Writing from the Margins

Where the writing begins

Growing up as a queer person of colour in apartheid South Africa taught me something about language before I had the vocabulary to name it. I learned early that the stories told about you are rarely the stories you would tell about yourself. That the dominant narrative has weight and consequence, and that silence, while sometimes a form of protection, is never truly neutral. These are not abstract observations. They are the ground from which my writing practice grows.

When I speak of writing from the margins, I do not mean it as metaphor alone. I mean a specific orientation toward power: a habit of noticing who is centred, who is absented, and what structural forces make that arrangement appear natural. My sociological training sharpened this instinct, but the instinct itself predates any formal education. It was formed in the everyday negotiations of belonging, the small acts of translation required to move through spaces that were not designed with you in mind.

This orientation shapes everything I write, whether a grant proposal, a strategic narrative, or a piece of creative non-fiction. It means I listen for what is not being said. I attend to the gap between institutional language and lived reality. I resist the temptation to smooth over contradiction in favour of a cleaner story. Because the contradiction is often where the truth lives, and honouring it is a form of respect for the people whose experiences are at stake.

I believe that writing rooted in marginality carries a particular kind of clarity. Not because suffering produces insight automatically, but because navigating exclusion requires a heightened attentiveness to structure, to context, to the way power moves through language. This attentiveness is not a limitation. It is a resource. It is what allows me to write with both empathy and precision, to hold complexity without losing sight of the human beings within it.