BEssie Frameless

A black Frame

We don’t know where we are until we know where we’ve been. That is easy for us to say being born into a family that has provided love, nurturing and guidance. It gives us a sense of direction, a reference point, a frame if you will. Most take for granted how lucky we actually are to have a reference point.

In Bessie Head’s “A Question of Power” she has no reference point and no frame as a guide. She personally isolates herself from everything and everyone. It comes clear from her past why this is. Elizabeth (being Bessie) starts off having these crazy nightmares then jumps into her life of how her mother was insane to being told “if your not careful you’ll be insane just like your mother” (16). That right there would make any person question who they are. No sane person would want to be tied or related to an insane person. Another reason she has no frame.

She grew up in South Africa which I think is a frame of reference. But she said that “I have always been just me, with no frame of reference to anything beyond myself” (3). She is lost in a world of mental instability and isolation. She shows us that her frames are random and all over the place. In her book she jumps around a lot from one experience to another. This could explain why she does not have a frame of reference but herself, going from one experience to the next.

In her early childhood bouncing around from one family to another getting bits and pieces of religion, culture, and family but Elizabeth never felt that she really belonged. It was devastating to her to find that the “Red House” that they passed was where her real mother was locked up. She married a thug it didn’t work out and left for Botswana with her baby boy to become a teacher. Frustrated by all the hatred, between the black and white people, saying that white people have a born hatred toward black she is fed up with it and moves on with her life (19). She stops in a village where everybody is a relative. She is visited by god who’s in a white robe and speaks in a friendly voice. He gives her advice but she thinks he is crazy and absurd. She is in the hospital she has dreams and realities that are merged so you don’t know what is a dream and is happening. Spiritual and enlighten after pain and suffering, she finds the perfection and perfection she said is love.

She is frameless because she is searching for her frame of love. Love is the tether that can hold steady from anything. Family, friends, even countries have it. She is searching for the love of life and life of love.