The story subtly captures the pangs of love and desire in the heart of the adolescent narrator towards William Mc Gregor, the neighbour’s son. In the story, The Flavours of Exile, the English family share the language of nostalgia and despite rich and luxuriant vegetables, always long for their inheritance of Brussels sprouts, cherries, English gooseberries, while the children enjoy the ‘inheritance of veld and sun’ (50). The recurring feature in Lessing’s fiction dealing with this period in her life is that of a young girl hovering between these two self-contained but related worlds. Somewhat solitary and in a manner tending towards what would in such a society be regarded as ‘tomboyish’, she grew up bound by her father’s farm and her mother’s house. The source of all her ‘African’ stories is found in her own experiences as a girl in southern Rhodesia. In order to maintain their separateness and their identity the whites generally carried their own cultural distinctiveness imposing it where it could be imposed and distancing themselves where it could not be. The “home” is thus alien and growing up here means deep cultural difference of being one and yet an outsider in the country they have adopted. Being a colonial means essentially that one is living in a strange land and this applies even when the family has lived for generations in a foreign country. But a country also belongs to those who feel at home in it (16)’’. As Lessing writes in Going Home, “Africa belongs to the Africans, the sooner they take it back the better. The different voices are not all written as ‘heard’ by their White ‘interlocutors’ and the multiple differences are also not erased by a generic otherness.
Thus, there is a strong dichotomy and ambiguity in her African short stories and in her non-fictional world. Lessing herself became a prohibited immigrant to Rhodesia, after 1956. The experience of the White Rhodesian, who came to settle in a culture foreign to his British tradition, raised and educated his family in the wilderness, created a productive agriculture for this land and saw the British motherland turn against her own progeny in the political economic feud over Rhodesian racial policy. The composite portrait has its own reality. It seems that the composite image of Doris Lessing is very different from the self-image which she presents in her autobiographical novels, even though the facts themselves often concur. There is no significant connection between the White and the Black worlds because of the restraints on a socially formed and positioned author, and the ‘objective narration’ of African culture is related to the writer’s refusal to violate its rhythms, meanings and mysteries. In Doris Lessing’s writing there is a detachment, marginality as she belongs to neither of these two worlds. Such multi-valences prompt both closure and fixity, making it available to other modes of oppression. As Benita Parry puts it ‘Negritude is not a recovery of pre-existent state, but textually invented history, an identity affected through figurative operations and a topological construction of blackness as a sign of the colonized condition and its refusal’ (45). The term “Black” at times deployed as a multi accented signifier of oppression and resistance has energized a discursive stance.
The notion of Africa also emerges as the homeland of dispersed population in search of solidarity and the construing of black identity as creolized and dislocated. For Lessing, there are two Africas – the continent which always belongs to the Africans, and the label or veneer which the White colonial has imposed upon it. ‘African identify’ is seen by her as the product of Europe’s gaze and returning its own anti-colonialist look.
The prevalence of colonialism in Africa is important to her, moulding her outlook towards people. Her fiction is tough, rational, concerned with social roles, collective action and conscience, and she is unconcerned with the niceties of style and subtlety of feeling for its own sake. Her Parents, her isolated and lonely childhood influenced not only the themes in her fiction but also shaped her as a fiction writer.ĭoris Lessing, whose position as one of the major women writers of the twentieth century is now assured, stands quite apart from the feminine tradition of sensibility. After the First World War, her father migrated to Africa and purchased three thousand acres of land to do farming. She was born to British parents, Alfred Taylor and Maud Me Veigh, in 1919. Doris Lessing spent her childhood and the first twenty five years of her life in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and her experiences there have been a powerful influence on her fiction.
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