Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing: A Postcolonial Feminist Hauntological Approach

Abstract

Doris Lessing is known for her metafictional narratives that provide a literary framework towards understanding historical events from embedded, postmodern perspectives. Most of her work is said to have autobiographical elements but there is a definite distinction that needs to be made between authorial insertion and the actual characters in her novels. This article analyses the ways in which her first novel, The Grass Is Singing may be understood through the perspective of Doris Lessing as a Third-Culture Kid (TCK) but by also demarcating the differences between Lessing and the protagonist of that novel, Mary. Following from this, a postcolonial feminist hauntological approach is deployed as a theoretical intervention into better understanding the different states of trauma and existence imbued in Lessing’s characterisations in The Grass Is Singing. In the novel, Mary’s clashes with the environment in which she is situated and with the natives of the land is imbued by the spectres of colonial domination and of her father. Subsequently, this article offers an analysis of Mary as an individual and the ways in which understanding her contentious and difficult character sheds a light on the postcolonial hauntological aspect of life in-between margins from a TCK perspective. The implication of the study is that an interrogation of Lessing’s oeuvre from the perspective of the TCK will yield a new way towards approaching postcolonial feminist hauntologies in Lessing’s novels through a broader context that can be applied across postcolonial nations in the Global South and in South East Asia.