Doris Lessing's trysts with communism, feminism and Sufism
Tuesday, 23 October 2007
Maswood Alam Khan
DORIS Lessing has shown to the world the convenience of searching the truth concealed in nature by her gifted education instead of wasting time digesting texts in schools. Energy and time she invested of her own free will since her young life in comprehending tomes of Dickens, Scott, Stevenson or Kipling could have earned her many certificates that she could nicely laminate to treasure in a showcase if she instead did invest under compulsion the same in schools and universities, but would have missed her bijou moments to write "The Grass Is Singing" or "The Golden Note Book" or dozens of other volumes that has crowned her with this year's Nobel Prize in literature.
God does not endow anybody or every graduate with a gift of power to converse with nature and then weave the dialogues in the literary or scientific equivalence of a garland. A handful of gifted geniuses---Bengali Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore is one of them---stepped on this earth to leave behind their immense contributions in the fields of science, art and literature. Gifted students ironically are often frustrated with the 'education as usual' systems, which, while it may suit the majority of students, do not suit their needs. Doris is one of those talented prodigies who found committing passages of textbooks to memory shelves and vomiting those words in exam halls a caricature of an idiot storing his/her mind with a million facts and still remaining entirely uneducated.
At 13 was the end of her trialing with formal education and at 15 she left her home to elope with nature. Her childhood was an uneven mix of some pleasures and much more pains. A self-educated intellectual Doris did not need fancy highbrow traditions or money to really learn. Her labour pains in giving birth to literary flowers and fruits started when as a child she first saw and heard the pains and groans of her crippled father, who lost his one leg in World War I, trying in vain to make fortunes through maize farming and her ambitious mother fruitlessly trying to reproduce an Edwardian lifestyle in the midst of Rhodesians (now Zimbabweans). Lessing's soul always looked for chances to escape from dilemmatic torments of life she witnessed inside her home into an imaginary world that she ardently fancied outside.
The only runaway from an otherwise miserable existence during her childhood she could explore was in the world of nature. Her insatiate childhood seems to have prodded her to satiate her adulthood thirst and hunger through writing "The Grass Is Singing", her first fiction the manuscript of which she carried along with her youngest son as she left Rhodesia for England to begin her career as a professional writer leaving behind bitter memories of her two failed marriages and two children from her first marriage.
Materials that fueled Lessing's emotion to read maps of nature and shapes of human mind emanated from her childhood memories and later from her encounters with politics, duality of cultures, inequality of races and the struggle within an individual's own personality to find the truth in the forest of falsities. She was declared a prohibited alien in Southern Rhodesia and South Africa as she exposed the brutality of the whites over the blacks and the sterility of artificial white culture in the pristine nature of southern Africa.
The most talked about works of Doris Lessing are referred to as 'The Grass Is Singing' and 'The Golden Notebook', the two fictions she wrote with her restless intellect in no-nonsense language based on her bumptious experiences in Africa, Europe and America. 'The Grass Is Singing' is her first novel published in 1950 that dealt with racial politics between whites and blacks, a dreary and horrifying tale of a failed marriage, a feverish neurosis of white sexuality and fear of black influence---a novel with depth and maturity of a psychological study.
'The Golden Notebook', published in 1962, is a daring narrative experiment in which the multiple selves of a contemporary woman are rendered in astonishing depth and detail---a novel with fecundity of ideas and insights. But on the contrary, whenever, however, she was asked to name her best works Doris Lessing would always point at her science fictions which though were not much appreciated by the reviewers in the press or the readers in the library.
A prolific writer Lessing once described writing as a kind of 'wool-gathering' -- a slow, tedious and difficult process. Still she could manage to raise a child alone, be so involved with politics and still find time to write. Her involvement though with politics was perfunctory. She attended not more than 10 meetings as a member of the communist party writers' group in Rhodesia. Lessing believes that she was freer than most people because she became a writer.
Readers of Lessing became her followers largely because of her odysseys in inner space of human mind and outer space of the cosmos and her commitment to major issues, such as communism, feminism and Sufism. In her struggle to prove or disprove existentialism she continued writing one fiction after another constructing characters acquiescent with ephemeral matters, pleasures and pains of life as if she were tirelessly climbing a tall flight of stairs with books considered her steppingstones in quest of a truth fleeting and missing for ages before her arrival at the theatre of this planet.
