She's Come Undone, Almost

The elegant pathways of private thought stretched ahead of her, shimmering with light and undisturbed by the clamour of horrors. She turned and picked up a book from a table beside her bed. It had waited a whole year to be read: The Gift of the Cow, by Permchand. It was a UNESCO publication of the classic Hindi novel which exalted the poor. In their introduction to the novel they wrote that it opposed the basic trend of Indian literature, which seemed to be a literature intended only to 'entertain and to satisfy our lust for the amazing...' a literature of magic, of ghosts, of the adventures of high-born heroes and heroines.

It was quite the opposite in Africa. There was no direct push against those rigid, false social systems of class and caste. She had fallen from the very beginning into the warm embrace of the brotherhood of man, because when a people wanted everyone to be ordinary it was just another way of saying man loved man. As she fell asleep, she placed one soft hand over her hand. It was a gesture of belonging.

--From the ending of A Question of Power, by Bessie Head

I finished reading Bessie Head's A Question of Power one very late night during the summer of 2006, and it had, despite its almost obsessive return to the subconsicous state of its main character, Elizabeth, rather moved me in an unusual way. Bessie Head is one of those complex and bold South African writers whose fiction gets you as close to a deeply troubled place as is possible. There is a fair amount of the absurd and frankly, the mad, in her often curiously brilliant prose.


[Painting by Pegi Smith]