The Hell of Desire: Narrative, Identity and Utopia in A Question of Power

Counter to the critical tradition of reading Bessie Head’s novels as autobiographical, this essay argues that A Question of Power’s notoriously challenging narrative structure cannily exposes the fault lines of colonial and decolonizing politics of race and gender. The novel argues that Elizabeth’s status as an embodied woman of color is precisely what prevents her from attaining subjectivity in racial and national communities, and the novel suggests that the postcolonial subject’s attempts to claim these narratives are destructive in and of themselves. Rather, Elizabeth’s madness is a result of their prescriptive force, not her exclusion from stable racial and national identities. The essay concludes by examining the community work garden—the novel’s utopic alternative—and, against the grain, arguing that this utopia on a troubling erasure of difference and desire.