'They Whisper in my Blood' is Franciska Soares’ debut into the world of fiction, after having achieved undreamt-of success in the world of non-fiction with Hachette, UK. Her statement: This move to fiction has been influenced by an artistic impulse that has lain dormant in the years bookended by ‘life’ – the same life that has metabolized in a dark place and from which I have drawn on, now that it has ripened. It’s time for that exilic ideator, that person who has hitherto stood outside of, looking in, constantly cross-examining and pondering the questionable societal norms that exist, to come into her own, I decided. As a child and a teenager right up until my (teenage!) marriage I wrote and got some recognition – I have a letter from the President of India that says: ‘I hope you grow useful to the country’, which speaks to my fresh-faced, exuberant prolificity . . . A decades-old time lag is what I draw on - the turning points, the high-noons, the knife-edges, the quotidian - all of it experienced during my chequered life lived in three disparate countries: India, The UAE and now New Zealand; as well as my confusing (to me!) ethnicity (Portuguese, Italian, Indian, Kiwi). This is me, speaking through my character Rodrigo in 'They Whisper in my Blood': “Whatever language I speak in, people think, it must be 'rented'. Born mid-flight, with feet in two disparate ethnicities, I am always in denial of one of them. Two rich cultures – do they endure? No! They trickle away like water on the oiled feathers of foreign […] I don’t decide which race I am. My hair, my accent, my eyes, my skin, circumstances and the people I happen to be with at that moment in time, decide that for me!” Hence, I would go so far as to say that mine is a marginalized voice: That of a woman seemingly unconnected to the milieu in which she has often found herself in, and thus 'different'; with an accent that immediately stuffs her into a pre-ordained, suboptimal, claustral box. Its walls, if one cared to inspect them (so few do), bear claw marks for all the times she’s had to fight for purchase to heft herself out – when partisanship happened to be distracted. If one cared to look more closely, they would find some existential DNA clinging imperishable under her fingernails. In returning to writing I have found my native language, one that has afforded me an ‘in’ to be in. Art, of which writing is one, is not a torch, it is said, directed at the root of things, but a subtle mist where the unseeable is revealed. This, my most Eastern of attributes, has helped me weave mysticism, poetry and the ineffable into my prose. Has helped me find my home.” Franciska lives quietly in Queenstown, New Zealand, the supposed ‘Adventure capital of the world’.
