Marginalized Knowledge: An Agenda for Indigenous Knowledge Development and Integration with Other Forms of Knowledge

References

Koopman, N.N. 2007. “Towards a human rights culture in South Africa: The role of moral formation.” Deel 48; Numbers 1 & 2. March & June.

Van der Ven, J.A. 1998. Formation of the moral self. Grand Rapids/Cambridge: Eerdmans.

Wallie, R.H. 1965. The role of the virtue of prudence in the ethics of St. Thomas Aquinas. Pietermaritsburg: University of Natal Press.

Landscape and subversive subjectivity in Doris Lessing’s African Stories.

Pat Louw⁶ [e-mail]

Department of English,

University of Zululand,

South Africa

Critical writing on The Grass is Singing has given attention to the way Doris Lessing portrays the African landscape. Eve Bertelsen highlights the way in which the forces of nature cause the gradual decline of Mary Turner. Bertelsen says:
What emerges is an idea of nature and consequently Africa, as quintessentially savage, a symbol of uncontainable energy, a collection of dark, extreme forces that are constantly threatening to run out of control, to reassert themselves and claim some primitive ascendancy (1991:657).
Lessing herself has deliberately distanced herself from the attitude of Mary Turner towards nature. In an interview with Stephen Gray in 1983, Lessing describes the person on whom she modeled this character:
The Grass is Singing itself was based on somebody I knew, though, - I suppose not an uncommon type. Don’t forget I was brought up on the veld, and then I came into Salisbury and met people who never put their noses out of town, unless they went on some picnic or other. One of the people I knew was a woman who used to go on a picnic and sit with her ankles together and her skirt down in case some beetle might crawl on her. She hated the veld with such a passion. And I thought, supposing this woman by some tragedy married a farmer…(2005:128).
Oliver Buckton maintains that Lessing is delivering an anti-pastoral critique in the novel. He argues that the novel offers a critique “not of African “nature” as such, but rather of the pastoral tradition that embodies an idealized and unrealistic response to landscape and rural life” (1999: 8). The farm is seen as a dystopia and a site of racism and sexism.
I would like to look at the way in which Lessing represents landscape in the African Stories. I hope show that Lessing conveys a much more complex variety of perspectives on landscape and the pastoral tradition in the stories than is reflected in the novel because of the scope and range of the short story genre. She goes beyond the limited perspective of Mary Turner in the novel to a more complex view of the space which is occupied by the human beings in a colonial context. However, because of the variety of narrative situations in the short story genre, I have found it necessary to confine my analysis to one aspect of subjectivity which is constructed in relation to landscape, that is, subversive subjectivity.
The relationship between landscape and the self is a reciprocal one. On the one hand, landscape is constructed by the act of investing the physical environment with meaning. Simon Schama maintains that “Landscape is the work of the mind” (1995:6). He says, “Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock” (1995:6). On the other hand, landscape can be said to have an effect on the way in which identity is constructed. Lawrence Durrell, for instance, maintains that “human beings are expressions of their landscapes” (1960: 156). A later view is expressed by cultural geographer, James Tyner, who writes: “It is a matter of who we are through a concern of where we are (2005: 261). Both Durrell and Tyner are raising the question of the connection between place and the human subject. Durrell was trying to isolate an essential quality in a culture whereas Tyner is using a post-colonial framework where essences are replaced by the concept of subjectivity. He sees landscape functioning as a medium through which subjectivity can be constituted.
