Murder

The Grass is Singing is a tragic novel written by Doris Lessing, born of British parents in
Persia (now Iran) in 1919, who spent her childhood in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe)
since she was five and went to England in 1949. Published in 1950 it is her first novel which
gained outstanding success in Britain, America and other European countries and which
resulted in her international reputation. The novel centres on the murder of a white farmer’s
wife by her black houseboy, a crime driven by the ingrained racism that pervades 1940s
Rhodesia. The novel has an exceptional structure; it starts with the murder of Mary and
features the manner in which the locals react to it, and then segues into a long recollection to
explain the causes and events that went behind the committing of the aforementioned crime.

A newspaper article titled "Murder Mystery" begins the novel, reporting of the murder of
Mary Turner at the farm at Ngesi, Southern Rhodesia (modern-day Zimbabwe), where she
lived with her husband, Richard "Dick" Turner; their African houseboy has confessed to the
crime. After Mary's body is discovered on the front veranda of her house by her farm
workers, the workers come to neighboring farmer Charlie Slatter to apprise him of the
incident; he sends a messenger to alert police sergeant Denham and drives himself to the
Turner farm.

Doris Lessing opens her novel with an efficient and haunting depiction of the racist society of
South Rhodesia. Using a sensational newspaper blurb about the murder of Mary Turner by
her houseboy Moses, Lessing sets up a story against which she tells her own tale; if we return
to this first paragraph after finishing the novel, we find that there is nothing strictly incorrect
about it, but, as the first sentence of narration—"The newspaper did not say much" (9)—
foreshadows, the "truer" story lies beneath these seemingly easily interpretable facts.

The key sentence in that opening newspaper blurb it that "No motive has been discovered"
(ibid). Such an unknown variable, a void in the middle of the story is what makes it a
"Murder Mystery" (its title); and indeed, the title of the novel itself—"The Grass is Singing,"
drawn from T.S. Eliot's famous poem of Western decline, The Waste Land—comprises part
of a funeral and apocalyptic image of societal collapse. For most South Rhodesian readers of
the newspaper, as Lessing's narrator tells us, their racial prejudices make quick work of
filling in this hole with received notions concerning Moses, a black man, and his relation to
Mary, a white woman. In contrast to this is another group, the neighbors of the Turners, who
have had the opportunity to observe something that complicates this story.

In the beginning, Lessing withholds from the reader the information about Mary's tortuous
obsession with Moses. This serves her aim of using the slow-acting, transformative power of
the narrative character development (i.e. Mary) to dissolve prejudiced preconceptions to their
core. Readers will ultimately discover the moral failings of the group of neighboring farmers
in their privileged position of knowledge of the Turners: although they may have observed
enough to come to the same terrible self-critical conclusion the novel tries to convey, their
unwillingness to confront the true image of their own cruelty and hypocrisy makes them just
as blind as those who know no more than the newspaper article. "It was as if they had a sixth
sense which told them everything that was to be known, although the three people in a
position to explain the facts said nothing. The murder was simply not discussed" (ibid).

All the characters in The Grass is Singing maintain complex and ambivalent relationships to
one another. These relationships are invariably defined by feelings of both intimacy and
hatred, which—rather than cancelling each other out—are shown to exist side by side,
creating intense conflict and turmoil. The most significant example of this can be found in the
relationship between Mary and Moses. Mary has a severely racist, cruel attitude toward all
black people, and treats the black farm employees in a sadistic manner. She is especially
antagonistic toward Moses, constantly insulting him and forcing him to perform an endless
series of pointless tasks. At the same time, Mary is also fascinated by Moses, a fascination
that she will not allow herself to openly acknowledge. Toward the end of the novel, it is
revealed that she has been forcing Moses to help her with intimate tasks such as getting
dressed, leading Tony and Charlie to believe that Mary and Moses are sleeping together.
Mary is ambivalent. She sobs and cries with relief for his departure. Then suddenly as a mad
woman she pushes Tony away and expresses her anger against him for sending Moses away.
She says that things were all right before he came but now she will not see Moses again.
Then she starts weeping. She vacillates between her instinct (emotion) towards Moses and
her environment (White culture). She is now afraid of the black boy doing some mischief
against her for taking support of Tony to drive him away from her house. She thinks of taking
Tony’s help against her danger. Moses takes Tony as his enemy for being instrumental to
break his relation with Mary. While Moses’s feelings toward Mary are not stated explicitly,
his hatred is made obvious by his resentful and defiant attitude toward her. At the same time,
he cannot escape the intimacy of the master/servant relationship that inevitably binds him to
her. Eventually, the coexistence of both this intense intimacy and hatred reaches an explosive
climax in which Moses kills Mary. He thinks to outwit him by avenging his wounded human
affection by murdering Mary. Thus, Moses, the houseboy, comes at night to the Turners’
house and murders Mary. He gets arrested to be ruined in jail. Dick Turner becomes lonely
and miserable, and Mary loses her life. This suggests that while the dynamic of intimacy and
hatred is inevitable in a colonial society, such a dynamic is unsustainable and will eventually
erupt into violence. Thus, this novel depicts the adverse effects of heredity or instinct and
environment, and Darwinian competition for survival.