Evensong ~ The Dust Diaries by Owen Sheers

Dimension

EVENSONG

2011 ~ 2025

Review

EVENSONG

Dimension I define simply as a reflection, often jotted onto paper to hand or my smartphone capturing that moment before its meaning and purpose vanish.

Occasionally, I might refer to being ‘outside-the-box’. I prefer to stand back from all organised religion, yet have a cast-iron faith. The Bible is a central plank to my upbringing. These days I’m more likely to write of it in lowercase, and so too any deity, a subtle hint at the change in progress. This does not mean I’m a fifth-columnist or an enemy at the gate if attending a church service.

In 2022, I wrote…

Last evening, reading Dust Diaries ~ An African Story by Owen Sheers, I found I had marked a paragraph on page 66. I must have done this in either 2011 or 2018 according to my annotated note which reads:

Dust Diaries by Owen Sheers

I must have marked this in either 2011 or 2018. But only now, on 4 October 2021, on finding it fresh just two hours after I've revamped Dimension Fables ~ do I grasp the meaning.

In Tewkesbury Abbey, Gloucester Cathedral, Liverpool Cathedral and Worcester Cathedral did I find this in Evensong, but it is Oliver Sheers who has given me the beatific description.

Owen Sheers writes into The Dust Diaries a most wonderful description into the mind of the character … one of his ancestors, an ordained missionary in the Anglican Church in the newly developing British colony of Rhodesia as it then was, that we, of course, rightly know as the fully independent and sovereign Nation state ~ Zimbabwe.

Sheers writes thus …

“I don’t think I will ever have a relationship with a god in the way you did. Perhaps the modern imagination will not allow such a thing, or perhaps I know of too much harm done in the name of gods. As I sat there, however, with that singing uncoiling into the air, something happened: a tuning in of the mind, a spiritual awareness, a consequence of sound and place – call it what you will, but there, in that evensong, I felt a connection with a presence larger and greater than the present and the self. Perhaps it was the clarity of the notes clearing my consciousness, but I was aware of it, whatever it was, out there, beyond the thick stone walls, past Epstein’s pale Lazarus, outside the hushed cloisters. History, the collective soul, I still have no name for it, and I didn’t then either. I just knew I wanted to be part of it, always pitched at a higher note, and I knew that would be impossible, and that is why I wanted it.”

— Owen Sheers (© Owen Sheers)

I completed The Dust Diaries, I learned a great deal about the mindset of British colonial rule, the attitude of the Church within that rule, and indeed the role, even, that it is happy to engage in. Owen Sheers gives us in this superb title an extraordinary and uplifting study, a balancing of the scales, enabling me to examine the reality of colonial rule and the narrowness of mindset within the Church that he and his ancestor confronted.

This, for the moment, is a pen note; my chief concern is to highlight the crucial importance of descriptive writing.

At School in the 1950s-1960s, so often in history lessons we were reminded of the Dark Continent. There is anything but dark about the Continent of Africa. What is dark is that which outsiders have brought to it over the centuries.

The Dust Diaries recalibrated my mindset.

Professor Owen Sheers, one of our greatest contemporary poets and playwrights has given us all this Gem.

3 June 2025

First written 24 November 2022 and reviewed and updated on 3 June 2025

FABLES
by
An Bradley Marshall