“Across the Frontiers”: Reading Africa in The Golden Notebook

Abstract

Many readers—whether devotee or dissenter—have personal and sometimes even visceral recollections of reading Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. Having mostly avoided it for the last twenty-five years—which I attribute to being an Africanist—it is my turn to tell a complicated story of my own reluctant engagement with Lessing’s magnum opus. In fact, the first Lessing book I read was The Grass Is Singing; it was also the first properly African book I read—notwithstanding David Livingstone’s Missionary Travels when I was an adolescent. It was 1989, and I was an undergraduate student posted as a volunteer teacher at a secondary school in the chrome-mining village of Mutorashanga, Zimbabwe. I had only one or two books with me, and so rummaged through the cardboard boxes full of well-read books in the mostly empty school library.² I learned later that Banket—where Lessing grew up and where she too rifled through boxes of books with anticipation and pleasure—was only about forty kilometers away (Under My Skin 88–89). In the library’s boxes, I found books by Lessing, Ngugi, Achebe, and other writers in the Heinemann African Writers series.³ I can still recall the worn cover of Lessing’s first novel: a photograph of a black male servant’s torso, his hands holding a tattered tea service. I read the back-cover description of a poor white woman’s place in the complex racial politics of white-ruled Southern Rhodesia.

Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook 75.