GQ gets unfairly tagged as a magazine more about $300 Hugo Boss T-shirts than real life. But in the July issue, GQ correspondent Andrew Corsello tells a deeply moving story of anguish and extreme forgiveness amid the racial chaos in Zimbabwe. "The Other Side of Hate" tracks the dual narratives of Jim Steele, a white farmer who was jailed and saw his land taken by poor squatters, and Paul Neshangwe, a hate-filled young black man who turns his life around, utterly. The two bonded in a strife-toughed version of Christianity.
What drew you to this story?
I'm one of these writers who has themes in his life that are unresolved and require a story for me to at least learn what I can, or to resolve them. I'm a big believer in writing about stuff that addles you or confuses you or frightens you.
I've become increasingly churched in the last seven years, being married to Dana [his wife, an Episcopal minister]. So I'm going to church and mouthing all these creeds, including the Lord's Prayer, and—to me—the crux of the Lord's Prayer is that phrase, "as we forgive those who trespass against us."
For whatever reason, I'm a person who has doubts about forgiveness. I think I have an inability to believe in it because I have a corresponding inability to believe in the capacity for people to change in fundamental ways, and I believe forgiveness involves that.
You were in Zimbabwe for 10 days reporting this piece. What was it like there?
There's a theme in the story about the way in which Shona culture observes no barriers of the kind that we observe. Not just property boundaries, but all sorts of subtle social boundaries—the boundaries, for example, between speech and singing and breathing. They see no distinctions between those. That notion permeates every moment there.
The instance where it was most pronounced for me was the refusal of that church to acknowledge a grand distinction between clergy and lay people.
On that Sunday, we get to the church, and I see Paul for the first time in a few days. We give each other a hug, and he says, "So, you'll be preaching for us today!" I thought it was a joke, and I laughed. And he said, "No, no, you'll be preaching for us today!" There, it's like everyone's ordained.
I said, "What do you want me to preach about?" He said, "Whatever the spirit moves you to say." I'm like, the spirit is moving me to void from every orifice. I ended up speaking for 25 minutes. What I basically did was enumerate all the kinds of lines and grids and delineations that the Western mind draws that they don't draw in Shona culture. I said, "In my life, because of shoes, and cars, and cement and cold seasons, four or five months might pass before my bare feet touch the bare earth." That, actually, got the biggest gasp.
And what did you learn about forgiveness?
I learned that a profound act of forgiveness is never going to be transactional. You have harmed me, I forgive you, and it's over, let us go on our way through life. It's a process and it doesn't stop. And it's full of contradictions. He loves the people who took over his land—but he's also angry as hell at them.
Jim and Paul—these are not lovey-dovey guys. I mean, they're full of love, but they're tough motherfuckers. And this is what it takes. Jim has that remarkable quote near the end of the story, where he says, "Forgiveness is an act of will. It is not for the weak."