Journal: Arts Studies and Criticism DOI: 10.32629/asc.v7i4.5423
Abstract
In Doris Lessing’s The Grass Is Singing, the narrator grants sustained access to Mary Turner’s psychological world while persistently withholding the inner life of Moses, her Black servant. Rather than a mere limitation of characterization, this asymmetry functions as a formal site through which the novel registers the epistemic violence of settler colonialism and the exclusion of Black subjectivity from authorized forms of knowledge. Lessing’s refusal to “speak for” Moses transforms his opacity into resistance to the colonial gaze, unsettling the assumption that the racialized Other must be made fully intelligible. At the novel’s end, Moses’s symbolic association with the African bush extends this opacity beyond individual psychology, exposing the limits of colonial systems of knowledge, possession, and interpretation. The novel therefore advances a postcolonial ethics of representation, in which opacity is a formal limit that resists totalizing colonial intelligibility.
Keywords
The Grass Is Singing, postcolonial ethics, epistemic violence, narrative opacity, representation of the Other
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[3] Mutekwa, A. (2009). Gendered beings, gendered discourses: The gendering of race, colonialism and anti-colonial nationalism in three Zimbabwean novels. Social Identities, 15(5), 725–740.
[4] Hanley, L. (1991). Writing across the color bar: Apartheid and desire. The Massachusetts Review, 32(4), 495–506.
[5] Fishburn, K. (1994). The Manichean allegories of Doris Lessing’s The grass is singing. Research in African Literatures, 25(4), 1–15.
[6] Schwarz, B. (2016). The fact of whiteness: Doris Lessing’s The grass is singing—A historian’s notebook. Journal of Southern African Studies, 42(1), 127–136.
[7] Spivak, G. C. (2010). Can the subaltern speak? Reflections on the history of an idea. In R. C. Morris (Ed.), Can the subaltern speak? Columbia University Press.
[8] Lessing, D. (2008). The grass is singing. HarperCollins.
[9] Sage, L. (1983). Doris Lessing. Methuen.
[10] Jeater, D. (2002). Review: “Black peril” in Southern Rhodesia. Journal of Southern African Studies, 28(2), 465–467.
[11] Fanon, F. (1967). The wretched of the earth (C. Farrington, Trans.). Penguin.
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[13] Hall, S. (1997). The spectacle of the “Other.” In S. Hall (Ed.), Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices (pp. 223–290). Sage Publications.
[14] Morrison, T. (1992). Playing in the dark: Whiteness and the literary imagination. Harvard University Press.
[15] Lessing, D. (1994). Doris Lessing: Conversations (E. G. Ingersoll, Ed.). Ontario Review Press.
[16] Glissant, É. (1997). Poetics of relation (B. Wing, Trans.). University of Michigan Press.
[17] Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The location of culture. Routledge.
[18] Bertelsen, E. (1991). Veldtanschauung: Doris Lessing’s savage Africa. Modern Fiction Studies, 37(4), 647–658.
[19] Wang, J. (2009). White postcolonial guilt in Doris Lessing’s The grass is singing. Research in African Literatures, 40(3), 37–47.
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