On the analysis of Imperial diaspora awareness of white South Africans in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook

Abstract

As Alice Ridont and Susan Watkins remarked in their symposium Doris Lessing: Border Crossings, born in Persia, raised in Rhodesia and living in her parents’ hometown---England postwar, Doris Lessing’s experiences of space border crossings has an important influence on the thematic and cultural border crossings of her literary creations. Lessing’s experiences of border crossing both physically and spiritually are in a great degree her diaspora experiences. Influenced by her parents and sense of personal identification, Lessing had an awareness of imperial diaspora in her early years, reflected by the white South Africans in her work The Golden Notebook. This sense of imperial diaspora is embodied in idealizing the motherland, treating the culture of the resident country as the “margin”, whereas taking that of native land as the “centerpiece”, and having a partiality for the lifestyle from motherland, and meanwhile longing for a return to the motherland. This preference to the "myth of roots" is not an exception but a common feature of the imperial diasporas.