"The real white man is waiting for me": ideology & morality in Bessie Head's A Question of Power.(Essays)(Critical essay)

 
  Replacing value with authority, choice with drive, psychoanalysis 
  offers an Ersatz, a substitute, for morality--the concept of 
  normality.... The descriptive schema is proposed as a law; and most 
  assuredly a mechanistic psychology cannot accept the notion of moral 
  invention; it can in strictness render an account of the less and 
  never of the more; in strictness it can admit of checks, never of 
  creations. If a subject does not show in his totality the development 
  considered as normal, it will be said that his development has been 
  arrested, and this arrest will be interpreted as a lack, a negation, 
  but never as a positive decision. (de Beauvoir 1949, 50) 

When, in The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir interrogates the methodology of psychoanalysis, she does so in terms of morality. Not only is psychoanalysis ahistorical, she argues, it hides its ideological assumptions under the guise of normality and sanity. Not acknowledging its own ethical or cultural foundations, psychoanalysis presents a particular psychological development of a subject, which she demonstrates to be deeply ideological, as "law" and casts deviation from this law as neurosis. In contrast, de Beauvoir wants to situate the subject in history and give her a dimension of agency: "For us woman is defined as a human being in quest of values in a world of values, a world of which it is indispensable to know the economic and social structure" (1949, 52). Morality, for de Beauvoir, here lacks a particular valence; rather, the term seems to include the spectrum of ethics that are tied to ideology. In pointing out the "moral invention" that psychoanalysis neglects, she seeks to recognize women's agency without discounting the ideological and structural pressures brought to bear on them.

In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon discusses a different version of morality. In a black-phobic world, he writes, "to achieve morality, it is essential that the black, the dark, the Negro vanish from consciousness" (1952, 194). In fact, "one is Negro to the degree to which one is wicked, sloppy, malicious, instinctual. Everything that is the opposite of these Negro modes of behavior is white," he writes, "he is Negro who is immoral" (192). Therefore, the white-identified black subject distances the self from the immoral: "If I order my life like that of a moral man, I simply am not a Negro" (192). So, in the quest to be "moral," the subject will want to identify with the white subject. But historical, social, and economic circumstances make this identification impossible; as Fanon puts it, "the real white man is waiting for me" (193). In other words, the black subject recognizes the "unreality" of the dominant ideologies because "the first encounter with a white man oppresses him with the whole weight of his blackness" (150). Because this encounter is played "out in the open," the black subject cannot fully repress the situation. Whereas perhaps the white man can repress recognition of the colonial encounter out of guilt and social privilege, Fanon writes, "The Negro's inferiority or superiority complex or his feeling of equality is conscious" (150). This "drama" of the colonized, which induced so much of the neurosis Fanon worked with, finds the subject caught in an impossible bind between who you should be and who you are. (1) Here, a version of "morality" serves the colonialist ideology.

De Beauvoir and Fanon's discussions of subject formation, morality, and ideology constitute challenges to psychoanalysis that are still relevant, and that resonate with the project of South African/Botswanan writer Bessie Head's 1974 novel A Question of Power. (2) Although Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis recognize "morality" as a battleground for the subject, these forms of Eurocentric analysis often ignore the ideological and historical contexts of such processes. The bildungsroman exemplifies in literary form the assumption that individual and linear subject-development is universal. In contrast, Head's novel posits an alternative picture of subjectivity in form and content. The novel's project resonates with Fanon and de Beauvoir's interventions into psychoanalysis, while also addressing lacuna in each of their studies, particularly gender in Fanon and race in de Beauvoir. (3) Like de Beauvoir and Fanon, Head's novel situates a partially free, partially determined subject in a world of psychically and ideologically overdetermined moral injunctions. Various colonialist, patriarchal, racist, and bourgeois ideologies lay claim to morality in contradictory ways that place the subject in an impossible bind and drive him/her mad. Furthermore, although Head does not discount the reality of mental illness, she situates psychic phenomena in history. As Hershini Bhana points out, because "madness is not a culturally neutral concept," any kind of psychological analysis has to be "read against the grain of its universalizing claims that mask its racist underpinnings, in order to re-situate mental illness within a politicized and historical framework" (2004, 34-5). In other words, as Carol Anne Taylor (2000)nobserves, A Question of Power itself is a form of theory. (4)

