Home Fires: Doris Lessing, Colonial Architecture, and the Reproduction of Mothering

Abstract

In a 1980 interview, Doris Lessing speculated about effect the proportions of buildings have on the people who live in them, insisting, is not a metaphorical thought at all. This is a practical thought, which think about more and more.' The building most crucial to Lessing's own self-construction was the rickety old settler's farmhouse her family built and lived in for years in the Lomagundi district of Southem Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe). No house, Lessing writes, could ever have for me the intimate charm of that one.2 Since living there she has never settled down for long; as she notes in the memoir Going Home, I don't live anywhere; never have since left that first house on the kopje.3 That first house was simply a thatch-topped homestead, rapidly constructed in the local style, with linoleum laid over floors of dung, mud, and blood, and earthen walls in which homets would occasionally nest. From the day it was built, the house began to erode, and only attentive maintenance kept it from merging back into the bush that spawned it. As the child of settlers, Lessing's claim that the house in the Southem Rhodesian bush is her true home reveals a complex set of affiliations with a land the English occupied by force, a land that, in more than just a nominal sense, no longer exists. The transitory nature of Lessing's childhood home should not be taken as a measure of its influence or importance. Rather, it is emblematic of Southem Rhodesian settler culture and for the imperialist mentality that built it. Specifically, the house illuminates how boundary markers were deployed to police the doctrine of racial hierarchy and how notions of femininity and domesticity, seemingly marginal to colonization, actually undergirded the project of empire. In this essay, read the form, construction, and use of Lessing's childhood home as an architectural representation of colonial subjectivity in order to discuss the cross-hatched operations in the colonies of gender, race, and class that, as Anne McClintock has argued, come into existence in and through relation to each other-if in contradictory and conflictual ways.4