Bonding with Bessie Head through ‘A Question of Power'(1973)

Bibliomancy, madness, salvation, inner lives and world of love

A black and white photograph of Bessie Emery Head (1937-1986) posing in front of the sea. A part of the text at the back of this photograph, handwritten by Bessie Head in blue ink reads: “ME, as I am.” This picture was sent in October 1960 to African American poet, social activist and leader of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes (1901-1967). Source: Moore, David Chioni. “The Bessie Head–Langston Hughes Correspondence, 1960–1961.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 41, no. 3, 2010, pp. 1–20. JSTOR

Answering the call

Bessie Head’s name has been on my mind lately. It has been bouncing in my consciousness and conjuring black and white images of the South African novelist, letter writer and essayist commonly known as Botswana’s most influential writer. My first instinct was to watch archival interviews of her online so I could feel the texture of her voice and my second was to take a look at her birthdate and death anniversary. On some occasions, these dates tend to coincide with my periodical obsession with deceased people I knew of but never met¹. It is usually a cross-dimensional reminder to me or whoever is momentarily tuned in to their astral channel to remember them and to get to know them a little bit more. As my quick search for her voice was somewhat disappointing, I resorted to dig through my book-filled-boxes (I still haven’t unpacked from my recent move) in search of the only novel I have of aunty Bessie Amelia Emery Head.

It was underneath a stack of three rare books I bought in company of my friend Moshood in February 2023, at the Holy Man Book Store, one of my favourite secondhand book kiosks located in the bustling labyrinth that is Makola market in Accra. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer (1969), no ! Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1965), no! Efua Sutherland’s The Marriage of Anansewa and Edufa (1987), no! Bessie Head’s A Question of Power (1973) YES! This novel is the 149th book out of 359 published between 1962 and 2003 by Heinemann as part of their African Writers Series (AWS)². Sadly gracing the book cover is a picture of a naked woman with her arms tightly wrapped around her legs and her head, heavy with anxious thoughts, rests atop her knees. Her explicit vulnerability encapsulates the state of affairs I was about to come into contact with through the flawless, yellowish and fragile pages of this novel. Despite the pile of short stories, essays and autobiographies I was yet to finish, I decided to begin A Question of Power and pay attention to what aunty Bessie had to tell me/us.

Befriending our own madness

I sat down through Elizabeth mental breakdowns, witnessing the workings of her mind twisting my own mind in search of respite and meaning-making. She calls them “journeys of the soul” through the inner “ugly” life. They are outrageous spiritual experiences/trances/manic episodes/tormenting nightmares, that pierce the soul of poor Elizabeth with the sum of humankind indecencies and suffering past, present and future. Each of these painful symphonies are punctuated with fragmented revelations that help her crack the code of human existence:

“… people, in their souls, were forces, energies, starts, planets, universes and all kinds of swirling magic and mystery; that at a time when this was openly perceived, the insight into their own powers had driven them mad, and they had robbed themselves of the natural grandeur of life […] ‘Oh, what a world of love could be created!’”

— Bessie Head, A Question of Power (1973), pg. 35

In theory and practice, the possibilities for this "world of love" are endless as long as Life continues to unapologetically spring in spite of our necrophilic³ society. However, what happens when day-to-day living becomes impossible and suffocating on both an individual and collective level? What happens when the simple act of getting out of bed becomes a herculean task? Elizabeth’s troubled inner life is the consequence of her damaging upbringing in apartheid South Africa, her status as a coloured⁴ woman born in a mental hospital coupled with her exile to Motabeng. It is in this rural area in Botswana, confronted with her old traumas that her mental health collapsed. Her relentless encounters with the faces of evil on a psychological and metaphysical plane emerged from the patriarchal, racist, colonialist and sexist ecosystem she had been exposed to all her life. Years after years, layers after layers, it polluted the rivers of her inner world leaving her psyche with corroded edges. Three blurry years of soul-shattering incidents and Elizabeth never failed to recognised love and refused to become like her dementors. When everything was an incomprehensible mess, meaning-making was not always necessary and that was okay! What mattered was to secure her inner life by returning to the mundane, the ordinary and to re-enchant it. Elizabeth hit rock bottom but she remembered Thoko’s swollen yellow pumpkin, a keepsake of her forgotten longing to farm. Elizabeth was a wreck but she had her “brilliantly green cabbage-head”, her giant cauliflower, her miraculous Cape gooseberry and her candide jam-making practice. Elizabeth created her world of love in her backyard and kitchen with every dust of hope that reached her doorstep and when the time came, she extended her world to her community through the village vegetable garden. She seized every opportunity that could propel her to the surface of her murky waters to take a deep breath, to fill her lungs with the sandy air of Motabeng, before diving in once more.

