The heart of Africa

Commonweal, Nov 5, 2004 by Rand Richards Cooper

Beneath all the playful narrative undercutting lies a haunted fascination with time and mortality. Opening a packet of Cripps's correspondence, Sheers imagines he is inhaling the same air his great-great-uncle breathed over them a century ago; he runs his finger across the page, "tracing the looping, slanting ink that ran back through the pen to your hand." Studying photos of Cripps in boyhood and old age, he feels "uneasy," sensing "something voyeuristic in my ability to have the boy and the old man in front of me, a lifespan laid out on the table." These musings reveal a romantic's awe at the sublime nature of time and its powers of oblivion, burying the living Cripps under "a hundred years of forgotten memories."

To unearth someone from oblivion, Sheers perceives, is both rescue and appropriation--"colonizing your life with my imagination," he writes, addressing the ghost of his ancestor. People in Zimbabwe relate conflicting impressions of Cripps; their memories of the man tend to mirror their own life values and predicaments. Is The Dust Diaries' version of Cripps's life, the theory Sheers himself puts forth about the man, true? "Perhaps," the author muses; "perhaps not." And yet it has the truth of fiction, persuading us by letting us inhabit it. Sheers insists this is not simply a benign process. Ironically he joins himself to the company of empire: like those digging for gold or for souls, the writer digs the past for stories, unearthing historical figures and making them his own. From now on, Cripps will largely become the person we meet in these pages--left for posterity as Sheers has re-created him here. By laying bare both the procedures and the implications of his attempt to capture Cripps in narrative, Sheers highlights the contingent nature of history, our collective memory. This may sound dryly academic, but it isn't; in Sheers's hands, it comes off as elegant testimony to the stubborn elusiveness of the past.

The Dust Diaries is finally a sympathetic portrait of a turn-of-last-century sensibility, part muscular Christianity, part passionate Romanticism, and part fiery late-Victorian reformism. Sheers shows us a man who found his life bearings almost entirely in reading--Keats first and foremost, but also David Livingstone, Rider Haggard, and Olive Schreiner--deriving an idealism all the more uncompromising for its being essentially literary. "Above all," writes Sheers, "he wanted to prove himself worthy." He did so by becoming a thorn in the side of administrators (and his own superiors in the church hierarchy) bent on producing docile African Christians for the colonial labor market. Sheers uses his captivating biographical fiction to comprehend the split nature of Cripps's character, joining the man's moral stringency with his swooning, poet's susceptibility to beauty. One reads The Dust Diaries as a twenty-first-century poet's ode to a nineteenth-century forebear, and to his attempt to locate in poetic ecstasy a viable stance for confronting injustice in the world. Sheers's haunted elegy of a book is postmodern in structure, but its soul is Romantic to the core.