Not before reflecting her interests on Sufi mysticism could she climb high enough to tryst with the truth of spirituality. Her science fiction in series probing higher planes of existence (Canopus in Argos: Archives, 1979-1983) was greatly influenced by the Muslim scholar Idries Shah whose writings on mysticism stress the evolution of consciousness and the belief that individual liberation comes about only if people understand the link between their own fates and the fate of the society. Sufism's universality in source, scope and relevance persuaded Doris Lessing to ornament her writings with sequins of Sufism.
Lessing viewed her space-fiction series of Canopus as a platform where she extrapolated fates of the living from the fate of cosmic evolution---raising humankind to a higher plane of existence-which is a basic tenet of Sufi philosophy, the latest of three major influences on her thinking. The first was communism that lasted from 1944 till 1956, the second was feminism that began in 1950s and lasted through the 1960s when she turned to Sufism. Most readers, however, felt dismayed at the sudden veering of the writer from her steadfast position as an archeologist of human relations to the smog of mystification. She was dubbed an African writer, a Communist writer, a feminist writer, a psychological writer, a science-fiction writer and lastly a mystic writer. Her pilgrimage progressed from Communism to Sufism covering three continents and a world war.
The Swedish Academy, while announcing the 10 million Swedish Krona (US$ 1.54million) Nobel Prize for literature, termed this year's recipient Doris Lessing as an "epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny."
Lessing, to be 88 on October 22, is the oldest person to win Nobel Prize for literature and the 34th female laureate since Nobel Prize was introduced in 1901. Though British by heredity she could be introduced as an Iranian baby, a Rhodesian adult and a British poet as she was born and spent her childhood till she was five in the Iranian city of Kermanshah, was raised in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) till she was 15 and had since her literary talent flourished in the United Kingdom till today. According to the statutes of Nobel Foundation framed in strict compliance of what was mentioned in the will Alfred Nobel wrote in 1895, the Swedish Academy had chosen Doris Lessing from among hundreds of candidates nominated by thousands of registered nominators all over the world -- nominators like members of academics, university professors, writers and poets from numerous countries, previous Nobel Laureates, members of parliamentary assemblies and others.
Anybody from anywhere in the world did cast votes -- through SMS or E-mails -- to make Nolak the best (or the most popular) 2006 singer in Bangladesh through Close-up One competition sponsored by NTV and also did put weights of votes on Time magazine's Editorial Board to choose their 'Person' of the yester century. But Tom, Dick or Harry like you and me cannot voice to the Swedish Academy our supports or recommendations for a writer who touched our souls by his/her writings composed in our own mother tongue and styled in our own lore and tradition.
Had Alfred Nobel had the slightest inkling on the possibility of a global referendum through instant messaging he would perhaps added a clause in his will to take into account a percentile weight for global opinion of the masses in addition to votes from think tanks of the world to decide for the best of the year and in that scenario we could perhaps find among the Nobel Laureates many other new faces from China or Bangladesh whose labour pains in giving birth to literary flowers and fruits were more excruciating than those withstood by Doris Lessing.
Nevertheless, we are looking forward to a Monday on December 10 of this year when Doris Lessing attired in her best evening gown will be receiving the Nobel Prize Medal, Diploma and Pay Order for US$ 1.54 million from His Majesty King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden and shaking hands with Her Majesty Queen Silvia reciprocating measured bows and smiles in regal style. We are also eager what message she would convey to us in her Nobel Lecture Lessing will have to deliver as a Nobel Laureate a day or two before the Award ceremony.
In the most coveted banquet following the Award ceremony, a rare partying arranged in the most splendid settings adorned with the best thinkable culinary protocols from flower arrangements to food, wine, dessert and divertissement -- everything minutely orchestrated to make the banquet unforgettable -- as Doris Lessing would be sipping soup or picking dessert her mind would be traveling back to a variety of panoramas that molded her pen to spill inks in composing parables of life and living that has earned her a space in the glittering world of the noblest.
Maybe at one poignant moment, during her exchanging pleasantries with a few known faces amid the murmuring of 1300 VIP guests who would be gathering in the banquet at the Blue Hall of the Stockholm City Hall, Doris will overhear a ventriloquial whisper reminding her a mystical advice: "Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much s/he has polished it", as quoted in 'The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi' by William C. Chittick.
