The Grass Is Singing

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The Grass Is Singing

THE L1TERAEY WORK

A novel set in early 1900s ryral Southern Rhodesia; ptiWished in 1950.

SYNOPSIS

Feeling displaced on the veld m Southern Rhodesia, a white woman breaks the color bar fey becoming too intimate with her African servant and pays for the Indiscretion with tier life.

Events in History at the Time of the Novel

The Novel in Focus

Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written

For More Information

Born October 22, 1919, in Kermanshah, Persia (present-day Iran), Doris Lessing moved to a farm in Southern Rhodesia with her family in 1925. Her father was an unsuccessful maize farmer who, like thousands of his British contemporaries, ventured into southern Africa in search of freedom and prosperity but found instead isolation and despair. Lessing left the countryside for the capital of Salisbury in 1937 (present-day Harare, Zimbabwe). In Salisbury, she found a job as a typist and joined the Communist Party, which led to her becoming an active member of the movement for African rights. After two unsuccessful marriages and three children, Lessing left Africa for London in 1949 to concentrate on professional writing. Her fiction has been acclaimed for its humanist portraits as well as provocative subject matter. It was with the publication of her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, that Lessing established herself as one of the most formidable novelists to emerge since World War II—a writer unafraid to tackle taboo subjects of the day and to challenge the status quo. She continued to focus on African issues in her widely acclaimed five-volume Children of Violence series, featuring the autobiographical heroine, Martha Quest (1952-69), as well as in short stories and memoirs, including her nonfiction African Laughter. With The Grass Is Singing Less-ing initiated a lifelong investigation into the Afro-European experience and broke with convention to bring controversial, thought provoking subject matter into the public eye.

Events in History at the Time of the Novel

Southern Rhodesia and imperialism in Africa

At the turn of the twentieth century, the leading colonial nations—Portugal, Great Britain, France, Belgium, and Spain—were scrambling for African land and resources to fuel the Industrial Revolution in Western Europe. Rich in minerals, such as gold, platinum, asbestos, and coal, Africa was a veritable treasure chest for imperialists who, for the most part, seemed to have no moral qualms about exploiting human and natural resources for their own personal gain.

Cecil Rhodes, diamond magnate and founder of the British South Africa Company—more commonly known as the Chartered Company—was a leading British imperialist who, by age 36, owned the world’s largest company (De Beers Doris Lessing Consolidated Mines) and controlled nearly all of Southern Africa. Like many of his contemporaries, Rhodes considered Africa the “dark” continent—backward and in need of enlightenment. At the same time, he recognized that it held a wealth of fertile land and minerals with which he could build and expand his empire.

In 1890 Rhodes sent an expedition up from South Africa into Mashonaland and Matabeleland to add to his agricultural and mineral interests. White encroachment finally led to outright rebellion by the local Ndebele (in 1893 and 1896) and Shona peoples (in 1896-97) against the colonists. The concerted strategy of the colonists, and to some degree their machine guns and artillery, helped them emerge victorious, after which they went on to create Southern Rhodesia. In 1894 the colonists set up reserves, or specially designated areas, for the Ndebele, and in 1898 for the Shona, relegating them to “locations” on the desolate outskirts. White settlers received the choicest parcels; to each white settler the Chartered Company granted 3,000 acres on which to farm maize, wheat, and tobacco for export via the Company. Rhodes also established a white-only government, giving no representation or rights to the native peoples—precedents that would have devastating long-term effects on African-European relations in the region. Comparing the groups and evincing white attitudes, in 1912 Belgian lawyer Henri Rolin spoke of the blacks “two castes below the whites … one has only to see [the Africans] in their sordid villages… to appreciate the immense difference which divides the victors from the vanquished” (Rolin in Blake, p. 158).

