Hybridity has been a controversial issue not only in eugenic hypotheses
of the nineteenth century but also in the postcolonial, cultural, linguistic, and
geographical contexts. It can be seen as a ‘Janus-faced’ entity. Theorists like
Bhabha consider it as a ‘Third Space’ which is fraught with ambiguities, while some
use the term ‘liminal’ to point to its location in history, culture, and society in
general. This essay deals with a ‘coloured’ writer’s coloured character in the light of
hybridity. Elizabeth, the coloured protagonist of Bessie Head’s A question of power
lives as a hybrid in a state of liminality, and tries to dismiss the worldview of
colonialism and the postcolonial nationalism of South Africa and reconstruct her
shattered identity in the ‘Third Space’ of Motabeng. Elizabeth’s hybridity and her
iconoclastic condition are intensified by rampant liminal elements in the novel. The
essay follows the intricate interrelationships of hybrid elements in terms of Elizabeth’s
multi-faceted character, her garden, and the borders she crosses in the course
of the novel. Hybridity here is by no means a mere inter-racial issue, the attempt
here is to relate this concept to the anti-conventional and iconoclastic; the things that
are liminal and indefinable within established epistemology.

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• Liminality, hybridity and ‘Third Space:’ Bessie Head’s A question of power