Bessie Head's Maru: Identity, Pathology, And the Construction of Difference‪.‬

Critical responses to Bessie Head have generally tended to focus, even to a point of needless surfeit, on her autobiographical third novel, A Question of Power, published in 1973, many of them construing it as the most significant work in her oeuvre. Craig MacKenzie (1990) is convinced that the novel, cathartic in its measured formulation, is "pivotal to any examination of her life and work..." (p. xi). Lloyd W. Brown (1981) suggests that A Question of Power represents a touche in Head's literary achievement (175). Huma Ibrahim (1996) regards the novel as the most important work in the novelist's attempt to navigate the troubled waters of transnational identities and her exilic consciousness which she calls "Head's point of engagement" (p. 125). These critical opinions are quite tempting in their candor, and yet one is inclined, given all that we know about Bessie Head, to proffer a different conclusion, a conclusion very much in step with Head's own uniqueness as a writer which "marks her writing off from that of her contemporaries" (MacKenzie, 1990, p. xv). Just as Bessie Head from the start "set herself on a path that was uniquely her own" (MacKenzie, 1990, p. xv), so would I argue that Head's Maru, more than A Question of Power, distils the very essence of her creative enterprise laced with an overriding concern for what MacKenzie describes as an investigation into the enigma of human prejudice. Although A Question of Power can be said to be an important site for "unravelling the strands of her anguished life story ... [with] instances of immense suffering and privation ... [and] crippling alienation..." (MacKenzie, 1990, p. ix), Maru, on the other hand, provides the fertile site for mounting a literary resistance to the mistaken ideology which often gives rise to that anguished life story. For without this insane ideology there would not be crippling alienation. Without this ideology, there would not be suffering and privation. Both the ideology and its accoutrements represent the two sides of the same morbid state. But while A Question of Power can be related in terms characteristic of a symptom, Maru, on the other hand, can be interpreted as the cause or aetiological source. This inverse relationship leads to my thesis: that in Maru, Bessie Head constructs a site not only for unravelling the very enigma of human prejudice, but also for mounting a stiff resistance to its ideological undergird. There is a second, more poignant reason why Maru may be viewed as the pivot of Head's "point of engagement." This has to do with what MacKenzie has appropriately identified as the one recurrent dynamo that fuels and drives her artistic consciousness. He writes: "As a South African-born 'Coloured', Bessie Head was subjected to all the brutalities meted out to those citizens not born white, and she, as a 'first generation' child of bi-racial origin, bore the full brunt of South Africa's discriminatory legislation" (p. x).