Glossolalia and Bessie Head

I was around 10 years old when I first heard a person speak in Glossolalia.  I sat in church with my mother surrounded by a congregation of about 500 people. It was a unlike the Lutheran church I went to each Sunday with my family. This church was very different; there were people fainting in the isles and uttering in a strange gibberish language with their eyes closed and their palms stretched toward the sky. Desperately trying to make since of what was occurring around me, I looked to my mother who sat quietly listening to the words of the pastor. It wasn’t until a couple of years later that I discovered that the strange gibberish language I heard that Sunday morning in church was called Glossolalia, a language  known to many Christians as the most intelligent, perfect language in the Universe.

To the listener Glossolalia seems to defy logic of modern language, it seems to exist without syntax, semantics or phonetics leaving an outside observer confused, and wondering if any form of communication is really taking place. I started to think of this language in terms of expressing a feeling that everyday language and words failed to articulate. For instance: Have you ever been so angry that you could barely formulate a sentence, or so hurt you struggled to find the right words to truly express how you felt?

If we find it hard to sometimes express the everyday feelings of happiness, fear, and pain imagine how difficult it would be to articulate or accurately portray the very depths of insanity. In Bessie Heads book “A question of power” her style of writing is similar to that of Glossolalia, in that she articulates a matter that is very hard to express in modern words or terms, however seems to accomplish such a task with a certain type of fluency and accuracy. This is to be commended and although it is easy to give up entirely on trying to understand the text of the book, it is quite possible that her chaotic story-telling technique is a very honest depiction of truly living a life without working frames.

While reading the book I am immediately stricken by the chaos of the text. The reader is immediately thrown into a word salad, where there is disorder in the thought of the Author, and ideas are constantly derailing from one topic to the next. It is a voice that characterizes a condition of person either on drugs or is suffering from a mental illness such as schizophrenia. The beauty of the novel however is that we are invited into the frameless and chaotic world of Bessie Head, encouraged to fully grasp the meaning (or lack of meaning) the character is experiencing. In order to do this we must in fact enter the mind of a mad woman. This is hard to do; it leaves the reader in a state of discomfort, struggling to find logic at each corner. In fact, I have reached page 34 of the novel and still struggle to find a rhythm, a way in which I can just read the book without trying to force my own logic into every sentence and to just go with the flow.

If reading Bessie Heads story causes such discomfort, I cannot begin to imagine the discomfort associated with actually living through such an ordeal. This is why her style of writing is so valuable.  I believe that the purpose of the book is not to make the reader uncomfortable nor is every sentence intended to be analyzed. The book actually allows us to learn about the importance of living with frames and personal references first hand, without actually having to endure the experience of living in a frameless world ourselves. The way in which the story is written illustrates that while frames and points of references might be artificial, arbitrary and man made- they are completely necessary in order to live in a state free of anarchy or chaos.