Doris Lessing’s message of hope for anti-Zionist protesters

October 23, 2024

DHAKA – Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing was no ivory tower writer and no detached observer of local or global events. She was a perceptive social critic and an engaged intellectual. She dared to defy the political establishment and dived straight into political hot water by speaking truth to power. According to a 2015 report by The Guardian, British intelligence service MI5 targeted “Lessing for 20 years, listening to her phone conversations, opening her mail and closely monitoring her movements.”

In 1956, Lessing’s views against racism, apartheid and other inhuman and degrading practices led to her being “declared a prohibited alien in both Southern Rhodesia and South Africa.” The ban on entering Southern Rhodesia (where she grew up) was lifted in 1980 when it was renamed Zimbabwe after the collapse of the old order. Apartheid in South Africa ended in 1994, and Lessing visited the country in 1995 on a book tour to promote the first volume of her autobiography, Under My Skin.

On a few occasions, Lessing appeared remarkably prescient about political trends and social issues. For example, in her 1957 essay “The Small Personal Voice,” she wrote, “We are living at a time which is so dangerous, violent, explosive, and precarious that it is in question whether soon there will be people left alive to write books and to read them. It is a question of life and death for all of us; and we are haunted, all of us, by the threat that even if some madman does not destroy us all, our children may be born deformed or mad.”

Aggression, land grab and forced eviction, mass murder, genocide and other gruesome events in the world—as well as the challenges of artificial intelligence that we are grappling with—resonate with the