Doris Lessing: The “Prohibited” Writer Railing against Hegemonic Discourse

Abstract

A ground-breaking and intellectually uncompromising essayist and novelist, Doris Lessing, who died in 2013 at age 94, was one of the most influential women writers of the second half of the twentieth century. A prolific writer of more than fifty novels, a pioneering individualist and a non-conformist thinker, she always refused allegiance to formal ideologies and vehemently objected to dogmas and rigid institutions. Even though she spent twenty-four years of her life in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) as the daughter of settlers who travelled to that colony through the British Empire scheme, she was one of the fiercest voices railing against injustice and, the apartheid system, and tried through her writings to resist an era tainted by colonialism. Subsequently, her books were banned in South Africa and she was barred from entering Southern Rhodesia in 1956, a ban that would last for almost thirty years. This article deals therefore with the aspects of censorship in Doris Lessing’s first novel The Grass Is Singing and the way the writer was censored after writing it.