The writer is General Manager, Bangladesh Krishi Bank and can be reached over e-mail: [email protected]
DORIS Lessing has shown to the world the convenience of searching the truth concealed in nature by her gifted education instead of wasting time digesting texts in schools. Energy and time she invested of her own free will since her young life in comprehending tomes of Dickens, Scott, Stevenson or Kipling could have earned her many certificates that she could nicely laminate to treasure in a showcase if she instead did invest under compulsion the same in schools and universities, but would have missed her bijou moments to write "The Grass Is Singing" or "The Golden Note Book" or dozens of other volumes that has crowned her with this year's Nobel Prize in literature.
God does not endow anybody or every graduate with a gift of power to converse with nature and then weave the dialogues in the literary or scientific equivalence of a garland. A handful of gifted geniuses---Bengali Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore is one of them---stepped on this earth to leave behind their immense contributions in the fields of science, art and literature. Gifted students ironically are often frustrated with the 'education as usual' systems, which, while it may suit the majority of students, do not suit their needs. Doris is one of those talented prodigies who found committing passages of textbooks to memory shelves and vomiting those words in exam halls a caricature of an idiot storing his/her mind with a million facts and still remaining entirely uneducated.
At 13 was the end of her trialing with formal education and at 15 she left her home to elope with nature. Her childhood was an uneven mix of some pleasures and much more pains. A self-educated intellectual Doris did not need fancy highbrow traditions or money to really learn. Her labour pains in giving birth to literary flowers and fruits started when as a child she first saw and heard the pains and groans of her crippled father, who lost his one leg in World War I, trying in vain to make fortunes through maize farming and her ambitious mother fruitlessly trying to reproduce an Edwardian lifestyle in the midst of Rhodesians (now Zimbabweans). Lessing's soul always looked for chances to escape from dilemmatic torments of life she witnessed inside her home into an imaginary world that she ardently fancied outside.
The only runaway from an otherwise miserable existence during her childhood she could explore was in the world of nature. Her insatiate childhood seems to have prodded her to satiate her adulthood thirst and hunger through writing "The Grass Is Singing", her first fiction the manuscript of which she carried along with her youngest son as she left Rhodesia for England to begin her career as a professional writer leaving behind bitter memories of her two failed marriages and two children from her first marriage.
Materials that fueled Lessing's emotion to read maps of nature and shapes of human mind emanated from her childhood memories and later from her encounters with politics, duality of cultures, inequality of races and the struggle within an individual's own personality to find the truth in the forest of falsities. She was declared a prohibited alien in Southern Rhodesia and South Africa as she exposed the brutality of the whites over the blacks and the sterility of artificial white culture in the pristine nature of southern Africa.
The most talked about works of Doris Lessing are referred to as 'The Grass Is Singing' and 'The Golden Notebook', the two fictions she wrote with her restless intellect in no-nonsense language based on her bumptious experiences in Africa, Europe and America. 'The Grass Is Singing' is her first novel published in 1950 that dealt with racial politics between whites and blacks, a dreary and horrifying tale of a failed marriage, a feverish neurosis of white sexuality and fear of black influence---a novel with depth and maturity of a psychological study.
'The Golden Notebook', published in 1962, is a daring narrative experiment in which the multiple selves of a contemporary woman are rendered in astonishing depth and detail---a novel with fecundity of ideas and insights. But on the contrary, whenever, however, she was asked to name her best works Doris Lessing would always point at her science fictions which though were not much appreciated by the reviewers in the press or the readers in the library.
A prolific writer Lessing once described writing as a kind of 'wool-gathering' -- a slow, tedious and difficult process. Still she could manage to raise a child alone, be so involved with politics and still find time to write. Her involvement though with politics was perfunctory. She attended not more than 10 meetings as a member of the communist party writers' group in Rhodesia. Lessing believes that she was freer than most people because she became a writer.
Readers of Lessing became her followers largely because of her odysseys in inner space of human mind and outer space of the cosmos and her commitment to major issues, such as communism, feminism and Sufism. In her struggle to prove or disprove existentialism she continued writing one fiction after another constructing characters acquiescent with ephemeral matters, pleasures and pains of life as if she were tirelessly climbing a tall flight of stairs with books considered her steppingstones in quest of a truth fleeting and missing for ages before her arrival at the theatre of this planet.
