| Title | : | The Grass Is Singing |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0002257556 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780002257558 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 208 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1950 |
Mary Turner is a self-confident, independent young woman who becomes the depressed, frustrated wife of an ineffectual, unsuccessful farmer. Little by little the ennui of years on the farm work their slow poison, and Mary's despair progresses until the fateful arrival of an enigmatic and virile black servant, Moses. Locked in anguish, Mary and Moses -- master and slave -- are trapped in a web of mounting attraction and repulsion. Their psychic tension explodes in an electrifying scene that ends this disturbing tale of racial strife in colonial South Africa.
The Grass Is Singing blends Lessing's imaginative vision with her own vividly remembered early childhood to recreate the quiet horror of a woman's struggle against a ruthless fate.
The Grass Is Singing Reviews
-
This book is a stunning exposé of why Zimbabwe has Mugabe and why he, evil as he is, is certainly no worse than that great white hope, Sir Cecil Rhodes. The whites in this book, with one exception, are all devotees of Rhodes and his brand of racism - Rhodesia for the whites, the blacks are suitable for being farm animals as they are all simpleminded thieves, liars and hate the white man. It's the same mindset as slavery really.
The grass is singing cicada songs, songs of blood, songs of freedom whispering in this hellish place on earth.
Leaving aside the political inferences which are not heavily obvious in the story anyway, the book is a good read. The characters are beautifully drawn, very strong and believable. It begins with what happens at the end and works, in a slightly unusual way, back to the beginning and thence to that end. Not light reading, but not at all dense, heavy literature.
The Grass is Singing would make a great film but would be very difficult to do in this day and age of pc language, publicly reviling the awful Mugabe and talking of how it wasn't good for the blacks before Mugabe is one thing. It wasn't, but it wasn't bad like this. And it isn't the inhumanity they suffered under Sir Cecil Rhodes.
This is a good companion book to Nadime Gordima's
July's People, which at a similar domestic, personal level deals with racism in South Africa. -
Doris Lessing's first novel has the precision of a fine short story and the depth of a longer novel. This portrait of the psychological disintegration of a farmer's wife saddled with an ineffectual husband on a luckless South African farm is precisely realized and and completely convincing.
The last quarter of the novel, however, is weaker than the rest. The character of the black house servant Moses is more of a symbol than a human being, and the ending--meant to be tragic--descends to melodrama. -
If this novel impresses from the very beginning it is because of the openness in which Lessing plays her cards in the first chapter. The voice of the omniscient narrator glows with the clarity of objective facts that is missing in the rest of the novel, replaced by an increasingly suffocating account of two doomed lives that slowly disintegrate in polarized madness.
The tragic end of Mary Turner, a white woman, in the hands of Moses, her black servant, in a remote, hostile South African hell is reported in crushing detachment by a young farmer, recently arrived from Great Britain, who cannot digest the unwritten laws of the Apartheid. His silent revulsion acts like a metaphor for the unspeakable horror that has ransacked a barren, parched land that the imposed supremacy of the white civilization has failed to subjugate.
Showcasting an indisputable mastery of descriptive skills, the daily life of the Turners, a couple whacked without mercy by the gender and racial prejudices imposed on them by the rules of a segregated society, unfolds mercilessly in front of the increasingly horrified reader.
The gradual mental decline of Mary and Dick Turner runs in parallel to the growing menace of the African landscape and its severe climatic conditions. The maddening chirping of cicadas, the extreme heat that accumulates on the tin roof of the decrepit farm-hut and the poisonous dynamics between natives and whites present a recurrent pattern of symbols that infuse the narration with a morbid undertone, erasing all traces of light, of hope for a better future.
Both oppressors and victims at once, the characters never dwell in self-pity; rather the opposite, they abuse themselves until they lose touch with a reality that becomes more and more distorted as years pile up in front of the unchanged shapes, scents and noises of the indifferent savannah.
The collective psychological portrait that Lessing paints with unfaltering resolve is a blunt criticism to the system of racial segregation that proved to be equally destructive both for the perpetrators and the tyrannized.
Blacks who despise white women, who in turn, never miss an opportunity to humiliate their servants as means to evince their unquestioned racial superiority. Ironically, the white man remains impervious in the apex of the social pyramid, looking down on both groups condescendingly, keeping the wheels of a perverse social scheme going round inexorably regardless of the terrifying consequences of dehumanization on a major scale.
When a woman, deranged by prolonged loneliness, turns to “an inferior man” for solace, a disquieting attraction shifts the scales of power and exposes the fragility of artificially set boundaries.
When the white mistress looks the black servant in the eye and recognizes the human being staring back, insolent, reproachful, his blood boiling with barely contained rage, the whole system collapses in a pool of murky, diluted color.
“What is madness, but a refuge, a retreating from the world?”
Witnessing the inevitable decomposition of a woman locked in a world that chokes her to death is nothing short of appalling, but doing so through Lessing’s unnerving prose-poetry allows us to come to terms with the beastly outcome of this novel, which appositely exposes everything that makes us disgustingly, questionably and undeniably human.
The man is hollow, the land might be wasted; but the grass is singing. -
The Grass is Singing is Doris Lessing's first novel, published in 1950. It is a savage and stark indictment of South Africa's apartheid system. It is set in what was formerly Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and concentrates on Rhodesian white culture with its racist and prejudiced attitudes. The system of gross racial injustice dominates both the society and this story.
The novel is told in flashback. At the beginning of chapter one there is a brief news report of the murder of a white woman plus her assailant's arrest and the purported motive for the crime. The rest of the book details the events leading up to this, with Mary Turner, the victim, as the main character. It is many-layered, the characters being not only individuals in their own right, but also "types" indicating the strata of complex society in South Africa at that time in history. The local culture is not rich and the humiliating results of poverty are always apparent.
Before the long flashback, however, we have chapter one, which is particularly hard to read. The attitudes by each character, whilst varying in degrees, display such incipient arrogance and complicit acceptance of both the corrupt regime and its hidden implications, that the reader is all too aware that these views are only the tip of the iceberg. It is a manipulative and exceptionally well crafted piece of writing.
One character, Tony Marston, has recently come from England. He is portrayed as having the typical views of a newcomer to the country, with misguided views of equality. He will soon learn the ways of South Africa, the others think indulgently. And these ways vary from treating the "natives" (and yes, an even worse "n" word is also used) as less than human, the "masters" having an unwavering conviction of their entitlement to maltreat, bully and beat these workers with a "sjambok", even sometimes until death if they deem it necessary. Such a sorry event would be passed off with a shrug. White women were taught from a very early age to live in fear of the natives, that as a group they were untrustworthy. The shades of attitude vary, the other end of the spectrum being that the natives were alright if you knew how to handle them. They knew their place, and the master knew his.
The repugnance felt by modern readers towards this whole spectrum of views is compounded by the fact that these are overt and explicit. This is the system of apartheid. This is the status quo. Far worse lies underneath, and this introductory chapter indicates with hints, veiled expressions, subterfuge and things left unsaid, that there are are additional ugly factors at work. The recently arrived English character is a useful hook for the reader to identify with, at this point. He knows something is badly amiss and hates the arrogance, intolerance and prejudice that he sees in neighbouring farmers such as Charlie Slatter. He also knows that plenty of people in his position give up trying to farm under such conditions, and are viewed by those who stay as not hard enough - not up to either the unforgiving land and weather, or the imposed social regime either.
The novel itself does a thorough job of describing how each character has become what they are. Mary and Dick were two sad characters whom the reader sees very early on should never have married. For reasons that become clear on reading the novel, Mary should never have entered the farming community. Dick for his part, was a struggling farmer who wanted a family, but did not know how to choose one. The neighbours variously made successes of their lives, by their own terms. They all had a view of the "homeland" (England) even though some had never stepped foot in it, having been born in South Africa. And they all had a view of solidarity, of the way things should be, and that they had no connection with the "natives", who came from their "kraal", except as their servants or workers. They were only concerned with what the natives could do for them, viewing it as their inalienable right.
The book is solidly set in its location. The natural strength and hostility of the South African landscape, the all-pervading poverty, the white townships, "ugly little houses stuck anyhow over the veld, that had no relationship with the hard brown African soil and the arching blue sky", the unbearable heat of the corrugated iron and brick houses aggravating the desperations and tensions of the characters, are all conveyed very well. It is a finely judged and balanced book with a good narrative flow, ahead of its time, written by an author who went on to write exemplary works. So why does it not get 5 stars. Have you perhaps deduced why from this description?
