She is not black, and her work is not fashionable.

She remains however one of the foremost writers of her time, and with a life's passionate work on socialism, feminism, colonialism and race relations she is very close to the heart of this young black woman. Her book, the Golden Notebook has become something of a bible for feminism, one that will outlast her by many centuries even. Today however, I will write on what is for me her greatest work, ‘The Grass is Singing', especially because after a lifetime of crusading for the lowly and the downtrodden, the grass really is singing at her triumph in Stocklohm.

"The Grass is Singing" is a psychological and social analysis on race relations in the old Zimbabwe, and an exploration of the dichotomy of culture and nature.

Doris Lessing

It is perhaps most interesting where Lessing describes the lives and thinking of white colonists in Africa. In particular, its exploration of the idea that racism develops out of a need to justify the economic exploitation of the subjugated class. By this explanation, it is not that the coloniser oppresses the Africans because she hates them, but rather she hates them because she has to oppress them and shut her eyes to their human worth in order to sustain the order of things that grants the foreign interloper a standard of living in excess of what would be coming to her in her native Europe. Thus it is that any newcomers from the mother country must be indoctrinated into the proper manner of dealing with the natives and how best to keep from falling into sympathizing with their plight. In the same way, the white people who abuse this colour bar, and those who are themselves poor and lowly are doubly despised, as their station blurs the colour lines, reminding the oppressor of the truth she cannot know, the universal equality of women.

The main players in the story are the Turner family, Dick and Mary. Dick, has bought a large farm in the fertile soils of the Rhodesian outback, but he fails at making something of it, primarily because he is risk-averse and a poor manager of his resources. Although he is in perpetual debt and constantly threatened by bad harvests, he plods on stoically, finding fulfillment in his labour, and an intense attachment to his land. His missus on the other hand is very unhappy.

A native of the city, with training as a secretary and a familiarity with the fast clip and noisy vitality of city living, of the cinema and of social clubs; she only marries when she feels an obligation to do so from her friends' pressure. The confrontation with nature is not pleasant, and the stark reality of the tropical sun, the dark skins of the servants, the harsh demands of the bush, these all devastate her, and she hates it all passionately. It's too natural for the cultural her, and her unhappiness so overcomes her she is smothered by a profound melancholy that teeters on the edge of becoming a psychosis. It is in this way that we see the deterioration of Mary's spirit, as beset on all sides by the strictures of colonial life it falls apart completely.

On the way down with Mary, we see that the colonial world went against the very nature of men and that the preconceptions and attitudes come apart with the slightest disturbance, as they do when Mary's relationship with her servant goes terribly wrong. The harsher life on the farm is to her, the less reasonable and more unbalanced Mary becomes. Fully won over to the cruelty and deep injustice of the settler system, she whips a farm-worker, obtaining great pleasure out of her power. Later, when the same servant is employed as her houseboy, she is alternately terrified and fascinated by him. In the end,just as her husband gives up on farming and her cage door begins to open, their illicit relationship culminates in her murder at his hands for reasons the book does not quite make out.

A masterful work in the esoteric art of painting with words, Lessing's book describes a dramatic picture of life in the Rhodesian farmlands. She gives an urgent account of the values of the white farmers that is a very moving but removed depiction of the intricacies of race relations. It is the tale of the master-servant dichotomy of existence, which the world has experienced in all its history, between women and their men for example, but nowhere as profoundly and completely as in the confrontation between black Africa and the Western Europeans.