Spilt Milk is the story of two passionate people who share a shameful past and a tenuous present.
Decades after a childhood love affair earns upright school principal Mohumagadi and disgraced preacher Father Bill expulsion from their communities, the two characters are brought back together under the most unlikely of circumstances.
Mohumagadi, headmistress of the elite Sekolo sa Ditlhora school for talented black children, takes in Father Bill as a teacher much to the dismay of her students and faculty. Thus begins a battle of wills and wits for the hearts and minds of the students living in the shadow of revolution and change.
About the Author
The EU Literary Award-winning Kopano Matlwa is one of South Africa’s most vibrant young writers. A medical graduate, Kopano is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Coconut. She is a founding member and chairperson of Waiting Room Education by Medical Students, a non-profit organisation run by students and is a 2010 Rhodes Scholar.
In The Angina Monologues three women medical interns from vastly different backgrounds are sent to a rural KZN hospital where gang assassinations and rogue snakes are facts of life and AIDS simply does not exist.
Pampered, spoilt Rachel struggles to establish her independence and learns to love across the cultural divide. Conservative, beautiful Seema struggles to end a relationship that has become increasingly abusive. And street-savvy Nomsa finally learns to accept a past she has spent a lifetime denying.
This is the story of three women finding courage, love and compassion in the most unlikely places. Like its bestselling predecessor, The Karma Suture, The Angina Monologues brings readers face to face with what it takes to be woman doctor in the New South Africa without losing your soul.
About the author
After studying medicine for six years and then working as a doctor for another five, Rosamund Kendal decided that the creative side of her brain needed some stimulation and enrolled for the Masters degree in creative writing at UCT. She hasn’t been able to decide whether she prefers being a freelance writer or a general practitioner, so she’s come to a compromise and does both part-time.
Megan Voysey-Braig, winner of the 2007/08 EU Literary Award for Till We Can Keep an Animal, answers some questions posed by the Mail & Guardian:
Tell us about your everyday writing routine Everyday? I wish I could be that disciplined! It involves a lot of pacing, swigging back the tea and coffee and rolling cigarettes, feeling haunted and staring at the screen. For me it has a lot to do with listening — I have a few hundred people in me at a time (so it feels!) vying for their stories to be told, which can make it very exhausting. It is more of a process of sorting out the stories, one by one, what are they saying, what do they want to say, etc. While I am listening nothing much in the way of actual writing happens. I need to find the quiet “OK, now it can be told” space and I don’t stop till it is done.
Jacob Dlamini, author of Native Nostalgia, takes a critical look at some of the unintended consequences of Black Economic Empowerment, in light of the recent Eskom saga involving CEO Jacob Maroga. He rolls out memorable lines from fellow writers Bheki Peterson – “being black is not a job description” – and Jabulani Sikhakahne – “Maroga holding on to his job by the pigmentation of his skin”.
Take a look:
It seems like only yesterday that Wits University academic Bheki Peterson was warning South Africans against the elevation of blackness into a job description. In fact, Peterson issued his warning in the mid-1990s, when ideas about black economic empowerment and affirmative action were more confused than they are at present.
The warning must have fallen on deaf ears, given the sorry saga at Eskom at the start of this week, where CE Jacob Maroga was, in the apposite words of Business Day columnist Jabulani Sikhakhane, holding on to his job by the pigmentation of his skin.
Die kunsinnige Zinaid Meeran – skrywer agter Saracen at the Gates se kop is oop – hy sê self sy gunsteling mense is die sonder ras, kleur of geslag. Mense wat nie ingeperk word deur kultuur, geslagsrolle of tradisie nie. Dit is ook so vir die hoof karakter in sy boek – Zakira – wat haarself van nuuts moet definiëer. Deborah Steinmar het die kleurvolle knaap in Kaapstad ontmoet:
Zinaid Meeran lyk soos Peter Pan, Dorothy van Oz en Michael Jackson als in een. Hy dra ’n kortbroek en ’n sonbril met wit raam en donker lense soos ’n ruimtereisiger of ’n huisvlieg. Meeran is ’n kultusfiguur met ’n besige, goddelose brein en ’n lakoniese geselstrant – en hy het onder meer ’n meestersgraad van die Universiteit van Kalifornië in Los Angeles.
