Garden-Variety Holiness: Bessie Head's "reverence for ordinary people" in A Question of Power

To unfold the "reverence for ordinary people" that Bessie Head says animates her writings and to move beyond the dominant trend of treating Head's work autobiographically, the present study considers A Question of Power in light of Njabulo S. Ndebele's theories of the spectacular and the ordinary. For Ndebele, these categories correspond to the dramatic and the mundane, and they map a developmental history in South African fiction that uses the language of "redemptive transformation" to describe how representing ordinary things in ordinary ways critiques apartheid and imagines a new social order. This study argues that A Question of Power contains the spectacular in the dreams, nightmares, and visions that the main character, Elizabeth, suffers. Nevertheless, in the novel's local industries garden, which gathers a cast of common individuals around the simple feat of growing vegetables, Elizabeth finds ordinary work marvellous and venerates the garden and its people. The garden thus becomes both mundane and blessed, and Elizabeth embodies an amalgam of sacred and profane that aligns her with the archetypal and prophetic figure of the holy fool. A Question of Power thus displays the play of serious and ludic elements in Head's aesthetics as she creates a garden-variety holiness that questions apartheid and envisages a more just society.