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Deconstructing Feminine Sexuality and Madness? Memory-Work and Fictionality in Bessie Head´s A Question of Power - South Africa - Südafrika
Woman cannot be the subject of Western phallogocentric discourse, as she is the object of its pursuit of the truth. Nietzsche writes that man looks for the truth under the woman´s skin, or worse (from the woman´s point of view), under her clothes. (1988: 95) The "truth" is not something abstract and neutral, as the humanist discourse implies, but always coloured by the subject´s (man´s) desire to uncover, reveal the Other (woman), although this Other constantly eludes him. In this sense truth, like desire is based upon an impossibility, because it remains a question that can never be answered completely. Where can woman speak then about her desire and what will that desire be? The French psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray describes the discourse of the hysteric/mysteric, which mimics the symptoms of her/his body, as an instance, where a feminine desire can be articulated. The hysteric/mysteric speaks of a repressed sexuality, to which there is no simple recourse, because it, too, is caught up in the phallogocentric discourse. Nevertheless the hysterical/mysterical discourse irrupts in the gaps of the phallogocentric discourse, upsetting the hierarchical order between men and women, black and white, high and low by refusing to acknowledge the binary oppositions that constitute it. It is discredited as mad, because it refutes the categories of consciousness and knowledge, upon which power is based. Instead it assumes different positions, causing the chain of signifiers to slide.
The cryptic names which the woman uses to describe her desire refer to another scene, which does not coincide with the scene of consciousness. On this stage the drama of her sub-jection is acted out. In A Question of Power, a proliferation of projections of Elizabeth´s unconscious merge and separate seemingly at random. Thus "The Father" and Sello appear as "easily interchangeable souls, because Sello stood up, walked straight into his person and totally disappeared." (30) Besides "The Father" and Sello the monk, there is Sello of the brown suit, who loses his power to the goddess Medusa, and there is Dan the romantic lover and Dan the womaniser with his seventy-one "nice-time girls", to name some of Elizabeth´s more frequent apparitions. Sello and Dan, to each of whom one half of Bessie Head´s autobiographical novel is dedicated, switch positions between godliness and debauchery with apparent ease. This indicates to Elizabeth that spiritual powers are potentially destructive, if they are deployed to dominate others. Yet by assuming a central role in the struggle between good and evil herself, as the privileged prophet of God, Elizabeth discovers her own feeling of superiority towards the poor, illiterate majority of Africa and recognises her own potential for power and corruption. Sello accuses her that she "`never really made an identification with the poor and humble." (31) Then to indict her a group of people passes before her inner gaze: "They were the poor of Africa. Each placed one bare foot on her bed, turned sideways so that she could see that their feet were cut and bleeding. They said nothing, but an old woman out of the crowd turned to Elizabeth and said: "Will you help us? We are the people who suffered." (Ibid.) In response to this appeal, she develops a conception of God not as a unified power but as a composite of ordinary people. (54)
Besides the vision of the "still, sad fire-washed faces" of this "vast company of people", Elizabeth is tormented by images of a degrading sexuality. (Ibid.) At the end of her journey through heaven and hell she regains her mental and emotional stability, however precarious. In retrospect she is able to justify Dan´s spiritual torture as a lesson in self-control and tenderness: "But Dan blasted her to a height far above Buddha; he had deepened and intensified all her qualities. He was one of the greatest teachers she´d worked with, but he taught by default - he taught iron and steel self-control through sheer, wild, abandoned debauchery; he taught the extremes of love and tenderness through the extremes of hate; he taught an alertness for falsehoods within, because he had used any means at his disposal to destroy Sello. And from the degradation and destruction of her life had arisen a still, lofty serenity of soul nothing could shake." (202) By ascribing God-like powers to Dan and Sello, Elizabeth lends their struggle over her soul an universal importance which could be summed up in the question: What happens to a woman who refuses to sub-ject herself to patriarchal discourse?
