A Question of Madness: Re-Reading Bessie Head's A Question of Power

Abstract

In reassessing A Question of Power, widely regarded as Bessie Head's major work, this article re-examines the biographical context in which the novel was written in order to establish its generative matrix. It then turns to key aspects of the novel and attempts to describe and analyse some of their most puzzling and inexplicable features. The article concludes with an assessment of the novel's value in the corpus of African fiction four decades after its first appearance.

Keywords:

• Bessie Head
• A Question of Power
• fiction and insanity
• autobiographical fiction

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation [grant number 85368].

Notes

1 When Rain Clouds Gather and Maru, re-edited by Stephen Gray, reappeared in the Heinemann African Writers Series in 2008; these versions were then re-released in the US by Waveland Press in 2014. In 2010 Virago released the novels in a combined edition that was completely re-edited from the original typescripts by Mary Lederer and Craig MacKenzie. That Power was excluded from this flurry of re-releases clearly indicates its lack of commercial appeal. It did eventually appear in a Penguin classics paperback edition in May 2012, but perhaps it is too soon to assess its recent popular impact. Gray also re-edited a selection of Head's stories (The Lovers, 2011), while a selection of Head's autobiographical writings, A Woman Alone (edited by Craig MacKenzie), originally published in 1990, was re-released by Heinemann in a new African Writers edition in 2007.