Dié Suid-Afrikaanse skrywer het onlangs die EU-toekenning vir sy debuutroman, Saracen at the Gate, gewen. Die boek is ’n skreeusnaakse wipwaentjierit wat wemel van oordadige, fassinerende detail soos Vikram Seth se boeke, elegant en diepgaande soos Salman Rushdie se werk, psigedelies bont soos Bollywood, masala, hibiskus en mango. Dit handel oor ’n Johannesburgse kerriemafia-prinses, Zakira, wat verlief raak op die leier van ’n anargistiese vrouebende.
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.”
In response to recent accusations that Cape Town is a racist city, Bryan Rostron (Black Petals) rather cheekily explains the city’s demographics by suggesting that Noah’s Ark marooned on Table Mountain and not, as is thought, Mount Ararat:
In a dazzling eureka moment I may have figured out where Noah’s Ark finally reached dry land, as described in Genesis, perched atop a mountain. Yes, there are claims for many parts of the world. Biblical literalists still dig on Mount Ararat in Turkey.
But from recent evidence I’m pretty sure it must have been Table Mountain. The earliest shipping exploit round the Cape was claimed for the Phoenicians, in the seventh century BC, by the Greek historian Herodotus. He says the Pharaoh Necho instructed those seafarers to go round Africa.
Aspasia Karras interviews European Union Literary Award winner Zinaid Meeran for the Sunday Times:
‘As children Zakir and I would empty out the bottom shelves [of the fridge], remove the racks and play David Cronenberg’s The Fly in this gleaming chamber.
My mommy’s bridge cronies would come by to admire the fridge, it being an Italian import. Once we were mid-body in the transmogrification process when aunty Farah opened the door to test its luxurious handling. I was perched on the crisper trays, half fly, half human.”
The transmogrification of Zakira, the lead character in Zinaid Meeran’s European Union Literary Award-winning novel, Saracen at the Gates, is the subject I want to talk to him most about when I meet him for coffee in Parktown North, Johannesburg.
Saracen at the Gates is a wildly revolutionary tale that is as raucously hilarious as it is bitterly sad, with a satirical edge that finds easy comparison with books like White Teeth, The Ground Beneath her Feet and Gravity’s Rainbow. In this, his first novel, Zinaid Meeran explores the fluid and fragmented nature of identity, and searches for the liberation of the individual from the tyranny of what he calls “groupthink”. It is about renegades living both on the murky borderlands of society and the gilded steps of privilege – places where life can be as dark as it is hopeful.
Don’t miss the launches, in Johannesburg and Cape Town, of this important new novel – we’ll see you there!
Saracen at the Gates is a wildly revolutionary tale that is as raucously hilarious as it is bitterly sad, with a satirical edge that finds easy comparison with books like White Teeth, The Ground Beneath her Feet and Gravity’s Rainbow. In this, his first novel, Zinaid Meeran explores the fluid and fragmented nature of identity, and searches for the liberation of the individual from the tyranny of what he calls “groupthink”. It is about renegades living both on the murky borderlands of society and the gilded steps of privilege – places where life can be as dark as it is hopeful.
Zakira, a curry mafia princess, is kept on a short but well-funded leash by her wealthy and conservative parents . . . or so they think. At once a devoted money-laundering curry mafia princess and vodka-guzzling, pill-popping, night-clubber, Zakira falls in love with Sofie, the punky-gorgeous leader of the Saracens – a girl gang that will change her life forever.
The Saracens, an anarchist cell whose graffiti tags the overpasses of the city, initiate Zakira into an underworld that wades grinning and lipsticked into an ongoing battle against tyranny and social injustice. The Saracens’ impending war with the city’s sex slavers brings the girl gang head-to-head with Zakira’s father and her erstwhile clan, the curry mafia.
As she is drawn ever deeper into the anti-world of the Saracens, Zakira finds herself faced with the simple but awful choices between family and lover, tradition and dissidence – choices that will ultimately force her to decide what will define her and who she will become.
About the author
Zinaid Meeran worked in current affairs television, producing Parliamentary Service TV, before developing feature films P-I-G and The Concubine with twin brother Jean Meeran, the other half of filmmaking duo Team Tarbaby. Having secured a Fulbright scholarship, Zinaid earned an MA in Critical Studies and an MFA in Film at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Since returning to Cape Town, and Team Tarbaby, Zinaid has been developing feature films The Djinn and Gazelle911, while making art, particularly photography and experimental short films. For Zinaid film, art and literature are ways to investigate identity as fluid and fragmented, rather than the concrete and fixed phenomenon that the powerful claim it to be. Zinaid’s work is a rallying call for those who believe in the emancipation of the self from concrete notions of gender, race, class, national and sexual identities.
This April from Jacana Media