Monetary slavery

Lured by promises of land ownership and prosperity, disenchanted and adventure-seeking British subjects, like those in The Grass Is Singing and Lessing’s own family, came by the tens of thousands to Southern Rhodesia from 1907 through World War II, initiating the most dramatic economic transformation ever witnessed to that point in southern Africa. Whites were initially granted 21 million acres of prime land, which they could purchase for the low sum of five shillings per acre (government loans were readily available). In contrast, the indigenous African peoples—though they outnumbered colonists 30 to 1—were apportioned just 24 million acres of barren land. Through 1914, African farmers produced as many or more cash crops as settlers but new laws, as well as taxes, and the colonists’ monopoly of the finest lands, eliminated their ability to compete. In 1930-31 the Land Apportionment Act granted 43 million more acres to colonists, along with seven million to Africans, and made it illegal for indigenous peoples to purchase land in European areas. The Land Apportionment Act disabled African farmers from competing economically with European farmers and merchants and legalized segregation across the board. In sum, developments forced the Africans to become wage earners rather than independent farmers.

Though the colonists had every economic advantage, they still needed cheap labor in order to become profitable. Farming and mining for export required an abundance of menial workers and there were simply not enough colonists willing or able to meet the demand. In the interest of creating a workforce, first a hut and then a poll tax of £1 were imposed on all African men. At the time, the Shona-speaking majority had no hard currency system—they traded in commodities or bartered. The tax law forced them to work for colonists in order to earn British pounds so that they could meet their new financial obligations. Since slavery had been abolished in the British Empire in 1834, technically the colonists could not enslave locals. However, they managed to do so indirectly, by forcing every African man to pay taxes and by limiting freedom of movement so that nonpayers would not escape. The colonist government restricted movement between districts by requiring visiting passes and registration certificates of all African men, to be carried at all times and produced upon demand. Separated from their families, African men were transported into “locations,” the urban equivalent of a reserve, where they either rented or built their own dwellings. The idea was to live here on a temporary basis, long enough to earn their tax money after which they could return to their family dwellings in the rural reserves.

Lodged in these shoddy locations, on the outskirts of white enterprises, African men provided farm labor and domestic service for the Europeans; if they attempted to flee, they would be hunted down and punished as tax evaders. The effect on indigenous life was dramatic. Back on the homestead, by the 1930s, women were forced to take on tasks formerly performed by the men—threshing, for example, in addition to the planting, hoeing, weeding, and harvesting. An investigating committee sized up the impact: “This uncontrolled and growing emigration [of black men to white farms] brings misery and poverty to hundreds and thousands of families and the waste of life, happiness, health and wealth [is] colossal” (Hallett, p. 525).

Re-education Victorian-style

Along with the forced labor came a climate of racism and cultural misunderstanding. Out of a combination of ignorance, arrogance, greed, and fear, most European colonists from the outset discriminated against the locals, known by the British as “Kaffir” (a denigrating term equivalent to the disparaging American term “nigger”). The British viewed what they perceived to be the Africans’ lack of “progress” and non-British ways as abhorrent, dismissing the indigenous people as idle and lazy, interested only in drinking and making love. Under the guise of “Christian duty,” some of the colonists set out to re-educate the local peoples and teach them British values of thrift, individualism, self-help, and hard work. The colonists banned alcohol sales to locals in 1903 and restricted production of “Kaffir beer,” which was vital to many tribal rituals. According to the leading colonial politician Godfrey Hug-gins (1883-1971), the Europeans were acting as a “leaven of civilization,” and “the black ma would inevitably revert to a barbarism worse than before” if left to his own devices (Huggins in Hallett, p. 533). Like Huggins, most British colonists believed they had a “dual mandate” to “re-educate” the African peoples, whom they considered backward, and to extract resources to fuel industrialization and further Western progress (which they believed was promoting the progress of the world).

But the re-education aimed to go only so far. While the colonists wanted a diligent, tax-paying, and subordinate African community, they in no way wanted it to mix with their own. Yes, the colonists felt more secure as their population increased, but many of them continued to feel threatened by the African majority, who by 1930 numbered over 1 million while whites numbered 50,000 (Blake, p. 161). For the Europeans, segregation was the key to maintaining control and,

PSIUDO-SCIENTIFIC SUPREMACY

By the time British colonists founded Southern Rhodesia, Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution were well known (see On the Origin of Spwcim , also in WLAIT 4; British and Msh Litersfiunte: and IB Tim&& Having product the railroad, telegraph, and machine gym, Europeans felt immense pride in their contributions to what is known as the fate-nineteenth-century Age of Progress. Many: Europeans considered these in, ventions evidence that they were indeed more highly evolved than other races. Cecil Rhodes himself is said to have subscribed to this theory, adding further that the British sat atop the European hierarchy because their Empire controlled the world (Thomas, p. 109). White-nowned newspapers such as The Ope TYmes wrote that South Africa’s indigenous peoples were “among the lowest,’ and the Cape Argus added, “the lower peo, pie are tn the scale of humanity, the more will they be taught by working, obeying and submitting” (Thomas, pp, 108, 109), From the point of view of their countrymen, then, the colonists had a pseudo-scientific basis that condoned their treatment of Africans, a basis that deemed this treatment not only correct but in accordance with the natural order of things.

