“Then Spoke the Thunder”: The Grass is Singing as a Zimbabwean Novel

Doris Lessing's first novel was greeted by the international press as important news from a region that seemed poised for change in 1950, but in subsequent decades, it was read, especially by Southern African critics, as an increasingly irrelevant echo of colonial discourse. I argue here that The Grass is Singing (1950) should be read anew in the twenty-first century as a prescient anti-colonial text which prefigures contemporary postcolonial themes and issues. Specifically, I situate Lessing's novel in dialogue with two novels by Zimbabwean author Alexander Kanengoni: When the Rainbird Cries (1987) and Echoing Silences (1997). I suggest that aspects of The Grass is Singing which literary critics found objectionable, such as its mythopoeic natural symbolism, and the unrealistic, thus implicitly racist depiction of Moses, can be read differently in the context of Kanengoni's novels and related works by his contemporaries. I read Lessing's novel within the genre of the Zimbabwean literature of Chimurenga, or resistance, in which violence is interpreted through ritual and the personification of natural forces.