Questions of Adaptation: Bessie Head's A Question of Power and Ingrid Sinclair's Riches

Abstract

Riches (2001) is a short film directed by Zimbabwean filmmaker Ingrid Sinclair. The film is about a fiercely independent coloured woman, Molly McBride. She is a single-mother who is exiled from South Africa on an exit permit, with her young son Peter, at the height of apartheid in the mid-1980s. Hoping to find peace and a sense of ‘home’ in neighbouring Zimbabwe, Molly settles and finds a job as a primary school teacher in the country side. Before long, however, Molly feels exiled in her new home. Struggling to fit in with the other teachers and with the larger community due to her liberated, ‘city woman’ ways, Molly survives by incessant writing in her journal, and by heavy drinking and smoking. She fights the onset of poverty and mental breakdown by befriending an ostracised old woman from the village. Sinclair's film draws on Bessie Head's life and work, and significant parallels can be observed between the film and Head's autobiographical novel A Question of Power (1974). This article examines Ingrid Sinclair's short film as an adaptation. It argues that Riches not only draws on Bessie Head's work, but also creatively re-imagines it.