Anette Horn

Bessie Head´s third novel, A Question of Power, was published ten years after she had entered Botswana on a one-way exit permit from South Africa in 1964. In it she confronts her own experience of isolation and alienation as an exiled "coloured" single woman writer in a patriarchal rural African society. The psychological strain of this experience contributed to her nervous breakdown, which she has recreated so powerfully in the character of Elizabeth. Yet what surfaces in this fictional account of madness is the close relationship between the construction of feminine identity, and that of feminine sexuality in a patriarchal discourse. This discourse transcends not only the borders between Botswana and South Africa, but also those between the first and the third world. It is her failure to conform to the patriarchal norms of feminine sexuality that results in Elizabeth´s insanity. By re-presenting Elizabeth´s transgression of the borders of appropriate feminine behaviour, however, Bessie Head succeeds in exposing the artificiality and oppressiveness of these purportedly natural norms, and in making visible identities for women, which are not based on domination. I wish to argue that she achieves this through memory-work - a concept developed and applied by a women´s collective working on female sexualisation. (Haug: 1987)

Memory-work is based on the premise that the norms of feminine sexuality neither form a unified whole, nor are stated in the manner of a law. Instead women are trained to actively participate in a number of norms or structures ("heteronomy"), which they do not consciously determine. The women´s collective calls this subjectification, the process whereby women subordinate themselves to the patriarchal discourse in order to be able to speak as subjects. Yet this process is not merely understood as passive: "It is the fact of our active participation that gives social structures their solidity; they are more solid than prison walls." (Haug 1987: 59) Because women inscribe these structures onto their own bodies, they are particularly resistant to rational argument. Thus a woman might consider herself enlightened, but still conform to the dominant beauty ideals, which reinforce her subordinate status. This approach to female sexualisation accounts both for the socio-economic differences between women, and for the similarities of their acquisition of gender identity in a patriarchal discourse which ascribes to women the position of object.

The women´s collective describes the strategies by which women stimulate desire within these patriarchal structures as slavegirl behaviour: "Posture, external appearance and movement are adjusted by women themselves in their attempts to conform to and reinforce the status quo." (Ibid.: 79) The seventy-one nice-time girls who haunt Elizabeth in A Question of Power typify this type of behaviour: By conforming to the status quo, they gain power not only over the men who desire them but more importantly over the women who deviate from the norm, in this case Elizabeth. Their pleasure derives from this power over their masters as well as over their potential rivals. Even Elizabeth is not free from these norms, but suffers under her deviation, which she experiences as lack: her hair is too frizzy, she is too fat, her breasts are too large, she has no vagina. In their collective memory-work, the authors of Female Sexualization investigate how the young girl´s body is sexualised through a series of body-projects, whose sexual significance is never stated, though constantly alluded to. Thus a mother or aunt might scold a girl: Don´t sit like that (with your legs apart), or you´ll never get a husband. Similarly, a girl might be chided for wearing her hair loose, because nice girls don´t wear their hair like that. Implicit in these admonitions is the potential threat of women´s bodies to society. This is, however, the pivotal construction of the patriarchal discourse: The woman represents that chaos and disorder which the patriarchal discourse excludes but constantly tries to reintegrate in order to re-produce itself.

Escape from these norms cannot, however, be achieved simply by negating them, since this would invert the rigid oppositions of the patriarchal discourse (feminine-masculine, black-white, high-low) without dissolving them. In this context, the way memories are verbalised, poses a problem, since it tends to present extraordinary events as the triggers of all developments, while assuming that in between these breaks life proceeds quietly, unobtrusively. It therefore veils the crisis in everyday life by subsuming it under the "normal". In order to avoid this pitfall of memory-work, the women´s collective suggests the following strategy: "Instead of this, we should perhaps begin from the premiss that all developments contain an element of crisis and thus that crisis itself has an everyday quality; that the catastrophe is prepared well in advance, and is itself the result of a general training in the normality of heteronomy." (Ibid.: 86f.) Since memories are also articulated in the patriarchal discourse, the gaps and elisions of memory have to be teased out in order to subvert the "normality" of women´s subordination.

The prevalence of clichés in early memory-work reinforces this point. Recording opinions and judgements as well as studying the "theories, popular sayings, images and so on" that already surround the object of study, "in other words, the way in which the field was already colonized" is, however, an important first step. (Ibid.: 59) In the second stage of memory-work, the limitations of clichés become visible, as they hinder thought and understanding. Lack of language is not the problem here, as is often argued when explaining the sparsity of women in art or literature or in the sciences, but rather the kind of language being used. The cliché seems of little or no use in this context as it assumes a consensus which blocks any further questions. The authors of Female Sexualization write: "Cliché defines like a corset the contours of `appropriate´ female feelings and desires." (Ibid.: 62) In Bessie Head´s portrayal of Elizabeth´s madness, she uses clichés to describe her protagonist´s relationship to the two men, Sello and Dan, but she hollows and burns them out to make way for a more complex understanding of the character´s thoughts and desires.

