Kabo pens life experience novel
Nnasaretha Kgamanyane | Sunday April 10, 2022 06:00
One such new writer is Segolame Kabo, a secondary school teacher and artist who recently published her first novel titled, 'I Live For Me'. The 358-page book has 60 chapters.
She recently told Arts & Culture that the novel is about a young woman who lives in a present-day cold world where genuine love is rare to find and people get mocked for being dumped. She added that people do not know how to comfort others anymore when they are going through difficult times. “This is a book about a modern working-class woman finding love beyond her class. She has the emotional intelligence to wade through the challenges. She is socially wise and fortunate enough to learn fast from the challenges of both the middle-class perspective and the upper class. This is a book that covers different life challenges from both the middle-class perspective and the upper class.
It covers GBV, teenage hormonal tantrums, mid-life crises, passion killings and bed wetting,” she said. Even though the book is fiction, Kabo pointed out that some issues in it were a depiction of her real-life experiences. However, she said she spiced up the book with a few events. In the story, she also advertised the beauty of Botswana as a country and its culture.
The story is about a woman who travelled a lot internationally yet her country and the deltas remain pronounced and captivating. The book breaks boundaries and unites people. It is about a black middle-class woman from Botswana who fell in love with a white man from America. The interracial connection and cultures were interesting. The book also covers religion and beliefs. It is a book told in the eyes of a Christian vessel living in dynamic cultural beliefs and phenomenal gifts, someone who sees and has an eye. Kabo explained that the book covers almost all the complexities of a human being, saying her own life inspired the book. “I was once dumped and found love.
I am a Christian, met different religions and cultures. Almost all topics in this book happened to me even though I told the story in the innocent humour of a fictional approach. My target audience is women, broken women, women who have gone through pain, divorce and have financial intelligence. This book is a walk of life, it is a journey of a girl who had her fair share of the world but ended up successful and went solo,” she noted.
The book encourages the reader to have strength, endurance, humour, wisdom and the authority to know she lives for herself. Moreover, she explained that when she wrote the novel, she would occasionally throw a chapter on Facebook to get feedback from the public, which made writing less challenging, especially when she had a writer's block. She said the readers sailed her through making writing fun.
She added that writing was therapy, saying it healed her. She said as she went through her own life and had the command of words to manipulate issues she could not at first handle, the book helped her a lot with reflection. She also emphasised the ability to spice up issues and make them hotter and more romantic and more enjoyable. She added that she got support from members of her family, especially her son, partner and her friend.