S C H O L A R LY A R T I C L E S

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CAJETAN IHEKA

Dispossession, Postcolonial
Ecocriticism, and Doris Lessing’s The
Grass is Singing

Introduction
The primary critique that postcolonial ecocritics leveled
against first-wave Anglo-American ecocriticism was that it neglected
the social dimensions of environmentalism in the effort to preserve na-
ture.1 This criticism rested on the assumption that the deep ecological
perspective ignored the conditions of humans especially people of
color in Western contexts as well as the inhabitants of postcolonial soci-
eties who are disadvantaged in the allocation of ecological risks. In
addressing this shortcoming of Anglo-American ecocriticism, postco-
lonial ecocritics have pointed to the lingering ecological implications of
colonialism and neocolonialism as well as the negative impacts of ex-
tractive industries and other vectors of globalization in the Global
South.2 While these “corrective” studies have articulated the socio-
environmental issues left out in the first wave of ecocriticism in com-
pelling ways, they have not sufficiently addressed the condition of the
more-than-human beings in the environment, even when the fact of
ecological entanglement implies their inextricability. Even in those sce-
narios where “nature” has emerged as the primary subject of analysis,
it is often the case that the histories of their social imbrications are
elided.
ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 25.4 (Autumn 2018), pp. 664–680
Advance Access publication October 4, 2018 doi:10.1093/isle/isy070
C The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the
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 The Grass is Singing 665

Take the example of Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing. Ecocritical

reading of the novel has foregrounded the distinction between the eco-
logical attitudes of Charlie Slatter and Dick. While the former symbol-
izes the human exploitation and commodification of nature as he
appreciates the land and other nonhuman aspects of the environment
only for their monetary or instrumental value, Dick “represents the al-
ternative ecocentric, deep ecological environmental philosophy,” that

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effectively counters Slatter’s anthropocentrism (Mutekwa and
Musanga 244). There is indeed much in the novel to support this binary
positioning of both characters and critics adroitly marshal these to but-
tress their claim. One of the goals of this essay is to complicate the bi-
nary categorization of Dick and Slatter by acknowledging that Dick’s
ecocentric disposition notwithstanding, his attitude toward his envi-
ronment has commonalities with Slatter’s exploitative posture.
Furthermore, this article offers a reflection on the implications of
rereading Dick’s ecological stewardship for a postcolonial ecocriticism.
I argue that Dick’s treatment of the Africans and his view of animals in
Lessing’s novel undermine his ecological virtues while bringing to fore
the colonial dispossession of black Africans of their land. My reading
models a form of critique focused on the intersections of human lives
and other components of the biosphere, as well as the inextricability of
human oppression from the exploitation of the larger environment. At
the same time, it reiterates the pitfalls of a limited environmentalism
that privileges, say, land conservation while neglecting human con-
cerns and interests of other ecological constituents.
My analysis is informed by a combination of recent critical interven-
tions in postcolonial ecocriticism, including Rob Nixon’s, as well as
Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin’s scholarship on the postcolonial
pastoral, Byron Caminero-Santangelo’s writings on conservation dis-
courses in Southern Africa, and Karen Thornber’s work on ecoambigu-
ity. Nixon defines the postcolonial pastoral as “writing that refracts an
idealized nature through memories of environmental and cultural deg-
radation in the colonies.” For Nixon, “postcolonial pastoral can be
loosely viewed as a kind of environmental double consciousness”
(245). At stake in Nixon’s postcolonial pastoral, of which V.S Naipaul’s
autobiographical novel, Enigma of Arrival, is an example, is the inser-
tion of colonial histories of dispossession into the otherwise tranquil
space of order, leisure, and green aesthetics. Thus, for Nixon, Naipaul’s
novel insists that the scenic manor garden in Wiltshire, England cannot
be divorced from the wealth and welt built on the back of slaves in the
Caribbean sugar plantation. Given postcolonial pastoral’s tendency to
disrupt or queer the tranquility of the European pastoral, it is no
wonder that Huggan and Tiffin employ “counter-pastoral” and
666 I S L E

“anti-pastoral” to capture its subversive nature in the postcolonial nar-

ratives they analyze. The deconstructive sensibility of the postcolonial
pastoral allows it to interrogate questions of ownership and disposses-
sion. It “affords a useful opportunity,” as Huggan and Tiffin put it, “to
open up the tension between ownership and belonging in a variety of
colonial and postcolonial contexts: contexts marked, for the most part,
by a direct or indirect engagement with often devastating experiences

