HELD: Portrait of the Black Family, by Lulama Mali

HELD is a memoir that spans three generations of one South African family, beginning in the erased neighbourhood of Wittebome and unfolding through the forced removals of apartheid, the intimacy of township life in Gugulethu, and the hidden truths that reshaped a child’s understanding of love, belonging, and survival.

At its heart, this is the story of a girl raised by her grandparents in house where politics coexisted with the daily rhythms of survival, and where abundance was measured not in wealth but in ritual, memory, and care. It is also the story of her mother, Nokhephu — first believed to have died in a tragic accident. The truth would turn her childhood upside down: the sister she thought she had was in fact her mother and hadn’t died.

Both personal and political, it’s is a meditation on memory, silence, and inheritance. It asks: what does it mean to be held — by grief, by history, by love — and what happens when the truths that bind us finally come undone?