51 pages • 1 hour read
Bessie HeadA Question of Power
Fiction | Novel | AdultA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Pages 150-206Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “Dan”
Part 2, Pages 150-176 Summary
Villagers and teachers from the Motabeng Secondary School attend the opening of a shop selling handmade items. Eugene explains the shop’s philosophy: The members own it, and they work together, sharing skills and resources. A young girl models dresses, shopping bags, and jewelry, and another girl shows off bowls, jugs, and plates. A man holds a brick he made, and Kenosi discusses the garden and the pounds of Cape Gooseberry that miraculously grow. In pamphlets, Elizabeth extolls the benefits of Cape Gooseberry—it contains lots of Vitamin C, an antidote to skin diseases like scurvy. The audience is suspicious of the shop. The villagers hadn’t made any money. A teacher jokes that too many people want too few items.
On a Saturday morning, the people running the shop discuss prices and shares. They have a total of 80 rands to split among 40 people. An older woman suggests taking half and saving half. Eugene notes that people take a long time to produce goods, driving up prices. An older man scolds the girls who need six days to clean cotton wool. Another woman complains that people, already owning 25 cent shares, don’t want to work. They take their 25 cents and go home.
Elizabeth thinks about her garden and how the English volunteers are impressed by it. The English praise the green peas, the Cape Gooseberry, and the Sweet Peppers. Yet, Elizabeth’s infernal inner world persists.
Dan claims Elizabeth isn’t a true “African,” and he shows her a “poor” woman who has sex with men while her kids sleep nearby in the same hut. Dan’s theatrics cause Elizabeth to snap at people. She maintains her relationship with Kenosi by becoming silent. She also stays close to Tom, though Dan says Tom could become gay. Elizabeth asks Tom about gay people, and Tom says there aren’t gay people in the village—it’s an “unobscene” place. He also says that if a gay man approached him, he’d take offense.
Elizabeth asks Tom what he would do if he were simultaneously God and Satan. Tom says he’d want the strength to admit it, but he wouldn’t tell other people. Tom and Elizabeth agree that the boundary between evil and good is thin. Later, in November, Elizabeth harangues Tom about the Ku Klux Klan, but Tom understands that Americans can be racist or bad allies. Elizabeth feels like she’s falling, and to maintain control, she works in the garden or her yard, where she experiments with different plants.
Dan returns with his “harem” or “nice-time girls” and introduces Madame Loose-Bottom. Her symbol is “wild grass,” and her sexual strength is 10 times greater than Dan’s. Dan claims Madame Loose-Bottom had sex with her sons and has such a debauched past that police couldn’t record it. Dan moves onto Body Beautiful, who orgasms on top of Elizabeth. Madame Squelch Squelch is “too much” for Dan, but the Sugar-Plum Fairy is his goddess. She tortures him with love affairs and is always ready to “go.” Dan was once engaged to Miss Pink Sugar-Icing, and Miss Pelican-Beak has a “passageway” like a bird’s beak. She sits on Dan’s face, and Dan, thinking she’s too “pushy,” breaks her legs and makes her over with pink roses. Miss Chopper carries a chopper and threatens to behead Dan’s women.
Dan claims he’s the “king of sex” (168), but he doesn’t love any of the sex workers. He says that if he loses Elizabeth, he has nothing. Elizabeth connects Dan to Medusa. Like Medusa, he attacks Elizabeth daily and won’t let her sleep. She hasn’t slept in a year.
Through gardening, Elizabeth meets Mrs. Jones, an older English woman and Motabeng project volunteer. She speaks in “platitudes” and used to identify as Leftist until she realized Marxism was “too materialistic.” Sometimes, she’ll fall asleep while speaking. According to Dan, Mrs. Jones is the “mother” of the sex workers.
Sensing peculiar “happenings” in Elizabeth’s home, Kenosi leaves her alone and tells Eugene that Elizabeth isn’t feeling well. Mrs. Jones visits people when they’re sick, and she visits Elizabeth, telling Elizabeth she’ll pray for her. Elizabeth wonders what God she’ll pray to before she slams the door.
That night, Elizabeth hears a voice calling her a “dog” and telling her to die. She runs away from her home and into Mrs. Jones (she was visiting a friend). Elizabeth says that she makes her children into sex workers, and then she hits Mrs. Jones on her head. The villagers don’t know what to do, and Elizabeth’s son asks why she’s screaming and talking to herself at night. Elizabeth thinks she’ll kill her son and then herself.
Pacing, Elizabeth mutters that she’s not a “dog.” She says Dan and Sello are “dogs.” She reflects on how they’ll have sex with anything and deviously move between saintliness and sordidness. She doesn’t understand what’s happening, and she doesn’t know why they’re destroying her. She makes a note calling Sello a “filthy pervert” who has sex with his daughter, and she sticks the note on the post office wall. Later that morning, Two Botswana police officers come to her house and take her to the hospital.