Irigaray argues that in her hysteria/mysteria woman creates God in order to glow and burn in her desire. (1974: 247) Similarly, Elizabeth could be said to create Dan and Sello in order to explore not only her own subjection and resistance to the sexual norms of her society but also a burning desire that transcends any norms. Her relationship with Sello is portrayed as platonic, based on spiritual communication, whereas her relationship with Dan is depicted as individual romantic love. She describes the conflicting emotions Dan´s behaviour evokes 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 exteme 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. They appear as objects of his insatiable desire, which is borne out by their lack of 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 becomes more clear: Although she wants to be like the nice-time girls in order to experience herself as a woman and to be desired by the "masculine" Dan, she cannot admit that she desires her own subordination. 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. In a ground-breaking collective work on female sexualisation (Haug 1987: 81), this double-bind is described 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." Memory-work enables them to confront the instances of their active participation in the patriarchal norms of feminine sexuality and so explore new possibilities of pleasure without domination. This presupposes a transposal of one´s own experience onto different contexts: "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 using the alienating device of fiction. Her personal experience is therefore transposed onto a fictitious character, Elizabeth, who in turn distances herself from her own fictitious experience by using a third person narrator.
The norms of female sexuality are neither homogenous, nor clearly stated. Haug et al. argue that women are trained in the normality of heteronomy, i.e. they actively participate in a set of contradictory norms, without realising their full implications: "The concept of subjectification can be understood as the process by which individuals work themselves into social structures they themselves do not consciously determine, but to which they subordinate themselves. The concept allows for the active participation of individuals in heteronomy. 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 these structures are inscribed onto women´s bodies, they are particularly resistant to rational arguments. Thus a woman might consider herself enlightened but still conform to the dominant beauty ideals, which reinforce her subordinate status. Heteronomy accounts both for the socio-economic differences between women and for the similarities of their aquisition of gender identity. In patriarchal discourse women occupy the position of object. Yet to be the object of male desire does not simply presuppose women´s passivity, as Haug et al. (Ibid.: 79) point out: "The stimulation of desire is (...) by no means simply a passive process. Posture, external appearance and movement are adjusted by women themselves in their attempts to conform to and reinforce the status quo. There is a name for this female participation in the reinforcement of women´s subordinate status: we have called it slavegirl behaviour." The seventy-one nice-time girls who haunt Elizabeth typify the slavegirl 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. Thus they ensure that the status quo is upheld. Their pleasure derives from their power over their masters as well as over their potential rivals, women. Even Elizabeth is not free from these norms, however, and she suffers from her deviation, which she experiences as lack: her hair is too fuzzy, she is too fat, her breasts too large. The authors of Female Sexualization investigate how the young girl´s body is sexualised through a series of projects, whose sexual significance is never stated. 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. Implied in these admonitions is the potential threat of women´s bodies to society. This is, however, the construction upon which patriarchal discourse is based: 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 binary oppositions without dissolving them. In this context, the way in which memories are articulated, is problematical, too, since it presupposes a normal, everyday life which throws extraordinary events into relief. It therefore veils the crisis in everyday life by subsuming it under the "normal", as the participants of the collective memory-work were to find out: "Strange the tricks our memories play. Events are etched on our memory as the triggers of change; we see our socialization and the construction of our identity, in retrospect, marked by twists and turns, breaks and fractures. (...) 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 the articulation of memories is also structured by the patriarchal discourse, the gaps and elisions of memory have to be teased out in a strategy of reading that subverts the "normality" of women´s subordination.
