Book Review- The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing

From the cover of the novel, Doris Lessing gives a brilliant contrast of the two races that seem to exist in Southern Africa. The cover shows a black man’s hand and a white lady in the background. From this picture, one can depict the message that Lessing wanted to put across. It juxtaposes the power of the blacks in the African context, seen with the hand that hangs above the white woman in the picture, and the white superiority, in the backdrop of an uprising against colonial rule in Africa.

Doris Lessing, British writer and novelist, was born 22 October 1919. She was born in Iran, which was known as Persia at the time. Born of British parents, who moved to Rhodesia in 1925 to become maize farmers, Lessing uses this experience she has on the land as she writes this piece of work. In her novel there is a farmer, Dick Turner, who is in love with the land and his farm. He does all he can to become a good farmer and get a good yield but fails. Doris Lessing’s father was a farmer but did not do well in the business. Thus she interprets her personal experience to come up with a relevant and context-driven novel

She left Africa to go and pursue her career in writing in London, after doing some education reading politics and sociology. This knowledge helped her to be aware of her environment and the imbalances that existed within the Southern African context. Mostly she did not like apartheid ideologies in South Africa, and thus she was banned in that country and in Rhodesia too.

The novel The Grass is Singing is somewhat a diary into the life of Doris Lessing. The character Mary, who is the wife of Dick Turner, seems to uphold the character of her real mother, Emily Maude Tayler, who was also withdrawn from the farm lifestyle in Africa. Mary is murdered at the end by her servant Moses. The way Mary is taken out of the novel in way shows what the colonial system expected if one broke the rules or barriers between blacks and white. In this case, Mary had to have feelings for her servant Moses, and had broken the colour bar.

Overall, the novel is about life on the African continent. Black people who chose to stand against white colonial rule, which faced copious opposition from those who had the guts to defy it. In this case, Moses stands tall even after murdering his master Mary. He does not run away from the scene but stands a little distance away from the corpse and waits for the police to come and get him. In retrospect, it entails how white rule was beginning to lose its grip in Rhodesia, and slowly the black people where gaining some of form of stronghold in the land.

This is a remarkable anthology, which views the life of colonial masters through the eye of the oppressed.