The Fact of Whiteness: Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing – a Historian’s Notebook

In an oblique homage to Frantz Fanon, this article is a cultural historian’s reading of Doris Lessing’s famous 1950 novel, The Grass is Singing. I approach it as an engaging and sophisticated exploration of gendered racial whiteness, manifest in the settler colony of Southern Rhodesia towards the end of colonial rule. I suggest that central to Lessing’s novelistic project is a thinking through of how it might be possible to envisage ‘knowledge’ (truth) if it were to be freed from ‘race’. Arguably, the novel is a fictional embodiment of the thesis that the dismantling of racial whiteness provides the precondition for new thought to happen, both in an epistemological and ethical sense. Deliberately open-ended, and taking as its starting point Lessing’s narrative procedure in the opening pages, the article situates ‘knowledge’ in relation to the emotions and psychic life of characters. In opposition to the imperatives of instrumental reason, The Grass is Singing arguably champions an ethics of ‘principled unknowability’, in which the location of the unconscious is never far away, and the Manichaean certainties of colonial-era whiteness are revealed as pathologically overdetermined.