SOURCE: Pearse, Adetokunbo. “Apartheid and Madness: Bessie Head's A Question of Power.” Kunapipi 5, no. 2 (1983): 81-93.

In the following essay, Pearse offers a psychoanalytic reading of Bessie Head's quasi-autobiographical novel, A Question of Power, arguing that, for Head, the social system of apartheid creates psychological distortions through stigmatization and isolation.

No work in the corpus of African literature dealing with the theme of madness, for example Achebe's Arrow of God, Kofi Awoonor's This Earth, My Brother, or Ayi Kwei Armah's Fragments, captures the complexity and intensity of the insane mind as does Bessie Head's A Question of Power.¹ Bessie Head's thrust into the insane mind and her ability to speak the highly symbolic language of madness derives, it seems, from a combination of the painful personal experience of mental aberration and an interest in psychoanalytical theories.

In A Question of Power, Bessie Head uses the psychoanalysts' delimitation of the...