Mental Illness: The Healing Power in Bessie Head’s A Question of Power

Bessie Head's A Question of Power is one of the great African literary pieces that deals with insanity. As a reader, I found it challenging to cope with the traumatic situations encountered by Elizabeth, the central character of this novel. She struggles with her two inner beings; Sello and Dan. Both of them represent either God or Satan or vice versa. To escape the violence of apartheid, Elizabeth leaves South Africa and immigrates to Motabeng, a village in Botswana. Elizabeth, like Bessie Head apparently leads her life alienated from the society. In South Africa, She experiences inhumanity, poverty, and mental torture as she has no truly pure identity. In apartheid period, intercourse between a white and a black person was illegal. Elizabeth's mother was white and her father was black and she is neither white nor black. In Botswana, she was an outcast in the society again because she was unfamiliar with language and culture of Botswana. So, Elizabeth's isolation from the entire world, her poverty and the extreme violence of Sello and Dan eventually force her to suffer mental illness. Though on a superficial level, it seems that Elizabeth's insanity gives her nothing except mental and physical trauma; her illness brings freedom and peace for her at the end of the novel. So this paper will analyze the impact of the state of insanity to prove that Elizabeth's mental illness strengthens her power to understand social and political issues which ultimately leads to the reconciliation of her body and soul in A Question of Power by Bessie Head.