Abstract:
Throughout her long career, Doris Lessing frequently wrote about Rhodesia or
Zimbabwe, often giving the country fictional names, including Anna Wulf’s Central
Africa in The Golden Notebook. Anna dismisses her account of the country as falsified
by nostalgia, but her Black Notebook contains energetic debates about what the
country would be like if blacks emerged victorious from an anti-colonial war. African
Laughter, her account of her visits to Zimbabwe in the 1980s and early 1990s, allows
Lessing to consider how accurately these debates anticipated what the country
became. Her narrative moves through delight at the new nation to disillusionment
with the opportunities that are being wasted. Disillusionment is also the dominant
mood of The Sweetest Dream, a novel partly set in the newly independent Zimlia,
and Zimbabwe is explicitly discussed in an influential article called ‘The Tragedy of
Zimbabwe’. In the 1990s Lessing wrote the two volumes of her autobiography, Under
My Skin and Walking in the Shade; several episodes of the Rhodesian section of the
first of these are re-worked in sketches in her final book, Alfred and Emily, part novella
and part memoir of a Rhodesia that her parents experienced as an extension of the
trauma of the First World War. In each of these different types of narrative Lessing
assumes a different subjective point of view, and there is no single objective account
of the country. Her narrative choices require that Lessing’s versions of Zimbabwe are
nearly always provisional.
