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.
Symbols & Motifs
God and Evil
The motif of God and evil underpins the theme of Power and Helplessness in the narrative. Elizabeth’s quest turns power into an umbrella term that includes both God and evil. Power separates people and creates hierarchies that allow for domination. Dan and Medusa have power, and they use it to torture and oppress Elizabeth. The Christian God has power, and the God is separate from the people. Around Christmastime, Elizabeth hears a chorus sing, “Glory be to God on high, on earth peace, goodwill toward men,” and she’s “appalled” (109). She believes that if God is supposed to be good, he shouldn’t be above people—that’s where evil resides. Remembering what Sello told her, Elizabeth thinks, “God is people. There’s nothing up there. It’s all down here” (109). She believes a good God doesn’t seek power over people, nor does a good God want to make people feel helpless—a good God lives among people, and the focus on people accounts for Elizabeth’s interest in Buddha, who rejected his royal wealth and embraced a simple, reflective life.
The motif of God and evil also supports the theme of The Internal World Versus the External World. The motif manifests in Elizabeth’s inner journey through Sello, Dan, and Medusa, and Elizabeth shows how it appears in the external world when she references the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. These antagonistic groups manifest forceful, godlike dominance. Provocatively, Elizabeth also sees God and evil in the Black Panthers, with Elizabeth advocating for “a power that belongs to all of mankind and in which all mankind can share” (135). A good God (or power) is inclusive, while an evil God (power) excludes.
The Vegetable Garden
The vegetable garden gives Elizabeth a break from her intense journey of self-discovery. When she’s in the garden, the hellish battle subsides, and Elizabeth can focus on growing vegetables or the Cape Gooseberry. The garden provides Elizabeth with a purpose separate from her quest, and it introduces people into her life that don’t have a direct relationship to the hellish battle. Through the garden, she meets Kenosi and Tom, and she engages with the village. People buy from the garden, and she encourages them to consume the Cape Gooseberry, extolling the health benefits of Vitamin C. The garden represents a breath of fresh air, a road to her external community, and a break from the intense quest.
Conversely, the garden symbolizes the teachings of the quest. The journey helps Elizabeth discover that evil is hierarchical and exclusionary. It seeks to dominate people and make them feel helpless. As power-hungry people become caught in their power, they become helpless. Like good power, the garden is inclusive. Elizabeth explains:
It is impossible to become a vegetable gardener without at the same time coming into contact with the wonderful strangeness of human nature. Every man and woman is, in some way, an amateur gardener at heart and vegetables are really the central part of the daily diet (72).
God is good when every person composes God. The vegetable garden mimics the positive diversity. Every person can help make up God, and every person can eat vegetables and become a vegetable gardener—it’s not an exclusive realm.
Gender and Sexuality
Sex isn’t a positive experience throughout the story. Elizabeth’s mom has sex with a Black “stable boy,” and the authorities punish her. Elizabeth’s husband turns out to be a sexual predator, so she leaves him. In the internal world, Medusa and Dan use sex to taunt Elizabeth and make her feel helpless and inferior. Sex represents harm and often has connections to evil and power. Medusa is better than Elizabeth (and everyone else) because she has what “no other woman had […] like seven thousand vaginas in one” (64). Dan and the sex workers are better than Elizabeth because they have strong sexual desires that Elizabeth lacks. As sex symbolizes harm, Elizabeth stays away from it, stating, “[I]t was not such a pleasant area of the body to concentrate on, possibly only now and then if necessary” (44). For Elizabeth, sex creates hierarchies and represents violence and abuse.
Issues of gender in relation to sex also arise in the narrative. The apartheid system in South Africa makes some men feel as though they must be gay. An African man tells Elizabeth, “How can a man be a man when he is called boy?” (45). The formula is problematic and perpetuates anti-gay stereotypes. Still, Head subverts typical ideas of masculinity. Her husband has a white boyfriend, but he also has predatory sex with women. With Medusa, Head upends the historical dynamics of gender power, as Medusa becomes the aggressor with Sello as her passive victim.
The story isn’t necessarily sex-negative, despite Elizabeth’s personal feelings toward sex. Sex gives the sex workers agency and complexity. Through sex, they can counter the dominance of Dan. Sello alludes to a healthy idea of sex when he says, “Love is two people mutually feeding each other, not one living on the soul of the other, like a ghoul” (13). Like positive love, positive sex moves away from exploitation. Such holistic sex doesn’t happen in the novel, but through Sello, Heads provides a framework for it.
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