FIRST-TIME PUBLISHED

Writing a book about your own life is something many people aspire to, as there are so many epic stories out there, woven into the fabric of peoples lives, that many want to express and share them.

I carried the idea of writing a book about my own life, as it involved a national secret, but decades went by and nothing worked in my favour, not even my attempts to write my story were satisfactory. Then, starting in January 2017, through a series of “chance happenings and opportunities” it became a reality.

Although the publisher is small, it has been a huge benefit to have access to editors and people who know the ropes and have walked the same path so many others down their book-writing road. They put up with lots of re-edits and remained committed and encouraging and saw the project through to the end, when in October 2020 I finally held the book in my hands.

In the background to the publishing process is the question of whether a book will make money or pay its costs is inevitable, as publishing is a business like any other, and in many respects it is even more of a risky business than most because only once the book is exposed to public do book reviewers and the public reaction – only then can its success be measured.

For me, being published came about as a series of amazing opportunities that opened for me after enrolling for a short course in creative writing at Rhodes University. Later the publishers connected to the University called for manuscript submissions for non-fiction genre, and mine was amongst those chosen.

In the book I take you on a journey from birth and then “shards of memory” through childhood and adolescence to a conclusion as a grown woman, reviewing how the secret we’d had to carry about racial reclassification had impacted my life as a young teenager.

“And my mother knew. But she’d had to lock up all her words. She locked up her words and threw away the key. Even when the desire to unlock her words rose in her heart, when we begged her to tell us a truth to help us understand, she could only grope in her pockets. The key was long gone. There were no longer any heart-words. Without heartwarm words our tears froze. We became like fresh fish on ice with glassy eyes that looked for our mother’s keys in our own pockets where they could not be found.”

There’s not much more to say now except the hard work of supporting the sales process and the hope that there will be other books in the future.

Is the story coming to a world ready to hear the twists and turns of apartheid’s dark secrets, some much worse than other, mine relatively tame in that it is a story of falling into privilege rather than torture. I believe now is the best time as any for such a story to be made known as there is a world-wide need for understanding of people’s differences.

Would I write the same story today if I write again? Definitely not! I would write about my identity as a Christian and the benefits of belonging to a multi-racial family in the Kingdom of God. But getting to this outcome took laying down my pain over the loss of what should have been my birth identity through a choice that was not my own.

Much is said about the healing value of writing – journals and books that carry away our immediate confusion and hurt, replacing them with a fresh page, a chance to put distance between what was so painful and the dreams we left behind – and start again…. Literally, turning over a new page. Beginning the next chapter.

BY NISIS DANIELS