The Grass Is Singing
From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.
THE GRASS IS SINGING by Doris Lessing
Doris Lessing's explosive debut was printed in 1949 and remains one of the most devastating analysis of the colonial experience in English speaking literature.
It tells the story of a lonely and desiccated South African white woman, Mary, who marries a white farmer working in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Dick Turner after a perfunctory courtship. Brutalised and made emotionally empty by an unhappy upbringing she is wholly unsuited to marriage and the hardships which go with working on a small farm in the veldt. As her relationship with the decent and gentle but fundamentally weak Dick deteriorates and the fortunes of the farm decline due to Dick's incompetence she veers from an almost hysterical racism to an illicit, and ultimately destructive sexual relationship with one of the black Rhodesian farm workers.
THE GRASS IS SINGING is a bleak and terrifying analysis of a failed marriage, the febrile neurosis of white sexuality and the fear of black power and energy which Lessing saw as underlying the white colonial experience of Africa. Written in a relentless but devastatingly powerful prose the tragic decline of Mary and Dick Turners' fortunes become a metaphor for the whole white presence in Africa and is shot through with passages of startling and shocking honesty about the fault-lines in the white psyche. Brought over as a completed manuscript when Lessing moved to England in her late twenties it is a startlingly original, still shocking and challenging debut of one of the twentieth century's greatest female novelists.
