate than logical descriptive language” (xv). Head goes beyond the scope of storytelling by using allegorical figures of her protagonist's mind to impart a story of madness and the destruction of society. These mythological images, Watts’s states, who are concerned with matters of opposition use it as a “running commentary” to the theme at hand (xv). Head’s characterisation of nightmare figures is able to act as a voice and narration for the oppositions that exist within a hypocritical society.

Elizabeth, amidst her new life in Botswana journeys on an exploration of

consciousness, questioning the nature of good and evil and the quintessence of power. The nightmare beings that inhabit her subconscious represent these aspects of good and evil. Pearse argues that the characters of Elizabeth’s madness represent variations of her sub-consciousness. Sello, exists as her subconscious self, Medusa and “Sello in the brown suit” present the derivatives of her subconscious (88). Dan as the unconscious self represents the collective South African subconscious mind of inciting difference, which has prevailed the forces of evil (88). They are not conventional characters of literature as they exist as aspects 7 Concept of hybridity is further explored in Chapter 3.

of her mind, infecting the inner corners of her sensitive mind. Head as a postcolonial writer does not simply mirror social realities but goes beyond that to explore the underlying tragedies imposed by society. In a sense, her narrator provides commentary for the suffering of human life. Head essentially achieves a novel that explores the sources of evil in the hope of exposing its true face.

Goodness, is found in Elizabeth’s relationship with Sello. Sello encourages Elizabeth to question. He encourages her to inquire upon the natures of good and evil and its

relationship to Man. He is the first ‘person’ she encounters upon her descent into madness and journey into the soul. “Everything was evil until I broke down and cried. It was when you cry, in the blackest hour of despair, that you stumble on a source of goodness” (29). Pearse suggests that this inscribes the novel’s philosophy of “man’s well-being with the world begins with himself” (87). Sello implores her to look beyond that which is presented to her. The evils that have camped out in her mind has blinded her so intensely that she is unable to understand herself and her place within the world. Foucault’s theory of “madness begins where the relation of man to truth is disturbed and darkened” finds validity in Elizabeth’s quest to understand humanity. Spirituality is found here as well and plays an important role in her relationship, to not only Sello, but the novel as a whole. She is able to encompass spiritual proportions because of the Buddhist philosophy which Head expresses in her character relationships and in the novel. According to this faith, the focus of spirituality is placed on man’s relationship to man. Elizabeth’s well-being is thus measured and tested against investigations of self-image (Pearse, 85). Her self-image is symbolised through her relationship to her sexuality. Sexual negation is what symbolises the negative view of the self.

Sexual negation is found in the taunts imposed upon her by Medusa and “Sello in the brown suit”, in an attempt to mentally harm her and accuse her of sexual ineffectiveness. They also accuse her of social failure. Their comments on her social exclusion is what Elizabeth despises the most (Pearse, 88). As a coloured woman, they accuse her of not being able to fully immerse herself within an African landscape. They play on her South African experiences and its permanent tension between differing races and equate her to lost and suffering homosexual men.

Dan is the ultimate sorcerer: “There was nothing beautiful in the Dan story. He was a big-time guy from hell” (133). He uses much subtler methods to negate and abuse Elizabeth. He utters promises of love and affection and declares his innocence. He appears in many forms, as friend, as lover, as destroyer. Dan conjures up seventy-one lovers for himself and

uses them as sexual pawns to inflict harm upon Elizabeth. She calls them the ‘nice-time girls’ and distinguishes between them using defining features or characteristics as names8_{. These}

women are thrown in Elizabeth’s face as an indication and comparison of her sexual inadequacy. They represent who she cannot be, as her ability to please is made trivial. It is through the use of these women that Dan issues his plan of attack to rid Elizabeth of any sense of love and respect that she may have for herself or others (Pearse, 89). Dan preys on every one of her relationships and finds a way to pervert them. Consequently, it is in the destruction and the constant perversion of sexuality that causes her next mental breakdown. Dan in his plan to kill, associates himself to the prevalence of evil and attaches Africa to the charade of his lessons. In the totality of his evilness he “began to make all things African vile and obscene. The social defects of Africa are first the African man’s loose, carefree

sexuality” (145). It was in the powerful projections of his own personality as Africa (145) that Elizabeth found Africa as evil and as the main cause of her problems. It is in Dan’s connection to Africa and the way all of the existing nightmare figures disassociate Elizabeth from Africa that distresses her the most (Pearse, 89). Contrarily, Elizabeth’s want and need to be welcomed in Africa is contradicted in both of her mental breakdowns.

