About Manas Na'ala

Manas Na'ala is my pen name. There are two reasons for using a pseudonym. Firstly, retaining my anonymity allows the texts to take centre stage, for to me the texts are infinitely more important than I am. Secondly, I aspire to write my texts in the comfort of my study or somewhere on my travels, not behind barbed wire with bodyguards at the gate to protect me from sinister fanatics. I am no coward nor do I wish to be a hero.

At school my teachers judged me to be good for nothing. My father died when I was fifteen and shortly after I was expelled from school, deprecated a persistent truant. For the next ten years I held a series of odd jobs and went to evening school. In my late twenties I studied history and language, in my thirties I studied political sciences.
At some stage in his life a man is forced to choose a trade; men are socially expected to become the bread winner. The positive spin off of this force was that after careful digging into my soul I became aware I was a teacher - I had always been one and I still am. In this period too I felt the presence of a book under my skin, behind my eyes, on the shelves of my mind. I also knew I was not even ready to begin to write. I had not experienced enough of adult life -to become a man takes more than a lower voice and some hair on your chin and chest-, yet I expected the writing would announce itself when I was ready.
So after my study of language I became a teacher, in spite of my experiences at the hands of more than a few poor examples in that profession. After careful observations I chose to educate those who are termed less gifted and less intelligent and are consequently stowed away from the mainstream; this preference was a pronounced political choice too. Because I was politically engaged I also became active in the teachers union and a political party. The latter made me aware that in a very hands on manner life stank. In any way that politics stinks, or at least that I am not fit for the practice of wheeling and dealing. I retreated from life in many ways and was able to take a sabbatical.
It was in this time, in my late thirties early forties, that after a series of so called serendipitous coincidences I met several people who consciously or not provided me with the absent pieces of the riddle I had been trying to solve. For a brief time I found myself working together with a small group of people with similar goals, who had arrived at a similar stage of development. This work progressed until it became apparent one in the group put himself forward as perchance the leader, the spiritual leader, thereby underlining my increscent feeling I had landed into some sort of a sect in creation. I had to leave for I did not want to walk in line as eventually I was required to do. I was flustered when I broke out through the front wall, sad for I had to leave my love and exultant for I felt I had passed my last trial. I had plunged in at the deep end to resurface into the warmth twenty five years later.

Now more than twenty years after my break out I can look back on a time I had known to come as I entered adult life. I had seen life in many ways. From the 'bottom' looking upwards and from a 'top' ranging the plains. Now, that I am over sixty I can reassert I know this universe just as well as I knew it when I was sixteen. The fundamental knowledge is the same, the difference being a certain expressive style. What I was unable to voice in my teens I now can phrase.