Zinaid Meeran’s Saracen at the Gates Launched at The Book Lounge

November 9th, 2009 by Thando

The launch of the EU Literary Award winning novel, Saracen at the Gates, at The Book Lounge on Friday saw a large audience kept chortling along by Zinaid Meeran’s eccentric take on his upbringing, the writing process and the movie version of the novel.

He claimed he didn’t write the book at all. “There was a groundswell of feeling in the world that chanelled itself through me,” he said. “People, fed up with being stuffed into concrete identities, wanting to express their fragmented selves, seeking a flow, spoke up and the novel wrote itself. Their protests cover every element of identity: race, class, gender and sexuality. The potential of every human being has been squashed for too long into absurd postures.”

He said the characters in the novel, which appeared in a caffeine-fuelled fog, are yearning for “fluidity of living and were tired of being in camouflage”. In the novel, they manage to bust their way out of their stereotypic existence.

Meeran, who grew up on the KwaZulu-Natal coastline, said, “I grew up marooned between the green swathes of endless fields of sugar cane and the blue swathes of the endless ocean on a small strip where there were so many frogs in spring that you needed a snow plough to clear the drive way. Then there were the sardines, clogging the sea if you risked the Zambezi sharks to go surfing. It was intense!”

Adding to the concentrate, he grew up “with two dozen aunties and a handful of grannies” but he’d lost count on the exact numbers. “The two male role models were my father, strapped into a lazyboy made by the NASA interstellar travel people, who was fed by the maid – no… wait, that was my aunty slapped into a maid’s outfit bringing in saucers of boiling water and boiled egg snackwiches – and my grandfather, who both wanted me to be a man. I have no idea why they wanted that…”

Meeran also has “a Cape Coloured mother, absent; a father of cane-cutter stock; those ancestors were thrown into the jungle in 1860; and English-South Africa step-father and a Cape Coloured grandmother of Malaysian origin.” He reflected that even were the racial categories 100% sorted, things would still be puzzling.

“There’s a need to carve out a space for a different way of thinking. The novel issues a rallying cry for a hammered concrete block. It means a lot to those who all wrote this book to have the cry heard.”

Taking questions from the floor he said Joburg had been chosen as the setting for the story because there was a lot of power the “curry mafia” had invested in that world. “It makes for more skills: bandicoots of the highest order trying in the worst possible conditions to escape the camouflage. Joburg has a sci-fi-dark-underworld feel to it.”

Meeran said he’d fled Durban because while he was away for a month on holiday he returned to discover that a leather bag he’d owned had been eaten by bread mould. “It was striking,” he said.

When asked to comment on the humour in the book he said he felt surpised when ever people noticed that. “I’m not a humourous guy. I’m a very pained person. I see things in a twisted way. To survive.”

When asked about the movie version of Saracen at the Gates, in the works, he said, deadpan, “Dan, our producer, says that when all the SABC guys are released from prison and they’ve paid back their gazillions in debt, we’ll make this at the level of The Titanic.”

The author, who is also a film-maker with his Team Tarbaby twin brother, Jean, was asked about how he writes. He said, “The world of film becomes so annoying and scary. I flee that to go and write, but then I get sick of being alone, so I return to film. Oh. And there’s lots of coffee involved. Large sections of the novel are unadulterated caffeine abuse. I recently read the whole book from started to finish, and I’m shocked at the quality. Caffeine is a bandicoot as well.”

Johan Hugo, of The Book Lounge, who facilitated the dialogue, said the book was created from a splendid riffing structure that made great dialect. “It’s fantastically entertaining with fun, colourful and sparkling variation.”

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