“Alone in a Landscape”: Lessing's African Stories Remembered

Abstract

In many colonial and post-colonial writers there is a dialectic between different forms of nostalgia that avoids the bad faith assumed by those (like Fredric Jameson) who denounce nostalgia as a de-historicizing trend. Doris Lessing, through her “African” work both fictional and non-fictional, offers a suitable example. From her first African Stories onwards, she suggests that her mythic Africa, the remembered Rhodesia of her childhood, is at once a place of pain and suffering, and yet also the source of something that transcends, as it helps put into perspective, the human condition. As Mara and Dann shows, a nostalgia for the future appears in her later work, as part of her sometimes fruitless search for ever new perspectives upon her past, evident in The Grass is Singing and the Martha Quest series, as it is in The Golden Notebook and, most effectively and poignantly, “The Old Chief Mshlanga”.