The world is teeming with the here and now, current stories in the making with the mounting flux of national and international events and situations that drown the past as voices evaporate into the mists of time. The danger is in relegating these voices to forgotten histories when they have much to teach this time on human kindness and compassion, to obliterate the self-centred I, me and my way of thinking and behaving.
Fiction writers have the skills at their finger-tips to animate these voices through fictional recreations, Many such esteemed writers, as Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Elif Shafak, et al, have done so to great effect over time.
Ignorant of history, we find it easy to accept our isolation from one another. We are more able to recognize differences than shared experiences and perspectives. History proclaims our common humanity. – Author: Linda Simon
South Africa’s apartheid history has a multitude of women’s voices, women of colour – some of whom have gone unnoticed under the radar of time.
Souls of Her Daughters arrived to highlight the role that women of colour made to the contribution in dismantling apartheid’s constructed barriers of race, sex, culture and ethnicity.
In Souls of her Daughters, two mothers, Varuna and Elsie, the mothers of Grace and Patience unite as one family when their husbands are brutally killed during the darkest times in the land’s racist history. Their daughters, Grace and Patience, become the stoic women they reveal themselves to be while fighting their own demons on sexism and abuse. Kindness and compassion pave the way forward as the personal histories of Varuna and Elsie in demonstrating their resilience under the scrutiny and accusations of racist stereotypes.
From humble beginnings both Grace and Patience emerge as women of courage, serving humanity in an international arena. Before they achieved this level of confidence they found a space where they were valued, belonged, to reach out to those struggling a similar or worse fate.
These four forgotten voices were deep, and the reach expansive that it opened the way for two more novels to follow, Chosen Lives, and, What Change May Come. These novels that followed, Souls of Her Daughters takes the reader on a journey from South Africa to Australia, Ireland and India. The novels showcase the kindness and compassion of two sisters born from different mothers into a segregated South African society with the potential to overcome the debilitating challenges of their birth country’s political history.
Fiction has a valuable role to play in the recreated telling of stories that did not make it into the history pages of its respective time, yet these stories carry the potential to educate the here and now for a future built on kindness and compassion. These human qualities dissolve the quagmire of the human condition.
Please like and share your thoughts and ideas on the recreated fictionalised histories you would like to read.
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