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of dispossession and loss” (85).
I should state from the outset that Lessing’s novel is not a postcolo-
nial pastoral text per se. In fact, despite the text’s antiracism and cri-
tique of the hypocrisy undergirding white settler colonial ideology, it
retains certain colonial stereotypes of its own, many of which bothers
on the appropriation of colonial discourse in the representation of the
African bush. Critics have pointed to the negative, stereotypical por-
trayal of the bush as a place of darkness, an emblematic sign of the
dark continent.3 The fact that Mary’s disintegration is linked to
the pressures of the environment and the fact that she has to die in the
hands of the black native of the bush support the position of critics that
Lessing’s novel retains certain colonial tropes in its representation of
Southern Rhodesia.
It is possible to include its investment in colonial conservation dis-
course as an additional layer of evidence testifying to the failure of
Lessing’s novel to transcend the limits of colonial ideology. In his
work on conservation discourse, Caminero-Santangelo opines that the
“practice of conservation in Africa has often been underpinned by
ideas about a pristine nature that is threatened by indigenous environ-
mental practice and in need of protection by those from the West with
proper environmental sensibility” (13). By eliding the subjectivities of
the Africans, including their complex environmental practices, and po-
sitioning a white settler (Dick) as the epicenter of positive, transforma-
tive environmental praxis, Lessing endorses the idea of Europeans as
repository of ecological stewardship. As I show in further detail later in
the essay, this positioning of Dick as ecological custodian elides the
colonial history of land dispossession that makes it possible for him to
acquire land in the region.
Although Lessing’s narrative does little to situate the colonial his-
tory of Southern Rhodesia in its story of land ownership and agricul-
tural land use, the postcolonial pastoral’s deconstructive character
makes it a useful tool to highlight the history of dispossession that
makes possible Dick’s ownership of land, and to critically examine his
attitude toward his environment. While the novel title, depicting the
singing grass, is indicative of a pastoral vision of a Southern African
environment where man (Dick) and the earth (his farm) are in
 The Grass is Singing 667

harmonious communion as Mutekwa and Musanga contend, the ques-

tion of ownership and belonging at the heart of the postcolonial rendi-
tion of the pastoral interrupts the canonization of Dick as ecologist par
excellence. In fact, as I demonstrate here, if the history of colonial dis-
possession in Southern Africa is brought into play, it becomes apparent
that Dick’s treatment of people around him and the surrounding non-
human presences undermines his identity as a positive environmental

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steward.
The grounds on which to fault Dick’s ecological credential include
not only his mistreatment of the Africans who owned the land before
they were forcefully removed by the Europeans; paying careful atten-
tion to his treatment of animals in the novel also raises doubts about
his ecological proclivity. Therefore, it is more appropriate to consider
Dick as an ecoambigious character, following Karen Thornber’s work
on ecoambiguity. Thornber explains the concept as the “complex, con-
tradictory interactions between people and environments with a signif-
icant human presence” (1). Elucidating the forms that ecoambiguity
takes, Thornber writes that:
Environmental ambiguity manifests in multiple, inter-
twined ways, including ambivalent attitudes toward na-
ture; confusion about the actual condition of the
nonhuman, often a consequence of ambiguous informa-
tion; contradictory human behaviors toward ecosys-
tems; and discrepancies among attitudes, conditions,
and behaviors that lead to actively downplaying and
acquiescing to nonhuman degradation, as well as to in-
advertently harming the very environments one is
attempting to protect. (6)
Thornber’s concept is profoundly useful for this study insofar as it
names the gap between ecological tenets and the ethical and political
ambiguity that obtains when these tenets become action. In other
words, ecoambiguity describes the shift from what Timothy Morton
calls “ecological thought” to action.4 While Morton insists on the inter-
connections of beings and the equality of the ecological components,
Thornber’s work points to the contradictions that characterize the pro-
cess of putting such ecological ideas into practice. Thornber’s richly
textured work includes copious examples from East Asian literature to
illustrate her notion of ecological ambivalence.
In her reading of Ishimure’s Sea of Suffering, for instance, Thornber
indicates how “on the one hand, the narrator and most Minamata
patients idealize symbiotic, mutually beneficial contacts between peo-
ple and environments” (110). However, Thornber also points to the
668 I S L E

belief of these people that the environment exists for their benefit and
for intergenerational transfer to their offspring (110). As this example
indicates, there is a tension between an ideal, non-exploitative concep-
tion of human relation with the nonhuman, and actual praxis which of-
ten lapses into instrumental or utilitarian purposes. Dick’s character
plays out this tension as he vacillates between nurturing the earth and

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commodifying animals, and as he moves from condemning the abuses
his wife metes out to the African servants to inscribing other forms of
violence on their black bodies.

