Abstract
Hybridity has been a controversial issue not only in eugenic hypotheses of the nineteenth century but also in the postcolonial, cultural, linguistic, and geographical contexts. It can be seen as a ‘Janus-faced’ entity. Theorists like Bhabha consider it as a ‘Third Space’ which is fraught with ambiguities, while some use the term ‘liminal’ to point to its location in history, culture, and society in general. This essay deals with a ‘coloured’ writer’s coloured character in the light of hybridity. Elizabeth, the coloured protagonist of Bessie Head’s A question of power lives as a hybrid in a state of liminality, and tries to dismiss the worldview of colonialism and the postcolonial nationalism of South Africa and reconstruct her shattered identity in the ‘Third Space’ of Motabeng. Elizabeth’s hybridity and her iconoclastic condition are intensified by rampant liminal elements in the novel. The essay follows the intricate interrelationships of hybrid elements in terms of Elizabeth’s multi-faceted character, her garden, and the borders she crosses in the course of the novel. Hybridity here is by no means a mere inter-racial issue, the attempt here is to relate this concept to the anti-conventional and iconoclastic; the things that are liminal and indefinable within established epistemology.
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Notes
All subsequent references in the text are to this edition.
It seems that everything in this novel is in ‘passing’—there is no static concept throughout the novel. Because of her mixed heritage, Elizabeth wanders in a bipolar white and black world. Elizabeth like Bessie Head herself adheres to black movements and black brotherhood. ‘What did mothers, black mothers, say to children whose fathers had been lynched by the Ku Klux Klan in America’(92)? However, it is only at the end of the novel that she says to Tom (her American friend) ‘I don’t like exclusive brotherhoods for black people only. They wouldn’t want you. You’re not black’ (132).
To consider the novel a (semi)-autobiography entails referring to similarities between the protagonist and Bessie Head. This tone of determination and hope can also be traceable in Head’s letters. Offering a glimmer of hope, Bessie Head writes in a letter:
Many people pointed out to me that I was not black enough. I began to feel queer, that something was wrong somewhere and that my destiny led me along other paths. Some people can hog the black skins for themselves but I have to opt for mankind as a whole. You know, my friend, a combination such as I of two nations finally establishes the human race. (Vigne 1991, 64).
There are four ‘soul personalities’ (Sello the monk, Sello in brown suit, Dan, and Medusa) that occupy Elizabeth’s mental life. Each one is representative of a period and a group. Dan is the nationalist absolutist: ‘Someone told her he was […] an African nationalist in a country where people were only concerned with tribal affairs’ (104), Medusa was expressing ‘the surface reality of the African society’ (40), Sello the monk is representative of priests’ cruelty, and Sello in the brown suit becomes a representative of bourgeoisie (see also Kim 2008).
As it is the case with Bessie Head herself, and her tendency towards an Eastern religion like Buddhism and mixing it with Christian beliefs, it should be noted that although there are frequent references to Buddha, Elizabeth does not accept it blindly. Sello, one of the ‘soul personalities’ in charge of Elizabeth’s tortures is described as ‘Brahmins or Rama’(15).
Young points that people used to think of hybridity as sterility and infertility. Since animals like mule are sterile, they generally thought of hybrids as infertile and so doomed to extinction. Hybrids, sooner or later will be absorbed by one of the pure species.
Bhabha considers cultural hybridity as the site of narration where the clashes and inherent discrepancy annihilate the illusion of monopoly of a sole system or reasoning. While for Bakhtin, it is the polyphony of the novel with its dialogic aspect that paves the way for redemption form the long preserved beliefs. Likewise, Elizabeth discarding ‘Godlike figurehead’ and celebrating ordinariness and polyphony claims, ‘It was as though a crossroad had been reached and that [ordinary] people would awaken to a knowledge of their powers […]. None of mankind’s God-like figureheads recorded seeing what she saw in this nightmare soul-journey’ (35).
Whereas Fanon views hybridity as the source of schizophrenia, it should be noted that, for some critics like Deleuze and Gauttari, it is the schizoid self that can overcome the capitalist society.
Despite the fact that cognitive theories believe the very process of recognition occur when one appreciates opposites; Elizabeth’s perfection is achieved when she mixes the opposites in terms of her body and, later on, all aspects of her life. She is the site of ‘reconciliation of opposites’ whereas the onset of the novel indicates how she is tormented by concepts like heaven and hell, man and woman, good and bad, and even God and man.
It cannot be denied that carnivals according to Bakhtin are a temporary masqueraded response capable of revolution; likewise it should be noted that one should not oversimplify Elizabeth and her creator’s quest as finished and permanent. The story’s conclusion remains problematic.
Michelson (1999) notes, ‘Bakhtin makes the important point that this carnival body is a communal body, contained in the collective mass of the people, not the biological individual. In carnival, the body is valuable precisely because it is not a closed unity, but violates the boundaries between self and other, self and world’.