There are no black viewpoint characters. Not one. Even Moses, who was arrested in the first chapter, is not fleshed out; his actions are merely reported without any comment, insight or indeed any given motivation. The reader has to infer a resentment against the corrupt system, and that Mary is his personal representative of it. We are told that he came from a mission school, just as we were told briefly where the original old servant Samson came from. The author describes as a group where the natives come from, and how far they travel in search of work. Doris Lessing allows them to vary in looks, in attitude to work and other superficial indications. But they are not filled out in anything like as much depth as the white characters.
Dick Turner, one of the more sympathetic white main characters, feels aggrieved, thinking of of the South African government as being "under the influence of n------lovers from England." And the newcomer Tony Marston, "had the conventionally "progressive" ideas about the colour bar, the superficial progressiveness of the idealist that seldom survives a conflict with self-interest."
The author repeatedly castigates her white characters by implication, for lumping all "natives" together. Yet she does precisely that herself in this novel. In addition to the lack of characterisation of non-whites, Doris Lessing talks about "the genus native". At another point she refers to, "a native... conveniently endowed by nature with the ability to walk long distances without feeling fatigue." Is it deliberate? Is it an attempt to make the point about one culture alienating another even stronger? If so I think it misfires.
The ending of the book is beautifully written. Mary's gradual mental deterioration into a complete breakdown is very convincing, and the reader is unsure what is real and what is in her mind. There is an hypnotic and oppressive feeling in this final chapter. Clearly we are invited to feel that the ending was inevitable - that the characters of Moses and Mary are puppets, or victims of their own doom. Yet nothing earlier in the novel had indicated any feelings on Moses' part, except for a brief moment of surprise and pity, when Mary had begged him not to leave, back before her depression took hold. But at the end of the novel, Lessing says of Moses, "what thought of regret, or pity, or perhaps even wounded human affection were compounded with the satisfaction of his completed revenge, it is impossible to say." Why, exactly? This idea of an enigmatic native "type" is not only inaccurate but very distasteful.
It is a brave book for its time. And it is extremely well written, by an author who went on to be a Nobel prize winner. But this is far from an exemplary work.
My Personal Glossary of terms:
Veld - wide open rural spaces of Southern Africa. It is used in particular to refer to flatter areas or districts covered in grass or low scrub, especially in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia.
Vlei - a shallow minor lake of an intermittent nature. Seasonal ponds or marshy patches where frogs and similar marsh dwellers breed.
Kopje - a small isolated hill.
Kraal - a homestead and usually included a simple fenced in enclosure for animals, fields for growing crops and one or more thatched huts. Afrikaans and Dutch word (also used in South African English) for an enclosure for cattle or other livestock.
Kitchen Kaffir (dated - now offensive) - Fanagalo, a Zulu-based pidgin language.
Compound - Closed labour camp of migrant male workers from rural homes in Bantustans or Homelands to the mines and jobs in urban settings generally. One of the major cogs in the apartheid state. Flash points for unrest in the last years of apartheid.
Sjambok - official heavy leather whip of South Africa, sometimes seen as synonymous with apartheid.
Mashonaland - a region in northern Zimbabwe.
Lobengula - the second and last king of the Ndebele people, usually called Matabele in English. Migrant workers from there. -
In her first novel, The Grass is Singing (first published 1950), Doris Lessing begins with a short description of a crime on a farm in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe):
MURDER MYSTERY
By Special Correspondent
Mary Turner, wife of Richard Turner, a farmer at Ngesi, was found murdered on the front veranda of their homestead yesterday morning. The houseboy, who has been arrested, has confessed to the crime. No motive has been discovered. It is thought he was in search of valuables.
For Lessing, the crime itself isn’t of interest -- it seems in some ways a foregone conclusion. Instead, she focuses on the intertwined hierarchies in Southern Rhodesia -- race, gender, class -- and uses her novelist’s lens to dissect these hierarchies. She reveals how they are formed, what holds them together, and the profound toll they take on all who live according to their rules. Her first novel is unwavering in its portrayal of the damaging racial, class, and gender-based power dynamics in Southern Rhodesia in the early 20th century. It’s all the more powerful because of Lessing’s intimate focus on the psychological toll taken on the three main characters: Mary Turner, Dick Turner, and Moses, their African houseboy (a title that is difficult to type, but that says much about the racial hierarchy in Southern Rhodesia at the time).
Doris Lessing, c. 1950
Lessing is well known for channeling her personal experiences into her writing. Her acute eye and gift for social analysis lend The Grass is Singing its matter of fact style and its psychological acumen. Lessing knew about unhappy marriages by living through her parents’ frustration over their inability to make their maize farm in Southern Rhodesia profitable, as well as through her own marriage. She understood the particular pressures women in the veldt faced as they struggled to translate their lives on farms in Southern Africa into cultural terms understood by their Edwardian culture. Lessing’s own experiences of being an outsider observing social conventions that limited women’s independence and autonomy fueled the hopeless desperation in her descriptions of Mary Turner. She also saw first-hand the rigid rules imposed by the white settlers to ensure that their neighbors reinforced white rule. They had to treat their African workers as subhuman, or face the consequences -- social isolation and opprobrium.
Farm in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe)
African workers and children farmworkers at their compound
Mary Turner grew up in a town. When young, she saw the friction between her mother and father, and for that reason never thought much about marrying. As an adult, she has a job, lives in a boarding home for women, and enjoys being a friend and a confidante to men and women alike -- until an overheard conversation between two of her friends leads her to follow a more socially acceptable course and get married. After a very brief courtship, she marries Dick Turner, and only then discovers that he is a struggling farmer, engaged in series of unprofitable experiments to make money on his farm, but on his own terms. (For example, he is reluctant to engage in profitable tobacco farming because of its factory-like requirements, as well as its tendency to drain the soil.)
Lessing slowly and painstakingly unfolds the Turners’ struggles -- with the land (including drought and disease), with local white society and its rigid code of conduct, with Africans whom they need to work the land, but fail to understand or treat like humans, and with each other. Over time, as Mary moves further from her husband and neighbors, she eventually begins to see Moses, the African who works for her as a houseboy, in a different light. This shift in their relationship sets into motion the catastrophic events that lead to the novel’s conclusion.
Southern Rhodesia -- postcard c. 1940
Countryside of Southern Rhodesia
This is a novel that explores the gaps between individual and social expectations and reality. Lessing understands the profound dangers faced by people who lack a fundamental psychological understanding of themselves and each other, especially in a society that is built on inequalities. She unflinchingly portrays the staggering cost we pay as a society, and as individuals, when we reinforce a social order built on dehumanization and surface appearances.
Lessing took her novel’s title from Eliot’s The Waste Land. She includes the relevant passage as an epigraph:
In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home.
It has no windows, and the door swings,
Dry bones can harm no one.
Only a cock stood on the rooftree
Co co rico co co rico
In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust
Bringing rain
Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves
Waited for rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant.
The jungle crouched, humped in silence.
Then spoke the thunder
-- T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
It’s difficult to imagine a more ominous, or perfect, opening passage to set the scene for the Turners’ tragedy. Eliot’s focus on an unforgiving landscape and on severe weather that is inescapable carries us to the African veldt where we are left, vulnerable and exposed to the dangers heading our way. It is all the more tragic when we realize these dangers are of our own making.
-
Colonialism in southern Africa: both sides left in destruction
Doris Lessing, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize for literature, tells the incredibly haunting story of the disintegration and descent into madness of Mary and her husband Dick Turner, simultaneously revealing the scathing truths of apartheid-ruled life in Rhodesia. This was her first book, published in 1950. What a debut! I'm stunned, I have goosebumps; I'm unfit to do this book justice, to convey the claustrophobic, solitary descent the Turners take in the unbearable heat of their barren, hopeless farm and tin-roofed house.
The beginning of this book reveals the end: Mary is found murdered by her "houseboy", a native worker named Moses. The book then backs up a good fifteen years, when Mary is younger and living a rather enviable, independent life. It explains how she ends up choosing to marry, and the slow, hot, soul-destroying existence she shares with her husband on their farm. And it tells the story of her murder, and all that contributes to this tragic violent end.
You get a clear idea of the rigid class system - rich white colonists at the top, followed by poor whites, then Afrikaners, and then blacks. Constantly toiling, yet ineffectual and blinded by his pride, Dick Turner keeps them spinning in poverty, season after season, year after year. The Turners are looked down upon because they simply can't succeed. They are a stain and shame on their people.
Lessing sets the tone for this novel in the first page, illuminating the colonial attitude towards the black Africans.** It is made painfully clear as the novel progresses, especially through Mary's treatment of the workers in her home and on the farm, which originates from both fear and the poisoned world she has lived all her life.
This is a story of poverty, of racism, of the twin solitude that marriage can be. This is a story of what happens when unspeakable lines are crossed. This is a story of the cost of segregation, where the propagators are also victims of a hateful system. It is also a story of southern Africa, a merciless, sun-scorched place where men struggle and die but the cicadas keep singing.
