Abstract
As authors and women writing within a postcolonial paradigm. Head and Valenzuela posit power relations as a prominent feature in their respective novels, A Question of Power and Cola de Lagartija. These texts specifically expose the multi-layered scope of power relations and confirm the presence of such dynamics within the fabric of society and history. Different perspectives/voices represent the dynamics of social context as a series of power relations best interpreted by Bakhtin's perception of the dialogic principle operative in literature. In A Question of Power and The Lizard’s Tail, the abuse of power is challenged and exposed by the different narrators in their capacity as protagonists, narrators and authors. In this way they assert their powers as subjects, individuals, women; they gain a voice, an identity, and can proceed to make history as well as make history (in both the historical and literary sense). By writing, or perhaps re-conceptualizing their past as individuals and writers. Head and Valenzuela have been enabled to forge their own future.
Highlights
A comparison of two texts written by women from disparate countries and cultures, A Question o f Power (1994) by Bessie Head and Cola de Lagartija [The
These authors’ dependence on different perspectives/voices to represent the dynamics of social context and to express personal perceptions of political and social realities, is best interpreted by Bakhtin’s understanding of the dialogic principle operative in literature
As fictional autobiography and biography respectively, A Question o f Power and The Lizard's Tail represent self-conscious forms of narration that attribute the texts with additional interpretations of power
Summary
Bakhtin never consciously acknowledged the feminist perspective (whether as author, narrator or character)^ as part of the polyphonic voices inlierent in the novel, but his concept of the novel as a social construct and his recognition of the various power relations embedded in discourse, provide a suitable framework for a feminist interpretation and deconstruction of power relations. The business of a feminist dialogics is to gender these voices and to unmask the complex, contorted play o f hegemonic forms and female speech - to explore the ways in w hich wom en fi'om a variety o f tem poralities, ethnicities, races, and classes initiate dialogues with their oppressions With this framework in mind, I shall attempt to illustrate how A Question o f rower and The Lizard's Tail relate to their specific socio-historic contexts and indicate how “the speakers of the word, either in life or in art, are located as socially marked in class, generational, professional and regional terms” (Dentith, 1995:48). In Dentith’s (1995:61) terms, Bakhtin perceives the novel as an example of active intervention in the social struggle “seeking to re-accent the other’s word, to parody, subvert, overcome, accede to, or argue with that other word in multiple, different, but traceable ways” This subversive quality is especially prevalent in Bakhtin’s notion of carnival, or the “principle of grotesque realism” (Dentith, 1995:67) that is manifested in ironic commentary and situation. It is the concept of polyphony in discourse and the revelation of power dynamics with its subsequent (and concomitant) subversive potential that I wish to identify and explore in A Question o f Power and The Lizard's Tail
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