In postcolonial terminology the subjectivity of the oppressed ‘other’ is constituted in terms of powerlessness with regard to the oppressor. In the story “No ‘Witchcraft for Sale” however, there is a significant shift in power relations due to the interaction between landscape and the main character, Gideon. He is archetypal faithful servant of Mrs Farquar, a settler farmer’s wife: “a mission boy” (1994:36). The parameters of his existence seem to be bound by the domestic space of the kitchen and hence his identity is defined as the oppressed, powerless ‘other’. However, when a crisis happens in this household, it is redefined. A snake spits poison into the eyes of Mrs Farquar’s little son, Teddy, and he is almost blinded. Gideon immediately runs into the veld, fetches a plant which acts as an antidote to the poison, and saves Teddy’s eyes. When Gideon administers the remedy, he becomes strong and powerful, dominating the situation in his gestures:
He stripped the leaves from the plant, leaving a small white fleshy root. Without even washing it, he put the root in his mouth, chewed it vigorously, then held the spittle there while he took the child forcibly from Mrs Farquar. He gripped Teddy down between his knees, and pressed the balls of his thumbs into the swollen eyes so that the child screamed and Mrs Farquar cried out in protest: ‘Gideon, Gideon!’ But Gideon took no notice. He knelt over the writhing child, pushing back the puffy lids till chinks of eyeball showed, and then he spat hard, again and again, into first one eye, and then the other (Lessing, 1994:38).
Gideon mirrors the action of the snake in spitting into the child’s eyes but this time bringing healing. He is empowered by the landscape, by the wild veld and the plants to slip out of the passivity implied in the colonized subjectivity to one involving agency. His power derives from bringing the wild into the domestic space. The concept of wildness is however constructed by the settler’s consciousness, not Gideon’s. For him, indigenous plants with their healing properties are well known to him, and the wild veld is his garden. The concept of ‘wildness’ is the way in which the colonial consciousness constructs the landscape.
Gideon’s subjectivity is thus redefined in terms of the outdoor space in which he is familiar and which holds for him layers of history: the wealth of tradition of the healers who had gone before him. Lessing alludes to this alternative narrative and history at the end of the story, where another employee of the Farquars says, ” Ask your boy in the kitchen. Now, there’s a doctor for you. He’s the son of a famous medicine man who used to be in these parts, and there’s nothing he cannot cure” (1994:42). In this way Lessing’s narrative produces a palimpsest effect where the previous narrative which occupied this space before is glimpsed at, but not elaborated, emphasizing the way in which the colonial space erases past histories. However this alternative identity of Gideon as traditional healer is not a naïve, sentimentalized reformulation of a precolonial subjectivity. He is being seen against a colonized landscape and this is made clear in the last part of the story where a scientist comes to the farm to find the plant which healed Teddy’s eyes and the Farquars try to force Gideon to show it to them. At this stage Gideon seems to relapse into the old subjectivity demanded of the colonized other. He is under the control of his employers and is called upon to obey them. Gideon engages in a power struggle with these people as it is suggested that it is against the African tradition to pass on the secrets of the healer to anyone, especially to strangers. However he manages to subvert the situation through his identification with the African bush. He appears to obey his employers but then takes them on a long walk in the blazing sun and then giving them a plant which is clearly not the right one.
He walked them through the bush along unknown paths for two hours, in that melting destroying heat, so that the sweat trickled coldly down them and their heads ached (Lessing, 1994:41).
Gideon uses his alliance with nature to punish his oppressors. The specific knowledge about the root is withheld from the whites and from western medicine in general as well as from the reader. This in itself is a reversal of power which is made possible by the landscape. Landscape acts as a site of subversive action for the oppressed ‘other’ in colonial society.

