Sección 2ª Tutor del Capítulo IV del Decreto 75/2009, de 15 de octubre

In order to locate the source of Justine’s displacement, one should examine her perception of her parents’ relationship, which she constructs mainly through reading Black’s novels. Watching her parents’ life unfold in fictional reality is a surreal experience, but not as strange as having to map

out her own identity through reading her assumed father’s novels and listening to sporadic and

female characters, including Anna Devine in The Black Window, does suggest that the writer once intimately knew her mother. However, she is notorious for misremembering the past and twisting the truth. Once she said that Justine was a product of a one-night stand fuelled by alcohol, yet in

Black’s fiction the female protagonist always has a prolonged and deeply meaningful relationship

with the male character. It is such inconsistencies that destabilise Justine’s understanding of who

she is, and dislocate her from her reality. Not only is she positioned between her parents distant, in geographical and temporal terms, relationship, but she also finds herself stuck between truth and fiction.

In the novel, Grimshaw creates an intriguing composition of Justine’s alleged father. For the

young protagonist, Black exists on the overlap of several dimensions: Aniela’s memories, his fiction,

snippets of his reality through carefully montaged TV interviews and printed blurbs on the back of his book covers. Living on the opposite side of the world, he is as distant and unreachable as London

itself, with its “iron gates, rigid parades, the royals and their frumpy banality” (254). Sometimes, Justine manages to reduce that distance through imagined conversations between them. “Do you know who I am?” she hears herself ask and him reply, “Definitely” (274). Justine is unsure about the circumstances of Aniela and Richard’s separation, and sometimes even doubts her genetic bond with the English writer. Having read Black’s Foreign City, where the male protagonist discovers that the woman he once loved has a daughter, likely to be his, Justine thinks that Black knows of her existence, and yet she is unsure as to why all these years he has not tried to reach out to her.

One connection Justine feels strongly with her presumed father is their love of books. For Justine, literature forms a passage into another reality, yet Black’s novels affect her differently.

Reading them, sometimes she becomes lost in her own reality, for they often undermine what she thinks she knows about herself. In one of his interviews, Black shares the fact that his father was a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto. In Foreign City, this textual detail instantly reveals a link between Black and Henderson. Here Grimshaw makes it obvious that Henderson is important for

understanding the character of Black, thus it is appropriate to read the two characters as an

extension of each other. Through Henderson, Justine would have learnt of her grandfather’s

fortunate escape from Treblinka extermination camp, his work as an interpreter for the allied forces, as well as his subsequent marriage into a well-connected London family. On the one hand, the

discovery of her father’s Jewishness may undermine Justine’s already fractured sense of place and belonging, for historically, the Jewish people have been associated with geographical and cultural displacement. The series of movements that led her grandfather, a Polish Jew, from forced

familial bond with him. If Richard Black, “the product of his father’s magic act” (125), is truly her

father, then Justine’s existence is also a kind of miracle.

However, the most immediate source of Justine’s displacement is her mother. Born into the

family of Czech immigrants in New Zealand, Aniela graduated from Elam Art School and later moved

to London with her husband David (Damien in “The Black Window”) and their children, Harry and

Lucy. While living in London, she perfected her artistic craft and travelled extensively in Europe, but that came at a price. In the name of art, Aniela had left her young family. She then lived in France

and Berlin, before returning to New Zealand. “Somewhere between leaving her husband and leaving London” (245), Aniela became pregnant with Black’s child and Justine was born in Auckland later

that year.

Surveying “The Box of Light” for details about Justine’s mother, it becomes evident that here

Grimshaw invites us to consider, yet again, the idea introduced earlier in the novel that “the real artist … puts art before everything” (44). In Aniela’s life, movement becomes a negative force, revealing her self-destructive tendencies. A Bohemian artist, Aniela rejects the notions of stability and home. Antagonistic towards convention, Aniela leads a life through chaos and dedicates her life to artistic pursuits. Her life is full of “glamorous mayhem” and “colourful madness” (240), but it is

also erratic and unpredictable. Sometimes, she confines herself to her studio for days, and “ha[s] binges of painting, followed by slumps” (234). Her long-time relationship with Bogusuav Jaszkiewicz,

or Bob, is ridden with indiscretions and arguments. She smokes and drinks and inhabits “an inner

world so intense that her hours on the couch see[m] less like idleness than a furious and exhausting

communion with life” (232). It is these colliding internal forces that upset Justine’s equilibrium and make it impossible for her to experience a sense of family and home.

However, similar to Anna in “The Black Window,” Aniela’s turbulent life translates into

fascinating art. The thematic and stylistic diversity of her work is startling. It ranges from the surrealist portraits of people to menacing Goya-style creatures; from “trees with eyes, [to] kitchen objects coming alive” (242); from the satirical depictions of praying Christians to the striking

depictions of New Zealand. Such versatility is a mark of Aniela’s fecund imagination and brilliance as

an artist, but also restlessness of her mind. Throughout her career, she has earned the highest accolades from her critics, and has drawn large crowds to her frequent exhibitions. Yet although she

is described as “a true creature of these islands” (234), there is a powerful sense in the novel that,