Owen Sheers, a Welsh writer, finds nation-specific pigeonÂholing imprisoning and would rather just be seen as a writer — and what more liberating a way to do this than to write The Dust Diaries, a book on Zimbabwean missionary Arthur Cripps, his great-grand uncle.
I am sure Sheers will take issue with being called a Welsh writer as he is quite clear, in our interview, that it is “not helpful to define a writer by his nationality, because you want to be writing in the world and about the world”. He would rather be described simply as a “writer from Wales, because Wales is my cultural background”. Sheers gives the example of his novel The Dust Diaries, a winner of the Welsh book of the year, but essentially about a maverick missionary and poet who left England for Rhodesia at the turn of the 20th century.
“The beauty of writing is that you cross all borders — and that should not be confined by nationalities,” he says in a clear tone, much to my relief. I had been apprehensive about getting lost in the fog of a thick Welsh accent. Still, the uniqueness of one’s experiences can’t be submerged, as shown by a conversation Sheers had with a poet from Zimbabwe, John Eppel. Sheers recalls: “He first said, ‘Your poetry feels very Irish, actually like Seamus Heaney.’ And then he said, ‘No, no, no, I realise that’s wrong. It is very Celtic. It is very ancient, man, so ancient.’ So maybe there is a Celtic note in my poetry.”
Despite his insistence on unshackling himself from national boundaries, you still get the feeling that Sheers is not dismissive of nationality, because one’s writing, he says, is “obviously informed by your histories, by your landscapes and the culture and the people that you grew up with”. For instance, in the course of our interview, he notes that “Irish and Scottish literature have been recognised within the canon of English literature much more than Welsh literature”.
Sheers pays tribute to what the Irish have brought to English literature, explaining their defining body of work as arising from “the violent nature” of their relationship with the English. Another reason, he says, is that the Irish are a nation of emigrants, unlike the Welsh, who are more a nation of immigrants. “[The Irish] were writing from the world. You cannot fail to acknowledge people such as [James] Joyce, [Samuel] Beckett; they were crucial to the modernist experiment and they were amazing writers.”
We turn to talk of an incident that surprised me in The Dust Diaries, which is an odd mixture of myth, fact and reality. There is an episode where Cripps, who was also seen as a powerful rain spirit, controls and sends bees to stop a car. “I am more comfortable using fictionalised techniques than using historical facts,” says Sheers. Consequently, his work sometimes strays into the realm of magical realism.
The novel is a poetic eulogy to Cripps, an independent missionary in Enkeldoorn, now Chivhu. Cripps was opposed to settler policies, including hut tax, and bought a farm where he invited Africans to live without being bothered by the colonial administration. Some of the policies he advocated, such as segregation, would shock from today’s perspective, but, viewed in the context of the times, can be considered quite progressive.
Regularly penning a poem or two that were critical of Rhodesia’s footprint in the life of the natives, Cripps came to be seen by African people as an ally, a hero, and was deified by some to the level of a rain spirit. A few white people were embarrassed by his spartan habits, his insistence on walking the more than 100km from Chivhu to Harare, but he received the grudging respect of others.
Much later, in the sulphurous atmosphere that hung over the farm invasions, even the driver of the infamous Chenjerai Hunzvi, leader of the war veterans, confessed to Sheers his admiration and love for the missionary and his work.
When I ask Sheers how the book has been received, he laughs and says he has been lucky that it was critically acclaimed. Touching praise came from Doris Lessing, who chose it as her best book for last year in The Times Literary Supplement, and Michael Holroyd — whom Sheers describes as the father of contemporary British biography — also chose it as one of his best reads.
“In the reprint I want to put [Lessing’s] quote on the front of the book,” he laughs. But Alexandra Fuller, author of the lauded Zimbabwean memoir Let’s Not Go to the Dogs Tonight, was not as obliging. She describes the book as “cheerless … and lacking in the essential ingredients of humour and humanity”. He waves away her criticism, which we agree is harsh and uninformed, because The Dust Diaries drips with humanity.
As I thumb through my copy, I open it to the inside front cover, where Sheers stares out from a portrait. Casually, I say to him that some girls from the office found him handsome and wanted to come along for the interview. Chuckling, he says simply that sometimes pictures overstate how people look.
I tell him that, when I read The Dust Diaries, what struck me was its poetic intensity and the easy way he has with metaphor. He attributes some of that to the early influence of RS Thomas, a Welsh poet. “He was a poet and a priest and I was fascinated by how the poet was always questioning the priest and vice versa.”
Another writer Sheers appreciates is Bruce Chapman, author of the novel On the Black Hill, for “moving the borders of fiction and non-fiction”.
Sheers says that when he was writing The Dust Diaries he “was always slightly worried about being too lyrical [for], as a poet writing prose, you don’t want to be writing purple prose”.
We turn to talk about his next novel, Resistance, whose manuscript he has just submitted. He says it is “a different book” to The Dust Diaries. The latter, he explains, had been “given” to him because it was a story already in existence. His forthcoming novel is “a counterfactual story set in an alternative history” of Britain had the Nazi invasion occurred.
There were British plans for an underground resistance movement of about 4Â 000 men, and local people had been recruited into the movement. The book begins with resistance activists heading for the hills. It deals, he says, with the concept of occupation and the validity of personal resistance for individuals caught up in world events. “To what extent can you define your own cause, or at what point is your cause defined for you?” is one of the questions the book attempts to answer.
Unlike The Dust Diaries, Resistance has a more accessible narrative structure. Perhaps the events in the Middle East influenced the book? He nods, but he hopes “it doesn’t ring too obvious”.
“I wanted to imagine a story that would really get hold of a reader and pull them along, which is what I suppose every writer wants to do,” he says. So is it as poetic as The Dust Diaries? “I do love imagery, metaphor, but this book is more simply written with a simple narrative structure. It is highly focused and takes place over nine months in a valley in Wales. My intention was to write a beautifully written page-turner,” he says, quickly adding: “This is a grand intention, so I don’t know if I succeeded.”
Perhaps this is because Sheers confesses to being “a terrible reader” himself. He started reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera in February. One hopes his forthcoming page-turner will not be read over six months.