Mazwi

Moments with a Nobel Laureate: Doris Lessing

Tinashe Mushakavanhu

Doris Lessing, now in her late eighties, is a prolific author who holds an aura not too easy to define. She’s a living legend, often prized, though she contests this position, to have prepared ground for the feminist movement with her critically acclaimed The Golden Notebooks. In 2007, the Nobel Prize literature committee, finally paid honour to a great literary genius, an overture that was since long overdue.

I met Doris Lessing, at the Hay Festival in Wales, the night she was presented with yet another accolade the Hay Festival Award for Excellence in Literature. In a genial way, she invited me to sit with her as we both reminisced about our ‘home’ country, Zimbabwe. ‘It’s terrible what is happening in Zimbabwe today’, she said. ‘Sad isn’t it? And how is your family coping?’ She paused and looked concerned in a grandmotherly way. I mumbled garbled phrases, stressing the words – struggling but surviving.

As it was everybody’s curiosity to know how a young Zimbabwean had ended up in Hay on Wye, a small countryside town of 1 500 people in rural Mid Wales, Doris Lessing did ask too, what brought you here? Isn’t it a running joke that you can find Zimbabweans everywhere on this planet, maybe even on the moon, I explained with what I thought was clever rhetoric. Ummn! She nodded, with an I-know-what-you-mean smile.

I read The Grass is Singing while studying for my first degree a few years ago, the manuscript Doris Lessing had brought with her when she left Zimbabwe for England in 1950. When it was first published the book created an impact whose reverberations we are still feeling, and immediately established itself as a landmark in twentieth century literature. The Grass Singing chronicles the relationship between a white farmer’s wife and her black servant and the contradictions inherent in a colonial relationship.

Zimbabwe is the backdrop of most of Doris Lessing’s fiction. There’s a sense in which all of Doris Lessing’s body of literature spanning six decades draws on her memories as a young woman growing up in the farmlands of Zimbabwe, then Rhodesia. While I listened to her talk about her latest novel, The Cleft, and her writing life in general, I was stuck with the references that Lessing makes to her own life and the memories of childhood and adolescence from which she draws the inspiration for her writings. In her earliest works particularly, Lessing drew upon her childhood experiences in Zimbabwe to write about the clashes between white and black cultures and racial injustice. She criticized the white colonialists for their sterile culture and for dispossessing us the native black citizens. Because of her outspoken views, the governments of both Rhodesia and South Africa declared her a ‘prohibited alien’ in 1956. She claims the prohibition at that time meant an exclusion ‘from my own best self’, since she considers Zimbabwe her home country, the place where her childhood memories belong.

An ardent critic of Robert Mugabe, Doris Lessing is saddened that almost three decades later, the ‘jewel of Africa’ now lies ‘ruined, dishonoured, and disgraced.’ Lessing remains skeptical and insists that the removal of Mugabe from power will change next to nothing. ‘People say, “Get rid of Mugabe and we will get back on course.” But he has created a whole caste of greedy people like himself. Get rid of him and there will be others as bad. If this is the merest pessimism and the crooks can be get rid of, then there will remain the damage that has been done.’

Things are bad, things are terrible but have things ever been good in post-independence Zimbabwe. ‘Here is the heart of the tragedy. Never has a ruler come to power with more goodwill from his people. Virtually everybody, the people who voted for him and the ones who did not, forgot their differences and expected from him the fulfillment of their dreams and of his promises. He could have done practically anything in those early years. When you travelled around the villages in the early Eighties you heard from everyone, “Mugabe would do this…Comrade Mugabe will do that…” He will see the value of this or that plan, build this shop or clinic or road, help us with our school, check that bullying official. If Mugabe had had the sense to trust what he heard, he could have transformed the country. But he did not know how much he was trusted, because he was too afraid to leave his self-created prison, meeting only sycophants and cronies, and governing through inflexible Marxist rules taken from textbooks.’ Lessing’s diagnosis is simple: the problem with Zimbabwe is squarely and purely a problem of short-sighted leadership.

Lessing became the 11^th woman to win the Nobel Prize. Zimbabwe shares the joys of this well deserved Nobel Prize, a global recognition to a woman whose writings and thinking has significantly changed the way the world perceives itself.