The Grass is Singingby Doris Lessing

I finished reading a very powerful novel. The Grass is Singing, the first novel, published in 1950, by Nobel Laurete, Doris Lessing. The book is said to be an immediate success and must have been quite popular. I came across it only now.

I read a library copy. The book is small and doesn’t threaten you with size. However it is power-packed with emotions, psychological analysis and bleak racial truths.

The story line is simple: Mary an uncoy, “unmarryable” White lady marries Dick very late in life to prove that she can have a family. But the city woman finds it difficult to survive the hot dry farm, the rural native slaves and most importanlty the ever failing and poverty stricken Dick. The marriage crumbles, Dick keeps on failing, Mary drifts into a slumpurous existence with no interest in anything, even escape. As the hot sun dries her down, she sleepwalks into a relation with Moses, the Black servant she hated and still hates from the bottom of her heart. She never realizes how racist she is, how cruel she is, how hated she is until she waits for the moment when she will be killed. She sleepwalks into her own murder. The reader always know it, and thus anticipates it at each racial action of hers.
One thing I feel reading any women writer, is the psychological depths they travel and traverse. Mary’s degeneration in the novel is the degeneration of a vivacious mind – out of ennui, or failures, or anger, or helplessness. She deteriorates within and it starts flowing out – through anger and lust for the Black. She is very much agential, primarily because of her Whiteness, but she doesn’t make it enough to save the situation.
A very powerful, disturbing novel. The most recurring theme in the novel, I feel, is the love-hate combination. Mary hates Dick, but marries him. She hates Moses for being a powerful Black, but cannot resist him. Dick knows Mary can help him succeed in life, but will not oblige him; still he is very sympathetic. Moses, though untold by the author, must be hating his mistress for lashing the whip on his face, for treating him as an inhuman, but he serves her with utmost care. He cannot leave her and when she lets another White man to ask him to leave, he realizes that as a time of reckoning.
What killed Mary: her cruel racial prejudices or unsympathetic love for the slave? Perhaps she was dead much before Moses killed her. In that sense, the novel is the story of how she walks into her death and lives her death, minute by minute in the hot dry sun, till one (very significantly) rainy night, finally Moses relieves her– out of love or anger?
The theme of failure is also striking. Dick is the obvious perenniel loser who loses his crops and his life in front of him. But Mary, who blames him for is failures is a failure in herself. That she realizes her failure is evident in her pining for the city life, at the same time her refusal to meet her old friends. Hers is a pre-stated tragedy with no escape.
Sometimes, it is necessary to say here, I also felt the combination of like and dislike for the novel. But, overall, it has touched me. I started reading her Golden Notebook, but somewhow cannot proceed beyond a few pages despite the women theme.