Versions of Human–Nonhuman Relations in Lessing’s

Novel
Lessing’s The Grass is Singing explores the color bar experience in
Southern Rhodesia (present day Zimbabwe). The novel begins with a
newspaper entry detailing the murder of a white woman, Mary
Turner, by her black servant, Moses. The police and the white settler
community are reluctant to investigate the murder since they would
like to uphold the stereotypical view of Africans as thieves and violent
as the cause of the tragedy. Although there is a sexual undertone to
Mary’s death, the fact that the inter-racial intimacy at the heart of the
tragedy threatens the racial, colonial hierarchy means that the intimacy
is left unarticulated. Unsurprisingly, the police investigation reaches
the expected conclusion: Black, violent Moses attacks his white boss,
steals her jewelry, and ultimately kills her.
Before Mary’s demise in the hands of Moses, she demonstrates a
palpable dislike for the human and nonhuman aspects of her environ-
ment, a disdain that critics submit is crucial for understanding her
breakdown in the novel. Edith Frampton, for instance, has explored
Mary’s revulsion at the Africans (nursing mothers in particular). She
writes that “Lessing’s first novel is thus a complex exploration of multi-
ple, interrelated and psychological boundaries, as these are anxiously
enforced and progressively transgressed” (23). To establish her case,
Frampton engages with Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject to read
Mary’s horrors as she confronts the black body. Exploring further the
context of Mary’s illness, Roberta Rubenstein claims that although
“Mary Turner’s breakdown is an essentially private one, the novel as a
whole provides the corresponding societal context within which it
takes place, through its dramatization of the dehumanization imposed
on both races by the color bar” (31). Frampton’s and Rubenstein’s anal-
yses show Mary’s disdain for the Africans and how her hatred serves
as a contributory factor to her ailment. Other critics have also pointed
to the bush/nonhuman environment as the corollary of the black body
 The Grass is Singing 669

in instigating her psychological breakdown. Mary Whittaker, for ex-

ample, argues that “[t]he bush symbolizes, like Moses, the wild, uncul-
tivated side of her nature, and she is frightened by it” (27). Similarly,
for Eve Berterlsen, “Lessing gives us her own version of ‘savage nature’
in a typically paradoxical natural and African context with its full rep-
ertoire of regression, savagery, and derangement, and alternating com-

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mendation and awe, revulsion, and fear” (650).
Taken together, these critics confirm what could be described as
Mary’s “ecophobia,” to use Simon Estok’s term for an aversion for and
fear of the natural environment. They also foreground the ecophobic
dimension of the narrative when they locate the framing of the novel’s
environment, and Mary’s breakdown within the context of the colonial
understanding of Africa as a site of wild nature to be exploited and
tamed. Mary has no connection to her environment. The human and
nonhuman aspects of her environment frighten her. Or rather, her
white colonialist subject position is predicated on the abjection of the
blacks and the surrounding environment.
Charles Slatter, on the other hand, may not hate his environment
like Mary did. Yet he does not care for it either, treating the land as
merely substance for mercantile speculation and exploitation. Charlie’s
capitalist inclination explains why Mutekwa and Musanga argue that
“environmentally exploitative discourses are represented by the ‘big
man’ (Slatter), whereas the environmentally friendly ones are repre-
sented by the ‘small man’ (Turner)” (244). The critics are correct that
Charles Slatter’s “ecological philosophy is in tandem with the domi-
nant Western world view and so it is quintessentially anthropocentric
and instrumentalist” (243). Charlie’s capitalist orientation engenders
environmental degradation in clear, unambiguous ways. He has over-
used his land for tobacco farming and leases some plots for mining.
These destructive activities damage the environment but there is no at-
tention to the degradation by Charlie. Instead, he cuts down the
remaining trees and sells them as firewood. In all these, he wonders
why Dick is tending his farm differently and hopes to buy the land in
the future. When Dick’s wife turns down Mrs. Slatter’s invitation to
dinner, the narrator presents Charlie saying,
Leave her, [. . .] ‘She’ll come off her high horse. Got ideas
into her head, that’s what’s wrong with her. She’ll come
to her senses. Not that she’s much loss. The pair of them
need some sense shaken into them. Turner is in for trou-
ble. He is so up in the air that he doesn’t even burn fire-
guards! And he is planting trees. Trees! He is wasting
money planting trees while he is in debt. (98)
670 I S L E

