“I want to feel that I saw and thought all those things for a purpose”: Bessie Head's letters to Paddy Kitchen about writing A Question of Power

While working on A Question of Power, Bessie Head wrote many letters to her friend and fellow-novelist, Paddy Kitchen, about the processes and problems involved in transforming the experiences which coincided with a mental breakdown into fiction. In joining the growing critical discussion of Head’s letters in their own right, this article considers both the peculiar generic properties of letters in general, and Head’s expectations of letter-writing in particular. Then it considers the insight that Head’s letters to Kitchen offer to four inter- related aspects of her novel’s creation: how the characters are made to figure the presence of evil in relation to good; Head’s decision to begin writing while still experiencing the visions which she struggled both to record and to understand and her concurrent discovery that she could no longer place an implicit trust in her dreams; her struggle to achieve a distance from her experiences and to integrate what began as two distinct stories in her writing; finally, overarching all of these matters, her desire that her work be taken seriously as a work of fiction about spiritual matters. The unpublished letters to Kitchen are set in relation to the published correspondence with Randolph Vigne and Patrick and Wendy Cullinan.