Although it can be argued that for Bakhtin the carnivalesque, grotesque representation of the body belongs to the culture of laughter, there are undeniable similarities between the two. Both Bakhtin and Bhabha reject the apparent monolithic and clashless use of the language and dominance. Both, believing we are rather in a state of becoming than being, challenge the simplistic reading of binary relations. They both—one in the form of heteroglossia and the other through mimicry—have faith in the infectious potential of the deprived even the most marginalized. Both claim that the notion of complete dominance of a group over others and ‘official authoritarian truth’ should be replaced with ‘cohabitation’ in ‘contact zones.’ In both mimicry and carnival, a kind of ‘dialogical coordination’ is emphasized. Bakhtin’s ‘parodic stylization of generic’ of the comic novel becomes Bhabha’s ‘hybrid mimicry’ where ‘the world of divine authority is deeply flawed […] the language of the master becomes hybrid—neither the one nor the other’ (Bhabha 1994 33). Both believe that our language—Bhabha talks about the English language for example in The heart of darkness—is ‘double-accented,’ ‘double-voiced,’ hybrid and hence ‘pseudo-objective. ’(See also Bhabha’s “Signs taken for wonder” in The location of culture and Bakhtin’s “Discourse in the novel”).
The term ‘episteme’ is used by Foucault to indicate the dominant knowledge and discourse in each particular era. Here, the term of ‘Western epistemology’ is used to show the framework of the imperialist’s imposed knowledge (see also Wolfreys et al. 2002).
Said (1975) differentiates between ‘origin’ and ‘beginning’ claiming that ‘a beginning is ‘what might be called an intentional act’ ‘this one avoids the passivity of “origins” by substituting the intentional beginning act of an individual for the more purely circumstantial existence of “conditions”’ (31). ‘The necessary creation of authority for a beginning is also reflected in the act of achieving discontinuity and transfer […], it must also connect the new direction not so much with a wholly unique venture but with the established authority of a parallel venture’ (32).
In her letters to Gordon, she even believes that her mind is male ‘that quiet rhythm of deep feeling which so often builds up in me is so powerfully masculine that I was forced to create powerful males to bear the tide of it […]. It’s simply my personality. I can’t express myself as female. I can’t stop thinking outside female bounds, in broad horizon terms, like a man […]. I know my head is male and I simply accept that […].There is something tough and masculine in me that will suddenly make me do bold, unexpected, courageous things, and I concentrate on that quality to the detriment of my feminine side’ (Pucherova 2011 120).
For further study consult Zoë Wicomb's “Shame and identity: The case of the coloured in South Africa.”
‘The novel explores the deep sources of the protagonist’s trauma in order to lay bare the very roots of human suffering. Experiences of exclusion, denigration and mocking rejection in both South Africa and Botswana have contributed to Elizabeth’s insecurity and isolation’ (Gagiano 2006 48). Bhabha (1994), on the other hand, believes that the ‘unhomely moment relates the traumatic ambivalences of a personal, psychic history to the wider disjunctions of political existence’ (11). Naturally, madness and trauma can have a double function.
Hybridity has been considered as a pejorative and un-natural phenomenon. There are many jokes related to hybridity. For example, ‘God made the white man, God made the black man, God made the Indian, the Chinese and the Jew—but Jan van Reibeek, he made the coloured man (Adhikary 2005 20). ‘I know I am black, an’ I know that God meck two colour, black an’ white, but it must be devil meck brown people, for them is neither black nor white!’ (H. G. Delisser, Jane’s career 56 quoted in Kolijan 2006 35).
Talahite (2005) says: ‘The garden acts as a tool for re-examining the colonial myth of the land in the South African literary tradition, while at the same time rewriting the Christian myths of creation and creativity that have traditionally been shaped around patriarchal images of the land […] female temptation, or unbound female desire and sexuality. One of the ways in which the novel constructs a series of counterpoints to these notions is by representing the garden as the site of bonding and desire between women’ (142). Despite frequent negative representations of men like Dan and Sello, I strongly believe that Elizabeth like her creator is by no means a feminist. We may consider her as a womanist or even a gender-blind person whose sole desire is salvation of the ordinary Man.
Garrett (1999) differentiates between utopian and pastoral fantasies. He considers both of them as an emblem of dissatisfaction with the condition of the person. He believes that, ‘positing the ideal in the past or future is a deliberate political act, for the ideal can be seen as a reaction or response to the real.’ However, utopian fantasy is social, optimistic, and active; while the latter is personal, pessimistic, and passive. The first one looks forward to progress, while the latter is retrospective and nostalgic. In the case of Elizabeth, utopian fantasy is dominant. Elizabeth runs away from her past, from ‘slums of South Africa where she grew up, from me and mine’ (128).
Bhabha (1994) takes the term from Frantz Fanon’s Black skin, white masks. He says: ‘The negative activity is the intervention of the ‘beyond’[…]: a bridge where ‘presencing’ begins because it captures something of the estranging sense of the relocation of the home and the world—the unhomeliness—that is the condition of extra-territorial and cross cultural initiations.’ (40–46).
Head’s desire for ordinariness has also been discussed by Susan Linda Beard in “Bessie Head’s syncretic fictions: The reconceptualization of power and the recovery of the ordinary.” Beard claims the notion of ordinariness includes Elizabeth’s activities such as gardening to gain her sanity while Head is using an extraordinary eclectic method.
The novel is a series of comments on the ways in which power and religion have been constructed through history. These are articulated through fragmented visions and images from a wide range of sources such as Roman history, Biblical stories, Egyptian mythology, and Eastern religions juxtaposed with references to modern history through references to the Ku Klux Klan, Nazism, and apartheid (see also Talahite 2005 146).
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Moosavinia, S.R., Hosseini, S.M. Liminality, hybridity and ‘Third Space:’ Bessie Head’s A question of power . Neohelicon 45, 333–349 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-017-0387-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-017-0387-8