The prevalence of clichés in early memory-work reinforces this point. Recording them is, however, an important step of memory-work: "The first step in analysis thus involved all members of the group expressing their opinions and judgements; in addition, they studied the theories, popular sayings, images and so on that already surrounded their object: in other words, the way in which the field was already colonized." (Haug 1987: 59) But it is equally important to realise the limitations of clichés as an impediment to thought: "The cliché was the most common form in which memories were verbalized - a form which might also be defined as the linguistic means by which we are socialized into heternomy. Lack of language was not the problem here: cliché is characterized by volubility. To the extent that the use of cliché assumes a consensus, it acts as an obstacle to thought and understanding. (...) 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 resorts to clichés to describe her protagonist´s relationship to the two men, but in a similar way to the women´s collective´s memory-work she moves beyond them to a more complex understanding. Like the cliché, the stereotype veils the contradictions of a person´s own thoughts and actions by projecting them onto others. Thus they ensure the unity of the subject: "Many of our stories derive their initial plausibility from the apparant incomprehensibility of the actions of others. Just as in fairytales 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 include all the characters of her psychological drama, could be seen as such stereotypes, but she transcends them by integrating them into her own experience, thus taking responsibility for their/her actions. Memory-work enables her to explode the limits of her perceptions and to see new connections. Haug et al. write: "It slashes through the horizontal seams that traditionally keep domains of experience separate and parallel, allowing us to forge collectively new connections between separate elements of our stories - connections that are then more relevant to the specific questions we want to raise." (Ibid.: 60)
In this process the woman can form another image of herself which does not follow patriarchal logic. Luce Irigaray uses the metaphor of a concave mirror which concentrates the rays of the sun and sets the dead, dry matter around it on fire without destroying itself in order to describe another (feminine) discourse, in which the woman´s desire can be articulated. The concave mirror re-flects reality but in contrast to the flat mirror of the phallogocentric discourse it has a focus which both concentrates reality and makes it catch fire. It therefore constitutes another reality which includes the emotions and the "distortion" of madness. The flat mirror on the other hand is the model of masculine re-flection and re-presentation. It re-flects the object in front of it as the same, identical replica of itself. The notion of the unified subject is based on this model of re-presentation. The identity of the object/subject can only be guaranteed by eliminating the emotions, however, which appear as "distortions" in the flat mirror. It is a sane but sterile perception based on exclusion: the "distortions" have been relegated to the insane person´s actions where they can be controlled by society. Elizabeth´s sense of identity is shattered by her madness and replaced with an anonymous "it". She feels that she is not responsible for her actions. This manifests itself in the mirror-scene, where she sees herself according to the logic of the patriarchal discourse: "She washed and dressed, then had to comb her hair in the mirror. She flinched and looked away. There was an unnamable horror there. She could not endure to look at it. Her hands were shaking badly. How could someone run away from their own mind?" (46) In order to re-flect this "unnamable horror", Bessie Head employs a curved mirror which allows her to follow a non-linear, acausal logic, where one term does not exclude its opposite. She therefore hollows out and burns out the conventions and clichés of patriarchal discourse. This resembles the paradoxical language of the mystics, which draws no clear division between the depth of suffering and the height of ecstasy.
The onlookers of this hysterical/mysterical spectacle are terrified, because it shatters the rules of propriety. (Irigaray 1974: 248) The woman revels in filth and defilement in order to purify herself. (Ibid.: 249) This filth is inextricably linked with her sexuality which has been marked with the sign of the unconscious, the negative. Images of filth and obscenity abound in Elizabeth´s nightmare. At one stage she is thrown into a "deep pit full of cockroaches" (41), at another she feels she is living in a toilet, in a cesspit, in a crater full of excrement: "She found herself faced with a deep cesspit. It was filled almost to the brim with excreta. It was alive, and its contents rumbled. Huge angry flies buzzed over its surface with a loud humming. He (Sello) caught her roughly behind the neck and pushed her face near the stench. It was so high, so powerful, that her neck nearly snapped off her head at the encounter. She whimpered in fright." (53) Furthermore, women display their vaginas in her face, Dan makes love to the nice-time girls on top of her and Dan suggests that Sello is a homosexual, commits incest with his daughter and sodomy with his cows, in fact every imaginable perversion is conjured up before her eyes.
Irigaray (1974: 250) writes, that the hysterical/mysterical woman becomes God in her rediscovered desire. She enters into a mutual exchange with God just as he did with his son. This is a subversion/perversion of the sanctified relationship between God and Christ, which, as Irigaray points out, is mediated by the mother´s womb. (Ibid.: 247) In A Question of Power Sello refuses to acknowledge Elizabeth´s claim to Godliness, because this would undermine his authority as the only God. Her words to Sello are: "`I´m God too.' (...) She wasn´t thinking of herself. She was thinking of the title which had already been shared. The man bared his teeth in a snarl: `You´re not God,' he said." (38) Sello is not interested in sharing or relinquishing the ultimate position in the hierarchy of being. His concept of God is diametrically opposed to that of Elizabeth, who imagines God as something people "have in mind that is consistently tender, a concept of goodness that is almost feminine in its pity and mercy. But they generally walk around looking like this God they are praying to. Most people have her expression; a softness, a vague unplannedness, a helplessness, a childlike pity and appeal." (196f.) Underlying Elizabeth´s concept of religion is a reversal of the opposition between "masculine" and "exclusive" and "feminine" and "inclusive".
