Doris Lessing :: Biography Biographies Essays

Doris LessingDoris Lessing is considered a S give awayh African writer, although Africa is not the place of her birth. She was, in fact, born in Persia (now Iran) to British parents in 1919. As a child, she and her parents moved to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where she lived until 1949 (Sage, 15). White colonists had not previously settled in the part of Africa to which her family moved (Charters 894). In 1949 she moved to London where she still, apparently, resides.Lessings life appears characterized by displacement. Charters tells us that Lessing left school at the age of fourteen in rebellion against her mother (894). Although neither Charters nor Lessing tell us for certain, it seems she may have been push button against a representative of the colonialist mindset and way of life that she fought as an adult. Her unease with her status as a British national in Africa can be clearly seen in an event related by her biographer Lorna Sage in a quote from Lessings Being Prohibit ed, a piece written for The New States universe. At the age of 16, Lessing was waiting in a train at a border crossing between Southern Rhodesia and South Africa. The bods she had been given to fill out at the border required her to declare nationality, birthplace, and other information. In this quotation, Lessing relates her discomfort at being one of the Herrenvolk (Sage 16) I had written on the form Nationality, British, Race, European and it was the first time in my life I had to claim myself as a member of one race and deny the others . . .The immigration man . . . looked suspiciously at my form for a long time before saying that I was in the wrong part of the train. I did not infer him. (I forgot to mention that where the form asked, Where were you born?, I had written, Persia.)Asiatics, said he, have to go to the back of the trainBut, I said, I am not an Asiatic. (Sage 16)For Lessing, this incident seemed to let out her lack of a secure place in the world. Insecure in the role of British national, unable to be a real national of her espouse homeland, she is further separated by the place in which she was born. According to Sage, in the same piece Lessing investigates the idea that maybe it was her Persian birth rather than her red anti-racist political science that made her a prohibited alien (16).