just as the land grants and commercial incentives had been introduced to attract white settlers, segregation laws, such as the Land Apportionment Act, which outlawed the purchase of land in “European areas” by indigenous peoples, were passed to placate and reassure them.

The economics of the Africans and the colonists became inextricably mixed. While the Africans lived mostly on subsistence agriculture, they came to depend greatly on an infusion of money from relatives in towns and the Europeans likewise depended on African labor. But socially they were strictly segregated, as observed by Henri Rolin in 1913.

The white man will not take his meals at the same table as the black; he will not meet him on the footpath of the streets; he travels by rail in separate wagons… The farmer sees him as a pilferer and cattle-thief … Those who know the natives add besides that the antipathy of black for white is not less, and that is easily to be understood in view of the brusqueness, the complete lack of consideration with which the European often treats the native.
(Rolin in Blake, pp. 157-58)

This was the state of affairs even from the start. Early in the twentieth-century colonists imposed

LYNCH MOBS IN AFRICA

Southern Rhodesian whites were unWke some otter frontier ommunities in thai they showed no affinity for Invoking lynch law; m fact Just two lynchlrlgs were pyblicly recorded. Instead the Southern Rhodestans passed stern, dtscrimfnatory laws against the local Africans and administered them with white-mate-only personnel, The intent was not to end lynch-ings but rather lo establish a semblance of law and order, Relying on export trade, the colonists actually feared that lyrich-Ings wouW damage their international reputation and the economy, One focal leader stopped a lynching, then rewarded the mob with free drinks, On the other hand, the discriminatory laws ware frequently invoked, There were numerous cases of black men charged and convicted on the thinnrat of evidence for rape and attempted rape of while women,

strict laws to keep African men from European women, addressing the main fear of European males. In 1903 the Immorality Suppression Ordinance passed, making it illegal for an African man and a white woman to have sexual relations (there was, by contrast, no edict making it illegal for white men to have sex with black women). The Rhodesia Women’s League lobbied, unsuccessfully, for equal punishment for white men under this Ordinance. White women risked jail time for being with a black man; white men were not punished for being with a black woman. Also in 1903 a law passed extending the death penalty not only to any African man who raped a white woman, but to any African man who attempted to rape a white woman (it was assumed that no white woman would willingly agree to have sexual relations with a black man, therefore all sexual advances were considered attempted rape). Some whites argued that these laws were passed to end lynchings, but the juries were made up only of voting males (white men), so that in effect the laws inaugurated what can be described as legal lynching.

The color bar

The color bar, or legal and customary separation between Africans and whites, pervaded Rhodesian society. In addition to segregation in housing, the workplace, and public facilities, there was a social convention—insisted on particularly by lower-class whites—that Africans would keep to their subordinate station and not coexist or communicate with Europeans on an equal level. Africans were to lower their eyes when addressing Europeans and, as Mary Turner says in the Grass Is Singing, were not to speak in English, for then they would be acting above their station, or being “cheeky” (Lessing, The Grass Is Singing, p. 180). A famous missionary and Yao folk hero, John Chilembwe, observed that a local African “was often times beaten by a white man if he did not take his hat off his head some thousand yards away, even a mile away of a white man” and that Europeans took strong exception to “natives who got above their station” (Chilembwe in Hallett, p. 527).