South Africa itself, exists as her conscious self, and therefore exists as the base of all aspects of evil. Pearse proposes that we should be asking certain questions when inquiring into the nature of good and evil. The first, due to the situation in South Africa and the

particular jargon imposed by the ruling whites in order to define their humanity as opposed to the de-humanity of non-whites: “how does one relate to oneself?” And subsequently, “how does one relate to others within society?” (85). The jargon imposed upon people like

Elizabeth carries lifetime effects and makes itself known in both inferiority and superiority complexes she has internalises. Pearse argues that the novel attempts to dispel the South African mindset, at the time, that “might is right” (87). The novel seeks to instil in her psyche the Buddhist belief in the righteousness of the modest. She is thus able to find solace in the philosophical teachings of Buddhism and Man, where she is able to undergo a transformation and reconstruct a new personality, separate and void of any traces of a past life.

Whilst in a mental institute after her second breakdown, Elizabeth is made to work as a part of her healing process. She refuses as she claims she is not African, implying that domestic work is only meant for Africans, and not herself, due to that streak of white in her. With every ounce of aggression, she claims that she never wants to be an African (195). This completely juxtaposes the entirety of the novel. Elizabeth is constantly in a state of

questioning. Questioning her race, her home, her sexuality and through the denouncement of her African-ness, denounces any form of an identity she was hoping to receive. However, Foucault proposes that the “totality of the body and soul are completely dispersed. The figures and images which envelop segments of the body and ideas of the soul in a kind of absurd unity” (93). This highlights the way in which the teachings of “Sello in the brown suit”, Dan, and Medusa have taken significant root in Elizabeth’s subconscious, to the extent where she believes all of the negativity in their annihilation of her African part. It is only when a psychiatrist confides in her of his own racist ideologies that “the thought of being thought of as a comrade racialist had abruptly restored a part of her sanity” (198). It is in this connection to white supremacy that Elizabeth realises the absurdity of her contradictions. “‘Oh God,’ she said, softly. ‘May I never contribute to creating dead worlds, only new worlds’” (103). Elizabeth wishes to use the liminal position she has been entrusted with, devoid of evil and death, as a means of mental stability. Her awakening to the evils that have persisted in her mind, ask for new worlds. One could thus argue that the blurred lines that exist between good and evil display themselves in Elizabeth herself. As stated, an aspect of her madness is found within the inferiority complexes she internalises. The next chapter focuses on why that is and where these complexes stem from. Essentially focusing on the discourses of race and sexuality.

3. The Shame in Being Coloured

“In South Africa she had been rigidly classified Coloured. There was no escape from it to the simple joy of being a human being with a personality.” Bessie Head, A Question of Power

Homi Bhabha in his novel Location of Culture, introduces the concept of hybridity. This concept of hybridity aligns itself with Elizabeth’s situation as a mixed-race person in a displaced state. Bhabha recognises the position of the coloured person in the South African context, as being one of an ‘in-between’ reality (13). The inception of the word ‘coloured’ was established by the Nationalist government’s Population Registration Act of 1950, which pertains to each inhabitant of the country being classified in accordance with certain racial characteristics as part of the apartheid system. The coloured was negatively defined as coloured as they were ‘neither white nor black’. Bhabha understands that Fanon asserts the crucial importance of secondary people in asserting their indigenous cultures and reclaiming their repressed histories. However, he also recognises that Fanon is “far too aware of the dangers of fixity and fetishism of identities within the colonial cultures” (5) where they advocate for the romanticising of the past, where “roots” are laid to rest, or by homogenising the history of the present (5). These roots are encouraged to disappear and open the way for an assimilation of sorts which advocates for the exploitation of the colonised people.

The questions surrounding hybridity and its place within a postcolonial context, as well as the “territorialisation of geography and belonging within which identity is produced” (Wicomb, 94) arises when we look at A Question of Power. The coloured individual is usually associated with the Western Cape. Elizabeth, having separated herself from that region becomes a coloured in a displaced state external to societal compartmentalisation. The problem of identity indicates a position that undermines the new narrative of national unity. South Africa, a society idolising the concept of binarism, aims to produce a society where easy classification is possible. The identity of the coloured person stands as one that challenges that. Elizabeth thus, enters life as a burden and one without a set home.

Native to Southern Africa, the coloured person is usually defined as having a broad ancestral history. Bhaba insinuates that the inception of racial and cultural fusion “bridges the ‘in-between’ diasporic origins of the coloured in South Africa” (13). This produces a symbol for the detached, displaced everyday life in the liberation of the struggle (13). Furthermore, he discerns that the public and private spaces converge with the past and present, the psyche and the social and thereby develops an “interstitial intimacy” (13). It is that intimacy that Bhabha argues, “questions the binary divisions through which such social spheres of social experience are often spatially opposed” (13). These spheres of life are connected through an ‘in-between’ ephemerality that takes the measure of dwelling at home, whilst producing an image of the world history which results in the movement of aesthetic distance that provides the narrative with a double edge (13). A question of shame arises when body politics and race

align in order to fetishize the hybrid female, by which she is vilified for the existence of her violated body.

