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 1, Pages 59-100Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Sello”
Part 1, Pages 59-70 Summary
Another rainy season arrives. The Motabeng women gather their items in a cloth that they carry on their heads, and they bring a hoe with them and start to plow their lands. The atmosphere is “magical,” and Thoko, one of Elizabeth’s friends from the village, tells her about the dangers in the area. There are snakes, wild dogs, and a leopard-like cat that can crack open their skulls, eat a bit of their brains, and then neatly put the skin back. Thoko’s depiction frightens Elizabeth, yet soil and growing food interests her.
During the rainy season, Elizabeth takes long walks with “the small boy” (her son), and she feels peace. However, the harmony doesn’t last. Medusa returns and calls her “fat.” No one stands up to Medusa. Elizabeth thought the inner turmoil was a confrontation between good and evil, but Medusa’s goal is “eliminating” Elizabeth. She hurls thunderbolts at her, and Elizabeth’s personality becomes an “ambiguous mass.”
Medusa sidelines Sello, who says she “means everything” to him. He thinks people should be free to grow and develop, but Medusa wants to take over Africa and expel people she dislikes. Elizabeth thinks Sello’s attachment to Medusa has to do with her vagina, which has the power of 7000 vaginas, and creates an atmosphere of savage desire. A tiny girl tells her she likes to have sex with her father. Elizabeth picks up the girl, and the girl bites her. Elizabeth realizes that learning from evil isn’t easy, and she thinks about the monks who face evil by meditating for 40 days.
In the external world, the principal of Elizabeth’s primary school tells her that she needs to get a “certificate of sanity” (65) to keep teaching. Elizabeth quits, and the principal tries to reason with her, but the teachers encourage him to let her go—the other teachers don’t like her.
Elizabeth thinks about the school’s lack of resources. The teachers lack reference books, and the children don’t have food. By midday, they’re starving. She walks to the better-funded Motabeng Secondary School, where work groups teach farming, textiles, carpentry, and other practical skills that develop local industries. She asks Eugene for help, and he assigns her to The Vegetable Garden.
Part 1, Pages 70-87 Summary
Elizabeth meets the agricultural expert and farm manager, Mr. Grahame. He’s from England, and he’s reserved and distant. The Dutch fund the farm projects, and they provide the white teachers with houses.
Elizabeth meets the students, and one of the workers, Small-Boy, tells her about the need for a deep trench bed to grow robust vegetables. Elizabeth connects the wonder of the vegetable garden to the wonder of human beings, yet Camilla, a Danish landscape gardener and assistant, arrives and ruins the atmosphere. Elizabeth thinks she’s condescending and racist, and she calls Camilla “Rattle-tongue.”
Nonetheless, Elizabeth accepts Camilla’s offer to help her run errands in her Land Rover, and then she visits Camilla’s stunning home. Camilla invites Elizabeth to Sunday dinner, where Camilla claims Danish culture is too “complex” for regular people. Camilla asks Birgette (a blond, unmarried math teacher) to confirm her opinion, but Birgette does not.
A month later, Elizabeth works with a group of women in the vegetable garden. They’re growing Cape Gooseberry, and after showing Birgette the plant, she invites Birgette to dinner. The women criticize Camilla’s condescending attitude toward Black people, and Birgette, who has taught in several precarious places, including Algeria, says Elizabeth should tell Camilla she’s a “racialist” (racist).
Elizabeth talks about racist perpetrators and their victims. The latter has freedom, as the former stays bonded to their racist laws and lies. The racist person devolves, but there’s always hope for the victim. Birgette agrees with Elizabeth’s theory, and she tells Elizabeth she’s emotionally “disturbed” and can’t read before bed anymore. Birgette thinks hatred fills the world and that some dismiss selfless people as “freaks.” Elizabeth alludes to her inner tumult. She thinks that Birgette will rescue her from greed and hate someday.
Two days later, Elizabeth meets Camilla, and her racist, condescending attitude vanishes. She’s quiet and introspective.
Part 1, Pages 87-100 Summary
The year is almost over, but the inner torment returns, with Medusa leveling Elizabeth’s soul with thunderbolts until Christmastime, when Kenosi, a woman from the village, arrives and helps Elizabeth build the fence around the vegetable garden. Elizabeth has difficulty keeping workers for the garden, as it demands time and doesn’t pay, but Kenosi is a solid worker, and Elizabeth admires how she moves like a cat. She thinks Kenosi saved her life.
The women discuss their Christmas plans: Kenosi will be with friends, and Elizabeth, not having friends, will roast a chicken and bake a cake for her son. Kenosi isn’t married, but she has a child. Elizabeth says that she’d marry Kenosi if she were a man.
Elizabeth catches her son listening to their conversation and calls him “very bad.” Her son mimics her. Elizabeth asks her son if he’d like to die if she died, and she explains that death is like going away. She wonders what Black moms say to their kids when the Ku Klux Klan lynches their fathers.