Moreover, the blacks were not the only ones expected to abide by prescribed behavior and “stay in their place.” Whites, taught the colonists, ought to act “above” their subordinates and not get too familiar with Africans. They were to keep their affairs private, live in a “more civilized” manner, and—especially in the case of white women—not show emotion or dress in front of African domestic servants. In The Grass Is Singing, this is the line that Mary Turner crosses, and her white neighbors cannot tolerate the transgression. As Victoria Middleton observes, the novel depicts the “white woman as a cherished luxury or valuable prize” (Middleton in Kaplan, p. 138). Mary sins against society by lowering herself and allowing her servant Moses close proximity to her. She thus outrages her fellow colonists and condemns herself. The Turners’ successful neighbor in the novel, Charlie Slatter, articulates the prevailing European attitude, the so-called “first law of South Africa” that said: “Thou shalt not let your fellow whites sink lower than a certain point; because if you do, the nigger will see he is as good as you are” (Grass, p. 210).

Lower than low

Of course, not all whites expressed such blatant racism in public. There were even whites who did not subscribe to such views—including some missionaries, officials of the Department of Native Affairs, and philanthropists. However, the lower down the socio-economic scale were the colonists, the more outward contempt they seemed to show for Africans:

The Petite Commercant (small businessman) will not hesitate to tell you that the black is a ‘stupid animal’… Educated men are naturally more prudent ‘more discreet’ in their language.
(Rolin in Blake, p. 158)

When officials in Salisbury, the capital of Southern Rhodesia, attempted to implement a policy of assimilation in 1910, arguing that better educated, English-speaking Africans would make for a more prosperous Rhodesia, the white laboring classes strongly objected. Increasingly hard-pressed to keep up their standard of living—even with all the low-cost labor and market monopoly—they felt more than threatened by any leveling of the playing field and made sure the Legislative Council, which they controlled, passed no such measures.

Isolation and decimation

European colonists came to Southern Rhodesia with dreams of wealth and freedom. What greeted most instead was a harsh landscape, overtaxed resources, and severe isolation. Droughts caused already difficult harvests to dwindle, and price-drops in maize from 25 shillings per bag to 9, which lasted until the end of World War II, further decimated earnings. Large farms that concentrated on major cash crops, such as tobacco, were those that succeeded, but small farms, such as those run by Dick Turner in Lessing’s novel and by Lessing’s own father in real life, barely eked out a living from year to year. As political scientist Colin Leys notes, “The first Europeans came to seek fortunes from gold; the second influx came to live by farming the land. Both resources were seriously overvalued, and not even a virtual monopoly of them both was sufficient in itself to provide the European population with the standard of living it had expected” (Leys in McEwan, p. 333). Pre-World War II farm output never exceeded £4 million. After the war, it increased more than tenfold, but by this time many small farmers, such as Lessing’s father and the fictional Dick Turner, were already bankrupt.

In the novel and in other writings, Lessing depicts Southern Rhodesia as a wasteland, not only because of the infertile crops but because of the extreme isolation that colonists often experienced. Living on about 3,000-acre farms at least five miles from their nearest neighbor and refusing to establish equal relations with locals, European farmers found themselves utterly alone. Lessing describes her own experience, noting that, though, the whole family felt isolated, most affected was her mother, the farmer’s wife:

My father went to Southern Rhodesia on an impulse, to farm . he took a very large tract of land to grow maize. Thus I was brought up in a district that was very sparsely populated indeed, by Scottish people who had left

MISSIONARY MIXED BAG

British missionaries traveling to Africa were inspired by anti-slavery crusadfrs who wanted to establish agriculture and commerce arid spread Christianity to make amends for British involvement in the slave trade. Patronizing as it may seem n&w, the missionaries felt they were saving the “savages, of the ‘’dark continent, and bringing them into the light It was, the Bible and the plough, felt the missionaries, that would regenerate Africa (Thomas, p. 106). So they founded missionary schools, took in orphaned Africans and taught them to speak English, By 1928, 86,000 of t million Africans had converted to Christianity, The ability of the converts to speak the language of their conquerors gave them a tremendous advantage for future advancement and change—an unhappy consequence in the eyes of most working-class whites. These working-class whites preferred for Africans employed m their homes as domestic servants or field workers to address them in ‘Kaffir, (actually a mixture of several African languages), enough of which the whites learned to state basic ordem. language boob, such as Mary Turner’s “Kitchen Kaffir” in the novel, were common among whites, who preferred to know what the Africans were saying but did not want them to understand the talk in English of whites, In The Grass ts Singing, Jvtoses is a “mission boy This, noes Mary, “explained a lot: that irritatingly well-articulated ‘mactame’ instead of the usual ‘missus/which was somehow in better keeping with his station in life” (Grass, pp, 180-81), Like many real, life contemporaries, Mary does not approve of higher education for blacks, Close by in Nyasaland (between Northern and Southern Rhodesia) Scottish missionaries established primary schools and by the 1930s raised the African literacy rate to the highest on the continent. This hardly mattered, however, to the whites of Southern Rhodesia, who did not allow Africans to attend secondary school until after World War ll.

