For those unfamiliar, I am a writer from South Africa. Born here and raised here.
Over the course of 5 posts, potentially more, I’ll share about me behind the pages. I will discuss what influenced me as a writer. I will also share how being South African influenced my writing.
My writing
My writing, as all writers, was heavily influenced by my upbringing and my environment. Writing entered my life nearly the same time libraries did. As much as I enjoyed escaping into books and stories and make-believe, my reality called for a deeper, darker place where I could hide and escape to.
I appreciate and love parents who encouraged their little writers in their writing endeavours from a small age. Mine thought God was punishing them for something by giving them a child that was seldom in reality. Therefore my writing happened in secret.
I filled up so many A4 hardcover counterbooks at that time. I hid these notebooks with my scribblings. The stories were always of dire situations and lots of violence and abuse. It both scared me but exhilarated me when I could cause that character to overcome the odds in a miraculous way. The ease and conflict-free pages changed with my reality to dark, suspenseful and conflict-ridden scenarios. Only to morph into a winner-takes-all all against the darkest most difficult odds.
Thinking back, I processed most of my days and all its troubles through the stories I weaved.
Shame the writing (writer)
Something I was never willing to admit was the shame that I carried with me and poured into my writing. Not just the shame about myself, my life, and what I carried with me but shame about writing.
Raised in the carefully crafted conservative, racist, politically moulded reality, shame is a powerful tool to keep everybody in line. And shame was something that worked double time in my parents. In my parents’ generation stepping out of line was a death wish. And both of them were quite rebellious come to think of it. The last thing they wanted to do in their lives was have children who stepped out of line.
Unfortunate for them, that is exactly what they received.
Fortunately for me, the environment in which I became an adult became a lot less of what it was but a lot more of a different kind of control.
We can’t get away from controlling people, can we…
But all in all, I prefer the modern day political and social environment. The African version of democracy is a far cry from the philosophical version of democracy. At least we moved past banning writers. We just threaten their families in which they make the prudent decision to move to Germany. Platforms aren’t banned from the South African population. If said platform can pay the bribe, they are free to do and be here.
**I promised myself to keep blog posts to no more than 500 words so I’ll end this post here.
Thanks for reading. Look out for the next post in this series where I’ll go into a little bit more detail about my writing
Cheers!
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