Closely related to the cliché, the stereotype veils the contradictions of a person´s own thoughts and actions by projecting them onto others. In this way it keeps up the illusion of the unity of the subject, at the same time as making the actions of others seem implausible. This lends memories a fairytale-like quality: "Just as in fairytales in which the plot is carried forward by the actions of the good and bad fairies, we too view the character traits of others as decisive in directing our lives - even though we have long since stopped `believing´ in fairytales." (Ibid.: 70) The projections of Elizabeth´s repressed sexuality, which appear as the characters in her psychological drama, bear the traits of stereotypes, e.g. the nice-time girls, Medusa, the masculine Dan and the spiritual Sello, but she transcends them by integrating them into her own conscious experience, thus taking responsibility for their/her actions. Memory-work enables her to explode the limits of conventionality by slashing through "the horizontal seams that traditionally keep domains of experience separate and parallel", and to forge connections between apparently unrelated elements of her story, thus illuminating both the structures of female sexualisation and a desire that transgresses them. (Ibid.: 60)

In this respect memory-work relies on the alienating devices of fiction, since they allow the person who remembers to distance her/himself from an experience already interpreted by clichés and stereotypes by transposing it onto different contexts. Instead of looking for the hidden truth behind these commonplaces, fictionality is taken to its limits so as to reveal the construction of sexuality and identity itself. Playing with one´s own story can become a source of pleasure and knowledge, as the women´s collective found out: "Collective experiments with the many different attitudes that surfaced in our work were a source of great pleasure; transposing them into different areas, seeing how they looked in different contexts; reversing them, trying to invert them, in short, by translating the stories out of the sphere of the purportedly `natural´ into that of the `manufactured´." (Ibid.: 61) I wish to contend that Bessie Head uses memory-work similarly: not only to explore her own subjection to these norms, but to reveal the pattern of feminine behaviour in an African society by transposing her personal experience onto a fictitious character, Elizabeth, who in turn distances herself from her own fictitious experience by using a third person narrator. An autobiography within an autobiography in effect.

Elizabeth explores the contradiction between her own subjection and resistance to the sexual norms of her society and a burning desire that exceeds any norms in her relationships with Dan and Sello. They are both fictitious characters, only loosely connected to their living counterparts in the village. (27) Sello is portrayed as a Buddhist monk, who shares spiritual insights with her, whereas Dan works through his "masculine" charm. She turns to Dan after Sello has revealed his weakness to her through Medusa, who dominates African men and women. Medusa wishes to shut Elizabeth out of her power circle because of her racial impurity. She asserts her superiority over Elizabeth through her sexual prowess, however: "Medusa was smiling. She had some top secret information to impart to Elizabeth. It was about her vagina. Without any bother for decencies she sprawled her long black legs in the air, and the most exquisite sensation travelled out of her towards Elizabeth. It enveloped Elizabeth from head to toe like a slow, deep, sensuous bomb. It was like falling into deep, warm waters, lazily raising one hand and resting in a heaven of bliss. Then she looked at Elizabeth and smiled, a mocking, superior smile: `You haven´t got anything near that, have you?´" (44) While Elizabeth can accept her lack of sexual attractiveness, Medusa´s constant mockery drives her mad, because it implies an intolerance towards anyone who does not conform to the norm. Sello is himself powerless against her.

Dan seems to be the complete opposite of Sello, although his "masculine" behaviour evokes conflicting emotions in her: "She was entirely dependent on what he would do, and what he did was astonishing. He bent right down to the floor and kissed her toes. As he removed his mouth a warm glow remained on the area he had touched. (...) More than anything, the extreme masculinity of the man instantly attracted her." (105) The romantic gesture masks the power relationship between Dan and Elizabeth, however, and makes her submit to him voluntarily. Once she has swallowed the bait, Dan´s psychological torture begins, which is to humiliate her by making her witness his exploitation of other women. The nice-time girls could be seen as modern-day versions of Medusa, after her power had been broken, reduced to objects of man´s insatiable desire. They lack individual names; instead they are identified by "brand-names", which attest to their most striking sexual feature: there is Miss Pelican Beak, Miss Chopper, Miss Pink Sugar-Icing, Madame Make-Love-On-The-Floor where anything goes, The Sugar-Plum Fairy, Body Beautiful, The Womb, Madame Squelch Squelch, Madame Loose-Bottom and so on. (148)

If all these women are viewed as projections of Elizabeth´s own repressed sexuality, however, her ambivalent attitude to Dan emerges: Although she wants to be like the nice-time girls in order to experience herself as a woman in the patriarchal society and to be desired by the "masculine" Dan, she cannot admit it. Her visions of Dan and the nice-time girls could therefore be seen as a rape-fantasy. Despite her contempt for them, she feels inferior to them, because she thinks she lacks something which she calls a "vagina", but which alludes to a set of "feminine" values. This feeling of inadequacy is reinforced by Dan: "Look, I´m going to show you how I sleep with B ... She has a womb I can´t forget. When I go with a woman I go for one hour. You can´t do that. You haven´t got a vagina. ..." (13) Elizabeth seems unaffected by this appraisal of her sexuality: "It was not maddening to her to be told she hadn´t a vagina. She might have had but it was not such a pleasant area of the body to concentrate on, possibly only now and then if necessary." (44) The ambiguity of this statement suggests, however, that she does not dare to have a vagina. She is caught in a double bind: On the one hand she is expected to suppress sexual pleasure, while on the other she is supposed to enjoy her sexual subjugation. The authors of Female Sexualization describe this double-bind as follows: "In our stories (...) we have detected a connection between pleasure and subjugation; or to put it another way, we saw ourselves as taking pleasure in the very process of being trained into particular dominant structures rather than feeling tyrannized by them." (Ibid.: 81)

I would contend that Bessie Head attempts to change our perceptions of normality and insanity just as much as those of blacks and women. On the most basic level she is concerned with why people inflict pain on each other, whether physical or psychological.

References:

Page numbers in brackets refer to: Bessie Head, A Question of Power. Heinemann: London 1974

(Haug 1987): Frigga Haug (ed.), Female Sexualization. A Collective Work of Memory. (Translated from the German by Erica Carter) Verso: London