Maize has long been a major crop in Zimbabwe (formerly known as Southern Rhodesia), although the novel’s Dick Turner is unsuccessful raising it there.

Scotland or England because it was too small for them. I spent most of my childhood alone in a landscape with very few human things to do in it.
[I] t was my mother who suffered … Poor woman, for the twenty years we were on the farm, she waited for when life would begin for her and for her children.
(Lessing, A Small Personal Voice, pp. 45-46, 91)

Both the novel’s Mary Turner and Lessing’s mother exemplify the lonely existence of the colonial farmer’s wife. Even more than the men’s, colonial women’s lives wasted away on the veld, cut off from community, the modern world, and any professional outlet.

The Novel in Focus

Plot summary

Beginning at the scene of her death, The Grass Is Singing retraces the tragic life of Mary Turner, a white woman in Southern Rhodesia. Her parents had emigrated to Africa to achieve success through farming, but like so many other hopeful Europeans met with little success and even less happiness. Determined to make a different life for herself, Mary leaves the veld for the city and becomes a professional secretary. She lives in a boarding house with other single women and, managing to support herself, feels quite content to go on like this forever. Though she still dresses like a schoolgirl, Mary is getting older, and one day she overhears some of her roommates mocking her. They call her an old maid and make fun of her dress, intimating that she should stop acting like a child and get married.

It is at this point that Mary meets Dick Turner, a young British emigrant who moves to Southern Rhodesia to farm. He buys thousands of acres out on the veld and comes to the city to find a wife to share it with. For Mary, returning to the veld is a nightmare, but the social pressure to conform and get married persuades her to accept Dick’s proposal, and off they go.

In contrast to her contentment as a professional woman in the city, Mary becomes distraught and increasingly withdrawn on the farm. She has no income, no social connection with her neighbors, no real intimacy with her husband, and no other family to sustain her. Moreover, her relations with the Africans who worked on the farm are abominable. Both fearful and fiercely racist, Mary cannot bear to be in the company of locals and speaks even more disparagingly of them than her other white neighbors. She repeatedly fires her domestic workers and quickly earns a reputation for being very difficult to serve. Since there is not an abundance of available domestic workers, this creates problems with fewer and fewer workers coming around to replace those Mary fires or drives away.

Farm labor in general grows increasingly difficult to acquire. Though Dick has a reputation as a fair employer, Mary’s antics cost him dearly, and, unable to get enough workers to harvest and plant, he is ako extremely unlucky when it comes to weather and crop selection. While his neighbor, Charlie Slatter, makes a fortune in tobacco, Dick barely survives year-to-year with his diverse fields of maize, wheat, and vegetables. His farm is always the most devastated by drought and storm, and price-drops seem to affect only his harvests. He continually comes up with schemes, like gold divining and bee keeping, to remedy his dismal situation and finally achieve wealth and success, but they all fail, leaving him broke and broken.

With each passing year of struggle and failure, Mary’s mental state worsens, as does Dick’s physical health. When Moses, a very competent, mission-educated man, comes looking for work as a domestic servant, Dick hires him instantly and sternly warns Mary against firing him. They desperately need help now, and Dick fears that if Moses leaves, no others will ever come to take his place.

As Mary slips deeper and deeper into depression, Moses becomes her only lifeline and human contact. Dick works morning to night on the farm while Mary, unable to even do the most menial task, sleeps all day and talks to herself. Moses becomes her caretaker, forcing Mary to eat and get fresh air. He makes her bed, combs her hair, and even begins to dress her, breaking with social convention, exhibiting practically criminal behavior for Southern Rhodesia. Such intimacy with a black man was taboo for a white woman. Once Mary had personally whipped Moses for speaking to her in what she considered an insolent manner. Now she cries in front of him and relegates all authority and control to him. “What had happened was that the formal pattern of black-and-white, mistress-and-servant, had been broken by the personal relation” (Grass, pp. 166-67). In her first substantive contact with an African man Mary finds herself shedding her racist beliefs and becomes enthralled by this taboo figure. She daydreams about him, admires his muscular physique, imagines him watching her from the shadows, listens intently for his breathing on the other side of the wall where he sleeps at night. Mary becomes obsessed with Moses, but her attraction is mixed with both guilt and racist contempt and adds to her increasing state of dementia.