**I learned some nasty racist language in this novel, a sad education of the time and place. -
The Grass is Singing is a novel of colonialism, human degradation, and an uncomfortable view of the prevailing attitude of a time and place, and yet, to me it was more so a powerful portrait of a crumbling mind.
Mary Turner is a hideous woman; bitter, cruel, entitled. What started out as a woman’s resentment over a boring farm life and a distant marriage soon turned into something deeper and much more unsettling. Sometimes people are broken so early in their life that it’s impossible to ever be whole, and at her core, Mary Turner was ruined long before adulthood and her neurosis was merely the lid on a simmering pot of rage and hurt. The book opens with her murder; we know she’s doomed. We watch as she flails and unravels and in the end, perhaps, finds some kind of distorted relief.
This is Lessing’s portrayal of a woman without a choice; a child without a choice; a people without a choice. The farm fails, the marriage fails, Mary Turner’s brain fails. Apartheid fails. The atmosphere in this book is sweltering, suspenseful, and hypnotic. It’s all unrelentingly heat and blinding sun and unbearable tension. Something’s got to give. The ineffectual trying trying trying…Mary Turner tried, but she never stood a chance, not with that husband, not in that country, not with that childhood, not when she was destined to brood away all her days inside her head, the frustration a ticking time bomb. This is what happens, Lessing said, when women can’t choose. This is the outcome, she tells us, when you enslave people. This is unnatural and wrong and this is what you get. -
There should be a few warnings on the cover of this short novel : contains no likeable characters and many descriptions of really disgusting racist behaviour. I can’t remember reading so much intimate detail about the white racist’s seething physical and mental horror at the very presence of a black person before. This is going to upset some readers for sure. Here is a mild passage about that :
She had never come into contact with natives before, as an employer on her own account. Her mother’s servants she had been forbidden to talk to; in the club she had been kind to the waiters; but the ‘native problem’ meant for her other women’s complaints of their servants at tea parties. She was afraid of them, of course. Every woman in South Africa is brought up to be. In her childhood she had been forbidden to walk out alone and when she had asked why, she had been told in the furtive, lowered, but matter-of-fact voice she associated with her mother, that they were nasty and might do horrible things to her.
Doris Lessing wrote this age 25, it was her first novel, and it’s quite brilliant. It does several difficult things at once. It traces the slow painful collapse of a hideously inappropriate marriage between two people who should have stayed single and didn’t simply because of the social pressure to conform; it explains the class divisions within white colonial society whereby “comfortably-off” British farmers were okay with thinking of some Afrikaans farmers as poor whites but couldn’t stand it if a British farmer couldn’t make a go of his farm; it shines a laserbeam light on the horrible dealings of the white farmers with their black workers in the fields and in their homes where men are always called boys, always; and it expertly performs that trick of making you think for many pages our main character Mary Turner is sympathetic and is just a misunderstood oddball until gradually you see she is a monster. I love that trick.
Mary is what cute columnists these days call a kidult – she never wants to grow up, she freezes at the mental age of 14, she becomes an office worker and lives in a boarding house for young ladies until she’s 30 and then unfortunately overhears a conversation and is rudely awakened to the fact that she should already be married with children so she marries the first guy who shows the slightest interest and this is a young farmer, so in the twinkling of an eye she is out in the bush on a run down farm with a guy who turns out to be a fool. This husband has some notions about soil and tree preservation and crop differentiation which may be ecologically sound but which condemn him as an eccentric and are guaranteed to never make him any money. There is a particularly great section showing how when Mary shakes off her depression and focuses her brain she sees exactly why their farm never makes money and how to improve their grinding life and he sees what she means and admires her rare burst of mental clarity and even agrees with her but he just can’t bring himself to rip everything out and plant tobacco, he just can’t do it.
In the end, everything goes to hell. Don’t look for any morally uplifting message here.
This short novel was on course for the full five stars, that's how good it is, until 40 pages from the end when Doris started waffling about Mary’s final mental disintegration and it seems couldn’t stop. She starts writing in slow-motion and it keeps getting slower. Such a shame, after being so sharp and indelible until then.
But still recommended, for sure. -
“It is by the failures and misfits of a civilization that one can best judge its weaknesses.”
-Author Unknown
****4.5 Stars**** I was shattered with the outcome of this novel. Disturbing. Unflinching. Compulsively readable. -
Re-read after about 7 year's break.
One of the unusual things about this, Lessing's first published book, is the extreme omniscient author position she takes. She describes a character's appearance to others, then swoops into her psyche to reveal her thoughts. She describes someone's response to another person's expression and then jumps to his companion's view of him. To emphasise her power even further, she shifts from objective descriptions of the landscape to characters' experiences of it. However, there is one threshold she will not cross, and it is into the minds of black characters, usually referred to in author-voice and by white characters as 'natives'.
I think Lessing has adopted this position, and drawn attention to it, and made an exception to it, to emphasise white supremacist arrogance and ignorance in general, and to acknowledge her own limited perspective as a white writer. In the opening chapter, we find this about the black man, Moses, who will be executed for murdering the white woman, Mary:"People did ask, cursorily, why the murderer had given himself up. There was not much chance of escape. But he did have a sporting chance. He could have run to the hills and hidden for a while. Or he could have slipped over the border into Portuguese territory. Then the District Native Commissioner, at a sundowner party, said that it was perfectly understandable. If one knew anything about the history of the country, or had read any of the memoirs or letters of the old missionaries and explorers, one would have come across accounts of the society Lobengula ruled. The laws were strict: everyone knew what they could or could not do. If someone did an unforgivable thing, like touching one of the King's women, he would submit fatalistically to punishment, which was likely to be impalement over an ant-heap on a stake, or something equally unpleasant. 'I have done wrong, and I know it,' he might say 'therefore let me be punished.' Well, it was the tradition to face punishment, and really there was something rather fine about it. Remarks like these are forgiven from native commissioners, who have to study languages, customs, and so on; although it is not done to say things natives do are 'fine'. (Yet the fashion is changing: it is permissible to glorify the old ways sometimes, providing one says how depraved the natives have become since.)
Here we have the assumption of white authority and expertise, exotification of 'native tradition', followed by a confession of ignorance that must be diffused with assertions of indifference and contempt.
"So that aspect of the affair was dropped, yet it is not in the least interesting, for Moses might not have been a Matabele at all. He was in Mashonaland; though of course natives do wander all over Africa. He might have come from anywhere: Portuguese territory, Nyasaland, the Union of South Africa. And it is a long time since the days of the great king Lobengula. But then native commissioners tend to think in terms of the past"
Having opened with the aftermath of the murder, Lessing rewinds to unravel the tableau, telling the story of Mary from her childhood. This section of the story has feminist interest, because the naive young woman from an unhappy, unsupportive background is happy, independent, successful and a good friend to those around her until the pressure of heteronormative expectations and patriarchal constructions of women's roles breaks upon her and pushes her into marriage to a young farmer, Dick, who is similarly directed by convention and vague desires. Knowing little of each other they are both disappointed in their expectations and sink into a mutually damaging marriage. Mary, struggling to adapt herself to her new situation, driven by a mixture of complex personal shame and the culture of white supremacy, abuses her servants and alienates her neighbours, mismanaging the little portion of her life she can control.
If Mary's redeeming feature is her former happiness, Dick's is his respect and love for the land of his farm. Unlike his neighbour Charlie Slatter, who grows tobacco, grazes cattle and makes no effort to maintain the fertility of his soil, Dick plants trees and rotates crops, growing them in small batches. Due to his lack of business sense and short attention span with his misguided investments, he never makes money, and both he and Mary are harrowed and embittered by their poverty.
Like all of the white South Africans, Dick is an ardent bigot, and Lessing-as-author cannot restrain herself from direct criticism of him: "'Listen to me,' said Dick curtly. 'I work hard enough don't I? All day I am down on the lands with these lazy black savages, fighting them to get some work out of them[...] you should learn sense. If you want to get work out of them you have to know how to manage them. You shouldn't expect too much. They are nothing but savages after all.' Thus Dick, who had never stopped to reflect that these same savages had cooked for him better than his wife did, had run his house, had given him a comfortable existence, as far has his pinched life could be comfortable, for years"
At other points in the book, she is more subtle, allowing white injustice to indict itself:"Like most South Africans, Dick did not like mission boys, they 'knew too much'. And in any case they should not be taught to read and write: they should be taught the dignity of labour and general usefulness to the white man."
and"She said again sharply, her voice rising: 'I said, get back to work.'
