SILENCE AND STORYTELLING IN DORIS LESSING'S THE GRASS IS SINGING | ||||
| CDELT Occasional Papers in the Development of English Education | ||||
| Article 13, Volume 65, Issue 1, July 2018, Page 437-466 PDF (715.04 K) | ||||
| Document Type: Original Article | ||||
| DOI: 10.21608/opde.2018.106584 | ||||
 View on SCiNiTO | ||||
| Author | ||||
| Azza Khalil Khalil | ||||
| Abstract | ||||
| Doris Lessing’s novels and short stories have been exposed to frequent criticisms, especially after her winning the Noble Prize in Literature in 2007, due to their complex natures and the unavoidable messages they occasionally deliver. The present paper examines Lessing’s first novel The Grass Is Singing (1950) as a literary work introducing the themes of apartheid and colonialism with a deliberately unique vision. The paper traces the employment of silence and storytelling as significant techniques fortifying those themes and spotlighting their atrocities. Actually, silence and storytelling are recurrent terms in the Critical Race Theory (CRT), a theory devoted to curing social injuries caused by imperialism and racialization. Unlike other civil rights movements and liberal approaches, which deny the existence of discrimination at present, CRT emphasizes the continuation of racial biases even in the most urbanized countries. Therefore, CRT theorists call for the confession of the occurrence of such a phenomenon, then the urgent need to eradicate it. In Lessing’s novels the colonist and the colonized exchange silences and storytelling in their communications. Both of them sometimes find difficulties in articulating their thoughts, and some other times they find it suitable to explain their viewpoints and narrate their stories. The paper investigates how the novel gives chances to each character to express openly his/her story, showing the situations in which silences are their finest choices. CRT theorists ascribe the utilization of speech and silence to power relation in societies governed by patriarchal authority and inherited social norms; consequently they require racial emancipation and insubordination to all sorts of prejudice. They claim that the counter stories are typically used by the oppressed to defend their stance; whereas majoritarian storytelling is employed by the powerful group for proving their dominance | ||||
| Keywords | ||||
| Doris Lessing; The Grass Is Singing; silence; storytelling; critical race theory (CRT); apartheid; colonialism; racial discrimination | ||||
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