Charlie’s outburst reveals an angry tone but what is of utmost interest

is his condemnation of Turner for planting trees, therefore discounting
their ecological value for animals, soil, water bodies, and even humans.
Charlie’s capitalist bent restricts his views to profit making in the short
term. As such, the reader is not surprised that he does not fertilize the
land. In fact, he sells his remaining trees as firewood.
Moreover, he seriously discourages Dick from planting trees and

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caring for the land:
Mr Slatter’s farm had hardly any trees on it. It was a
monument to farming malpractice, with great gullies
cutting through it, and acres of good dark earth gone
dead from misuse. But he made the money, that was the
thing. It enraged him to think it was so easy to make
money, and that damned fool Dick Turner played the
fool with trees . . . . He spent three hours trying to per-
suade Dick to plant Tobacco, instead of millies and little
crops. He was very sarcastic about those “little crops,”
the beans and cotton and sunhemp that Dick liked. (98)
Since deforestation precipitates flooding and erosion, the gullies on
Charlie’s farm are quite understandable. The passage underscores his
capitalist orientation when the narrator states: “But he made the
money, that was the thing.” The novel names here what is responsible
for Charlie’s inattention to his farm’s health and shows the impact of
unchecked capitalism on environmental sustainability. He pressures
Dick to plant tobacco, a cash crop destructive to the environment.
When Dick’s crops fail, Charlie covets his farm, “[h]e needed Dick’s
farm badly, because the farms that bounded his on the other sides were
taken up. He knew exactly what he wanted to do with it. He had a hun-
dred acres of that wonderful dark soil; and it was not played out, be-
cause he had looked after it” (211). It is remarkable that Charlie is
interested in “wonderful dark soil,” brought about by Dick’s care for
the land; yet he does not practice similar care on his farm. The reader is
convinced by his actions that he will put Dick’s well-cared-for land to
similar unsustainable use if he acquires it.
It is Dick’s judicious care for the land that motivates Mutekwa and
Musanga to classify him as a counterpoint to Charlie. Of course, there
is merit to that labeling. Dick plants trees and undertakes other
environmentally-friendly acts for which Charlie despises him. He is
also reluctant to plant tobacco because of the crop’s harsh effects on the
soil. Charlie’s offer to buy Dick’s failing farm should be irresistible
given his financial woes, but he is reluctant to leave because of his
attachment to the plants he knows by name. As the narrator states,
 The Grass is Singing 671

“[h]e knew every tree on it. This is no figure of speech: he knew the
veld he lived from as the natives know it. His was not the sentimental
love of the townsman. His senses had been sharpened to the noise of
the wind, the song of the birds, the feel of the soil, changes in
weather—but they had been dulled to everything else” (154). On face
value, Dick’s attachment to his farm demonstrates a remarkable envi-
ronmental stewardship. His knowledge of “every tree” confers indi-

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viduality on them. Dick’s differentiation of the trees personifies them
and confers an intrinsic worth different from the financial value
Charlie would ordinarily ascribe to them. Moreover, Dick does not per-
ceive his environment as inert. The narrative voice suggests that he rec-
ognizes the vitality of the wind and birds by using words such as
“noise” and “song” to underscore their aliveness and being in the
world.
The moment that best explains the characterization of Dick as an-
tithesis to Charlie is when the narrator provides a history of the for-
mer’s farm:
Years before he bought the farm, some mining company
had cut out every tree on the place, leaving nothing but
coarse scrub and wastes of grass. The trees were grow-
ing up again, but over the whole there was nothing to be
seen but stunted second growth: short, ugly trees from
mutilated trunks. There wasn’t a good tree left on the
farm. It wasn’t much, planting a hundred acres of good
trees that would grow into straight white-stemmed
giants; but it was a small retribution; and this was his fa-
vorite place on the farm. When he was particularly wor-
ried, or had quarreled with Mary, or wanted to think
clearly, he stood and looked at his trees; or strolled
down the long aisles between light swaying branches
that glittered with small polished leaves like coins.
(105–6)
In this passage, the farm’s past life had been in the hands of miners,
who turned it into a space of “fallen trees,” with “coarse scrub and
wastes of grass.” This ugly sight of decay is transformed by Dick and
the place becomes inhabited by “trees,” and “long aisles between light
swaying branches.” In fact, the romantic nature of this space is but-
tressed by the fact that it is Dick’s escape. It is a place free of his wife’s
troubles and a space for healing.
Although the humble Dick considers the transformation a “small ret-
ribution” for the enormous atrocities committed against the land by the
mining company, his actions here remain consistent with what Byron
672 I S L E