Mary's steadily disintegrating mental health is the dynamic moving the plot throughout. Lessing keeps the focus on her and most often takes her perspective. She carefully and cleverly marks this foregrounding, for example by suddenly giving Moses a name for the first time when Mary is shaken out of her lassitude by the sudden, deeply uncomfortable awareness of his humanity, when he waits for her to be out of sight before completing the task of washing himself. Mary is unable to process this pivotal revelation. Although she is deeply unsympathetic, the reader is able to empathise with her and see her as a damaged personality locked into a situation that is hostile to her fragile, confused sense of herself.
At this he stopped still, looked at her squarely and said in his own dialect which she did not understand, 'I want to drink.'
'Don't talk that gibberish to me,' she snapped. She looked around for the bossboy who was not in sight.
The man said, a halting ludicrous manner, 'I... want... water.' He spoke in English, and suddenly smiled and opened his mouth and pointed his finger down his throat. She could hear the other natives laughing a little from where they stood on the mealie-dump. Their laughter, which was good-humoured, drove her suddenly mad with anger[...] most white people think it is 'cheek' if a native speaks English. She said, breathless with anger, 'Don't speak English to me,' and then stopped. This man was shrugging and smiling and turning his eyes up to heaven as if protesting that she had forbidden him to speak his own language, and then hers - so what was he to speak? That lazy insolence stung her into inarticulate rage[...] involuntarily she lifted her whip and brought it down across his face in a vicious swinging blow."
In my opinion this book is a passionate, humble and self-aware response to the virulent injustice of white supremacy and the social structure in South Africa.
Just as I finished reading it, I came across the website of an exhibition of Margaret Bourke-White's photography from South Africa that is contemporary to Lessing's book. This section is on
farm workers and this one on
exotification is particularly interesting. The photograph at the top of this page could be Mary and Dick:
'poor whites'. -
The Grass Is Singing, Doris Lessing
The Grass Is Singing is the first novel, published in 1950, by British Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing. The novel begins with a newspaper clipping about the death of Mary Turner, a white woman, killed off by her black servant Moses for money. The news actually acts like an omen for other white people living in that African setting. After looking at the article, people behave as if the murder was very much expected. The bulk of the novel is a flashback of Mary Turner's life up to her murder at the hand of Moses in the last chapter.
Mary has a content life as a single white Rhodesian (we assume, though the novel refers to both Rhodesia and the Union of South Africa simply as South Africa, while making clear the farm is in Southern Rhodesia) woman. She has a fine job, numerous friends, and values her independence. Nevertheless, after overhearing an insulting remark at a party about her spinsterhood, she resolves to marry. After a brief courtship, she marries Dick Turner, a white farmer struggling to make his farm profitable. She moves with him to his farm and runs the household, while Dick manages the labor of the farm. Dick and Mary are somewhat cold and distant from each other but are committed to their marriage. They live together an apolitical life mired in poverty. When Dick gets sick Mary takes over the management of the farm and rages at the incompetence of her husband's farm practice. To Mary, the farm exists only to make money, while Dick goes about farming in a more idealistic way. Their life together is solitary. Because of their poverty Dick refuses to give Mary a child. They do not attend social events, yet are a great topic of interest among their neighbors. Mary feels an intimate connection with the nature around her, though being in general rather unexplorative in nature. ...
تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز هفتم ماه دسامبر سال 2002 میلادی
عنوان: علفها آواز میخوانند؛ نویسنده: دوریس لسینگ؛ مترجم: آذر کریمی؛ تهران: آذربد، 1379؛ در 302 ص؛ شابک: 9647181787؛ چاپ دیگر: تهران: آشیانه کتاب، 1386؛ در 286 و 2 ص؛ مصور، عکس، شابک: 9789646070523؛ چاپ دوم 1387؛ چاپ سوم 1388؛ موضوع: داستانهای نویسندگان بریتانیایی - سده 20 م
داستان در «آفریقای جنوبی» تحت سلطه ی سفیدپوستان میگذرد. رمان «علفها آواز میخوانند»، شرح از هم پاشیدگی انسانها و همچنین، نقدی بسیار جامع و کامل اما کمتر دیده شده، از مسائل اجتماعی است. «ماری ترنر»، از یک زن جوان با اعتماد به نفس و مستقل، تبدیل به همسر افسرده و مستأصل یک مزرعه دار ناموفق میشود. با گذشت سالها، کار و فشار مزرعه طاقت فرساتر شده، و یأس و فروماندگی «ماری» رو به فزونی میگذارد؛ تا اینکه یک برده ی سیاه پوست مرموز و تنومند، به نام «موسی» وارد زندگی آنها میشود. «ماری» و «موسی» (ارباب و برده) که در زندان غم و اندوه خود، اسیر گشته اند، دائما احساسات متناقضی، همچون علاقه و نفرت را، نسبت به یکدیگر تجربه میکنند. انفجار تنش روحی و روانی، میان دو شخصیت در صحنه ای به یادماندنی از این حکایت جذاب، درباره ی نزاعهای نژادی در آفریقای جنوبی تحت استعمار را، به سرانجام میرساند. «علفها آواز میخوانند»، از راه ترکیب ذهن خلاق «لسینگ»، با یادمانهای تجربه شده ی او در کودکی، خطرات و مسیر زندگی نفسگیر یک زن را، در ستیز با سرنوشت بی رحمانه ی خود، نشان میدهد. نقل نمونه هایی از متن: «کسانی که از روی ضرورت یا به دلخواه، تنها زندگی میکنند و کاری به کار همسایه ها ندارند، اگر بفهمند دیگران پشت سر آنها چه حرفهایی میزنند، سخت ناراحت و برآشفته میشوند. درست مثل کسانی که از خواب میپرند و میبینند عده ای غریبه دورشان را گرفته و به آنها خیره شده اند.»؛ «دیروز صبح جسد مری ترنر همسر ریچارد ترنر، کشاورزی در گوسی، در جلوی ایوان خانه شان پیدا شد. خدمتکار خانه که دستگیر شده، به جنایت خود اعتراف کرده است. انگیزه ی این قتل هنوز روشن نشده است ولی به نظر میرسد که قاتل در پی سرقت اموال خانواده ترنر بوده است.»؛ «روزنامه بیش از این چیزی نگفت. مردم سراسر کشور حتما نگاهی به این پاراگراف و عنوان مهیج آن انداختند و فورانی از خشم که تا حدی با رضایت آمیخته بود، در درون خود احساس کردند. مثل این بود که باور قدیمی آنها باز هم تایید شده بود. گویا ماجرایی اتفاق افتاده بود که میشد انتظار آن را داشت (هر بار که مردمان بومی دست به دزدی، قتل و یا تجاوز میزنند، سفیدپوستان همین احساس را دارند) بعد هم روزنامه را ورق میزدند و به مطلبی دیگر مشغول شدند.»؛ پایان نقل. ا. شربیانی -
“Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people's company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.”
― Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing
Amazing..rating and review to follow.
Sometimes a piece of literature comes along that just leaves you speechless. The Grass is singing is one such book.
So I believe I read this as a kid. It has been on my TBR list for several years and I wish I had read it sooner. After reading it I did need to go back and read some parts again. I also looked at dozens and dozens of reviews. I really wanted to know what others thought.
I am not doing a plot review but will talk about the characters and their motivations.
If I had to use one word to describe this book it would be "enigmatic". I feel there is so much left unsaid and so much that is up for debate and discussion. It's hard to put in to words.
When I read Historical Fiction, I need the atmosphere to transport me there and man does this book do that. One feels right there in the midst of it all. And beyond that, the imagery is just..bewitchingly beautiful. Yes, it depicts poverty and apartheid and depicts them in the darkest of ways but the Stars, The Night Sky, the thatched Huts, the trees and open wilderness were so beautifully painted. As one reads this fascinating book, you can almost see the darkness of the sky with the stars illuminating the open farm. It is one of the most atmospheric books I have ever read.
And then there are the characters. Mary Turner. My feelings were so mixed. It was sort of a slow agony to see who she was and what she turns into. It is painful to see it all unfold.
The book almost lost me at first with its sparse, "telling not showing" prose but I adjusted and surprisingly came to like it.
Dick was Mary's husband and impossible to hate. He is a dreamer and who can hate a dreamer? All he wants is to belong to the farm. I do not believe, as others do, that he really cared about success. He had become one with the farm and were it n ot for the fact he had a wife to feed and someday perhaps children I really do not think he'd have cared. Except for perhaps the expectations of "Farm society". But Dick could have been just a happy dreamer content to toil away, barely noticing the poverty.
Moses. Here is where it gets tough. I still have no idea why: SPOILER ALERT:
Moses chooses to kill Mary. I have tried to understand it. I have googled "why did Moses kill Mary Turner?" I have come up with my own theories, most of which I have thrown aside.
