The grass is singing work theme
The exile that Dick and Mary experience in relation to their white neighbors is a microcosm of the broader experience of exile that is inherent within the colonizer’s experience. For both Dick and Mary, marriage is lonely, and exacerbates their existing isolation as white colonizers in Southern Rhodesia. As a married woman, she is cut off from her previous friendships and forbidden from returning to her old job. Somewhat paradoxically, it was in this state of independence that Mary had a far more fulfilling social life. Her increasing resentment of Dick makes her wish she had never married, and she even goes so far as deciding to leave him in order to return to her state of premarital independence. While Dick is on friendly terms with several of the black farm workers, Mary behaves with extreme, senseless cruelty to all black people, making it almost impossible to form a connection to most people around her. At times it seems that she enjoys socializing with others and misses interactions with other white people after marrying Dick, but she also harbors an antisocial attitude that at times rivals her husband’s. Dick’s antisocial tendencies mean that he hates going to the cinema, where the proximity to other audiences members makes him “uneasy.” Mary has a more ambivalent relationship to isolation. There is no doubt about the fact that, at least to some degree, both Dick and Mary enjoy their isolation.
Furthermore, not only do they not socialize with other white people, but-like all colonizers-they eschew the native population, treating their employees and other local black people with cruel disdain. It is thus remarkable that in this position, the Turners choose to further isolate themselves by declining to interact with their neighbors. The area in which Dick and Mary live is described as “a farming district, where those isolated white families met only very occasionally, hungry for contact with their own kind.” Even within this sparse community, the Turners are discussed “in the hard, careless voices reserved for misfits, outlaws and the self-exiled.” The narrator explains that the reason for this prejudice is simply that the Turners “kept to themselves.” The farming district in which the Turners live is already isolated in the sense that the families living there are spread far apart from one another it is also isolated from the nearby town and, in a broader sense, from the Turners’ homeland of England. Life for white colonizers is defined by a certain kind of independence, isolation, and self-imposed exile.