Part 2, Pages 176-192 Summary
In the hospital, a doctor asks Elizabeth what’s wrong, and Elizabeth says it’s Sello—he’s the devil and God. The doctor tells Elizabeth not to worry and orders a nurse to give her a shot every three hours. The shots silence Dan, but then she sees hands (possibly Dan’s) open her skull and hears him growling into it. Elizabeth wakes, and a nurse tells her Mrs. Stanley (a friend of Mrs. Jones) is looking after her son.
Mrs. Stanley and Elizabeth’s son arrive, and with Mrs. Stanley’s money, the son buys Elizabeth a lollipop and a pen. Elizabeth wonders if she will die, and Mrs. Stanley says many people have “nervous breakdowns” and survive. What scares Elizabeth is “soul death,” not bodily death. Mrs. Stanely says, “I’m sorry,” and the son, listening in, repeats the phrase, causing both women to laugh. The son says he saw a dog die. Mrs. Stanley says no one will die, and they exit, leaving Elizabeth and her inner “war with hell.”
Part of Elizabeth’s mind is chaotic and hard for her to make sense of, but the other half can methodically witness Dan’s assaults. The doctor asks what’s bothering Elizabeth, and her reply is the same: Sello. In response to her lack of progress, the doctor has to transfer Elizabeth to a psychiatric hospital. Elizabeth requests no more shots. She tells the doctor they suffocate her, but she’s lying. The truth is that when she falls asleep, Dan attacks her head like he assaults the vaginas of the sex workers or like a cat beats a mouse.
At the hospital, she yells at a nurse who asks about her son. She feels like a corpse, and she screams that she isn’t African and doesn’t want to be African. She receives a box of chocolates and a note from her son (he spells “dear” “dare”). Tom tries to visit, but Elizabeth tells the nurse she doesn’t want to see him, and then she writes Tom a note telling him this. The note makes Tom cry. The nurse jokes that Elizabeth hates everyone—white people and Black people. People call Elizabeth a “wild animal” due to her outbursts.
Elizabeth meets the doctor at the psychiatric hospital, and she thinks he’s “stark raving mad” (184). He hates Black people and thinks South African spies litter Botswana, and South Africa runs the country. The doctor doesn’t think Elizabeth has a mental condition—he believes she had a minor “nervous breakdown.” The doctor thinks Elizabeth is also a racist, and she goes along with his ideas so he’ll let her leave. Though racist, the doctor sticks up for Sello and lets Elizabeth send her son some money for his birthday.
Elizabeth’s son claims life with Mrs. Stanley is better because she gives him whatever he wants. She tells Elizabeth he can leave if he wants, and he asks her to buy him a football, and she agrees to get him one tomorrow.
Sello sits in her room, and he pushes toward life while Dan tugs her toward death. Tom interrupts, and Elizabeth greets him and laughs. She can’t believe Tom still wants to see her after she linked him to the Ku Klux Klan. Tom laughs and calls her Lucrezia Borgia—Pope Alexander VI’s tempestuous, “illegitimate” daughter. Tom cooks for her, and Elizabeth tells Sello she loves Tom. Then, she tells Tom she loves him. Tom calls her Lucrezia Borgia again and says Sello, the man who lives in the village, doesn’t hold a grudge against Elizabeth for her note.
After eating and washing, Elizabeth tells Tom about the “terrible pain” inside her. She feels like she took a peculiar trip to hell, where Sello showed her that God and “personalities” with soulful powers and energies caused suffering. Thus, Sello is the source of human pain. Sello also produces goodness and “personalities” like Buddha, who became nothing but an inner “simplicity.” Like Buddha, Elizabeth believes humans will see the “wonder” in their souls. Tom hopes they don’t see it. If they do, they’ll likely use it to kill one another.
Tom thinks Elizabeth should marry because a husband would keep her attackers away. Elizabeth doesn’t want to marry. She has the strength to face her problems alone.
Part 2, Pages 192-206 Summary
Dan makes a sexualized replica of Elizabeth. He opens her skull and speaks into it. Elizabeth can’t remember who she is or where is. Her son appears, and she wants to ask him who she is. The son reminds Elizabeth about the football and making breakfast. He tells her it’s Friday, and Elizabeth remembers she’s supposed to kill herself at 12:45, per Dan’s prophecy. She takes out a tin of sleeping tablets, but then her son comes home for lunch, and he and his friends play with the football. Tom arrives and tells Elizabeth he has to go away. Elizabeth reflects upon their defined friendship and Tom’s big heart.
Sello tells Elizabeth that he’s not a “pervert,” and Dan tells her that her son will die in two days. Awake, Elizabeth writes an apology note for her son to take to Mrs. Jones. However, Mrs. Jones is already at Elizabeth’s house, telling her not to let evil frighten her. Sello agrees, and Mrs. Jones mentions Jesus and praying to God. Elizabeth thinks God is too “important” to be honorable.