I still do not know and would welcome discussion. One thing I do not believe is that the act of undressing Mary drove him to rage. Moses appeared to want to be Mary's protector. I believe he welcomed the chance to undress her, the chance to take command over virtually her whole self. He came to regard her as "his". I do not mean sexually. It was way more primitive then that.
I believe that Tony Marsten was the trigger for Moses. There are many reasons I think that. I have examined many reviews and many theories and this is the one that seems to make the most sense. Also, there is a line that I did not pick up the first time I read it but did pick it up upon reading again where, as Mary, clearly knowing she was about to come to her end, reflects that she "betrayed Moses" with Tony. I did not understand that at first. But it makes sense.
Moses sees her with Tony. And she is crying. That is exactly how she came to know Moses. She broke down crying and he took charge giving her drink and sleep. That was the first time he reached out to her and the whole relationship shifted.
I believe in the mind of Moses, Mary came to belong to him in a way. Then he was humiliated by Tony and thrown out. He knows Mary is leaving and wrongly suspects she is leaving with Tony. And the crying..that would have figured in. Mary had "replaced" him. I believe that is why he regards Tony..not Dick Turner..as his ultimate rival. Remember, directly after killing Mary he goes to watch Tony sleep and bask in the glow of his final triumph over his enemy. And he says to himself that Richard Turner is unimportant because he was defeated so long ago.
In spite of this, I do not think their relationship was sexual although it certainly had sexual aspects and may have become sexual in time. I admit to being hopelessly frustrated that we were not allowed into the mind of Moses until at the very end and I almost took off a star for that but decided not to.
The only thing that puts my theory into question is the comment Moses makes about the oranges being missing when they so clearly are not. That makes me think well..maybe he always intended harm to her. But then again, he could easily have killed Mary at any time. His actions were protective until she decides to leave the farm.
Then again I could be way off..there are so many theories surrounding the motivations of Moses, of Mary etc that it is impossible to know for sure.
I will say ..I liked Moses BEFORE, NOT AFTER he killed Mary. I kept hoping the murderer somehow was someone else. And I thought it just might be someone else. There are theories, even on GR, that Moses was not the killer. (which I do not agree with). There is also speculation that Mary as good as ASKED him to kill her (but I do not agree with that either).
I am also interested as to why Moses so readily waits to turn himself in. And poor Richard Turner! At the end, everyone is either dead, about to be dead or emotionally gone. It was deeply moving.
I would also like to know how Mary knew she was going to die. This is also not explained. I believe she knew Moses had it in him to kill. She had seen glimpses of his rage and knew it was possible.
And the whole book seemed to me sort of Shakespearean in nature. I have to say this book deeply affected me and I loved it. -
2.5 Stars The Grass is singing by Dorris Lessing was a bookclub read.
I found the book an ok read, I liked the setting of the novel and thought the author conveyed an excellent sense of time and place.
The story at the core of this novel is about race and the racist attitudes of society at this time in Southern Rhodesia.
The book is a challenging read and I found the characters quite dislikable and a relentless air of doom and gloom about the plot.
The novel opens with the announcement in a local paper of the shocking news that "Mary Turner wife of Richard Turner, a farmer at Ngesi was found murdered on the front verandah of their homestead yesterday morning. The houseboy, who has been arrested has confessed to the crime. No motive has been discovered. It is thought he was in search of Valuables.,
While I felt the Novel was extremely well written in places I never really felt the author gave me the full facts of the stroy and therefore I never believed what I was reading. I even found it difficult to understand the reason behind the actions of the murderer as it never became clear in the novel and this was very fustrating. The book did create good discussion among the group and most people while not enjoying the novel did find it a worthwhile read and a good discussion book. -
3.75 stars
I always seem to find Lessing difficult to read, and this was no exception. This is Lessing’s first novel and it is set in what is now Zimbabwe in the 1940s. The title is from Eliot’s The Wasteland. Dick Turner is a poor white farmer who wants a wife: he meets Mary and asks her to marry him. The novel starts with Mary’s murder by Moses, one of the black workers on Turner’s farm. The rest of the novel is a linear chronology up to that point.
It shows Mary’s disillusion with her life, her disillusion with her rather incompetent husband Dick and her total inability to relate to the black workers on the farm. Their neighbours try to be neighbourly but to no avail and Lessing vividly describes the heat:
“she went out to look at the sky. There were no clouds at all. It was a low dome of sonorous blue with an undertone of sultry sulphur colour because of the smoke that filled the air. The pale sandy soil in front of the house dazzled up waves of light and out of it curved the gleaming stems of the poinsettia bushes, bursting into irregular slashes of crimson.”
This is an extended diatribe about the immorality of the farming system and that is clear, but it also feels like Lessing is also being negative about the natural world the farmers inhabit. The climate and landscape almost feel like characters in themselves. The language consists of frequent racial slurs and the main black character, Moses is not very well drawn. As his relationship with Mary develops the reader sees all of Mary’s issues and angsts but Moses seems more inscrutable because his character is not developed. The failed farming and strained relationship Lessing takes from observation of her parents and presumably relationships with the black workforce came from there as well. Lessing does sum up well Mary Turner’s attitudes to race:
“She had never come into contact with natives before, as an employer on her own account. Her mother’s servants she had been forbidden to talk to; in the club she had been kind to the waiters; but the ‘native problem’ meant for her other women’s complaints of their servants at tea parties. She was afraid of them, of course. Every woman in South Africa is brought up to be. In her childhood she had been forbidden to walk out alone and when she had asked why, she had been told in the furtive, lowered, but matter-of-fact voice she associated with her mother, that they were nasty and might do horrible things to her.”
Some of the attitudes are much more visceral. I have speculated why Lessing chooses not to enter the minds of the black characters. It may be that she didn’t really know how to. Maybe she wanted to focus on the arrogance of the white farming community. It was published in 1950 and certainly held a mirror up to the racism of the she was brought up within. Lessing writes from a position of privilege, but one thing she does very well is analyse the roots and nature of the white supremacism she saw in her home country. Where she is on less sure ground I think is her description of Mary’s mental disintegration and the murder. I found this section of the book less convincing. Nevertheless this is a powerful description of the racism prevalent in 1940s Rhodesia. -
رواية (العشب يُغني) للكاتبة الإنجليزية (درويس ليسينج) نالت جائزة نوبل للآداب عام 2007. فهل تستحق ذلك؟
بكل تأكيد تستحق ذلك..
الرواية موضوعها الأساسي هو العنصرية ضد الزنوج وإن كُنت أخشى من ذلك اللفظ ولكن ذلك ما أجبرتني عليه كاتبة الرواية.. فقط حاول أن تحصر كُل مرة تم ذكر فيها كلمة (زنجي) ومُشتقاتها.. الكثير والكثير.. إذاً فلنتسخدم هذا المُصطلح رغم العديد من التحفظات.
تبدأ الرواية بآخر أحداثها وهو مقتل (ماري) على يد أحد العاملين لديها وهو (موسى).. نعم أن تعرف القاتل وآخر حدث فهذه ليست رواية جريمة سننتظر حتى آخر الصفحات حتى نعلم من القاتل وأي إلتواءة ستحدث!
ديك تيرنر أحد الإنجليز المحتلين لجنوب أفريقيا.. والذي ما زالت آثار أحتلالها واضحة وجلية حتى تلك اللحظة.. فـ(ديك) يمتلك مزرعة يعيش عليها ويجعل أهل البلد السُكان الأصليين.. يعملون فيها له مُقابل مبلغ ضئيل للغاية من المال!
ألا يُذكرك ذلك بإحتلال الأمريكيين وإغتصابهم لأراضي الهنود الحُمر؟
بالفعل القصة تكاد تكون مُتشابهة وفي القصتين هي قصة دموية ومآسأوية بكل تأكيد!
فعلى الرغم من إستغلال (ديك) للمزرعة وكُل من حوله من إنجليز وسطوته على المزرعة ولكن نجد أنه يعيش حياة بائسة للغاية.. فهو وحيد.. وحيد إلى درجة أنه إذا مات.. فلن يكتشف ذلك أحد إلا بعد أيام كثيرة!
فيُقرر أن يتزوج أو الصدفة وضعت (ماري) في طريقه.. (ماري) التي هي على النقيض من حياة (ديك)!
حياة أغلبها في صُحبة الرجال والتنزه في النوادي والمرح ولا وجود لمسئولية أو مشاغل أو هموم.. فقط الرفاهية وذلك كان عنوان حياتها..
حتى يُقرر (ديك) أن يُخبر (ماري) أنه يُريد أن يتزوجها.. وبسبب ضغوط أصدقائها والمجتمع عليها أنها قد كبرت وأصبحت تقترب من سن خطر.. فوافقت!
