Ode to the Powerless: Bessie Head’s ‘A Question of Power’ through a Personal Lens
No writer’s life and work has had a more profound impact on me than that of Bessie Head, a woman who was born in a psychiatric hospital in South Africa, raised in foster care and later exiled to Botswana, a country she simultaneously loved and hated. By the time she died in 1986, Head had published several novels, including A Question of Power, which she described as “almost autobiographical” in its account of the life of Elizabeth, a woman in the midst of a psychological crisis against the backdrop of her country’s political struggles. I am afraid of readingthis novel againbecause of how vividly it evokes a memory from my medical school days, of a psychiatric evaluation with a patient exhibiting dissociation symptoms and who was later diagnosed with comorbid schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder.
;
