A Question of Power
Bessie Head
In exile, a woman's mind becomes a battlefield of good and evil.
Its protagonist Elizabeth, a mixed-race South African refugee in a Botswana village, descends into a hallucinatory breakdown in which figures of good and evil wage war for her sanity. Drawing on Head's own exile and statelessness, the novel turned interior madness into a meditation on power, race and belonging. It carried African fiction beyond social realism and became a touchstone for writing on gender, exile and the psyche.
- Author
- Bessie Head
- First published
- 1973
- Genre
- Novel
- Theme
- East, Southern and North African Literature
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