The entire concept of Greg Shaw’s Grey-Zones fascinates me particularly because it seems to render into art what is both a physicality (in terms of interrogating the status of the border crosser in relation to the border they cross) and a liminality of consciousness (in that we are forced to cross a psychic border whenever we enter into or engage with a piece of art in its own dimensional totality). Take the act of reading a book, for example. To pick up a physical book and to open its covers enacts a border crossing; something has been breached, something has been entered into; another land, another spatial reality. Then, of course, like any piece of art, we make a decision to cross the boundary when we begin to engage with it on a reactive intellectual, emotional or even purely cognitive level. In fact, we begin as migrants at the outer edges of a space which both invites us and repels us simultaneously; for art, any art, like any new territory, is primarily consumed with a foreboding which very much prefaces its ability to then subsume us and enthral us to profundity (whatever that really is!)

When I conceived my novel, Of Beasts and Beings, I was very much reacting to the destabilising impact of post-election landscape scenarios in Africa. I was also very much preoccupied with the nature of postcolonial narratives, and what it meant to be a “white writer” in Africa; the guilt, and also the inherited problems of writing from within the framework of a very apparent colonial legacy. This was around 2008, 2009, and everywhere one turned there seemed to be some or another nation on the continent erupting into a post-electoral spat. Visual footage of what was happening in Kenya had the most direct impact on me, and from there I drew my most explicit references, but of course 2008 was a dark time for Zimbabwe too. I remember shying away from exploring the visual reality of our own post-election horror stories because I assume I felt it was “too close to home”. I rather think there was a sense of national denial and a fear that, collectively, somehow, there was a larger horror absorbing us all; something that we were all, at the same time, inextricably complicit in too. It is interesting to me now to realise that I have my various protagonists all flee to a physical border; in fact, the idea of border crossing in that novel is, I see in hindsight, a quest not only for survival, atonement and a metaphoric birth (and rebirth), but really a desire to sever a physical link with what was then physically and psychologically intolerable: nothing good comes from violence, from hatred. In the novel this happens through a metafictional counter narrative, but I remember the sensation of “writing towards that border” as a way of prolonging the actual crossing of it, and therefore the completion of the narrative itself.

When a writer finishes a text, or when an artist completes a piece, I think there is a kind of crossing that takes place, too. You are never quite in the old space again, but never quite out of it, and the next space, wherever that is, seems as yet undefined and indistinct. I am not sure what this means exactly.

Neal Hovelmeier

(Ian Holding) J

uly, 2023