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.
Not her fly experimentation, but rather her frantic mutation from curry mafia princess to anarchist girl-gang acolyte.
It strikes me that her full frontal, down-on-the-mat grapple with her identity is of national importance.
After all, redefining our identity is something of a national pastime, and all our aunty Farahs are peering into the fridge for unseemly glimpses of our strange mutations.
Even as Meeran sips his blueberry juice, Julius Malema is visiting Jonathan Jansen to question him about retribution and justice for the Reitz four.
It's a meeting weighed down with hefty definitions of our national identity and what it means to be a contemporary South African. If we are not the rainbow nation, then who are we?
Meeran rejigs my question: "How to progress when the country has been hijacked by ethnic nationalism?"
All his work, in film and literature, is an attempt to work out an answer.
"We need to build a civic nationalism, where there is a free and fluid understanding of identity, and everything is celebrated as part of the whole," he says.
"All our films [he works with his twin brother] are about representing this idea of a fluid identity, but all we get is antagonism.
"They tell us that this is a Eurocentric approach, but that's just a red herring."
His approach to his own identity was forged in his school years. He was a product of an experimental school - uThongathi high school, in KwaZulu-Natal.
"It was a Disneyland environment, totally mixed race, no class, as we all came from such diverse economic backgrounds, an idyllic environment next to the ocean and the sugar cane plantations, no uniforms and friendly teachers.
"I came out of that heavenly environment into varsity and the bad old South Africa. I was in shock. But things got better."
A lot better. He was awarded a Fulbright to study film at UCLA in California.
But what caused him to veer into literature, other than the innate difficulties of producing a film in South Africa?
"I wrote the novel so I would not slit my throat. I feel I have to aestheticise life, otherwise it's unbearable.
This is the journey his protagonist makes: "She realises that you cannot camouflage yourself in one of those concrete identities: a woman, a heterosexual, a Muslim, a curry-mafia princess.
"Of course she got a lot of power from this identity, but she is prompted to release herself from it through her love affair with Sofie, a leader of the anarchist girl gang, the Saracens. All power is oppressive."
Even the liberated Saracens are in camouflage in order to survive society's disapproval. They recruit members through a baking circle for girls.
Meeran smiles and suggests: "All book clubs are probably hot-beds of revolution."
He bemoans the fact that unless society can neatly package our identity and contain it, they cannot deal with it.
"So they accept a Helen Zille if she bakes cupcakes and rages about politics, but they would have a hard time if she also only got around on her BMX bike, had an abiding love for her Sony Play- Station and an artistic bent."
I for one can imagine her expressing her groove by flirting with beat boxing.
So how would Julius Malema bust out of his ethnic nationalist straitjacket?
"He should just stay locked up in his mansion in Sandton and let the rest of us bust out," says Meeran.
"My grandfather was Afrikaans, of Portuguese and Hugue-not descent. My grandmother was a coloured Madagascan, Indonesian, Khoisan. My father was Indian from that group of 1860 indentured labourers.
"How can anybody identify me as an Indian man and appeal to me for votes and power based on my Indian identity?"
He concludes that "District 9 changed my life. It was the first film about South Africa that wasn't trying to construct South African identity around race.
"They needed to create prawns to show us that he's not black, or coloured, or white, just that person over there."
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