Medusa and Sello come back, and Medusa alludes to the appearance of Dan. Elizabeth tells the Sello in the chair to get another “punch-bag” for Medusa—she’s through taking her abuse. When she wakes, her son is beside her, and burned things litter the floor. With her son present, she asks Sello if Medusa is gone. Sello says yes. Her son asks what she’s talking about, and Elizabeth replies that she is referencing poetry.
Kenosi visits, and Elizabeth’s son throws a paper airplane at her. He tells Kenosi about the edge of the earth. Goats fall off it, and the sun rises on one edge and sets on the other edge.
Elizabeth harps on Sello and Medusa. Sello had tried to fit Medusa into his narrative, but she was overpowering. Elizabeth remembers Sello telling her people don’t always realize when they become evil. At night, a man puts a crown on Elizabeth, and Sello shows her the cesspit, but it’s clean and empty now. She falls into the hole but climbs out of it. Dead bodies fall into the hole until it’s full. Elizabeth wonders what the dead bodies mean, and Sello says anything Elizabeth didn’t like, he killed. Elizabeth wants to make “new worlds,” not dead ones.
Part 1, Pages 59-100 Analysis
The theme of The Internal World Versus the External World continues with Thoko’s account of life in the bush. About a fearful wild cat, she says, “[W]ith one smash of his paw cracks open our skulls and eats our brains” (60). Due to its violence, Thoko’s external world mirrors Elizabeth’s internal world, and through Thoko’s account of her plowing experience, Elizabeth becomes interested in gardening. It’s as if Elizabeth gravitates to precarity.
Yet, the vegetable garden doesn’t have the same dangers as plowing in the open land, and Elizabeth’s external world remains mostly calm and stable. Her principal asks to get a “certificate of sanity,” explaining, “It’s no trouble [….] Why don’t you go and see the doctor?” (66). The narrative again privileges Elizabeth’s journey over mental health assessment. Elizabeth doesn’t entertain the idea of being treated for a mental health condition.
The vegetable garden supplies Elizabeth with a stable task in the external world, offering Elizabeth a reprieve from her high-octane journey. While the soul journey involves destruction and precarity, the gardening centers on growth—she grows vegetables and the Cape Gooseberry. The garden symbolizes a pause from her journey—she can go out in the community, contribute to it, and make friends. Through the garden, Elizabeth makes a reliable friend, Kenosi, and she briefly befriends Birgette. Unlike Sello and Medusa, these women don’t test or harm Elizabeth. Kenosi is a helpful worker, and Birgette encourages Elizabeth to confront the toxic Camilla.
In conversation with Birgette, Elizabeth circles back to the theme of Power and Helplessness. Elizabeth says, “The victim is really the most flexible, the most free person on earth. He doesn’t have to think up endless laws and endless falsehood” (84). The racist person becomes helpless—they’re chained to their suffocating, prejudiced system. The “victim” doesn’t have to subscribe to a narrow, noxious formulation, so they have power. Elizabeth adds, “The victim who sits in jail always sees a bit of the sunlight shining through” (84). The victim has the power of hope, but the racist person is stuck in the hateful world they perpetuate.
Elizabeth showcases her power over Medusa when she suddenly says, “Sello, find another punch-bag for your girl. I’m not her match” (93). Sello abides by Elizabeth’s request and banishes Medusa. Though Medusa regularly appears indomitable, Elizabeth isn’t helpless. She doesn’t have to fight Medusa in a life-or-death battle to make her go away—she only has to ask.
As Sello creates Medusa, she’s a part of him, reinforcing the self-discovery aspect of the quest. Through Medusa’s appearance, Elizabeth learns that “evil and good travel side by side in the same personality” (98). The bad/virtuous binary is fluid, and people have positive and negative traits, so it’s up to them, as Sello tells her, to try and “realize the point at which [they] become evil” (96).
Children symbolize innocence. Elizabeth’s son (no one gives him a name, so the characters call him “small boy” or “Shorty”) doesn’t judge Elizabeth’s behavior, nor does he appear bothered by it. Elizabeth asks him, “If I die, would you like to die too?” The son replies, “What is to die?” (92). They briefly discuss death before the son loses interest. When the son finds Elizabeth sleeping on the floor, surrounded by burnt things, he asks her more questions. His innocence creates curiosity, not condemnation.
Not all children symbolize innocence. On her nightmarish journey, Elizabeth meets “one weird little girl” who states, “I like to sleep with my daddy” (64). Sex continues to symbolize harm. The little girl lacks a healthy relationship with sex, and Medusa continues to use sex to control and manipulate Elizabeth’s journey. The narrator says Medusa’s vagina is “like seven thousand vaginas in one, turned on and operating at white heat. And an atmosphere of brutal desire pervaded everything, stagnated everything” (64). Her vagina is an insidious weapon, not a source of positive pleasure. Again, Elizabeth experiences sex only in relation to harm or abuse.
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By Bessie Head