The way Mary acts does not escape the attention of her neighbors. They are outraged by her behavior and seek to get her off the farm and away from Moses. Charlie Slatter finally persuades Dick to sell out to him so that Dick can take Mary to the Cape Colony (in South Africa), where she could get mental help and get away from Moses, who is embarrassing all the whites of the area by acting as their equal with Mary.

When Mary realizes she is being forced to leave the farm and Moses, she panics. By this point she is gravely ill, wholly dependent on Moses, and beyond rational thought. In her mind, her only recourse is to fire him and rescind his authority over her. Mary is convinced this action will prompt Moses to kill her. However rational or irrational this thought is, in real life the ultimate colonial fear was that Africans would retaliate against whites by murdering them.

The night before she is to leave, Mary sits outside her dilapidated house in the dark and waits for Moses to come. She’d rejected him harshly and knew he would now come to take revenge.

Then, as she heard the thunder growl and shake in the trees, the sky lit up, and she saw a man’s shape move out from the dark and come towards her, gliding silently up the steps … Two yards away Moses stopped … [A]t the sight of him, her emotions unexpectedly shifted, to create in her an extraordinary feeling of guilt; but towards him, to whom she had been disloyal.
(Gross, p. 243)

Mary’s inner torment was quelled finally when Moses stabbed her in the throat. “’And then the bush avenged itself:’ that was her last thought” (Grass, p. 243). Moses left Mary bleeding to death on the porch and waited for the authorities to come and arrest him.

Trapped by taboos

In the novel, Lessing uses the intimate relationship of Mary and Moses to illustrate the human tragedy of racism in the Southern Africa of her youth. Trapped by taboos, Mary and Moses cannot connect. Culturally they do not understand and trust one another. Physically they cannot be together under penalty of death for Moses and jail for Mary (under the Immorality Suppression Ordinance of 1903 white women could receive two years hard labor for being with black men). Socially they cannot be seen as equals because that would be breaking what Charlie Slatter terms “the first law of South Africa,” which states that whites must always act superior to blacks in all aspects or the black man will realize he is just as capable. In each of these cases, the inability of whites and blacks to form meaningful relationships results in some form of death: spiritual, physical, and social.

At the time, sex was considered the “touchstone,” or ultimate test of race relations and because many European colonists believed that Darwinism proved they were a superior race, they viewed mating with Africans as “an act of much deeper degradation than a casual affair” (Blake, p. 158). Even affairs between white men and black women earned disdain. While the af-fairs themselves were tolerated, white society shunned racially mixed children, and European men generally did not acknowledge their “coloured” offspring. The ultimate sin was a white woman’s having any measure of intimacy with a black man:

The deepest degradation of all was any relationship between a white woman and a black man. For this there could be no excuse whatever and it was taken for granted that it could only occur as a result of force majeure by the black man, or criminal immorality on the part of the white woman.
(Blake, p. 158)

By pairing Moses and Mary, Lessing shows that this attitude, as well as racist segregation in general, caused misery and death. Moses is the only person who can possibly “save” Mary yet by her befriending and confiding in him, she condemns them both.

The connection between Mary and Moses breaks the great taboo of the color bar between the black and white races, with disastrous results, and yet in a way that both emphasizes the decadence and sterility of the life in which Mary is trapped, and hints that her only hope of renewal is through the forbidden bond which is being created with Moses.
(Vinson, p. 64)

Lessing visually depicts the destruction caused by racism—particularly to Moses and Mary—with the barren landscape of the veld. It is a dying wasteland just as the souls of its inhabitants are stripped of humanity. Taking the title of the novel from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (also in WLAIT 4: British and Irish Literature and Its Times), Lessing makes it clear that racism has robbed Southern Africa of its value and fertility (“In this decayed hole among the mountains/In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing”—Gross, preface). After Mary sends Moses away, she sees nothing but doom and despair on the horizon:

A lean, sun-flattened landscape stretched out before her, dun-colored, brown and olive-green, and the smoke-haze was everywhere, lingering in the trees and obscuring the hills. The sky shut down over her, with thick yellowish walls of smoke growing up to meet it. The world was small, shut in a room of heat and haze and light.
(Gross, p. 228)

Tormented by the society in which she lives and the belief system she has been taught, Mary protests that she is not a “criminally immoral” woman for befriending Moses. She has been brought up within the system and for the majority of her life adheres to the color bar. But when she gets to know Moses as simply a person and not a black person, her beliefs begin to change. Mary’s new boarder, Tony Marston, discovers her relationship with Moses and observes that she “behaves simply as if. other people’s standards don’t count” (Grass, p. 221). Indeed, Mary retreats into her own world to escape the harsh reality of the society she lives in, creating a refuge in which she and Moses can relate as equals. But when Tony enters this world she is forced to revert back to the “official rules” and send Moses away. “It was all right till you came!” Mary screams at Tony and collapses in a “storm of tears,” illustrating her outrage at a society that will not allow her to befriend the one person who can save her from her lonely existence.

Lessing leaves the union of Moses and Mary deliberately ambiguous to show that any intimate relationship between a black man and a white woman—no matter how innocent—was strictly forbidden. As was customary colonial society, represented in the novel by Tony and Charlie Slatter, succeeds in destroying it because in fact in the southern Africa of Lessing’s youth, any equitable relationship between a black man and white woman could only end in death. Like the inhospitable climate that withered crops, the novel shows that the color bar induced its own physical and spiritual draught, producing a devastatingly inhospitable climate that brought to whites as well as blacks misery and death.

Sources and literary context

Based on her formative years in Southern Rhodesia from 1925 to 1948, The Grass Is Singing draws on Lessing’s personal experiences. She uses the story she heard as a girl of a European woman dressing in front of her African servant—gossip that spread from porch to porch like wildfire across the veld—as the basis for the illicit relationship between Moses and Mary. But she alters the viewpoint of the real-life story from one of condemnation to one that evokes the human tragedy produced by the color bar. Lessing bases many of Mary’s early choices—for example, leaving the farm to work as a typist in the city—on her own life. She portrays the coldness she witnessed between her own parents in the frigidity between Mary and Dick. The isolation experienced by Mary is akin to that of her mother, who longed for England and her former social life, and the bad luck and lack of success experienced by Dick echo the fate of her father, who tried many of the same schemes as Dick to no avail. Though clearly full of personal detail, Lessing is quick to point out that the general story and behavior “could have been about white people anywhere south of the Zambezi, white people who were not up to what is expected of them in a society where there is very heavy competition from the black people coming up” (Lessing, A Small Personal Voice, p. 46).

In the tradition of realist, humanist writers of the Victorian Age such as Charles Dickens, Lessing believed she was producing “art which springs from a strongly-held, though not necessarily intellectually defined, view of life that absorbs symbolism” (Lessing, Small, p. 4). She wrote The Grass Is Singing to carry on what she termed propagandist literature in the tradition of Dickens’s Oliver Twist (Lessing, Small, pp. 3-4). Writing in the tumultuous yet hopeful post-World War II era, Lessing’s novel aimed to both enlighten European society and inspire positive change, objectives that testify to a fundamental faith in mid-twentieth century humanity.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written

African awakening-a turning point in history

Lessing witnessed the harsh experience of her parents and was fortunate enough to come of age in a more hospitable era when she could choose a different path. Opting off the farm as soon as she could, she ventured into Salisbury in about 1937 when great changes were taking place in Africa and the world. Two years later World War II broke out, initiating a boom in the local economy that continued in the postwar era. Meanwhile, Rhodesia’s African majority began demonstrating their discontent through strikes in the cities. In 1948 a general strike in Bulawayo erupted in riots that paralyzed the country’s second largest city. Resistance leaders Joshua Nkomo and Benjamin Burumbo called for higher wages, desegregation, access to secondary education, and government representation. Though the African National Congress of Southern Rhodesia had been founded in 1934, it did not establish itself as a powerful force of change until 1945, by which time African members had achieved the necessary educational and nationalistic skills to organize effectively.