Not before reflecting her interests on Sufi mysticism could she climb high enough to tryst with the truth of spirituality. Her science fiction in series probing higher planes of existence (Canopus in Argos: Archives, 1979-1983) was greatly influenced by the Muslim scholar Idries Shah whose writings on mysticism stress the evolution of consciousness and the belief that individual liberation comes about only if people understand the link between their own fates and the fate of the society. Sufism's universality in source, scope and relevance persuaded Doris Lessing to ornament her writings with sequins of Sufism.
Lessing viewed her space-fiction series of Canopus as a platform where she extrapolated fates of the living from the fate of cosmic evolution---raising humankind to a higher plane of existence-which is a basic tenet of Sufi philosophy, the latest of three major influences on her thinking. The first was communism that lasted from 1944 till 1956, the second was feminism that began in 1950s and lasted through the 1960s when she turned to Sufism. Most readers, however, felt dismayed at the sudden veering of the writer from her steadfast position as an archeologist of human relations to the smog of mystification. She was dubbed an African writer, a Communist writer, a feminist writer, a psychological writer, a science-fiction writer and lastly a mystic writer. Her pilgrimage progressed from Communism to Sufism covering three continents and a world war.
The Swedish Academy, while announcing the 10 million Swedish Krona (US$ 1.54million) Nobel Prize for literature, termed this year's recipient Doris Lessing as an "epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny."
Lessing, to be 88 on October 22, is the oldest person to win Nobel Prize for literature and the 34th female laureate since Nobel Prize was introduced in 1901. Though British by heredity she could be introduced as an Iranian baby, a Rhodesian adult and a British poet as she was born and spent her childhood till she was five in the Iranian city of Kermanshah, was raised in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) till she was 15 and had since her literary talent flourished in the United Kingdom till today. According to the statutes of Nobel Foundation framed in strict compliance of what was mentioned in the will Alfred Nobel wrote in 1895, the Swedish Academy had chosen Doris Lessing from among hundreds of candidates nominated by thousands of registered nominators all over the world -- nominators like members of academics, university professors, writers and poets from numerous countries, previous Nobel Laureates, members of parliamentary assemblies and others.
Anybody from anywhere in the world did cast votes -- through SMS or E-mails -- to make Nolak the best (or the most popular) 2006 singer in Bangladesh through Close-up One competition sponsored by NTV and also did put weights of votes on Time magazine's Editorial Board to choose their 'Person' of the yester century. But Tom, Dick or Harry like you and me cannot voice to the Swedish Academy our supports or recommendations for a writer who touched our souls by his/her writings composed in our own mother tongue and styled in our own lore and tradition.
Had Alfred Nobel had the slightest inkling on the possibility of a global referendum through instant messaging he would perhaps added a clause in his will to take into account a percentile weight for global opinion of the masses in addition to votes from think tanks of the world to decide for the best of the year and in that scenario we could perhaps find among the Nobel Laureates many other new faces from China or Bangladesh whose labour pains in giving birth to literary flowers and fruits were more excruciating than those withstood by Doris Lessing.
Nevertheless, we are looking forward to a Monday on December 10 of this year when Doris Lessing attired in her best evening gown will be receiving the Nobel Prize Medal, Diploma and Pay Order for US$ 1.54 million from His Majesty King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden and shaking hands with Her Majesty Queen Silvia reciprocating measured bows and smiles in regal style. We are also eager what message she would convey to us in her Nobel Lecture Lessing will have to deliver as a Nobel Laureate a day or two before the Award ceremony.
In the most coveted banquet following the Award ceremony, a rare partying arranged in the most splendid settings adorned with the best thinkable culinary protocols from flower arrangements to food, wine, dessert and divertissement -- everything minutely orchestrated to make the banquet unforgettable -- as Doris Lessing would be sipping soup or picking dessert her mind would be traveling back to a variety of panoramas that molded her pen to spill inks in composing parables of life and living that has earned her a space in the glittering world of the noblest.
Maybe at one poignant moment, during her exchanging pleasantries with a few known faces amid the murmuring of 1300 VIP guests who would be gathering in the banquet at the Blue Hall of the Stockholm City Hall, Doris will overhear a ventriloquial whisper reminding her a mystical advice: "Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much s/he has polished it", as quoted in 'The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi' by William C. Chittick.
The writer is General Manager, Bangladesh Krishi Bank and can be reached over e-mail: [email protected]