The Sun Between Their Feet: Collected African Stories Volume Two
The second volume of Doris Lessing’s ‘Collected African Stories’, and a classic work from the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.‘As for these stories – when I write one, it is as if I open a gate into a landscape which is always there. Time has nothing to do with it. A certain kind of pulse starts beating, and I recognise it: it is time I wrote another story from that landscape, external and internal at the same time, which was once the Old Chief’s Country.’ Doris Lessing, from the PrefaceThis much-acclaimed collection of stories vividly evokes both the grandeur of Africa and the glare of its sun and the wide open space, as well as the great, irresolvable tensions between whites and blacks. Tales of poor white farmers and their lonely wives, of storm air thick with locusts, of ants and pomegranate trees, black servants and the year of hunger in a native village – all combine to present a powerful image of a continent which seems incorruptible in spite of all the people who plough, mine and plunder it to make their living. In Doris Lessing’s own words, ‘Africa gives you the knowledge that man is a small creature, among other creatures, in a large landscape.’
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MODERN CLASSIC
DORIS LESSING
The Sun Between Their Feet
Collected African Stories
Volume Two
Contents
This collection has in it some of the stories I like best. One of them is the title story to this volume, The Sun Between Their Feet. It was written out of memories of a part of Rhodesia that was very different from the part I was brought up in, which was Banket, in Mashonaland, not far from Sinoia. But I used to visit around the Marandellas and Macheke districts, which are mostly sandveld, and scattered all over with clumps of granite boulders piled on each other in a way I haven’t seen anywhere else. These piles appear to be so arbitrary, so casual, that sometimes it seems as if a perched boulder may topple with a puff of wind. I spent hours, days, weeks sitting around, walking about, on that pale crusty soil, so different from the heavy dark soil of the district my father’s farm was in, examining the vegetation and the insects.
Here, too, is The Story of Two Dogs, which I think is as good as any I have done. And it is a ‘true’ story: at least, there were two pairs of dogs in my childhood, the first called Lion and Tiger, and the second Jock and Bill. I don’t know now which incidents belong to which pair of dogs; but it is true that Bill, or the ‘stupid’ dog, rescued Jock, the ‘clever’ dog, by gnawing through a strand of wire in which he was trapped – thus wearing his teeth down to stubs and shortening his life.
A Letter from Home seems to me to have in it the stuff of present-day South Africa. What sparked it off was hearing the account of a white friend, living in Cape Town with another – two bachelors in a small house – looked after, or nannied, by a large Zulu woman who treated them both like small boys. And then, as food for the same story, was my thinking about another friend, a marvellous poet, so I am told – but I don’t understand his own language – who writes his poetry in one of the very many languages of the world which ‘no one speaks’. Except the million or so people born into it. Which leads one on to the thought that if a poet is born into one of the common languages he can be a world-poet; but if he is, for instance, Afrikaans, he can be as great as any poet in the world but it would be hard for this fact to cross the language barriers.
Of the five long stories, or short novels in Five, Hunger which is reprinted here is the failure and, it seems, the most liked.
It came to be written like this. I was in Moscow with a delegation of writers, back in 1952. It was striking that while the members of the British team differed very much politically, we agreed with each other on certain assumptions about literature – in brief, that writing had to be a product of the individual conscience, or soul. Whereas the Russians did not agree at all – not at all. Our debates, many and long, were on this theme.
Stalin was still alive. One day we were taken to see a building full of presents for Stalin, rooms full of every kind of object – pictures, photographs, carpets, clothes, etc., all gifts from his grateful subjects and exhibited by the State to show other subjects and visitors from abroad. It was a hot day. I left the others touring the stuffy building and sat outside to rest. I was thinking about what Russians were demanding in literature – greater simplicity, simple judgements of right and wrong. We, the British, had argued against it, and we felt we were right and the Russians wrong. But after all, there was Dickens, and such a short time ago, and his characters were all good or bad – unbelievably Good, monstrously Bad, but that didn’t stop him from being a great writer. Well, there I was, with my years in Southern Africa behind me, a society as startlingly unjust as Dickens’s England. Why, then, could I not write a story of simple good and bad, with clear-cut choices, set in Africa? The plot? Only one possible plot – that a poor black boy or girl should come from a village to the white man’s rich town and … there he would encounter, as occurs in life, good and bad, and after much trouble and many tears he would follow the path of …
I tried, but it failed. It wasn’t true. Sometimes one writes things that don’t come off, and feels more affectionate towards them than towards those that worked.
Flight is, I think, a good story. But do I like it because I remember a very old man in a suburb in Africa, in a small house crammed with half-grown girls, all his life in his shelf of birds under jacaranda trees well away from that explosive house? In a green lacy shade he would sit and croon to his birds, or watch them wheel and speed and then come dropping back through the sky to his hand. The memory has something in it of a nostalgic dream.
