Going Home - Doris May Lessing [62]
This was the only touch of realism in the book.
The book was particularly a lesson to me because its author, once a violent and uncompromising Nationalist, is now a supporter of Capricorn and of Moral Rearmament.
These fantasies of mine, if unchecked, will lead me straight into the role of the Useful Rebel.
But it is intolerable never to be able to know, from the inside, the life of the people of one’s own country…It is three in the morning; everything silent, everyone asleep: the only people allowed by the Government to live in such a way that there is no unpleasant strain between white and black are the missionaries. But unfortunately I have not the benefits of religion. Supposing I became a missionary, would I then be permitted…
Enough now, it is time you went back to England and sanity! Four in the morning: what a pity I have had my sound political education. If I didn’t understand these matters, I wouldn’t know how the patient gets worse before he gets better; I wouldn’t always be croaking like Cassandra and finding my most unpleasant prophecies coming true; I could be a happy member of the interracial society, or a pleasant Capricornite.
Once a painter said to me that when his picture went wrong and he didn’t know what was wrong with it, he used to creep out of bed in the middle of the night, go to his studio, and very quickly and suddenly throw on the lights—so that he could catch sight of his picture before it could see him.
Well, I wish I could switch on a new light so that I could see me before I saw myself.
I am bored with my own contradictions. If, as a Marxist, I say certain kinds of people are bound to behave in a certain kind of way, according to the type of society they live in, or what part of that society they are, then there should be nothing emotional about this; it is certainly no theme for moral indignation. One can and should be morally indignant about the form of society, but not about the behaviour of the people in it. Yet these comfort-loving, pleasure-satiated white settlers make me angry and disgusted. And the way the Africans are forced to live makes me angry and miserable because of the waste and the stupidity of it.
But I don’t approve of any of these emotions.
If only, just for half an hour, I could be fitted into a black skin, to see what the world looked like from there. Quite different. Everything different? Lord, how many centuries before all this colour nonsense dies away…Five in the morning. I get to sleep, and immediately dream of the Garden of Eden like a Blake engraving with the Undying Worm, looking sly and mean and satirical, offering me a large apple marked: Communism, or the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
I have now been sent six novels by Africans. None of them was good enough to be published. But they all had the vitality and freshness of language of people who still use natural imagery in ordinary speech, and translate these images direct into English.
It was not the writing which was poor; at best it had a Shakespearean vigour and country directness. But the construction was bad.
In each of these novels the action ceased for several pages at a time, while this kind of talk went on:
[Two men are sitting at the hut-door at evening.]
‘How, then, can we Africans advance while the Land Apportionment Act still applies? Consider, my friend, the Land Apportionment Act as just amended by our Legislative Assembly. It is a wicked blow to African hopes and aspirations.’
‘And consider, too, the Native Pass Laws. Until they are revoked, there will never be freedom of movement in our country.’
‘And do not let us forget the Destocking Act, which makes the hearts of our rural Africans heavy indeed.’
‘And then, my good friend, there