Dan and the sex workers continue tormenting Elizabeth. However, while making her son porridge, she feels the tumult vanish and thanks Sello for getting her out of hell. While Dan and the Womb have sex on her bed, Sello, drenched in light, walks toward Elizabeth. Dan tells Sello he won’t take part. He promises to destroy Elizabeth, but then he leaves.
Sello apologizes for what occurred. He says Dan is Satan, and Sello and Dan had engaged in a battle of wits. He says that Dan was as “slippery” as a snake. Devils like Dan become aggressive when they see a helpless person, but Sello took away his power through Elizabeth. Elizabeth has 10 billion times more power than him. Sello won’t show Elizabeth her great power because such power corrupts. Power comes down to the soul, so a person with the power of the spirit can be Satan.
Sello allowed Dan to brutalize her because he wanted to study him––he also hoped Elizabeth would learn about evil. Elizabeth isn’t sure what she learned from her nightmarish three or four years. She believes she knows what the Nazi concentration camps were like when the Jewish prisoners wondered where their God was.
Sello and Elizabeth discuss how they will reunite in other lives, and the wife of Buddha exits Elizabeth. Elizabeth wonders if her and Sello’s work made humans nicer. She compares their love to the feeling of everyone kissing her. Elizabeth calls Dan a great teacher and believes he “blasted” her beyond Buddha.
Elizabeth compares her return to the garden to a commander coming back to the fort after fighting Satan on the battlefield. The fort/garden is in bad shape: The prices plummeted due to Elizabeth’s absence. Elizabeth and Kenosi form a plan, and Elizabeth thinks of a D. H. Lawrence poem, “Song of a Man Who Has Come Through” (1928), and her son gives her a poem about flying. Elizabeth links her son’s poem to the power in people’s souls. She believes there’s a God, and God is an ordinary person.
Part 2, Pages 150-206 Analysis
The juxtaposition between Elizabeth’s inner world and her external world grows further apart due to the shop opening and the meeting over shares and prices. Elizabeth’s external world turns into a set of tangible, rational numbers, while her internal world revolves around chaotic desires and conflicts. The gulf between the worlds is so wide that the business with the store becomes almost comedic. The store links to the ideology of the 18th-century political theorist and anti-capitalist Karl Marx. Mrs. Jones references him. She used to be a Marxist, so she was once against private enterprise and for collective ownership. As the villagers paid 25 cents a share, they don’t think they have to work, and their reluctance to work, however inadvertently, lampoons Marx’s cooperative ideology. The villagers maintain the divide between workers and owners.
Sex maintains its destructive symbology, with Dan attaching predatory behavior to Mrs. Jones and the Sello in the village. About Mrs. Jones, Dan tells her, “Even prostitutes had to have mothers. She was the origin of his nice-time girls” (171). The news causes Elizabeth to hit Mrs. Jones when she stops by to see how Elizabeth is feeling. Elizabeth’s growing concerns over Sello leads her to tack a note to the post office, calling him a child molester. Through sex, the boundaries between the external world and the internal world collapse. The violence of her spiritual quest manifests in earthly Motabeng. As Motabeng is a relatively peaceful place, it can’t tolerate her chaos, and the police put her in the hospital.
The doctor at the psychiatric hospital reveals his hatred of Black people and his theories about South African spies, and Elizabeth declares, “He was stark raving mad too” (184). The comedic irony is that the doctor of a psychiatric hospital seems to be mentally unwell. Elizabeth eggs him on so she can get out of the hospital. The ludicrous dynamic exposes the dubious history of the mental health field, with unqualified and corrupt doctors hurting their patients instead of helping them.
The motif of gender and sexuality remains present throughout the rest of the narrative. Head counters the objectification of the sex workers by giving them agency and power. Miss Sugar-Plum Fairy taunts Dan with love affairs, and Miss Chopper carries an axe to cut off the heads of potential rivals. Head continuously links masculine desire to helplessness. Dan tells Elizabeth, “I am the king of sex. I go and go. I go with them all [….] I have all these women, but I don’t love them. If I lose you I have nothing else” (168). Dan’s strong sex drive is a weakness. It doesn’t fulfill him—he still can’t get what he wants.
Sello’s explanation of the journey links to the themes of Power and Helplessness and Mental Health Versus Self-Discovery. As it turns out, Sello held the power the entire time. He created Dan and let him assault Elizabeth so he and Elizabeth could gain “insight into absolute evil” (200). Once again, Head favors the quest over mental health. Dan turns into one of “the greatest teachers [Elizabeth] worked with” (202). Yet, Sello claims Dan is Elizabeth’s inferior, telling her, “You were created with ten billion times more power than he.” He adds, “If the things of the soul are really a question of power, then anyone in possession of power of the spirit could be Lucifer” (199). Through the quest, Elizabeth learns that the world doesn’t need powerful people but regular people. As Elizabeth declares, “There is only one God and his name is Man” (206).
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