Space and Land: Belonging and Displacement-Cultural or Colonial Heritage in

The Grass Is Singing

Robert J.C Young, in Postcolonialism A Very Short Introduction, remarks that

the concept of landlessness implies a person who has become landless, exiled from their

land. Landless means land loss, land lost. Becoming landless depends on one’s relation
♠
to the land.1 The Grass Is Singing , depicts “the unease of those forced to divide

themselves between two cultures and pay allegiance to both.”2 Doris Lessing shows

this simultaneous belonging and displacement to land, of the white oppressor in

Rhodesia, South Africa. The “white man” in her novel turns out to be a human being

living in a limbo that leads him to total disintegration.

This paper will study the clash between belonging and displacement with

reference to the characters of Mary, Dick and Moses. Their relationship with the land

will be explored in the context of their past history with the land in order to understand

their distorted sense of identity. The study will conclude by establishing the fact that

such a clash can hamper the growth of the individual conscience and can lead a person

to madness under the influence of the “mob psychology.”3

When the British arrived in South Africa as colonisers, natives suffered from

“deterritorilization” in order to “territorialize” the British in the space that initially

belonged to them.4 The process of colonisation made both the British and natives

experience displacement. Thus it established the antagonism between the two from a

very early stage. However, the British had to hire the natives because they could not

work on the “alien” land all by themselves. Charlie might detest the natives and would

not consider them human but he was dependent on them for the farm work. For this

Doris Lessing, The Grass Is Singing,(London: Flamingo, 1994)
 Saqlain 2

reason the natives’ return to the land is significant in the terms of “reterritorialization”,

which the novel hints at towards the end of the novel. Ranajit Guha, in his book A

Dominance Without Hegemony, writes, “We have defined the character of the colonial

state therefore as a dominance without hegemony.”5 The whites’ dependence on the

natives developed into the absence of “hegemony” from the whites’ control over the

natives. Therefore, the whites physically acquired the land but spiritually they did not

belong to the land because of the resistance that the land itself offered. As Robert Frost

says, “The land was ours before we were the land’s.”6

•
The constant fear of “terra nulla” in whites, that they have to “empty the land”

one day, forced them to define the natives as “other.” They robbed the natives, both

physically and psychologically, of their sense of belonging to the land. The natives

turned from “free and vital people” to savages.7 According to Linnaeus, the blacks

became the “phlegmatic, relaxed, crafty, indolent and negligent…governed by

caprice.”8 It provided the whites with a superiority of colour over the natives and in

order to maintain the distinction between the black and white, they practiced their own

culture and attitudes. Charlie could rape the land on the one hand for making “money”

but on the other hand he had raised his children, as he would bring them up in England.

The strife between claiming the land on the one hand and declaiming it by claiming to

the land back in England caused the lost generation, which Lessing portrayed in Martha

Quest. Even Mary suffered from this simultaneous sense of belonging and displacement

.She was born in Africa but the natives were beyond her “orbit” till the time she arrived

at the farm.Doris Lessing in her short story “The Old Chief Mshlanga”, describes the

dilemma of such a child thus:


According to John Locke, a 17th century English philosopher, the term means “to declare the land
empty.” Robert J.C Young, Postcolonialism A Very Short Introduction. P.51
 Saqlain 3

The child could not see a msasa tree, or the thorn, for what they were.
Her books held tales of alien fairies, her rivers ran slow and peaceful,
and she knew the shape of the leaves of an ash or an oak, the names of
the little creatures that lived in English streams, when the words “the
veld” meant strangeness though she could remember nothing else.
Because of this for many years it was the veld that seemed unreal, the
sun was a foreign sun and the wind spoke a strange language.9

The absurdity of the whites’ was that they themselves did not realise the

irrationality of their attitudes. As Roald Dahl in his book Going Solo, calls them “a race

of people” which was “more English than the English”. He believed that it was the

result of living “for years in a foul and sweaty climate among foreign people” and in

order to “maintain their sanity” they became eccentrics.10 This is where Lessing’s

personal experience of living in Rhodesia becomes pertinent. She could write about

Charlie and Sergent, who clung to the myth of white man’s infallibility and had to hush

Mary’s murder because she understood their precarious position in “the foul and sweaty

climate.” She had the sensitivity and depth to understand that they had to behave

eccentrically because it was the question of “their livelihood, their wives and families,

their way of living at stake”(11).

