Can You Ask Yourself "Why"? Bessie Cannot.

My framework tells me “Why”.  Why do I pledge allegiance to the flag?  I am an American.  Why do I have the appearance of being “white” but have a nice olive complexion when kissed by the sun?  I am German, Irish and the Portuguese gives me the olive complexion.  Why was I able to birth two children?  I am a female.  Why do I strive for a career which will have me working until retirement?  I am of the Working/Middle Class.  Why am I allowed each and every opportunity in this great country?  I am white.  Why do I decorate Easter Eggs and put up a Christmas tree?  I practice and enjoy Christian holidays. 

This framework works as a filter.  I can rely upon my filter.  I belong to something and someone.  I am confident in this filter.  Some things you come to depend on.  A person’s framework acts as their net.  They can walk out on that high wire because their net is right there below them.  They are aware of their limitations and know just how far to push things.

This was not so for Bessie Head who wrote the novel “A Question of Power”.  Bessie was born in South Africa as a result of a love affair between a white girl and a black stable boy.  In South Africa, a relationship such as theirs was illegal.  Therefore, it could not exist.  A relationship that could not exist could not produce a child.  Well, it did.

Bessie’s framework was non-existent because the laws of her country would not allow her to be real.  In South Africa, there was no race known as “Mixed”.  She was nonexistent.  Therefore, she could not be granted a nationality, a class, an ethnicity or a religion.  The only thing they could not deny Bessie was her gender. 

“I just don’t fit in and belong anywhere”.  (Burton 63)  Without ever being given a framework, Bessie was sure to struggle.  Bessie was denied a relationship with her birth mother, perhaps the most basic of needs for a child.  She was passed from one familial situation into another in a country that has seen much chaos.  This chaos coupled with her not having a framework may have been what contributed to her mental instability.  She did not belong to anything or anyone. The absence of framework, the missing filter and not belonging gave her little confidence.  Everything she did was done without a net. 

Bessie demonstrates what happens when a person works without a framework in her novel “A Question of Power”.  We are taken into the mind of Elizabeth, her main character who first began seeing things three months after she arrived in the village of Motabeng.  It came at night, to sit on a chair beside her bed.  “He looked like a man she had seen about the village of Motabeng who drove a green truck, but the name she associated in her mind with the monk-robed man was that of an almost universally adored God.” (Head 23)  This vision is given the name of Sello.

Sello is not the only vision to come to Elizabeth.  “Dominating and directing the whole drama was Sello.  He was sitting at a switchboard plugging in the lines to all the beautiful people he had on call.”  (Head 29)  She meets Dan, the Father aka the King of the Underworld, an Asian man who speaks to her about Buddha, a tall monstrous woman whom another woman walks out of, and Medusa.  Medusa “could hurl a thunderbolt and shatter a victim into a thousand fragments.”  (Head 43) 

This journey into Elizabeth’s mind is difficult to follow but necessary to make obvious exactly how mental illness takes its toll on a person.  The visions are all over the place in nature.  Elizabeth weaves in and out of different religious backgrounds and there seems to be information on both good and evil.  Elizabeth cannot answer “Why”.

When Bessie wanted to know “Why”, she needed only to look at the fact that the South African government deemed her nonexistent.