Washington, DC — The Dust Diaries: Seeking the African Legacy of Arthur Cripps. Owen Sheers. Boston:Houghton Mifflin, 2004. 310 pp. $23.00 cloth.
The Dust Diaries: Seeking the African Legacy of Arthur Cripps is the story of a young man's search for the details of his great, great uncle's life. The young man is British poet Owen Sheers; his great, great uncle was Arthur Cripps, a missionary in southern Africa from 1901 until his death in 1952. Cripps originally went to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) as an Anglican missionary to the British colony. Once there, he became an ardent advocate for the rights of Africans and a critic of colonialism. After many years he left the Anglican Church and declared himself an independent missionary. When he died in 1952, the local newspaper, The Link, wrote of his funeral: "The congregation of Europeans, Indians, Coloureds and Africans was much too big for the church to hold." People paid tribute to Cripps with a dance and song, "used only to honor a great chief."
Owen Sheers discovered the mystery of his great, great uncle during a family reunion in which a relative mentioned his name. After finding Cripps' biography and poetry collections, he endeavored to discover who this man really was. He unearthed details in library archives, finding photographs and letters, before going to Zimbabwe, where he interviewed Cripps' secretary and many others, and visited the places where Cripps had lived. Writing directly to his uncle, the author declares that the secretary, "continues to guide me through the physical landscape of your life. He shows me the patch of ground where you grew your own pipe tobacco, the river in which you baptized him and hundreds of others, and the place on top of the kopje where you came to meditate."
The result of this exploration is The Dust Diaries, a book that mixes the true story of Sheers' search with a fictionalized narrative of Cripps' time in Africa. "It is the story of Arthur Cripps' life reflected through my imagination," Sheers explains. "It may not always be true to historical fact, but I hope it is true to the essence of Cripps' story and to the essence of the man I discovered buried in the nave of a ruined church far out in the Zimbabwean veldt."
What follows is a strange mix of novel and memoir. The novel far outweighs the memoir, and as the novel is slow to begin, readers may wish that Sheers had focused more on his own search. The narrative picks up however, as Cripps arrives in Africa and begins to form his own opinions about the place. Some memorable images are formed from Cripps' long treks across the veldt: picture Cripps running to save a sick child, "Arthur has been running across the veldt for over four hours. His feet are bleeding in his boots and his lungs feel the colour of the ground beneath him: red, coarse and grained."
Referred to by other characters in the book as a saint, Arthur Cripps, may be, for a good many readers, a protagonist difficult to identify with. He is just too good. But, Sheers portrays more than - and less than - a saint: he gives us a man. He shows us Cripps' anger and his frustration, his dated views on race and ethnicity, his shyness, his blindness in old age and he shows us Cripps' vulnerability borne from being a nurse's patient.
Sheers becomes increasingly intrigued with the possibility that Cripps had a lover before he left England, and that this woman bore his child. In his narration, directed at Cripps, he explains, "My intuition that you lived partly as a pursued man in Mashonaland has deepened, I feel more strongly than ever that your life of sacrifice was also somehow a life of personal penance...I know why you came here but why did you leave?"
Sheers writes that, "One man's life can resonate down the years in the lives of others." Cripps' story drew me in, but what makes The Dust Diaries so compelling is the relationship Owen Sheers forges with this long dead relative. What keeps one reading is the obsession that the author obviously has for his uncle, an obsession that Sheers is openly chronicling. Other authors have written about Arthur Cripps. There are two biographies, a novel based on his life, and Sheers mentions several other books. Sheers, never having met the man, draws on these sources as well as interviews, Cripps' own poetry and his correspondence to write the fictional narrative. Sheers can suddenly switch to take up the point of view of one of his somewhat-fictionalized characters. One suspects he does so to further elaborate on his own obsession with his uncle. Mrs. Cole feels that Cripps makes her recognize herself again. Noel Brettell is reminded of an African chief. Bishop Paget, who continues to accept Cripps' candidates for ordination long after the missionary has left the Anglican Church, tries not to bother him. He calls him a saint, and thinks that the churches he builds are "perhaps the most suitable churches of all for this maverick priest. Here there was no partition between the church and land, no entrances, no windows, the birds flew above them and the wind moved through them."
The problem with relying on these outside characters, some of whom did not know Cripps intimately, is that the narrative gets choppy. Captain Meinertzhagen comes in abruptly to relate Arthur Cripps' World War I service, but his presence is rather baffling because Cripps' appears late in the tale. Other characters seem to turn up and then vanish inexplicably. I was not surprised to find Captain Meinertzhagen's war diaries mentioned in the acknowledgements.
The Dust Diaries stands out for the lyricism Sheers employs in telling the story of his great, great uncle. At times the narrative seems to slow down and even stand still as the poetry of the language deepens. Whether Sheers is describing Arthur's interactions with friends in Mashonaland or his reason for coming there in the first place, he excels in his use of images and metaphor. The lyricism is the poetry of the moment, and it slows the story down by focusing the reader on images and contradictions. Far from being meaningless fluff, these images and contradictions are the true crux of the story. This is a story that always seems just about to move, as soon as it has pondered its present.
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This is not the quickest read. As the chapters progressed, one learns bit by bit of Cripps' possible lover. I found myself needing to read on. The narrative is punctuated with chapters about Cripps' last day of life, and those chapters show this complicated man in the simplest of situations: a man about to die at a ripe old age, among friends. Read this book to honor Sheers' ambition in writing about a man he never knew. Read it for the chance to delve into Zimbabwe's colonial past. Read it to learn about an extraordinary man. And, oh yes, read it for the poetry.
Norah Vawter is an intern at allAfrica.com, focusing on the book review page. She received her B.A. from the College of William and Mary, where she studied English literature and edited the fiction section of the William and Mary Review.