Landscape performs a similar subversive role in “Traitors” where it redefines the subjectivity of the protagonists, two little girls who are called upon to co-operate with adults against their wishes. As with Gideon, they use landscape as obstruction to prevent or at least delay the adults from reaching the secret space where the little girls have been playing in the bush. Even though they are apparently obeying their parents’ request, they are in fact using the landscape against them.

Initially, the little girls transgress the space which is regarded in settler society as the male domain: the bush. The space which the mother represents is the house, surrounded by the garden. In an article on motherhood in Under My Skin, Victoria Rosner writes about the “border skirmishes fought by mother and daughter across the all-important boundary between house and bush (1999:12).

A similar border skirmish is played out in “Traitors” as the little girls venture out from the domain of the house and the yard to the unknown, wild area of the farm in spite of their mother’s disapproval. Lessing gives a sense of their complete immersion in this ‘alien’ or wild, unknown world by describing their perspective:

When we had tired of our familiar acre we explored the rest of the farm: but this particular stretch of bush was avoided. Sometimes we stood at its edge, and peered in at the tangled granite outcrops and great ant-heaps curtained with Christmas fern. Sometimes we pushed our way a few feet, till the grass closed behind us, leaving overhead a small space of blue. Then we lost our heads and ran back again. (Lessing, 1994:83)
Here we can see that the outdoor space is further divided between the “familiar acre” and the wild bush. The young girls occupy a “threshold space” as they stand on the edge of the familiar, looking on to the unknown, the wild. When they make the transition and move into that unknown space, they are completely cut off from the familiar, and the contraction of the sky to “a small space of blue” takes the reader down to grass roots level, to the perspective of a small child looking upward. This perspective is a reversal of the ‘imperialist gaze’. Instead of the male standing on a promontory, surveying the land he has acquired or through which he has come, this is a landscape in which the subject is immersed and enveloped. The positioning of the girls in relation to the landscape distances them from the role of the imperial. It complicates the traditional picture of settler society.
Against the landscape of the wild bush, the girls have agency. Their subjectivities are constructed in a way that gives them power and that is subversive to the dominant settler culture. However Lessing shows us that this subjectivity is always under threat as it is only for a brief period in a young person’s life it is possible to engage with the landscape by exploring the natural environment. For a time they are free in their imaginary games and their exhilaration at being in the wild bush. But it is as if the shadow of adult life falls across them in the form of half-understood conversations about illicit liaisons and disgrace and the emotional pressure to be with the suffering women and to subscribe to their values and their fear of the bush. The women hold the view of ‘savage nature’ that Bertelsen describes, seeing it as hostile and threatening whereas the children see it as a site for adventure.
Pressure is brought to bear on them at the end of the story to return to the female domain of the house in solidarity with the female settlers who suffer from sexual oppression, especially when the men form illicit sexual relationships with black women. There seems to be a window period where children have the freedom to explore both the male and the female domains until they are finally locked into the role which society demands of them (McCormick, 1985: 13).
Lessing also shows us how the same landscape can generate different subjectivities. In “The De Wets come to Kloof Grange” (Lessing, 1992: 34), we are given two women, the English-speaking Mrs Gale and the Afrikaans-speaking Mrs De Wet, who are subject to the discourse of the patriarchal society but who are able to survive the oppression of male-dominated colonial society through their connection with landscape. Lessing constructs their subjectivities in relation to the landscape and in relation to each other. Both the women suffer from loneliness on the farm, but unlike Mary Turner, they look to the African landscape for comfort and even for survival. The older woman, Mrs Gale, creates a perfect formal English-style garden on their farm in Rhodesia. Here she is creating a landscape to act as a buffer zone between her and the alien wilderness of Africa. However her subjectivity is defined against one aspect of this wilderness: the mountain across the valley. She braves all kinds of weather to sit on her bench in the garden and look at this view:
Sitting here, buffeted by winds, scorched by the sun or shivering with cold, she could challenge anything. They were her mountains; they were what she was; they had made her, had crystallized her loneliness into a strength, had sustained her and fed her (Lessing, 1992:84).
In an odd mixture of imperial appropriation (they were her mountains) and subdued dependence, Mrs Gale depends on this landscape for her identity – for her very existence. At the same time she presents a rather pathetic figure, exposing herself stoically to all types of weather in order to commune with the view of the mountain (one cannot imagine a black woman doing this). The discourse of the sublime is suggested by the distance between her and the object of her attention and the awe with which she regards it. She is a spectator, not a participant in this landscape, just as at the opening of the narrative, she watches the sunset from her veranda “like a box in the theatre.” Mrs Gale’s positioning with regard to the landscape is a sad, pathetic copy of the strident imperial viewer of the conquered land.
In comparison, the younger woman’s subjectivity is constructed as a participant in the landscape. She is immersed in it in a similar way to the little girls in “Traitors.” She goes down to the swampy region of the river and dangles her legs in the water, fishes and watches the colourful birds. She is not put off by the steamy odours or threats of crocodiles or bilharzia as Mrs Gale is. I think Lessing is showing that she has a far more balanced and healthy attitude towards the landscape. Significantly, it is the Afrikaner who is more at home in the landscape. Her subjectivity is constructed in contrast to the quasi-imperialist subjectivity of Mrs Gale. The landscape functions for Mrs Gale as redemption, but not as power. She remains isolated both by her position in patriarchal society and especially in the farming community, but also by her class consciousness. This is expressed humorously in the end when she says to her husband, “next time, get people of our kind. These are savages, the way they behave” (Lessing, 1992:93).
The position of the Afrikaner is interesting in this narrative because they are a group who is both colonizer and colonized. Being part of white settlement, they are party to the colonization of the African, but being Afrikaner, they were colonized by Britain. Lessing brings out this ambiguity by showing that the young Afrikaans woman is more at home in the natural landscape than the English woman, but that she is still unable to cross the racial barrier and make friends with black women and so is subject to the same loneliness as Mrs Gale is (or that Mrs Gale has learnt to overcome). The significance of this narrative lies in the way the landscape constructs two different identities which then come into conflict with one another, playing out in microcosm the on-going battle between the English and Afrikaans-speaking groups.
In each of these stories the African landscape is represented as an enabling and sustaining force rather than a hostile one. Lessing uses landscape to open a space of possibility and of freedom within the confines of colonial structures (and within the binaries of oppressed and oppressor). She takes various marginal figures in settler society and empowers them through landscape to become more than the role allotted to them by male-dominated colonial society. In these instances landscape functions as a transformative agent in the construction of a subversive identity within the colonial system.