Caminero-Santangelo has described as a “romantic conservationist

ethic” (79). One colonial rationale for depriving Southern Africans of
their land and restricting their access to their rich natural heritage was
that they were destroyers of the environment. Dick is presented as a
repairer here, with a mission to return the environment to its healthy,
natural state. Caminero-Santangelo’s observation that colonial conserva-
tion policies were designed to align with the racist and economic

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ideologies of the colonists is relevant for understanding Dick’s transfor-
mation of the land (82). What is not explicitly mentioned in the excerpt is
that Dick’s “care” for the land or his reparative gesture is for his benefit
as a farmer rather than an altruistic act as the passage seems to portray it.
Moreover, Lessing’s narrative articulates a pastoral vision in the
passage above by treating the space as one devoid of earthly worries,
symbolized by Mary and the mining company, as well as the erasure of
the black labor that worked the land. In emphasizing its romantic
attributes, “the hundred acres of good trees,” and “the long aisles be-
tween light swaying branches that glittered with small polished leaves
like coins,” the text inoculates this space against worldly concerns. Tree
planting is supposed to excise the ghost of the mining operations but it
also provides this beautiful, glittery environment that is insulated from
worldly worries. We are returned to a pastoral scene, one which as
Nixon explains it is “where neither labor nor violence intrudes” (245).
However, this pastoral vision can only last for as long as we stick to the
perspective of Lessing’s narrator. If we veer from the narrator’s lead
and allow both labor and violence to intrude, we arrive at a different
picture altogether, one that is aligned with the tenets of the postcolonial
pastoral’s tendency to disrupt an idyll. If the British pastoral excises the
ghost of colonialism and its American counterpart is mute about the
decimated indigenous population, Lessing’s narrator’s historical ren-
dering of the farm’s history is similarly myopic.
Specifically, the narrator’s description foreshortens the farm’s his-
tory to its occupation by mining companies, which raises a question as
to the land’s status before then. Dick’s notion of “small retribution”
above also makes the reader wonder if the passage also implies an
atonement for the manner in which settlers, including the mining com-
panies, acquired land in Southern Rhodesia. Demonized as destroyers
of the environment in colonial conservation discourse, the Africans
were forcibly removed from their lands, enclosed in reserves, and
forced “into the capitalist economies of the mines and white
agriculture” (Nixon 189–90). Dick’s atonement for the mining opera-
tion could extend to the violence against the African owners of the
land. Discounted in the history of the farm are the indigenous people
who labored and toiled on the land before the mining companies and
 The Grass is Singing 673

the settlers arrived. Also discounted is the labor of the black workers
who planted the trees that the narrative voice attributes to Dick.
Throughout the novel, we are exposed to the labor that Dick and his
wife extract from black bodies who toil for them. Interestingly, the nar-
rator is not specific about who planted the trees although that voice
makes sure to inform the reader that they were “his [Dick’s] trees.”
These black Africans, destroyers of the environment, whose labor is al-