The displacement of the British from their native country, England put them

under immense pressure, as they could not afford to fail in front of the natives. Dick’s

failure was that he could not make the land to produce enough to get him counted

among the rich whites. They had a “little box of a house” whereas “some natives had

houses as good; and it would give them a bad impression to see white people living in

such way.”(p.10) The British carried with them their class system, which was modified

somewhat by the colonial experience as here the competition was among black and

white. The blacks were consciously reduced to animal existence so they would not

challenge them. What they could not afford was the notion of “poor white” and since
 Saqlain 4

the “Turners were British”, calling them poor “would be letting the side down.” They

had a sense of duty towards each other and tried to help them through the “esprit de

corps.”(p.11)

However, this “esprit de corps” could not be established with a person like Mary

who was a white British but town bred. For her the farm was “alien and rather a

distasteful affair.”(p. 117) Mary’s inability to relate herself to the land could be traced

back to her uprooted past. She, like Lessing herself, was “born uprooted.”11 Her birth in

South Africa severed her from the past of her older generations. Her parents’ unhappy

marriage and their poverty kept them on the move and gave Mary no sense of

belonging. Her history in Africa was defined by the myth of Eldorado, which must have

lured her grandparents to this continent and unfortunately, did not materialise their

dream of wealth and prosperity. Her horizon for “Home”(England) was limited to cars

outside the store on mail-day. Her sense of identity was “ influenced by the past

migration, history of her parents or grandparents.”12

Thus, poverty and squalor became her heritage and did not allow her to belong

to anything beyond the “store” and “a wooden box shaken by passing trains” called

home. The warmth and love a home could have provided her, was denied due to the

abnormal behaviour of her mother. What she had experienced throughout her life was

constant displacement both physically and mentally that refused her any sense of

belonging to anywhere. She was “emotionally blocked by her parents’ poverty and

misery and her contempt for her father.”13 Her mother’ indifference towards her father

hampered Mary’s growth of healthy and positive emotions regarding any human

relations. “She had a profound distaste for sex” and marriage reminded her of her

“fuddled” and “red-eyed” father. She dropped her father after her mother’s death and
 Saqlain 5

by doing that as if she was “avenging her mother’s suffering. It had never occurred to

her that her father, too might have suffered.” (p.35) Along with that was the colonial

pressure of segregating themselves from the others, who were non-British. She could

not play with the Greek girl because “her parents were dagos.”(p.32) In A Small

Personal Voice, Lessing says, “what it is like to be a human being in a century when

you open your eyes on war and on human beings disliking other human beings. I was

the member of the white minority pitted against a black majority that was abominably

treated.”14

Mary’s physical experience of displacement influenced her psychological make

up as well. “Man is a human being with sexuality; woman is a complete individual,

equal to the male, only if she too is a human being with sexuality. To renounce her

sexuality is to renounce part of her humanity.”15 In order to protect herself from any

hazard Mary refused herself the basic human instinct of contact as she was “almost

repelled by the thought of intimacies and scenes and contacts.”(p.37) Thus, by

renouncing her sexuality she not only refused to participate in the active procreative life

of the society but also denied her body the right of physical gratification. The “persona”

of social self that she took refuge into had no real self behind it.16 Mary even denounced

herself by insulating herself in the persona of a “girl to be taken out.”(p. 37) This is

where she differed from Martha because Martha acknowledged the presence of a self

that developed and took every challenge boldly. Mary accepted Dick’s proposal because

she “needed it to restore her feeling of superiority to men, which was really, at bottom,

what she had been living from all these years. She knew so little about herself that she

was thrown completely off her balance because some gossiping women had said she

ought to get married.”(p.44)

 Saqlain 6

Mary’s persona , that she erected in the hope of protecting herself from human

contacts ironically “depended on other people.”(p.37) Her fear of losing the image

forced her to “unconsciously, without admitting to herself” look for a husband because

her “idea of herself was destroyed and she was not fitted to recreate herself. She could

not exist without that impersonal, casual friendship from other people, and now it

seemed to her there was pity in the way they looked at her, and a little impatience, too,

as if she were rather a futile woman after all.”(p.43)

Mary’s lack of “intense respond to the living body of Africa” became the cause

of her madness at the farm.17 She refused the development of her individual conscience

which could have appreciated the positive aspects of white society or by being

sympathetic towards the natives. For Martha, in Martha Quest, life became a quest as

she realised the fact that she had to create a niche for her “self”, “an inner structure and

unity.”18 Mary had the realisation that, “It is terrible to destroy a person’s picture of

himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction. How can one know he will be

able to create another to enable him to go on living?”(p.43) She realised her mistake

towards the very end of her life when she saw Tony’s books. She remembered that

“long, long ago she had turned towards a young man…It had seemed to her that she

would be saved from herself by marrying him.” (p.200) Her marriage landed her into

her childhood of deprivation and misery, from where she could only get out with her

death. But before that the development of a personal, human relation with Moses undid

her because to get out of it she relied on Tony.

Mary’s dilemma of belonging to the farm as a white mistress clashed with her

wish to belong to it spiritually. She herself resisted the growth of a spiritual contact with

the land because she became the white woman, who had to consider the natives as
 Saqlain 7

animals, best handled with a “sjambok.”(p.14) This is where Mary differed from

Lessing because Lessing’s relationship to Africa can best be described as “sacred and

ancestral.”19 In spite of her nomadic existence by belonging to different lands

simultaneously, she has a “spiritual home” in Africa. When she moved to England,

South Africa became a “nostalgia, a hunger, a reaching out for something lost.”20 Mary

resisted her belonging to the African land in order to shield her persona of the white

mistress. Here the battle between the self and persona intensified because she had kept

herself to herself and had never met other farmers and their wives. But the white society

personified in Charlie did not leave her alone. Charlie brought Tony to the farm and it

was Tony’s presence on the farm that ruined her spiritual contact with the land.

