Author Q&A: Jon Keevy talks 'The Unwoven Warrior'

Our latest release, The Unwoven Warrior by Jon Keevy, is travelling far and wide - we've seen it in bookstores all over South Africa!

The Unwoven Warrior | Jon Keevy

As more of you are finishing this powerhouse debut, we decided to sit down with Jon and ask him some of the hard-hitting questions. We did our best to make you proud, Anderson Cooper!

Mirari: Dreaming-what-is-to-come is, in a way, part god, part ecosystem, part coloniser. What inspired this entity, and were you consciously exploring parallels with empire or spiritual assimilation?

Jon: One of the earliest things I wrote was a description of how dreaming-what-is-to-come evolved, and it has remained largely unchanged. I find the world of plants and fungi fascinating - how can one not be inspired by the clonal-colony of aspens in North America? It's thousands of clones connected by a shared root system. And it's maybe 14,000 years old. How would non-human intelligence form in such an organism? And how would it meet another intelligence? What would its drives be?

Uncovering dreaming-what-is-to-come as coloniser and assimilator came much later in the project. I was considering how much it might change the Inyentu and how much it would remove their agency.

Dreaming-what-is-to-come is the most genre-bending element of the novel - setting off a number of other ideas more common in science fiction than fantasy. It required a new set of metaphors for Amkela to grasp its full nature.

M: The duality between Amkela and the Other is deeply philosophical. How did you conceive their relationship, and what does it say about memory, selfhood, and survival? (And can you answer this without spoilers?)

J: As humanity moves to the next level of technological integration, we are going to have to wrestle with what it means to be conscious, and to be continuous - to close your eyes as a biological being and open them as simulation. Ken Liu looks at this in his superb The Hidden Girl and Other Stories - which was adapted into an excellent animated series.

But that most science fiction takes it as a given that souls aren't real. The Unwoven Warrior does the opposite. The afterlife is real so what does that mean for us? The competition between afterlives has only just begun in the novel and will be the driving force of the next instalment.

M: Amkela is both haunted and transformed by his brother's legacy. How did you approach writing a protagonist who literally becomes someone else?

J: Through grief. Though Amkela's transformation is extreme, at its heart its the grief we all know when someone we looked up to dies. We mourn as we step into their responsibilities, we redefine ourselves by their absence until we're able to sort through the difficult question: who am I without them?

M: The Eng culture is rich with oral traditions, rituals, and survival ethics. How did you go about constructing such a vivid, non-Western society?

J: The Eng is the nation of the Inyentu that we spend the most time with, and whose communities we visit. In creating their culture I wanted to draw on specific elements in the real world as inspiration but not duplicate them. For example in chapter four the Last Defenders of the Ancestors visit a "medicine tree" - which marks the burial site of a prophet. From the description some might recognise it as an exaggerated Buffalo Thorn, which in Zulu is called umLahlankosi, meaning “that which buries chief”. It's a tree with power, both medicinal and spiritual. These are the details that create the sense of depth. 

The oral traditions are drawn from a sense of rhythm in the language. As a theatre student I was able to learn from wonderful teachers, including the storyteller Gcina Mhlope who was a guest lecturer for a semester. Along with that I tried to create idioms of the culture to capture what's important to the people: the veneration of ancestors, the flora and fauna of their homeland, textiles and arts.

I wrote a few pieces of poetry as creative exercises to discover the voice and rhythm of the various cultures. This was created for the Eng:

Dust

Sung by Ukubona,

Daughter of the Hare,

Griot of the last Aloe Queen of the Black Rock Eng

  before the Ilishwa

Where there was truth in my mouth there is now dust.

Where there stood towers there lies now ruins.

Where there ruled my Queen — 

No.

I will not say.

Make my tongue to be stone.

Make my song to be silence.

No.

I will not tie the knots of that day into her daughter’s hair.

I will take a knife

  — the sharp knife of the women who shear the tofotofo without drawing blood — 

  I will shave her head

     so that she cannot remember

        what there was

           where there is now dust.

/* Tofotofo is a breed of goat from which the softest cloths of the Eng are woven.

The poem is in sharp contrast to the poetry of the Empire of Karaphier:

The Bannerman

Vro Mauren, Abbess of the Order of the Holy Blood

He stood all bold, bloodied and torn,

The final bannerman to Dynast sworn.

Clamouring round the Parani horde,

Came at him with ax and sword.

His knees his spirit then betrayed,

He sunk low and yet he prayed,

Not for the glory his sword deserved,

But for the Dynast whom he served.

The Parani fools mocked his chant,

And cursed him in their filthy cant.

But across the leagues, through thinnest air,

The Dynast heard His bannerman’s prayer.

M: Bonus question: who is your favourite character, and why?

J: Otja definitely. She's a salty granny and the only possible foil to Amkela's earnest brooding. She's ready to deflate any ego or grandiose sentiment with a few words and I loved writing those words. "You tail-less snake" is a favourite.

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