“People only function well when their inner lives are secure and peaceful.” — Bessie Head, A Question of Power (1973), pg. 49

A black and white photograph of a joyful Bessie Head standing proudly in front of ‘Rain Clouds’, the small house she built with the profits from her novel When Rain Clouds Gather (1968) after she returned to Serowe, Botswana in 1969. Source: Atkinson, Susan D. (1998). A living life, a living death: a study of Bessie Head’s writings as a survival strategy. PhD thesis The Open University.

Elizabeth is Bessie Head, Bessie Head is Elizabeth⁵. As she moved to Botswana in 1964 at the age of twenty-six with her son, Bessie Head became involved in the creation of Serowe's first public garden as part of the Boiteko Farming Brigades. She worked as a productive gardener intuitively watering her inner garden in pursuit of her own inner peace. She was obsessed with her newly found practice that kept her afloat and filled her thoughts with seedlings, sprouts, collar greens, cantaloupes, tomatoes and sweet peppers. At night, they became alive in her fugitive writing alongside her lived experienced in Botswana. Summer Flowers⁶ was the initial title of A Question of Power and Cape gooseberry bushes faced Rain Clouds, the name she gave to the small house she co-designed and built in Serowe with the proceeds from her first novel When Rain Clouds Gather (1968). Her home, as modest as it was, stood as her haven and shield. Just like Elizabeth, Bessie could take refuge inside Rain Clouds when her fragile mind turned into a battlefield, a condition she inherited from her white mother who was burdened with mental health issues. When Bessie’s joyful heart was fit to extend communal love, she would open her door to the only three black people she knew in Serowe: two women and a man.

How can my home be this way?
Most priceless, defenseless;
Most valuable, valueless;
Most welcome, forbidding;
Tread softly -
The walls breathe peace;
Deep dark black peace -
And the wind don't blow.⁷

If we were to journey through our rich inner lives, what elements would we uncover? What obsessions are inhabiting our thoughts and what do we do with them? What home(s), literal or metaphorical, have we made for ourselves to breathe easy? How about naming these homes? What world of love do we want to create and how could we share it with our community? What stops us to do so?

Another black and white portrait of Bessie Head smiling. Photo/Date: Unnamed and unknown. Source: Staffrider, Vol. 6, No. 4, 1987

1. In March 26, 2020, I was drawn to create a collage in honour of Ota Benga not knowing that this was the week of his passing 104 years ago. The collage is untitled ‘hommage: sorry U had to go through what U went through’.

2. The African Writers Series is a series of books written by African writers that has been published by Heinemann and Longman (now Pearson) from 1962 until 2003. The series has provided an international audience for many African writers like Chinua Achebe, Buchi Emecheta, Nuruddin Farah, Flora Nwapa, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Nadine Gordimer and many more.

3. “On his deathbed Erich Fromm asked a beloved friend why we prefer love of death to love of life, why "the human race prefers necrophilia to biophilia." Coming from Fromm this question was merely rhetorical, as he had spent his life explaining our cultural failure to fully embrace the reality that love gives life meaning. Unlike love, death will touch us all at some point in our lives. We will witness the death of others or we will witness our own dying, even if it's just in that brief instance when life is fading away. Living with lovelessness is not a problem we openly and readily complain about. Yet the reality that we will all die generates tremendous concern, fear, and worry. It may very well be that the worship of death, indicated by the constant spectacles of dying we watch on television screens daily, is one way our culture tries to still that fear, to conquer it, to make us comfortable. Writing about the meaning of death in contemporary culture Thomas Merton explains: "Psychoanalysis has taught us something about the death wish that pervades the modern world. We discover our affluent society to be profoundly addicted to the love of death…. In such a society, though much may officially be said about human values, whenever there is, in fact, a choice between the living and the dead, between men and money, or men and power, or men and bombs, the choice will always be for death, for death is the end or the goal of life." Our cultural obsession with death consumes energy that could be given to the art of loving.” - bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions, “Loss: Loving into Life and death”, pg. 191-192.

4. In South Africa, “being coloured” is used to describe people of mixed heritage.

5. I strongly encourage you to read about Bessie Head and her extraordinary and moving life. You can start with Atkinson, Susan D. (1998). A living life, a living death: a study of Bessie Head’s writings as a survival strategy. PhD thesis The Open University.

6. summer flowers - pumflet, 2019

7. An extract from Bessie Head’s poem “Where the wind don’t blow” taken from “Bessie Head: Unpublished Early Poems.” English in Africa, vol. 23, no. 1, 1996, pp. 40–46. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40238820. Accessed 20 Feb. 2024.