لتنتقل (ماري) إلى حياة الريف.. وتحاول أن تتأقلم وتُثبت أنها سيدة منزل جديرة.. ولكن سُرعان ما كانت تمل.. والسبب الرئيسي كان (ديك).. فـ(ديك) هو مُزارع فاشل بكل تأكيد.. مُتمسك بأرضه التي هي مُغتصبة في الأساس من أهل البلد!
وكأن هُناك لعنة ما على أرضه.. فكُتب عليه الفشل.. جرب كُل المشاريع وكُل الحيوانات وكُل المحاصيل.. ولكنه يبقى فاشل.. فتُصاب (ماري) بالصدمة وتكتشف أيضاً أنها فاشلة بـدورها!
حتى يأتي دور (موسى)..
موسى هو آخر خُدام عائلة (تيرنر).. التي وقعت بحبه (ماري)! نعم (ماري) التي كرهت كُل ما له علاقة بالزنوج بل أن (موسى) نفسه قد ضربته قبل أن تتعرف عليه!
ولكنه اليأس والوحدة يا عزيزي وما قد يفعلوه في فتاة هشة الروح مثل (ماري).
ولكن هُناك عيوب بالطبع في الرواية.. الملل بالطبع كان أحدها.. فأحياناً الرواية كانت بطيئة ومُملة الأحداث.. وفجأة تجد الرواية قفزت قفزة زمنية كبيرة.. قد تُربكك وتشك أنك قد تجاوزت بعض الصفحات عن طريق الخطأ.
ولكنها رواية جيدة تستحق القراءة.. وأحببت أجواء الرواية جداً.. وخصوصاً وصف حرارة الصيف جعلتني أشعر به في أكثر الأيام برودة!
وإلى لقاء آخر مع (ليسينج). -
“The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.”
----F. Scott Fitzgerald
Doris Lessing's, the Nobel Prize winning debut book, The Grass is Singing revolves around a youngish woman who after marrying a South African white farmer, and within a few years, looses herself and becomes a victim to immense loneliness as she realizes her husband's constant failure both in his farm as well as in their shared marital life, and that's how her remorse grabs her soul and makes her extremely critical towards her black servants treating them with distaste and hatred, ultimately paying a heavy price for her racial discrimination towards her servants.
Synopsis:
Set in South Africa under white rule, Doris Lessing's first novel is both a riveting chronicle of human disintegration and a beautifully understated social critique. Mary Turner is a self-confident, independent young woman who becomes the depressed, frustrated wife of an ineffectual, unsuccessful farmer. Little by little the ennui of years on the farm work their slow poison, and Mary's despair progresses until the fateful arrival of an enigmatic and virile black servant, Moses. Locked in anguish, Mary and Moses - master and slave - are trapped in a web of mounting attraction and repulsion. Their psychic tension explodes in an electrifying scene that ends this disturbing tale of racial strife in colonial South Africa.
The Grass Is Singing blends Lessing's imaginative vision with her own vividly remembered early childhood to recreate the quiet horror of a woman's struggle against a ruthless fate.
A small town girl like Mary, who grew up in an unbalanced household, is extremely head strong and self-reliant and because of her parent's divorce has made her grow a distaste for marriage in general. But at the age of 30, Mary finds herself liking the prospect of marriage and a marital life when she meets a white farm owner named, Dick Turner. Soon after the marriage, Mary realizes the pangs of marrying a man like Dick who is an unreliable and a struggling farmer, whose farm is falling down bit-by-bit despite of his labor and his hard work. And failure and a monotonous married life consume Mary into a state of extreme detachment and loneliness as Dick spends less time with her and more time in the farm due to extreme climate conditions. But the arrival of a black house boy labor named Moses, changes that state of Mary into a mixture of both hate and extreme attraction towards this slave boy. One time, Mary treats Moses with utmost anger and hatred, and on another time, she feels a strong attraction towards this native man. That which finally, leads her towards her own tragic end in the hands of that very same black boy Moses.
The book is so much more than just a novel about a lost married couple meeting their tragic fate because of their actions, meaning getting murdered by a black man because of their ill treatment towards them. Through the simple narration, the novel will provoke the thoughts of the readers and will force them to ponder about slavery, apartheid laws and how the society plays a major influence in Mary's downfall. This book is so tender and intense both at the same time that I often found myself reeling to the edge of my seat with horror, shock and curiosity to find out how it happens and why it happens, because the author already reveals in the first chapter itself about the murder of Mary Turner by her slave houseboy. So the focus entirely remained on the why part and for the first time ever, it felt like a crime happened, yet I'm much more interested in learning about the life of this married couple.
Right from the very first moment itself, the story gripped me and held a tight psychological hold over my mind until the turn of the very last page. Although the author was not capable of subtlety in this book, yet she penned it in a unique and a compelling voice. The narration is engaging yet heart-rending and often tense owing to a suppressing atmosphere that the author flawlessly portrays through her eloquent words. And with an articulate prose and moderate pace, the story sways in a gradual motion until the last breath of Mary left her body.
The characters, which are inspired heavily from the author's own life, are brilliantly developed, and layered with their flaws and thought trains. The central character, Mary Turner, reflects an era during the early years of Apartheid in South Africa through her constantly deteriorating demeanor. Both the society and the implicit laws made her a remorseful housewife, whose husband took no notice towards her or their marital life, instead presenting her with house slaves to ease her pain in managing the household. Both Mary and Dick are so lost in their own worlds that they barely realized the bridge it created between their marriage. The cracks of which are suffice enough to influence the ruination of their social stature, their farm business and so their mental balances. Even the character of Moses whose equal hatred towards his master and his wife is well explored and depicted through the pages of this book.
In a nutshell, this is a must read novel for one and all to explore the unspoken tragedy a white married couple due to Apartheid and its inhuman laws.
Verdict: A story with a strong underlying message about revenge, racism, marriage, depression and societal flaws.
Courtesy: A glimpse of my best buys! -
ماري تيرنر - سأظل اذكر تلك الشخصية كافضل تعبير عن مشاعر انسانية معقدة ومركبة ومتناقضة تم تصويره علي ورق
"ولكن اذا ما هو الجنون ؟ اليس هو ملجأ ؟ انسحاب من العالم "
ما الذي قاد ماري الي الجنون ، هل هي تلك اللحظة التي قررت فيها ان تكون شئ اخر ، عندما قررت ان تتزوج اول شخص متاح بسبب نميمة اصدقاءها ، هل عندما نترك انفسنا اسرى لارادة السائد و المتعارف ، نكون قد خطونا الخطوة الاولي نحو منحدر الجنون ، اللامبالاة ، الانسحاب من العالم
ماري ، لم استطع ان اكرهها ولا ان احبها ، لكنها عالقة في ، او الاصح اني عالق معها الي حين . -
This is a bummer of a novel--a mostly distasteful reading experience. But the honest evocation of human cruelty and misguided actions, alongside the brutal beauty of nature is so powerful and skillfully crafted that everyone should read it anyway.
Before becoming Zimbabwe, Southern Rhodesia was a British colony, from 1923 to 1970. Doris Lessing, born in Iran, was six years old when she moved to the country in 1925 with her parents, whose hope (unrealized) it was to make a fortune from farming.
“They were shocked, for the first week or so, by the way natives were treated. They were revolted a hundred times a day by the casual way they were spoken of, as if they were so many cattle; or by a blow, or a look. They had been prepared to treat them as human beings. But they could not stand out against the society they were joining.”
In this debut novel, Lessing wrote about what she knew: the destructiveness of poverty; the tragedy of colonization; specific, horrific racism; patriarchy; the treatment of people who didn’t fall in line with the norm; and the impact of a couple struggling through living together while holding dramatically different dreams and realities.
She tells the story of Mary Turner, how she rose from a loveless and impoverished childhood to become a confident, self-sufficient woman at a time when this kind of woman just wouldn’t do. Mary was disdained and made fun of, which pushed her into an ill-matched marriage to the kindly but hapless Dick Turner, after which farm life, blistering heat, and crippling poverty lead to her downfall. We’re told the tragic outcome on page one-- in the form of a newspaper clipping--so we know what will happen, but curiosity about how it happens propels us through the bleakness of the narrative.
I found the depiction of a woman’s anger particularly fascinating. We frequently hear discussions of men’s anger and the roots of it. But, though there are plenty of stories about women’s mental breakdowns, discussions about their anger, and what might be at the roots of that anger (anger which often precedes the breakdown), I don��t see very often. Lessing gives a very convincing description of the way poverty, a lack of family love, childhood trauma, and bullying can create a simmering pain and lead to a bitter, evil, nastiness.
“The women who marry men like Dick learn sooner or later that there are two things they can do: they can drive themselves mad, tear themselves to pieces in storms of futile anger and rebellion; or they can hold themselves tight and go bitter.”