Yet this does not simply reduce the difference between men and women to biology. The goddess Medusa is a case in point. She displays the same obsessiveness and cruelty as Dan and Sello in her pursuit and defense of power. She reigns over Africa to the exclusion of any outsiders. Elizabeth, because of her racial impurity, is cast as such an outsider and an inferior, who bears the brunt of Medusa´s attack: "We don´t want you here. This is my land. These are my people. We keep our things to ourselves. You keep no secrets. I can do more for the poor than you can ever do." (38) Elizabeth knows that this is only the surface reality of African society, "which had a strong theme of power-worship running through it, and power people needed small, narrow, shut-in worlds", because they "never felt secure in the big, wide flexible universe where there were too many cross-currents of opposing thought", but right now this conflict is taking place in Elizabeth's soul. (38) Medusa asserts her superiority over Elizabeth through her sexual prowess. "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.
Another reason why Elizabeth is shut out of this circle of power represented by Medusa, Sello and Dan, is because she cannot keep a secret. Yet the power and authority of the ruling class is based upon secret knowledge. It forms a subtle web of terror that encompasses the whole of society. Elizabeth discovers the adult game at the centre of rural life in Botswana: "I'll bewitch you and you'll bewitch me." (21) She rejects this aspect of the society: "They were terror tactics people used against each other. Such a terror was to fill her mind at a later stage that she would look back on the early part of her life in Botswana and think that the personality who held her life in a death-grip must really be the master of the psychology behind witchcraft." (Ibid.) In her battle with the master of psychology, Elizabeth is punished for refusing to submit to these power games. She earns the name of "Blabbermouth" because she opens to public scrutiny the "temples of dark secrets" closely guarded by the priests. (40) She is accused of seeking to establish her own power by revealing the secrets of the ruling class, while pretending to have the emancipation of the poor at heart. She has to admit that she has not really identified with the poor, illiterate people of Africa, but realising this, she begins to see herself as an ordinary person, not blessed with a more direct access to the truth than others.
In A Question of Power Bessie Head confronts the roots of evil in herself. Although she is aware of the social, economic and political systems of oppression, she examines the ways in which the subject submits to this system, and how s/he can become evil her/himself. Elizabeth puts it this way: "To submit to evil and learn from it was not as easy as those seemingly straightforward truthful statements Sello had made in the beginning. Evil is a complexity so monumental that everything becomes a tangle of lies." (65) in this learning process the dichotomies between the oppressor and the victim, between good and evil, truth and falsehood are overturned. In her analysis of the microstructures of power she combines all the discourses available to her through her English education, from ancient Greek mythology to Buddhism, from African mythology to European history and literature in order to shape her experience of alienation and madness in Botswana. She has been criticised for creating unconvincing characters (cf. Chase 1982: 72), e.g. her portrayal of Elizabeth as a "universal soul" and Sello as a Buddhist monk and as Caligula amongst other reincarnations. Yet this could be seen as an alienation-effect which allows her to distance herself from an overpowering psychological experience and to represent her alternating manic and depressive phases. By the way, no-one has ever accused Brecht of being un-European for setting his plays in China, when he was dealing with the social problems of his time.
