KINSHIP REIMAGINED:FAMILY IN DORIS LESSINGS FICTION. Selçuk Sentürk
ideology and social politics, rather than the liberation of women from the idea of the family altogether.30
Unlike communism and feminism, Sufism does not have an established theory of family. Therefore, Lessing’s representation of the family benefits from Sufi thought indirectly, hinting at ways in which Sufi principles and tenets could be employed to critique traditional family arrangements and to introduce non-normative ones. For example, gender plays a significant role in creating and sustaining the family ideology. It is due to gender that women and men are regarded as two different beings in a hierarchy. In contrast, Sufism suggests that although ‘in this world of duality we may find ourselves in different forms, ultimately there is no male or female, only Being’.31 The ultimate point one can reach in Sufism is to recognise one’s own capacities as a Being regardless of social roles and constructions. In Sufism traditional family, political parties, parenthood, and group minds of all kinds are regarded as the ‘constrictive collective’. Humans experience the loss of identity in these roles, what Sufis call ‘the false self’.32 Sufism stresses the importance of individualism in order to reach the real self, and in this regard, women are no different from men. Just as ‘male attributes of strength and determination also belong to women’, so too do ‘the feminine attributes of receptivity and beauty also belong to men’.33 The non-hierarchical and non-gendered nature of Sufism inspires Lessing’s creation of non-normative families.
Lessing’s novels highlight the intersection of feminist and Sufi concerns. This intersection gives rise to ‘Su-feminism’.34 In The Female Eunuch (1970), Germaine Greer talks about the ‘organic family’, which destabilises the relationship between biological parents and children to critique the role biology has in ←30 | 31→sustaining the traditional family: ‘[t];he point of an organic family is to release the children from the disadvantages of being the extensions of their parents so that they can belong primarily to themselves’.35 Lessing represents this ‘organic family’ in her personal life with Jenny Diksi, and her Sufi themed novels, The Memoirs of a Survivor and Ben, in the World. In the first novel, protagonists, Gerald and Emily establish a commune where they raise unrelated children, destabilising the tie between child and parent. The sense of ‘organic family’ is hinted at through their deviations from social conventions. There are not any hierarchies or gender divisions between these children as they have not lived within traditional family arrangements before. She introduces Ben as a Sufi in the latter novel. As a victim of the traditional family as represented in The Fifth Child (1988), Ben’s journey towards self-actualisation is accompanied by Mrs. Ellen Biggs, standing as a non-biological parent in his life. Therefore, Lessing’s fictional children in these novels do not internalise the gender roles of their parents, as highlighted by Greer. To borrow a phrase from Greer, Ben and the children in Gerald’s commune ‘initiate their own capacities’, which is in line with Sufi teaching. This is an example of the intersection of Lessing’s Sufism and feminism.
The term Su-feminism indicates that Lessing’s Sufism expands her feminist critique of the family by providing a new form of arrangement in which gendered parental roles are minimised. The labour motherhood involves was considered to be the main source of women’s oppression in the family and of their disadvantage in the society. For example, Shulamith Firestone in The Dialectic of Sex (1970) argues that new reproductive technologies and shared childcare would free women from the burden of pregnancy and birth, and a maternal role that guaranteed female oppression. Analysing the traditional family from a Sufi perspective brings a strong critique of hierarchies and parental roles in the family and reveals ways in which non-normative family arrangements could emerge. Sufism prioritises the idea of unity and oneness, without any discrimination. In this way, Lessing’s Sufism, I suggest, expands and contributes to her desire to eradicate gender-based segregation in both family and society. This suggests that her ambivalent relationship with the Women’s Liberation Movement can be reconciled through exploring the ways in which her feminism and Sufism intersect.
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Postcolonial Ecofeminism and the Family
Lessing’s increasing interest in environmental politics during the late 1990s also shapes her representation of the family. Growing up in the colony at Southern Rhodesia, she witnesses overlapping connections between unjustified subordination of women and destruction of environment. Both environment and women are controlled and exploited through gender with the former feminised, and the latter’s roles naturalised within the patriarchal systems of colonialism and the family. Lessing’s treatment of the environment links to her reconfiguration of the family and women’s domination. A comparative reading of her early and late postcolonial novels, The Grass Is Singing and Mara and Dann suggest that Lessing recovers environment from its submissive and exploited position, which in return enables her to challenge patriarchal systems and reconfigure her non-normative family. In Mara and Dann, Lessing creates a utopian continent, Ifrik, and looks for reasons for and solutions to environmental problems. Derek Wall, in Green History, argues that
the concept of ‘utopia’, variously translated as nowhere (utopia) or ‘perfection’ (eutopia), has powerfully inspired the Green movement. Greens would argue that to solve ecological problems requires the transformation both of institutions and of the individual, resulting in the creation of a new society.36
Lessing’s fiction mirrors the link between utopia and the Green movement. At the end of Mara and Dann, Lessing introduces her utopian family that adopts an eco-centric farming method with its members in neither hierarchal relations nor mastery over the environment. The Empire, which once ruled Africa on behalf of the British Royal Family, as shown in The Grass Is Singing, is contested and replaced by a utopian environmental family in Ifrik. The fact that Mara, the feminist explorer, rejects the idea of getting married to her brother to revive the Royal family implies that she challenges colonial and hegemonic control of the environment in Ifrik. Lessing’s modifications in her representation of the environment, from The Grass Is Singing to Mara and Dann, are translated into modifications in her representation of the family. Using these two novels, a postcolonial ecofeminist reading can provide fresh insights that acknowledge the significance of Lessing’s representation of the family in postcolonial literature.
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Intersectionality in Lessing’s Fiction
The combination of postcolonial and ecofeminist concerns in The Grass Is Singing highlights the intersectionality that characterises Lessing’s fiction. The family is a locus where hierarchies of race, class, and gender converge as different but intersecting forms of oppression. Family can then be defined as a complex ideological construction in which various forms of social hierarchies are performed and spread to the rest of society. A single critical approach to the family fails to recognise intersecting power relations that disadvantage particular groups of people. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s 1989 theory of intersectionality suggested that the oppression of black women can only be understood by looking at the intersection of womanhood and blackness.37 The intersecting lens, as understood from Crenshaw’s perspective, warned scholars and social movements that ‘address[ing] injustice towards one group may end up perpetuating systems of inequities towards other groups’.38 In her 1985 novel The Good Terrorist, Lessing addressed the intersection of inequalities long before Crenshaw’s theory, highlighting that communist/Marxist theory is gender-blind because it focuses on the oppression of the proletariat, a term used for men. As in the example of Alice Mellings, women are not considered a social class and therefore are excluded from the communist critique of a class-based system, though capitalism benefits enormously from their labour and oppression. The intersectional approach establishes the significance of family in understanding multiple sources of oppression in Lessing’s fiction, such as gender, sexual orientation, class, race, and bodily norms. Lessing’s fiction intersects political theories of communism, feminism, environmentalism and Sufi mysticism to address if not unpack entwined forms of oppressions