A Desperate Song Of The Grass

British writer Doris Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2007 owing to her contribution"that elicits of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny". The greatness of Doris Lessing was well exemplified by her first novel The Grass Is Singing.With the publication of The Grass Is Singing, this novel produced an immediate reaction from the readers and press. London Times Supplement commented it as"a powerful and bitter book"which indicated the high accuracy of the book. It was a powerful book in that the book powerfully exposed the disgraceful deed of the whites in the process of colonization and it was a bitter book because it bitterly revealed the wretched conditions of the natives as the colonized.Accordingly, this paper will be dedicated to the study of Doris Lessing's novel The Grass Is Singing (1950) with a theoretical support of the Postcolonialism. This paper consists of three chapters added with an introduction and conclusion. After a brief introduction to Doris Lessing's The Grass Is Singing and an overall review of the criticism on Doris Lessing's works home and abroad as well as an introduction to postcolonial theory with the emphasis on Edward W Said and his Orientalism, the first chapter of this paper is devoted to the study of the relationship between the white colonizers and the black colonized to show the discordance between the colonizer and the colonized. Furthermore, the social context of the colonial South Africa, including the political and social background in Doris Lessing's time is introduced in which a great deal of importance is attached to the policy of apartheid and Doris Lessing's stance on this policy to indicate her indignation over the colonizers and sympathy towards to colonized.The second chapter serves the white people's opinion over and treatment of the black people through their imposing"Orientalist gaze", represented by Mary Turner, a white female and Charlie Slatter, a white male respectively. Through their gaze, the white people's deprivations of the natives are well illustrated. The third chapter is concerned with the native black people's role in the process of colonization—the"Other". The term"Other"is a key concept in the framework of colonialism. With the settlement of the colonizers, the South Africa has rendered by the white colonizers as the"Other World"while the native people are regarded as the"Other"who are degraded into unspeakable animals by white people. As the old saying goes, wherever there is oppression, there is resistance. With the constant repression coming from the colonizers, the oppressed natives also try to seek justice through revolts. However, under such a circumstance in which the power between the colonizer and the colonized is severely unbalanced, the natives'revolts are destined to be futile. Even for Moses, the representative character for the whole native people, his effort to reverse this situation turns out to be futile and his disastrous ending mirrors the wretched fate of all the colonized. Through the depiction of the cruelty of white colonizers and the suffering of the native blacks and tragic ending of the novel expresses the Doris Lessing's strong sympathy for the colonized natives on the colonized land.