Zimbabwe: flashbacks to Doris Lessing

The great, now-deceased novelist Doris Lessing grew up in Rhodesia.  Lessing is such a brilliant writer that I find myself thinking I know what Zimbabwe is like, although Lessing's descriptions were during apartheid.

I could envison myself traveling in jeeps in her Rhodesia, then envision myself sitting around on shaded verandas drinking clever cocktails with a group of other young, white, privileged but mostly liberals.  I could feel the breeze on my skin, feel my skirts move in the breeze, feel my hair moved by the air. And the drinks were spectacular. All in my imagination and her writing.

Once I discovered Lessing, I devoured everything she ever published but her most vivid works, for me, were set in Rhodesia.

Lessing longed to escape Rhodesia. And so she did. She landed in London.  Her masterpiece, The Golden Notebook, remains one of the most fiercely penetrating novels I have yet read. Many of my college chums would not read it because, in the novel, the writer in the novel experiences major depression. I inhaled that book, which has many reveries of the writer-in-the-novel's past in Rhodesia, the memories that left her wounded. I loved that novel, have read it a few times, because it most closely captured my experience of being alive, as someone with deep emotions that sometimes are all absorbing.

What my friends wished to avoid was, for me, simply an accurate portrayal of my emotional life.

When the country was Rhodesia, the blacks were called kaffirs. All blacks were treated, in these novels, as less than the humanity of the whites, with clusters of liberals, then considered communists, who felt the blacks should be equal.

I wonder how Zimbabwe is doing these days.  I don't imagine I will ever see Zimbabwe but it will remain frozen in the time when it was known as Rhodesia, as described by Doris Lessing, for me.  Unless I ever find myself in Zimbabwe!