‘Take Care Earth’: Death and Re-birth as an Eco-critical Paradigm in Doris Lessing’s Briefing for a Descent into Hell

ABSTRACT

This paper approaches spirituality as an eco-critical paradigm in Doris Lessing’s Briefing for a Descent into Hell. Lessing’s unorthodox and extended literary production, which was crowned with a Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007, is considered by many critics controversial due to Lessing’s stand on colonialism, as well as her critique of both communism and feminism. This paper engages with the manner in which Lessing depicts modern patterns of individuality as ecologically destructive because she sees in them an accentuation of the material and selfish aspects of modern civilisation. For her, spirituality offers an alternative view of individuality based on a cosmological oneness, or a unification of the inner and cosmological spaces via the mystical experience of death and re-birth. Utilising a combination of contextual and textual approaches, this paper examines Lessing’s depiction of the intersection of the mystical and the profane and the impact of this intersection in recreating this alternative individual identity.

KEYWORDS:

• Postcolonial
• Doris Lessing
• identity
• ecology
• spirituality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Lessing wrote in an obituary of Shah: ‘I met Idries Shah because of The Sufis, which seemed to me the most surprising book I had read, and yet it was as if I had been waiting to read just that book all my life. It is a cliché to say that such and such a book changed one’s life, but that book changed mine … He was a good friend to me, and my teacher. It is not easy to sum up 30 odd years of learning under a Sufi teacher, for it has been a journey with surprises all the way, a process of shedding illusions and preconceptions’ (1996, 1).

2. The best way to explain Sufism is, as Julian Baldick argues, by not attempting to produce a delineated definition of the philosophical school (2012, 1). The origin of the word Sufism is Suf or wool, attributed to the wool worn by the followers of the school as a symbol of their ascetism (2). It can also be a reference to the Greek term Sophos meaning wise (3). Overall, Sufism, to its followers, represents the main mystical dimension of Islam, which revolves around asceticism and love of God but, unlike Western monastic traditions, does not promote celibacy (3).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mona Almaeen

Mona Almaeen holds a PhD in Postcolonial Studies from the University of Kent, United Kingdom. She published a paper entitled ‘The Mystical as a Social Commodity in Raja Alem’s My Thousand and One Nights’ (Journal of Gender Studies, 2020). Currently, she works as an Assistant Professor in Jouf University, Saudi Arabia.