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of Marxism.
In
Zimlia, on the other hand, Sister Molly speaks of the
Vatican and the aid agencies with the same impatience. As a Catholic
nun in Zimlia, she is one of the sane people who imagine possibilities
and provide hope. At Kwadere, Sylvia thinks less and less of a commu–
nity guaranteed by hierarchy and more of a community that draws its
energy from the diversity of particular human needs. She rediscovers the
community of Frances's table.
If
the traditional family in England is assuming new shapes, the tradi–
tional family in Zimlia is literally being destroyed. AIDS has left no one
at Kwadere untouched, and orphaned children return to grandparents
who are unable to cope. Twenty years of independence has been long
enough for the emergence of a new class of politicians and officials who
demand respect for position rather than achievement. Lessing traces this
class formation, notes the easy contempt with which the
apparatchiks
treat the mass of people outside the circle of privilege, and then identifies
in AIDS the great leveler. On one occasion, Sylvia has to tell a senior offi–
cial in the Ministry of Education that his wife is dying, and for the first
time he becomes transformed from a person accustomed to exercising
arrogant power to a man confronting the terror of his mortality.
Lessing has never shied away from controversy, but the ending of
The
Sweetest Dream
may prove as controversial as anything she has written.
In
a final twist
to
the family saga, Sylvia is deported from Zimlia and
returns to the Hampstead house, bringing with her from Kwadere two
boys whose parents have died and whom she intends to educate in Eng–
land. They will become part of the fourth generation. Such an ending
affronts the belief that identities derive from race and nation, a belief
that is still enthusiastically promoted in parts of Africa. The children will
die unless they are taken from Zimlia to England, and the novel implies
that if
to
take them is cultural or racial murder then so be it. But it is not
only the children who benefit from being taken away from their home.
By th eir presence, the Kwadere chi ldren confirm, if further confirmation
were needed, that the family is more than a shared genetic inheritance.
The Lennox family has been, throughout the novel, a voluntary com–
munity. That is one of its strengths. As a trope, the Lennox family is
placed in opposition to meta-narratives of soc ial determinism, whether
these are Marxism, Pan-Africanism or one or other of the many versions
of globalization. The family survives because its modest scale does not
allow it to claim too much for itself. The measure of its success is how
well it accommodates the humanity of the people who constitute it.
Anthony Chennells