An ANC-backed railway strike in Salisbury in 1945 succeeded in gaining higher wages for the laborers as well as official union recognition, which prompted many to proclaim, “The railway strike has proved that Africans have been born” (Hallett, p. 532). The strike’s success led to the establishment of African Representative Councils in 1946, the general strike of 1948, and the prelude to 15 years of mounting political excitement in every part of British Central Africa—literally the dawning of “a new era” (Hallett, p. 530). Brought on by increased industrialization of the country, a switch from rural to urban occupation, and a huge population surge, Africans were determined to rid themselves of their colonial chains and were gaining the power in monetary and physical numbers to do so.

Communism and African rights

Leading the fight on behalf of African rights was the Communist Party in Southern Rhodesia. It was the only public institution in which whites and blacks worked together on an equal footing and the first to champion the end of both segregation and monetary servitude. “The Communist Party had an enormous effect on politics because it ignored the colour bar” and fought for labor organization and workers rights across the board (Lessing, A Small Personal Voice, p. 74). Because Russia was a British ally during World War II, the Party was tolerated at the time, but after the war, it came under suspicion until it went underground, so to speak, and become a clandestine organization. Lessing joined the Party when it was considered “seditious, dangerous, and above all kaffir-loving” (Lessing, Under My Skin, p. 199). The suspicion under which it fell did not deter Party members from holding secret meetings under the auspices of the Left Bank Book Club and circulating pamphlets calling for education and better pay and working conditions for Africans. By this time even mainstream whites recognized the growing power of the Africans and the necessity of addressing some of their needs. As Prime Minister Godfrey Martin Hugagainst noted in 1948, “Weare witnessing the emer gence of a proletariat and in this country it hap pens to be black” (Huggins in Blake, p. 240).

For Lessing, the Left Bank Book Club and one of its principals, Gladys Maasdorp (to whom The Gross Is Singing is dedicated), gave credibility to her instinctive belief that the color bar was wrong. Though she had been raised by parents who very much believed in the system as it was, Lessing had always rebelled against it. “We were quarrelling about the Colour Bar, the Native Question,” she writes. “The trouble is, I had no ammunition in the way of facts or figures, nothing but a vague but very strong feeling there was something terribly wrong with the System” (Less-ing, Under My Skin, p. 179). The Communist Party provided those facts and figures—evidence of the physical, emotional, and economic suffering of both blacks and whites under the color bar—which Lessing then used in her writing. In other words, the movement for African rights and the Communist Party validated Lessing’s ideas and enabled her to publicly denounce segregation and discrimination in The Grass Is Singing.

Though her views on the Communist Party changed markedly over time, Lessing was originally inspired by its message of equality and its efforts to improve living and working conditions. As with Lessing, the postwar social movements had a transfiguring effect. They altered the course of colonial rule and the rights of Africans, rousing the continent and, with it, Lessing herself, who would go on to further this postwar awakening through her writing.

Reviews

Though criticized for flat depictions of the African characters—particularly Moses—Lessing was otherwise widely praised for her first novel. Spectator reviewer Marghanita Laski called The Grass Is Singing “the best first novel for a long time. Mrs. Lessing has written in a prose of exceptional strength and maturity” (Laski in James and Brown, p. 552). London’s Times Literary Supplement hailed the novel as “a powerful and bitter book,” and South African author J. M. Coetzee praised the novel too, deeming it “an astonishingly accomplished debut” (Times in James and Brown, p. 552; Coetzee in Peacock, p. 278). Across the Atlantic Ocean, America’s R. Anthony Appiah found the novel “intensely humane in its attentiveness to the minutest details of the mental life of this central character” and distinguished Lessing as “the finest new novelist since the war” (Appiah in Peacock, p. 278). The novel, said Anthony White in the New Statesman “is full of those terrifying touches of truth, seldom mentioned but instantly recognised” (White in James and Brown, p. 552). Written and revised from 1948 until its publication in 1950, The Grass Is Singing was among the first works to tackle the taboo subject of sexual relations between the races in southern Africa and spawned a distinguished career for Lessing, who would continue to tackle timely and controversial topics in her future novels, short stories, essays, poems, and plays.

—Diane Renée