Another interesting and always timely theme dealt with the treatment of the land, and the way Dick Turner, who loved and cared for his farm, was only punished for this by poverty and ridicule, while his neighbors, who prioritized short-term gain, became rich leaders of the district.
“He was sorry for Dick Turner, whom he knew to be unhappy; but even this tragedy seemed to him romantic; he saw it, impersonally, as a symptom of the growing capitalization of farming all over the world, of the way small farmers would inevitably be swallowed by the big ones. (Since he intended to be a big one himself, this tendency did not distress him.)”
The headline above the news clipping that begins the book is “Murder Mystery,” but don’t expect a solution from Lessing. Instead she leaves us with ambiguity and symbolism, perhaps the most honest way to end the tale.
“The crises of individuals, like the crises of nations, are not realized until they are over.” -
Today would have been Doris Lessing’s 100th birthday. I had trouble believing that this novel a) was Lessing’s debut and b) is now nearly 70 years old. It felt both fresh and timeless, and I could see how it has inspired writing about the white experience in Africa ever since, especially a book like Fiona Melrose’s
Midwinter, in which an English farmer and his son are haunted by the violent death of the young man’s mother back in Zambia 10 years ago.
For The Grass Is Singing begins with two sly words, “MURDER MYSTERY”: a newspaper headline announcing that Mary, wife of Rhodesian farmer Dick Turner, has been found murdered by their houseboy. It’s a tease because in one sense there’s no mystery to this at all: we know from the first lines what happened to Mary. And yet we are drawn in, wondering why she was killed and how the Turners went from an idealistic young couple enthusiastic about their various money-making schemes – a shop, chickens, tobacco – to a jaded, distant pair struggling for their health, both mental and physical.
The breakdown of their marriage and the failure of their farm form a dual tragedy that Lessing explores in searing psychological detail, all while exposing (with neither judgment nor approval) how Anglos felt about the natives at that time.
There’s a sense in which this was all fated: Dick is weak, someone Mary pities rather than loves and respects; and Mary’s mixed-up feelings toward her black servants – fear, contempt, curiosity and attraction – were bound to lead to an explosion. The land itself seems to be conspiring against them, too, or is at least indifferent to their plans and dreams.
So many passages struck me for their effortless profundity. I cringed to see myself so clearly in Mary’s boredom and restlessness, along with her ambivalence about the idea of motherhood: “She hated the idea of a baby, when she thought of its helplessness, its dependence, the mess, the worry. But it would give her something to do.”
This was the fifth full-length book I’ve read by Lessing, and by far the best.
Originally published on my blog,
Bookish Beck. -
Published in 1950 and set in Southern Rhodesia (today’s Zimbabwe) in the 1940s, the book opens with a news announcement that Mary Turner, wife of struggling local British farmer Richard Turner, has been found murdered on her verandah. The couple’s house attendant, Moses, has been arrested. The neighboring successful farmer, Charlie Slatter, seems anxious to downplay the murder and move on. A young newcomer to the area, Tony Marston, wonders why the authorities do not want to find out what happened and why.
Though at first it appears to be a murder mystery, this story is so much more. It is an exploration of the racial divide in southern Africa between the white landowners and the native workers. It also portrays the role of women in society of the time and the expectation that they would marry. Mary is independent at the time but overhears gossip that causes her to make an unfortunate decision, which will drastically impact her life. Mary is a rather unlikeable character, but reasons behind her unpleasantness are gradually revealed.
I felt the underlying current of discord as I was reading. We know something bad will happen and the author does a great job of conveying the tensions to the reader, slowly building to the climax. I cannot say too much without spoiling, so suffice it to say that it is a complex multi-layered social commentary that induces a feeling of impending doom. Lessing spent her youth in this region of the world, so she was relying on first-hand experience. I can see why this book is considered a classic. -
I wouldn't say that I enjoyed this book (because how can you enjoy the telling of the slow but constant decomposition of a woman and her psyche) but I do have to say that it was an engrossing read. Although I could not identify with the characters and rejected their weaknesses and frailties, I could not put the book down. The author creates a wonderful psychological vortex in the hot and arid lands of the African bush and she is not afraid to take it to its ultimate conclusion. The book is also a parable for racism, colonialism, and white supremacy in Africa and the destructive they had.
-

South Africa
The novel is set in Rhodesia now Zimbabwe in the 1940s. At this time the country was governed according to the rules of apartheid, a system of institutionalized racism in which the white minority was socially, legally, and politically dominant over the black majority.
I had a feeling this was going to be a challenging book for me.
The opening chapter is very difficult to read, begins with a newspaper report about the murder of a white woman by a black man, a servant in her house.
The ' shocking' racism, the language which even in my living memory was thought tolerable, normal had me cringing.
The story continues told in a third person , almost omniscient voice which allowed me to see most of the characters, the white people at least from each point of view, but very little of the black people's perspective is openly told, rather it's intimated at so you have to 'feel out' what they are thinking.
Doris Lessing has a way of describing places and things, sounds, smells that made me feel like I was there, in that time and place.
I'm really glad I read this book which was suggested to me by Raul for the August book swap suggestions on All about books. He also sent me some more suggestions which I am very interested to look into, so thank you Raul.
nb; 4 1/2 * -
Such a powerful book, especially striking for how early it appears in Lessing's career. Her indictment of apartheid is both analytical and devastating in its unflinching gaze. Mary Turner is a complicated character, completely vile and yet pitiable, too, caught as she is in the shaping pressures of 1950s femininity and South African white supremacy.
The pressures build and Mary's collapse into breakdown also culminates in a moment of searing self-knowledge though, tellingly, she never quite understands where and how her life has been so wrong.
It's possible to read this on a purely literal level but it seems to also be operating more figuratively, with the violent actions of Moses presaging the upheavals to come in South Africa.
Audacious and chilling, the depth of intelligence, prescience and sheer grip in the narrative belie the scant number of pages - the seeds of that Nobel were surely sown here. -
"It is by the failures and misfits of a civilization that one can best judge its weakness"
~Unknown
Was it civilization which led to colonization or was it the other way? Trying to find answer for this question would like trying to answer the ever puzzling question "Which came first: chicken or the egg? I am sure that there are apparently acceptable answers for the latter but not the former. Because civilization and colonization are confederates encroaching on the foreign lands, enslaving the natives, shattering the simple lives, corrupting the dreams, belittling the believes, obviating the originality and instigating the inequality. Inequality which gradually and unobtrusively grows, runs its roots deep into our
paradise ruining our hope and harmony, giving rise to supremacy which makes what is worse even worse. This is one of the stories along similar lines.
The grass is singing:
.::Songs of the disrupted solitude::.
"It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction."
Mary, disillusioned by marriage and disconcerted by distasteful encounters, has little or no interest in marriage or any romantic affairs and she likes going out with all those men who treat her comradely. What her mother had to go through has been enough for her for not thinking of getting married, but the unfriendly reminders from the 'society' made her think, and later, even believe that her life is incomplete, when all her friends are married and seemingly happy with their lunch affairs, movie nights, and exotic holidays. But ‘She'd make someone a good wife. She's a good sort, Mary.' Reminders have grown into rude remarks and she has become the subject of 'their' gossips, when her marriage remains as an unaccomplished social mission.
"If she had been left alone she would have gone on, in her own way, enjoying herself thoroughly, until people found one day that she had turned imperceptibly into one of those women who have become old without ever having been middle-aged: a little withered, a little acid, hard as nails, sentimentally kindhearted, and addicted to religion or small dogs"
She halfheartedly looks for a different life and a suitable or any guy, just to see that what she has been missing or what others said that she has been missing. It is true that any thought of sex or anything which put her close with any man in any sort of uncomfortable situation scared her, as she is haunted by her past life.
"In this age of scientific sex, nothing seems more ridiculous than sexual gaucherie."
.::Songs of the oblivious rage.:.
'What is madness, but a refuge, retreating from the world?'
She is rescued from the mouth of social animals, but only to be brought into a secluded farm by her new husband Turner who, with his 'natives' run ('down', most of the time) the farm. When Turner with his unrealistic goals and foolishly ambitious ventures keep letting the roof (which is never there, but figuratively) of the house collapse and the burden Mary felt in all the heat and turmoil building up in her as an unfathomable wrath. As rivers always flow from higher to lower elevations, her anger always finds 'natives' to be easy targets, for which 'apart-hate' they had no other options but mutely bear what befalls them.
.::Songs of the locked loneliness::.
'For even daydreams need an element of hope to give satisfaction to the dreamer.'
The uninvited daydreams of the life which, otherwise, she might have had, keep coming to her during her lonely hours, while daydreams of Turner keep shrinking him. Whenever there is any altercation, Turner always left the room 'inarticulate with irritation', leaving Mary to drive herself mad against the 'natives' (who works at her house as 'houseboys', and often, gets replaced) and keep herself tight and go bad. Mary has again become a gossip fodder to the people around. But, she continued to live silently as she is queen of sorrows and martyr of 'this' marriage, 'facing her future with tired stoicism and inner disintegration'.
'Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people's company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.'
.::Songs of the awaited ending::.
'It is difficult to tell with women how they are.'
When the new houseboy, Moses, who once felt the whip of sjambok by his 'madame' in a heated situation, and always acts as 'an object of abstraction and a machine without a soul' starts showing his kindness during her hard-times, Mary bleakly remembers his existence in this world as human-being, though of different color and culture. Unable to bear the burden of 'Color Bar', Mary drives out Moses from her estranged comfort and her collapsing house hold and continues to frightfully wait for his return knowing what he might bring to her.
Doris Lessing's writing is so vivid when she explains the inexorable things: the brutal and the ugly things, and the broken and the fragile things. This is the first book of Doris I have read and I must say that there are some resemblances between Lessing and Woolf. -
ليست القصة في جريمة القتل التي تحدث مع بداية الكتاب ولكنها القصة القديمة.
في مستعمرة بريطانية في جنوب افريقيا (زيمبابوي) تصل ماري تيرنر إلى حافة الجنون وتنتهي نهاية مأساوية بسبب زواج فاشل وحياة قاسية لم تستطع تحملها مع زوج لم تحبه ولم تستطع حبه بسبب الفشل الذي يرافق جميع خططه وفي أثناء ذلك تسلط دوريس ليسنج الضوء على مشكلة العنصرية بين السود والبيض التي تفاقمت إبان الحرب العالمية الثانية وهو الوقت الذي ارتفعت فيه الأصوات مدافعة عن المساواة بين البشر وإلغاء التمييز العنصري
في كوخ بائس حيث تدور الاحداث تعيش ماري مع زوجها ديك تيرنر المزارع البائس الذي يعاني الفقر ورغم ذلك هو مستعمر فعليه أن يكون قويا متسلطا على السكان الاصليين هو وزوجته التي تمثل المستعمر بعقليته العنصرية القاسية ويظهر ذلك في طريقة تعاملها مع العمال و"موسى" على الأخص الذي امتزجت مشاعرها تجاهه بين الكراهية والإعجاب فهي التي لم تلمس قط واحدا من السكان الأصليين أوكلت إليه الكثير من المهام مثل مساعدتها على ارتداء ملابسها وغير ذلك الكثير
كانت ماري تكره رؤية الحب أو السعادة فيما حولها وتكره رؤية الأمهات يحملن أطفالهن أو أي بادرة حب يظهرها السكان الأصليين تجاه بعضهم هي التي لم تعرف كيف تحب أبداً.
في هذه الحفرة المتحللة بين الجبال
تحت ضوء القمر الشاحب، يغني العشب
فوق ركام القبور، حول المصلي الصغير
ذلك المصلى الخالي، لا يأوي إلا الرياح
ليست له نوافذ ، والباب يتأرجح
لا يمكن للعظام العارية أن تؤذي أحدا
وليس ثمة إلا ديك وقف فوق السقف يصيح :
کوکوریکو .... کوکو ریکو ...
في ومضة من البرق ،
ثم تعصف عصفة ندية تجلب المطر
غاص نهر الجانجا ،
وأوراق الجذع انتظرت المطر ،
بينما السحب الرمادية
تجمعت بعيدا، فوق هيمافانت
الغابة تجثم رابضة، منحنية في صمت
ثم تكلم الرعد..
تي إس إليوت _ الأرض الخراب
بهذه الأبيات افتتحت دوريس قصتها جاعلة منها أرضاً خراباً تشبه أرض إليوت. في عنوان الرواية توجه الكاتبة رسالة إلى جميع المستعمرين والعنصريين "ألم تستطيعوا البقاء في أرضكم ولا تلحقوا الخراب بأرض افريقيا لتتركوا العشب ينمو ويغني؟ -
"MISTERIOSO DELITTO.
(dal nostro corrispondente).
Mary Turner, moglie di Richard Turner, agricoltore di Ngelsi, è stata rinvenuta assassinata ieri mattina, sulla veranda della propria abitazione.
Il “boy”, già tratto in arresto, si è dichiarato artefice del delitto, per il quale non è stato individuato finora alcun movente. Si ritiene che l’uomo fosse alla ricerca di preziosi. "
Un epilogo dà l'avvio a questa storia.
Mary Turner, moglie di Richard Turner è stata assassinata da un giovane nero.
Questa è la fine e poi il nastro si riavvolge portandoci indietro nel tempo:
una risalita ed una discesa nel baratro.
Questo romanzo (scritto dalla Lessing a trent'anni) è composto da una serie di dicotomie stridenti e dolorose insite tanto nel paesaggio naturale quanto in quello umano del Sud Africa:
▲Una società coloniale che contrappone il bianco occupante ed il nativo nero.
▲ Il doppio volto della natura: la bellezza che toglie il fiato, da una parte, e, dall'altra, le insidie che si nascondono tra l'erba.
▲Le due stagioni: la pioggia – pericolo che minaccia la rovina del prezioso lavoro agricolo- il caldo soffocante che toglie la ragione.
La società coloniale è quella regolata da leggi non scritte ma ben assodate che non permettono trasgressioni.
Una società che si fa forza e nasconde le sue paure più profonde in una coalizione artificiale.
Questa è la tragica storia di Mary e Richard:
due personaggi che non sanno stare al gioco; perdenti in partenza e le loro vite non possono che contenere le note di un dramma. -
Not the good time read of the year. In this book it's almost impossible to not pity and despise all of the characters. Set in Rhodesia, this is Doris Lessing's first novel and she pulls from her experience growing up in Africa.
Page 1. Mary Turner has been murdered on the farm where she and her husband Dick live. That's about as pleasant as the book gets. So be warned. Lessing goes back from this gruesome scene to explain how Mary left her pleasant single life working in the city and ended up miserable in the African bush on a farm that is nearly always bankrupt and with a husband who repulses her. Farm and an unhappy marriage drives Mary further and further into herself until she is hardly recognizable.
Lessing has a fairly severe commentary on this time period (40's or 50's I think?) and makes clear judgments on everything from the reasons for marriage to the proper way to farm, but most significantly she critiques the treatment of the native African people by the whites. Absolutely appalling. Even the staunchest bigot would feel a little uneasy reading her commentary on the poor treatment of the farm hands, and the white's assumptions about them.
I'd definitely recommend this book for those who can handle being in a bit of a funk for 200 pages. It's a quick read and a perspective on pre-Apartheid southern Africa. Lessing's psychological mapping of Mary as she deteriorates is intense and chilling. -
Als geen ander weet dit boek een sfeer op te roepen van een verzengende hitte, van waanzin door afzondering, van hopeloosheid. Giet er nog het koloniale aspect bij, met blanken die zwarten als werktuigen beschouwen, en je krijgt dit magistraal boek.
Ik ga hier nog even niet goed van zijn. -
This incredible book was Doris Lessing's first book, set in Southern Rhodesia (modern day Zimbabwe) where Doris Lessing herself lived for quite some portion of her life.
The book written in 1950 was banned in Southern Africa for years, and one can see why. Written when nearly all the countries on the African continent were still colonized, 30 years before Zimbabwe's independence and forty before South Africa's, the books honesty, especially considering the time and Lessing being a white woman in and of that time, is absolutely shocking.
Lessing's introspective style of writing highlighting a discrimination and hatred that existed against the Black native population by the white settlers is absolutely incredible, where she tells of the Turners and the destructiveness of hatred to all involved, especially to the victim, the active discriminating figures and the passive ones. -
A remarkable book, given that it was first published in 1950 during a much different era than the current one in Africa. For me it is an extension, if you will, of similar racial prejudice and hardships experienced by the Jamaicans who migrated to England after the Second World War as described in "Small Island", written by Andrea Levy, as well as so many other authors reporting similar kind of circumstances. Their books, however, were based on historical events, where as Lessing's book was relevant to the era it was written in and with a powerful message about human relations which would eventually lead to a revolution in Africa beginning in the 1960's.
The story of Mary Turner could have been any women's who ended up on farms anywhere in the world, especially for those women who had to settle on new continents in basically harsh, uncompromising wilderness. There is much to relate to. Some made it and some did not. Mara Turner's disintegration over a number of years was written with so much compassion and insight. "Little by little the ennui of years on the farm work their slow poison, and Mary's despair progresses until the fateful arrival of an enigmatic and virile black servant, Moses".
The powerful love-hate relationship between her and Moses was brilliantly depicted in the narrative. The cultural barrier that existed and lead to the dramatic events in the end could not have been done better.
Listen to this
Podcast with the author about this book.
