A review by lindseyzank
A Question of Power by Bessie Head

4.0

I honestly hated the entire first half of this novel, but once I started, along with Elizabeth, making sense of her nightmares and hallucinations, I discovered the beauty of what Bessie Head is doing with this text. Elizabeth is a Faust-like character in that she figuratively exchanges her sanity and soul for madness and martyrdom. After experiencing three brutal years of mind control at the hands of the fictitious Sello and Dan (who represent both God and the Devil at once in Elizabeth's mind), Elizabeth embraces her suffering, because she sees it as having advanced humanity, and more specifically the town of Motabeng, Botswana, where she goes to escape the brutalities she was experiencing in her native South Africa because of racism. For a woman to suffer such delusions and be so convinced that she will, at an appointed time, commit suicide and leave her young son behind, yet somehow view her suffering as a beautiful lesson, is a remarkable message that Head leaves us at the end. The relationship she develops with the American character Tom is another aspect of this story that I really loved. Half the time, I didn't even know what I had just read, but by the end, Head's intentions were so clear to me that I raced to finish. A truly captivating story about what can happen if you're seen as an outsider in southern Africa because of your mixed race, but also about the redeeming and cleansing places you can go as a result of this marginality.