As this collection testifies, Doris Lessing has always been drawn, from her earliest writings, to commitment literature, witness literature, whether in her fiction or her non-fiction. This article will centre on one of her most challenging and prescient works of reportage in the 1980s, a text that throws light on much that has happened in our contemporary world of conflict and refugee crises. The Wind Blows Away Our Words(1987) is based on her visit to Afghan fighters and refugees in Pakistan during the war against the Soviet Union. Lessing's reportage will be situated within the growing tradition of women writing witness literature in response to the traumatic events of the twentieth century, concentrating on an older contemporary, Storm Jameson.

The essential task for those, like Jameson and Lessing, with a legacy of such crises is to break free from the hauntings that they provoke, from becoming trapped in the past, to find, as the psychologist Robert Jay Lifton puts it:

Lessing's parents, trapped in the past by their experiences of the First World War, never achieved this. But many of Lessing's older women contemporaries, writers like Storm Jameson, set out, in the wake of the First World War, to establish just that: a lifeline ‘on a new basis’. However, there was also the pressing need to remember, to reassess, and to ponder on what was in danger of being forgotten or suppressed. For it is all too clear that what appals at one date can be forgotten, its lessons unlearnt. Wolf Gruner recalls, for example, how the massacre of the Armenians by the Ottomans has been ‘overshadowed by the Nazi extermination of the European Jews’ (197). After 1945, what had been seen in 1930 as ‘the bloodiest and most atrocious mystery in history’ was lost to view: ‘The “industrial enterprise” of Auschwitz would now replace the Kemach Gorge as the symbol of an “unprecedented,” horrific, and systematic slaughter of a people by another people’ (197–8).