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ways supervised by Dick or his wife when he falls sick, are written off
so that Dick’s pastoral vision, his communion with nature, as well as
his environmental stewardship can be upheld.
Furthermore, Dick’s racism against the Africans and his involve-
ment in animal trade problematize his supposedly sound environmen-
tal practices even as they show further proof of the self-serving
dimension of his environmental practices. Mary’s husband considers
the blacks, an essential aspect of this African environment, as savages,
useful for their instrumental value alone. In his reaction to Mary’s exas-
peration with the servant, he notes: “If you want to get work out of
them you have to know how to manage them. You shouldn’t expect
too much. They are nothing but savages after all” (95). Later in the
novel, the narrator informs us that: “Like most South Africans, Dick
did not like mission boys, they ‘knew too much.’ And in any case they
should not be taught to read and write: they should be taught the dig-
nity of labour and general usefulness to the white man” (191). Dick’s
position highlights that he is a product of his time, a proponent of the
constructed idea of savages deployed to justify European superiority,
as Valentin Mudimbe has shown in The Invention of Africa. The notion
of savages would qualify as a form of “Africanism,” Mudimbe’s term
for those discourses constructed to undermine the humanity of
Africans and to facilitate the project of imperialism (9).
Importantly, the narrator’s phrase, “like most South Africans,”
brings Dick closer to Charlie and the majority of whites who value
blacks for their “usefulness.” There is a recognizable parallel between
Charlie’s instrumentalization of the land as money-making machine,
and Dick’s view of the Africans as beasts of burden. While Dick exhibits
care for his farm and seems to manage his servants better than his wife
did, he is unable to transcend his racism against the indigenous people.
His racism ignores the status of the blacks as rightful owners of the
land on which they now toil for him and the other white settlers. Put
another way, an account of the novel’s ecological dynamics needs to
consider the dispossession of the indigenous people of their land.
In fact, Huggan and Tiffin’s point that there can be no pastoral with-
out politics is relevant here as it allows us to raise a host of questions,
including: how did Dick and the other white men become landowners
674 I S L E

in Southern Africa? (121). How did the black people become squatters
and vagrants on their own land? In what way(s) is Dick complicit in
this history of dispossession? Lessing’s narrative is not explicit about
the history of dispossession in Southern Rhodesia but nevertheless pro-
vides clues that complicate the treatment of Dick as an ecological ar-
chetype. One clue appears early in the novel as the community
ruminates over Mary’s death. Reflecting on the tragedy, Tony Marston,

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who arrived in the community just before Mary’s demise notes that
“the causes of the murder must be looked for a long way back” (33).
Like the history of the farm discussed above, Marston’s “long way
back” encompasses the interruption of the history of Southern Africa
with the arrival of the Europeans, the brutalities they committed against
the indigenous population, their displacement from the land, as well as
their transformation into servants. Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s work on
the 1896–1897 uprisings waged by the indigenous Africans against the
British South African Company in Southern Rhodesia has shown that
the “colonizers not only violently conquered the indigenous black peo-
ple, but also dispossessed them of land and denied them citizenship
rights, ruling over them as ‘rightless’ subjects” (8). Waged against the
occupation of their land, the liberation war was ultimately put down by
British forces who paved the way for the settlement of the Europeans
and the brutal eviction of the indigenous population.5
Layered into this dark history of Southern Rhodesia is a narrative of
violence that Dick (despite his benevolence) and Mary perpetuate.
When Mary flogs Moses with a whip for stopping work to drink water,
she is subscribing to the notion that Africans are lazy and need coercion
to work. She is also tapping into a larger colonial script that legitimizes
her and Dick as owners of the land and masters, a way of seeing that
normalizes the fact that Moses, a descendant of the black indigenous
population, works as a servant for settlers in his own country. The
stated colonial violence may have happened “a long way back,” but its
reverberation is the governing trope of Mary’s encounter with Moses.
To fully understand Mary’s death, therefore, is to consider the longue
duree of black oppression predicated on many levels of dispossession.
It is noteworthy that Mary’s first encounter with Moses is on the farm,
on the land, where they re-enact the violent struggle of their ancestors,
a struggle from which Mary’s forebears succeeded in dispossessing
Moses’s progenitors of the land and turning them into servants.
Although he did not physically abuse the Africans like his wife did
Moses, Dick’s environmentalism is nonetheless contaminated by his
attitude toward the Africans he calls “fools,” “old swine,” and other
derogatory racist epithets. Postcolonial ecocritics have written of the
animalization of the colonized as a strategy of upholding the
 The Grass is Singing 675

superiority of the colonizer and justifying the civilizing mission of the

colonial enterprise. Dick’s name-calling is understandable within the
same racist colonial ideology. As Huggan and Tiffin explain it, “the his-
tory of human oppression of other humans is replete with instances of
animal metaphors and animal categorizations frequently deployed to
justify exploitation and objectification, slaughter and enslavement”
(134–135). In equating the “brutish” humans with animals, Dick places