This journey to the heart of evil is taken at the traveller´s own risk. There is neither a guide nor an assistant to share the burden. It is something she has to go through herself because of her psychological disposition. In contrast to "normal" people, who accept their position in society unquestioningly, she is compelled to question the arbitrariness, with which these positions are assigned, because their boundaries cut through her own body. She has been marginalised as a "coloured" both in the country of her birth, South Africa, and in the country of her choice, Botswana. This position is however complicated by her personal history, which is marked by a series of traumatic events that shake her sense of identity profoundly. Despite the shortcomings of Susan Gardner´s memoir of Bessie Head (see Dovey 1989), her contention that almost all of Head´s work "is an attempt to create a viable identity" is convincing. (1986: 115)
What most people accept as a given of their biography, that they have been born on a certain date by parents, whose name they continue, has been denied in Elizabeth´s and her author´s case. This is where the novel and Bessie Head´s own biography coincide. It is a fictional account of a psychological illness, however, and not a psychological report, begging the question how anyone can psychoanalyse her/himself. Elizabeth is the illegitimate child of a liason between a white upper middle class woman and a black groom. In relation to the South African class and race system she is cast in a marginal position. The circumstances of Elizabeth´s birth are however aggravated by the cruel way they are disclosed to her at the age of thirteen. Until now she believed that her mother was a "coloured" shebeen-owner who gave her into the care of a mission-school because of financial problems. The headmistress not only refutes this, but also insinuates that Elizabeth is potentially insane like her mother, presumably because she cohabited with a black man. She calls not only Elizabeth´s identity into question but also her mental health. She warns her: "We have a full docket on you. You must be very careful. Your mother was insane. If you´re not careful you´ll get insane just like your mother." (16) Elizabeth views this story as an "imposition on her life", because she "belonged emotionally to her foster-mother". (16) The headmistress uses the authority of knowing the "truth" to discipline her. She isolates her from the other children at the least sign of disobedience, until the children notice something unusual about her and ostracise her. At this early age she already learns what it means to deviate from the norm. She identifies with her mother, whom she sees as another outsider to her community, describing her as "this unknown, lovely and unpredictable woman". Certainly a fiction, perhaps even a fateful one, but one borne out of the need for love of a lonely girl: "But later, when she became aware of subconscious appeals to share love, to share suffering, she wondered if the persecution had been so much the outcome of the principal´s twisted version of life as the silent appeal of her dead mother: `Now you know. Do you think I can bear the stigma of insanity alone? Share it with me." (17) By sharing the stigma of insanity, Elizabeth breaks down her mother´s and her own isolation. They enter a subconscious dialogue, which enables Elizabeth to invent not only her mother´s "real" self, but also her own self. At the heart of identity lies fiction, with the exception that most of our fictions are endorsed by society.
Although Evasdaughter (1989: 72) seems to agree with Lillian Feder´s observation that "(l)iterary interpretations of madness both reflect and question medical, cultural, political, religious, and psychological assumptions of their time", she uses such an authoritative text, the Desk Reference to the Diagnostic Criteria from Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Third Edition, in order to classify Elizabeth and implicitly Bessie Head as a paranoic schizophrenic. Aren´t these categories just as oppressive as race, class and gender, which are used to designate blacks, workers or women as inferior? I would contend that Bessie Head attempts to change our perceptions of normality and madness 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 and psychological.
References:
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Bessie Head, A Question of Power. Heinemann: London 1974
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(Chase 1982): Joanna Chase, "Bessie Head´s A Question of Power: Romance or Rhetoric." ACLALS Bulletin, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 65 - 75
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(Dovey 1989): Teresa Dovey, "A Question of Power: Susan Gardner´s Biography versus Bessie Head´s Autobiography". In: English in Africa, Vol. 16, pp. 29 - 38
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(Evasdaughter 1989): Elizabeth N. Evasdaughter, "Bessie Head´s A Question of Power As A Mariner´s Guide to Paranoia". In: Research in African Literatures, Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 72 - 83
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(Gardner 1986): Susan Gardner, "`Don´t Ask for the True Story': A Memoir of Bessie Head". In: Hecate, Vol. 12, No. 1/2, pp. 110 - 129
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(Haug 1987): Frigga Haug (ed.), Female Sexualization. A Collective Work of Memory. (Translated from the German by Erica Carter) Verso: London
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(Irigaray 1974): Luce Irigaray, Speculum. Spiegel des anderen Geschlechts. Edition Suhrkamp: Frankfurt
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(Nietzsche 1988): Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Zur Genealogie der Moral. (Hrsg. v.) Giorgio Colli und Mazzino Montinari. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag/de Gruyter: München/Berlin: "Allen rechten Frauen geht Wissenschaft wider die Scham. Es ist ihnen dabei zu Muthe, als ob man damit ihnen unter die Haut, - schlimmer noch! unter Kleid und Putz gucken wolle." |