Zoë Wicomb, in her essay entitled “Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Africa” questions exactly that: who are the coloured people, and why do they represent a mark of shame to the South African name? The title of this chapter is stimulated by

Wicomb’s essay. Wicomb analyses the manner in which the coloured woman’s shame is aligned to objectification. She provides an example of Saartjie Baartman, a KhoiKhoi9

woman who was advertised and paraded for the enjoyment and fascination of English and French spectators curious about the savage African woman’s body. She was forced to ‘perform’ for years before falling ill. A question of honour came into existence once the South African government was able to retrieve her remains: what was to be done with them? The obvious accord being that the violated, native body should be buried underneath native soil in the Western Cape, the sight of her origins (91). The people of Soweto argued that the Western Cape was hardly the sight for a national symbol of cultural restoration (91). The question thus being, what value does the coloured woman possess when an issue of what constitutes a national symbol is investigated? The coloured woman is an emblem of miscegenation and the body to be buried is a rite of passage. Bury the shame of having the woman’s body stared at and objectified by the coloniser, what’s more, bury the shame found in those who mated with the coloniser. The conceptualisation of the term miscegenation is defined by Wicomb as:

“... the origins of which lie within a discourse of ‘race’, concupiscence, and degeneracy, continues to be bound up in shame, a pervasive shame exploited in apartheid's strategy of the naming of the coloured race, and recurring the attempts by coloureds to establish brownness as a pure category, which is to say a denial of

shame.”

(91)

The provenance of the coloured birth therefore symbolises a scandal, whereby the categorisation of colouredness as a pure category suggests a goal in separating oneself from the history of their origins. Miscegenation is not something to be spoken about, the “very nature of shame is to stifle its own discourse” (91). Furthermore, what Baartman represents is the nature in which “shame, cross-eyed, and shy, stalks the postcolonial world broken mirror in hand, reproducing itself in puzzling distortion” (91). The postcolonial world is forced to recognise the hypocrisy in branding coloured people as shameful. The coloured subject exists 9 A group of indigenous people of South Africa.

as a product of colonialism. By attaching the coloured to the concept of shame implies that the coloured child carries generational marks of supposed traitorship forced upon her by oppressors10_{. Despite the fact of force, people are unable to disassociate the shame of having}

the body violated to the person violated. Wicomb proposes that we need to find a way of discussing the “textual construction, ethnographic self-fashioning, and political behaviour of coloureds in South Africa” (92) by analysing the condition of post-coloniality through the perception of shame. Through the process of transcoding ethnicity, of contesting its meaning within a new politics of representation, is when we are able to open up the scope of how we look at ourselves and the naming of ourselves. Saartjie Baartman’s name greatly signifies her cultural hybridity. The same can be said for Elizabeth, and Bessie Head herself. The name depicts the body as a site of shame, a body constrained by location. The name indicates a cultural history of not only colonisation but forced assimilation. The fusion of European and Afrikaans language-based names in conjunction with their external appearance highly announces the sight of their origins.

In the context of the anti-apartheid struggle, terms such as ‘black’ and ‘coloured’ were not necessarily based on circumstances of pigmentation but were political identifiers,

separated by ethnicity and language. Therefore, compartmentalisation allows for non-white communities to inflict internal hatred as well. In the eyes of black people, coloureds were considered “half-Afrikaans” due to the affiliation with the language which was most common amongst the coloured community. The hostility, thus, stemming from the proximity to the oppressors. Contrarily, the coloured person’s proximity to the black race, adds a layer of internal disdain in the coloured person towards the back community, which displays itself in the novel. Furthermore, in Black Consciousness poetry, the black woman was usually portrayed as a traitor of the struggle, whereas the coloured woman, a product of sexual depravity, was by nature a wanton and corrupt (Pucherova 110). Therefore, through the exclusion of women in their discourse of writing and resistance, it can thus be interpreted that “through the figure of chiasmus, shame is identified as the recognition of being the object of another’s shame” (Wicomb, 97). The self-fashioning of the term coloured by others who have scripted the subject of shame need to be analysed in the light of a narrative for liberation and examine the various overtones of oppression (Wicomb, 94). It is in the “metaphysics of race which allows differences to exclude an individual from what others in her own community

10 Essentially, the traitoriship implies the native African mother’s treason in uniting with the white, tyrannical European father.