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them in a subordinate position and makes it possible to conclude that
his contempt for the Africans offers an expose on his view of animals.
The animalization of the indigenous human population illuminates
Dick’s contemptuous impression of animals who are clearly considered
beneath him. Dick may dote on his farm but his relation to other com-
ponents of his ecosystem provides a different story, a story of commod-
ification. While he accuses his wife of apprehending the land as a
money making machine, his view of the indigenous people and ani-
mals is predicated on their instrumental value. We learn, for instance,
that he hires Africans conscripted by force to work for a pittance.
Furthermore, although he quarrels with his wife over her treatment of
the black workers, it is not because he recognizes his kinship with
them, the need for fellow feeling, or empathy owed to another human.
Rather, Dick is particularly concerned that his wife’s mean reputation
will make it difficult to attract labor to his farm.
If his relationship with the Africans—the “old swine”—is largely
contingent on their instrumental value, it is not surprising that Dick’s
treatment of nonhuman animals is consistent with the commodifica-
tion of animal bodies that Allison Caruth and other critics have cri-
tiqued in their study of human–animal relations in postcolonial
literature.6 Dick learns of the profitability of pigs and rabbits and
decides to diversify his business to include trade in livestock. He does
not think of the animals as other life forms worthy of respect. Like the
other farmers, he commodifies the animals and can only imagine the
profits to be made from their sale. In this scenario, “nature appears in
the commodity form as the product of labor,” as Michelle Yates puts it
in another context (529). By emphasizing the commodity value of the
animals and his labors at raising them, Dick discounts the suffering of
the caged animals and their impending death after he sells them. He
cannot “imagine” their “bodies in terms of” his, as Caruth proposes we
do in a reading of Coetzee’s work on animals (202).
To be sure, Dick confirms Thornber’s point that “[i]ndividuals and
groups can have at once positive, negative, uncertain, or apathetic
emotions about different species” (104). Dick plants trees, fertilizes his
land, and dotes on it. In principle, he is against tobacco and other cash
crops because of the heavy toll they exact on the land. We can say that
676 I S L E

Dick lives for the land, which he knows intimately and appreciates, as
against Slatter who is interested in the land’s instrumental value alone.
However, the distance between Dick on the one hand, and Slatter and
Mary on the other, diminishes when we consider that he shares their
philosophy of commodifying bodies—human and nonhuman.
Whether it is the indigenous people he loathes but tolerates for the
value they add to his land or the different animals caught in the web of

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his mercantile endeavors, Dick offers these bodies up for sale, refusing
or unable to extend to them the compassion critical for a benign rela-
tionship. The point is that Dick shows little concern for the Others in
his environment: the blacks who toil for him on “their land,” and the
animals commodified for profit purposes. But why do these matter?
Dick’s ambivalence provides an opportunity to reconcile the eman-
cipatory projects of ecocriticism and postcolonialism. While Dick’s care
for the land may be salutary, he is complicit in the subjugation of ani-
mals, human and nonhuman. Dick is a beneficiary of the status quo
and he is less cruel to the Africans in comparison to his wife because he
considers his “kindness” essential for the maximum functioning of his
farm. Dick’s contradictory environmental behavior underscores the
need for an ecocriticism that is not at the expense of Others in the envi-
ronment. The challenge, in other words, is to envisage a postcolonial
ecocriticism that is seriously attentive to both the exploitation of hu-
man and nonhuman life forms.
This critical practice must abjure “one at a time sequencing,”
Morton’s term for the privileging of certain creatures or species in eco-
logical considerations (38). This approach is the bane of postcolonial
studies which has retained the anthropocentricism of the colonialist
discourse it sought to eviscerate. An allied problem occurs when the
accent is placed on nonhumans with little concern for homo sapiens, as
reflected in the aftermath of the killing of Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe’s
Hwange Park by Walter Palmer, an American big-game hunter in July
2015. The media frenzy following the incident, especially in the United
States, was interesting because the Black Lives Matter movement,
which was mobilizing protests against police violence on black bodies
in the United States around the same time, could not muster the level
of outrage that the lion’s death elicited. Interestingly, in Zimbabwe
where the incident happened and in other parts of Africa, little tears
was shed for the lion; many Africans who followed the outrage in the
Western media wondered why such indignation does not follow the
many human right violations that western corporations and their col-
laborators among the African elites perpetrate on the continent daily.7
In making a claim for intersectionality or the entanglement of hu-
man and nonhuman lives here, I am cognizant of Cary Wolfe’s point in
 The Grass is Singing 677

Before the Law that “we must choose, and by definition we cannot
choose everyone and everything at once” (103). The fact that every in-
clusion entails some form of exclusion is indeed a challenge toward
more responsibility, to ensure that our choices maximize the chances
for inclusiveness. What this means is that we need to transcend the
simple either/or ethic of care displayed by Lessing’s Dick, which also

