A memoir in fragments. A love story without a lover. A reckoning written in three languages across fifty-two handwritten pages in Buenos Aires, March–April 2026.
Deon C. Visser
In progress — first draft
Trilingual — Afrikaans / English / Español
Buenos Aires · March–April 2026
52 handwritten pages
Salvaje. Sin vergüenza. Wild. Without shame.
Selfvaje is trilingual autofiction — Afrikaans, English, Spanish — structured around absence. A missing suitcase. A man's silence. A grandfather's cologne in a foreign street. A dragonfly that keeps appearing uninvited. The book moves the way memory moves: not forward, but inward. Deeper and deeper toward the thing that was locked away at five years old and has been running the show ever since.
It is not a travel memoir. It is not a romance. It is the record of one person dismantling the performance of themselves in real time — in a city they have been moving toward for twenty-two years — and finding, underneath all of it, something feral and luminous and completely their own.
The structure
Selfvaje is built as a tesseract — a four-dimensional object folded into visible form. Four layers exist simultaneously, bleeding into and interrupting each other the way dreams interrupt waking and memory interrupts the present moment. They do not take turns; they occupy the same space at once.
The body
Buenos Aires, 2026. Immediate. Sensory. Present tense.
The mind
Deon's MA thesis in Creative Writing from Rhodes University, 2020 — the intellectual framework that named what the body was living. Autofiction theory, the craft of self-writing, academic language arriving inside lived experience, uninvited and necessary.
The memory
America at 19. University. Coming out. Thailand. The years of living the thing before there was language for it.
The soul
The inherited dimension — a grandfather's emigrant family, Patagonia, the ancestral threads that predate the individual life entirely.
The MA thesis is not quoted. It is woven. Its theoretical voice surfaces inside journal entries, interrupts poems mid-line, annotates desire in real time — the academic and the feral in permanent, uncomfortable conversation.
Where it stands
Written in hotel rooms, parks, and a Recoleta apartment. Transcribed by hand. Currently in its first draft — no excerpt is public yet.
Connected work
Selfvaje is the first book of what's spiritually the Buenos Aires Trilogy, alongside Night Devourers and Writing, Undone — not a formally numbered series, but three books that grew out of the same stretch of time and the same reckoning. Writing, Undone, the next book up in the Write Your Way Home craft memoir series, grew directly out of the experience of writing Selfvaje.
Selfvaje
Night Devourers — Meridian
Writing, Undone — Write Your Way Home
About the author
Deon C. Visser is a South African writer living in Rayong, Thailand, where he teaches English while developing his creative work. Writing in both English and Afrikaans, his work explores white African identity, queer experience, and the interior life of the writer.