To do so, A Question of Power presents various models or modes of morality (including amorality) and subject development, scrutinizing them in excruciating detail to reveal the ideological underpinnings of these various ideas of moral subjectivity. We are presented with an acute portrait of the clash of different, overdetermined, and even contradictory ideologies and orders of being in southern Africa in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the context in which Head is writing. In the novel, the protagonist Elizabeth, while living and working in a village in Botswana, undergoes a series of hallucinatory episodes featuring the figures of Sello, Dan, and Medusa, and she suffers two mental breakdowns. (5) Processes of subject formation, morality, and encounters with the real occur in several ways, often simultaneously, because ideological interpellation and the complex articulations of the subject do not happen along any one axis. In the novel, many of these axes can be grouped into three categories, which correspond to the progressive stages in the novel: the moral clarities and feudal systems of the distant past (Sello the monk) and the bourgeois humanism and nationalist ideologies of the present (Sello of the brown suit), and the postmodern schizophrenia of the near future (Dan). The first two modes preoccupy the first part of the novel, titled "Sello," and the third mode takes up most of part two, named for "Dan." In all three categories, notions of morality and subjectivity are closely tied to constructions of the body. These modes are distinguished formally by subtle shifts in motif and style, as well as by correlation with hallucinatory and "real" characters. While I am reluctant to strictly correlate these modes directly to the stages of premodernity/precolonialism, modernity/nationalism, and postmodernity/globalization, because these correlations can be problematic and because the text stretches, crosses, and exceeds those categories, the novel does repeatedly refer to people, ideas, and symbols associated with these periods, as I will discuss below. Furthermore, all these different economic, political, and ideological modes do coexist in the context in and of which Head writes. So while I recognize the risk of applying an arbitrary sociohistorical-theoretical progression to the novel, I would argue that they are relevant because they are evidenced both in the novel and the historical context in and of which Head is writing. (6)

Destabilizing these problematic ideological constructions of the premodern/modern/postmodern modes is a multi-leveled irony in the text, through which a repressed "real" asserts itself repeatedly, although never in simple or direct ways. (7) Even when Elizabeth, the character, is not fully conscious of the ideological frameworks of events, the text subtly reveals, connects, and critiques these discourses and relations of power. The language and structure of the text prods at the manifest meanings of events and words in order to force reconsideration of both the text and the world, and the processes at this level of the text overlap with, but are distinguishable from, the omniscient narrator or Elizabeth. This process "debunks" the rhetoric of the three modes, implicitly suggesting ways to think beyond and outside of these dominant ideologies. So, for example, the notion of morality in both the first and second modes involves suppression of the body, while the third mode, drawing on resentment against the pitfalls of the first two modes, rejects the entire concept of morality as corrupt. The novel demonstrates that this total rejection of the entire notion of morality--one might call it "post-ideological"--can be as problematic and destructive as previous moralities. The undercutting process of novel ultimately reveals heteronormativity as an unspoken system of morality that undergirds the sexualized, racialized demarcations throughout the three modes, thereby destabilizing the supposed distinctions between them. As I will discuss, although Elizabeth wants to be identified with the bourgeois white man to constitute herself as a moral subject, homosexuality's interruption of heteronormativity masquerading as morality shows that identifying as a white man cannot suppress the body, and subsequently forces recognition of her own body. Thus Elizabeth is unable to repress the body--any body. At the same time, the text demonstrates that Dan's apparent rejection of morality is yet another tool of domination. So Elizabeth must redefine concepts such as morality, and while the end of the novel does not present any easy solutions, the conclusion of the novel resonates with hope.

To demonstrate these processes, I will first outline the three "modes," making the case that such stages exist and that the language of the novel undercuts them as it progresses. Then I will examine how this continuing challenge of the novel--the return of the real--stages a subtle war between the modern and postmodern modes in the second part of the novel, particularly in terms of morality and the body. Then I will show that rather than choosing between a previous version of morality or rejecting any notion of morality, the novel manages to show that each choice can be ideologically problematic. Ultimately, the novel implies that, despite the reality of the oppressive and repressive power of these different orders or modes, the repressed can become conscious knowledge of the situation. For example, all the various ideologies cast as "immoral" the outsider or Other--particularly black, mixed-race, and/or female--so Elizabeth must either go mad, caught in ideological systems that cast subjectivity in opposition to her, or pose counter-moralities and counter-models of subjectivity. The novel thus presents the reality of overdetermined ideological interpellation, the possibility of agency, and the productive choice of morality, although not in any easy or predetermined way.