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manifests in the reactions to Cecil’s death. More useful is a postcolonial
ecocriticism that is attentive to different forms of racism and anthropo-
centrism, the kind that understands the imbrications of Dick’s land
with the animals, and the indigenous people circulating in that ecosys-
tem. The principle of ecological intersectionality also means that Cecil’s
death cannot simply be read as a case of animal cruelty but also as an
affirmation of Africa’s disposability. The appropriate reading of the
lion’s death will be such that places it within a larger context of vulner-
ability that all life forms are exposed to on the continent.
Given the long history of environmental pillage in Africa uncovered
in my analysis of Lessing’s novel, the contemporary manifestation of
such exploitation in Cecil’s death, and the many other regular incidents
of environmental degradation that plague the continent, criticisms of
colonial and contemporary forms of exploitation in postcolonial litera-
ture have to account for their ecological inflections. Bonnie Roos and
Alex Hunt state it well when they write that “any postcolonial critique
must be thoroughly ecocritical at the same time” in their introduction
to Postcolonial Green: Environmental Politics and World Narratives (3). For
these scholars, the fact that neo-colonialism and imperialism entail
varying forms of environmental exploitation in formerly colonized so-
cieties require that their critique be couched in economic and ecological
terms. In Africa, neo-colonial forms of environmental exploitation will
include the dirty extractive industries scattered across the continent,
the indiscriminate dumping of toxic waste in the continent’s territorial
waters, illegal fishing, and animal poaching. To be sure, the fields of
postcolonial ecocriticism and African literary criticism are paying at-
tention to these developments but they have primarily focused on their
impacts on the human condition in these environments. More work is
needed to underscore the ecological imperative highlighted in this es-
say if these fields will be relevant for addressing the greatest challenge
of the 21st century society—that of climate change.

Conclusion
While an overwhelming amount of scholarship on Lessing’s The
Grass is Singing has focused on the protagonist, Mary, my reading pays
attention to the other characters, especially her husband, Dick, who
678 I S L E

remains understudied. I problematize the clear-cut distinction which

critics have identified between Charlie Slatter and Dick Turner in terms
of their ecological dispositions. The palpable distinctions between their
attitudes to the environment notwithstanding, I hope to have shown
the ambivalence characterizing Dick’s relation to the land in ways that
complicate the interpretation of his ecological behaviors as exemplary.

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Dick’s environmental failings suggest the need for vigilance so that cel-
ebration and/or endorsement of environmental-friendly acts do not en-
tail ignoring other layers of exploitation.
In my reading, Lessing’s narrative reminds readers that nature is al-
ways inscribed in history and that to fully understand a specific envi-
ronment is to locate it within a matrix of its historical complexity.
Katherine Bergren is indeed correct to note that we can hardly appreci-
ate the connection “between nature and nation without recourse to co-
lonial histories of nature, which indicate how indebted this
relationship is to imperial ideologies of appropriation, cultivation, and
improvement” (306). An unqualified celebration of Dick’s environmen-
talism can only stem from inattention to the larger history of his colo-
nial positioning as a settler. Although the novel hints at this complex
history, its silencing of the Africans forecloses their opportunity to dis-
close their stories of dispossession. Such stories could account for how
the settlers became “owners” of land in Southern Africa, the herding of
the black Africans into reserves, and the denigration of their environ-
mental practices and knowledge in colonial conservation discourses.
My sense is that such stories also have the potential to reiterate the fact
that we cannot fully comprehend Dick’s or Lessing’s relationship with
their environment without considering the violent histories embedded
in the land. The past haunts the present and should always be factored
into attempts at understanding postcolonial environments even when
the narrative in question veers from this salutary track.

NOTES

1. See Rob Nixon.

2. See Slow Violence; Huggan and Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism.
3. For example, see Fishburn (3–4); Wang (39–40).
4. Eschewing the idea of human superiority over his/her environment,
Morton’s ecological thought insists on the equivalence of all aspects of the eco-
system, their interrelatedness, and their interconnection. See Morton, The
Ecological Thought.
5. For a detailed analysis of the uprising, see Ranger, Revolt in Southern
Rhodesia, 1896-7
 The Grass is Singing 679

6. For further discussion of the commodification of animal bodies in post-

colonial African literature, see Woodward, The Animal Gaze.
7. For a discussion of the media reactions following the incident, see
Williams, “The Lions and the Hunters,”.

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