Author Tami Tsansai reflects on life’s journey with ‘unconventional autobiography’
Published:Sunday | March 5, 2023 | 5:22 PMKrysta Anderson - Staff Reporter -
“Everything is designed for a specific result. Immersion. Self-confrontation. And I’m proud of the way it all comes together to achieve this.” These are the words of Tami Tsansai, a Jamaican author who recounts her personal experiences with mental health and healing from trauma through art, spirituality, and self-study in her book, Hard Gal Fi Dead: Musings, Poems, Notes to Self.
“My book is a true reflection mirroring the coming of age. I like to call it an unconventional autobiography. It is a real experience that I’ve had, and writing became the channel to process, heal, or create something out of it,” she told The Sunday Gleaner. The page-turner explores themes of mental health, growth, blackness, womanhood as well as different kinds of relationships; those that are familial, intimate and spiritual, especially with nature. All have sculpted her way of thinking and living from her childhood into her early 20s.
Tsansai, whose birth name is Tameka A. Coley, has always been a book lover. The journey started at the age of six with the aspiring author describing herself as reading voraciously and making up her own stories. She was journalling her thoughts by eight years old. “People who don’t read are averse to growth. It’s an essential life practice and truly enhances us in every way. You can’t be a great writer without being an avid reader,” she added.
As she grew older, she yearned to put pen to paper in an ‘authorised’ fashion. With years of journalling and writing poetry, she noticed that a theme had been waiting in the wings to take centrestage. So she began orchestrating her symphony of ideas until her book was ready to star in a performance of a lifetime.
“There are a few idiosyncrasies that stand out for me. It’s a multigenre book of poetry, stream of consciousness, recollective dialogue, direct journal entries, and actual letters I wrote to myself. It’s a journey from beginning to end where I start at rock bottom, broken; go through the emotional processing in the middle and by the end, have a new perspective and have truly matured from my experiences, and the themes, of course. I was very intentional with everything. From the material I used for the cover to the alignment of the text in the pages, the make-up I did to make the cover image come to life,” the creative, who is also a professional make-up artist shared.
The journey aligned with the currents of a river. Some days, words flowed and she had a hard time keeping up with the ideas. Then there were still waters or a tide so strong that she produced only one line, pulling her under and making her unable to feel through that moment. “One particular piece took me about two years to finish. It was about five lines for over a year until one day the dam broke,” she revealed.
Once she finished her book, she wasted no time in self publishing with Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) platform. The writing process might have taken two years but publishing only took close to two months.
What was most striking was the cover, which became a real conversation starter for Tsansai. “I really wanted an image that would grab the viewer at first sight, and that would tell the story of growth and triumph that the book is about. I knew I wanted it to be unique,” she revealed, adding, “The concept is a Japanese one called kintsugi or kintsukuroi, where broken bowls are resealed with gold instead of being thrown away and given new life. I really resonated with that. People like to think of themselves as damaged goods or of other people in that light when they go through hardships or struggle with their mental health in any way as if we somehow lose worthiness rather than seeing it as building character or enhancing our beauty.”
Since releasing on Kindle on August 1, 2019 and in paperback for the book launch on February 28 the following year, the feedback, she says, has been amazing. Promotions have taken an organic route by word of mouth. “People connect with it deeply. I have so many messages and emails from people ranging from teenagers to even a woman who was 85, in Jamaica and around the world thanking me for helping them along their healing journey. It has been such an overwhelming and humbling experience.”
With readers spanning from the Caribbean to Germany, Australia, Wales, England, and even Japan, the author believes that it has a lot to do with expressing true vulnerability. “True vulnerability opens you up and expands you at a rapid pace, beyond what you could ever imagine for yourself. Not everyone will understand or accept you or your story, but that’s okay because it’s yours. I needed to share my story to free myself of the things I carried around with me over the years and wasn’t allowing myself to heal from. And I am excited that others can relate.”
Noting that her own revolution has been a beauty to behold, the director of communications and public awareness for the Jamaica Mental Health Advocacy Network is in the process of launching her new website – Writes and Kulcha media – which will honour and celebrate Jamaican culture, telling the stories of indigenous and black people in an unorthodox way. She is also in the process of writing her second book, set to be complete by the end of the year.
Her advice to aspiring writers is to just start. “As clichéd as it might sound, just start. Even if it doesn’t need to make sense, start anyway. Get everything out on paper and get your mind going. You will be editing anyway. Let the words flow and take shape naturally, then you only need to prune them. And if you’re struggling with the motivation or discipline to do it, set an appointment in your calendar every day, set an alarm and a timer. And when it pops up, go sit down and write. Don’t think, just write. Eventually it will become routine, and by that time of day, your brain will already be primed for writing. The writing is first, though, everything else happens when that is done.”