The displacement that the natives experienced because of the whites was

different because being the natives they had their natural claim to the land and also by

working on land they had a direct link with it. Mary belonged to the land only when she

allowed the growth of a personal relationship with the natives by acknowledging her

inner self. Dick was denied that link in spite of his detestation for those houses in the

town. He believed that “God made the country man made the towns.”21 He loved the

farm because of its closeness to the soil whereas “the suburb” was “as invincible and

fatal as factories, and even beautiful South Africa, whose soil looks outraged by those

pretty little suburbs creeping over it like a disease, cannot escape.”(p.45) But he himself

could not sever his link with the English land as he experimented with the African soil

with his English knowledge. He had been ruining the beauty of the soil at the land by

his repeated unsuccessful experiences at different crops, mining, dairy and poultry

farming. He, like Charlie, was not willing to acknowledge the natives as human beings.

For them the only possibility of belonging to the land might had been through the
 Saqlain 8

natives themselves. The human link could provide the necessary strength to avoid

madness because acknowledging the presence of the natives as the natural heirs of land,

would have enabled the white to face their guilt. It was their guilty conscience, which

did not allow them to come to terms with their unconscious. However, the “white

civilization” could not afford it as it would cause it to die a natural death. Tony had to

behave in the way he was expected of as a “white man” in spite of his progressive ideas.

He had the realisation that, “Either the white people are responsible for their behaviour

or they are not. It makes the two to make a murder- a murder of this kind.” P.27

Mary’s momentary link established with the land through Moses. Such a

companionship destroyed not only Mary and Moses but Dick too. “What had happened

was that the formal pattern of black-and-white, mistress-and-servant, had been broken

by the personal relation; and when a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes

of a native and sees the human being (which it is his chief preoccupation to avoid) his

sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip.

( p.144) She could not “thrust him out of her mind as “unclean” as she has done with

all the others in the past. She was being forced into contact, and she never ceased to be

aware of him.”(p.156) This allowed her to understand the physical presence of the

“veld” and bush around her. She also realised that nature was finally going to overtake

their farm and restoring it to the natives.

Moses’ sense of displacement destroyed him because of his contact with the

white woman. His relationship with Mary satisfied his sense of mastery over the white

that in turn restored his link to the land that had been severed by the white man. Mary’ s

betrayal forced him to kill her because in killing her he achieved “his final moment of

triumph, a moment so perfect and complete that it took the urgency from thoughts of
 Saqlain 9

escape, leaving him indifferent.” (p.206) Thus the violence that he perpetuates by

killing Mary becomes his source of satisfaction and his attempt towards his

“reterritorialization.”22 Moses’ indifference sharply juxtaposes with Mary’s murder and

Dick’s madness because it reflected his sense of identity that his natural belonging to

the land bestowed upon him.

Notes
1
Robert J.C Young, Postcolonialism A Very Short Introduction, (Karachi:

Oxford University Press, 2000) p.51

2
Jenny Tayler, Reading and Rereading Doris Lessing,(London: Routledge &

Kegan Paul, 1982)

3
Ross Stagner, A History of Psychological Theories, (New York: Macmillan

Publishing Company, 1988) p.341

4
Robert J.C young, ibid. p.52
5
ibid, p.51
6
The Oxford Book Of Short Stories, selected by Margaret Atwood & Robert

Weaver,(Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1986) p.xv

7
Jenny Tayler, ibid, p.23
8
Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism,(London: Routledge, 1998) p.115
9
Harold Bloom, Modern Critical Views Doris Lessing,( New York: Chelsea

House Publications, 1986) p.18

9
Jenny Tayler, ibid, p.102
10
Roald Dahl, Going Solo,(London: Puffin Books,1986) p.3
11
Jenny Tayler, ibid,p.102
 Saqlain 10

12
John Macleaod, Beginning Postcolonialism,(Manchester, Manchester

University Press, 1968) p.30.

13
Lorna Sage, Doris Lessing,(London: Methuen) p. 25

14
A Small Personal Voice, edtd. Paul Schlueter, (New York: Vintage Books)

p.51
15
Jenny Tayler, ibid, p.
16
Demacies & E.Wehr, Jung and Feminism Liberating Archetypes,(London:

Routledge, 1988) p.56

17
Michael Thorpe, Doris Lessing, (London: Longman Group, 1973) p.5
18
Ross Stagner, ibid, p.35.
19
Robert J.C Young, ibid,p.52.
20
Jenny Tayler, ibid,p.i
21
Robert Gray, Norton Anthology,(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978) p.20
22
Robert J.C Young, ibid. p.52