Sally-Ann Murray: "A Female Familial: Citiness in the Novel Small Moving Parts"

Small Moving Parts (Kwela 2009, 2010) is Sally-Ann Murray’s award-winning contemporary South African novel which puts Umbilo, a working class, unexceptional suburb of Durban, on the literary map (de Kock 2011, Jacobs 2010, Heyns 2009).

To some extent, readers might consider the novel to be credentialised by a revisionist or even subaltern intent, in terms of which the (positive) imagining of a ‘history from below’ offsets the continuing (negative) tendency, as Horrell sees it, for white South African women novelists to ‘write white’ (2004). Yet Small Moving Parts does not turn on historical recovery but on an experimental, even feminist historiography in which the intimate, imaginative depiction of female lives reveals the limits of history as official record, and the contradictory meanings which ‘place’ accrues in and over time.

In Small Moving Parts, the very process of narrative mapping, linking and cutting across characters’ lives, simultaneously narrativises ‘Durban’, creating the city as a distinct, regional character. My paper will consider how the fragmented story of a white working class female family, one shot through with contradictory forms of personal-political presence and absence in a specific South African place, enables the author to devise a consciously ‘partial’ (piecemeal and affective) representation of Durban as a city which exists in history through the imagination. This is in keeping with Jacobs’ discussion (2010) that for all its detailed evocation of ‘Durbanness’, Small Moving Parts finally insists on the ‘atopical’ quality, the “unplaceable place” (Miller 1995:7) of Durban as that which eludes mapping.

My paper will indicate that Small Moving Parts combines attention to specific sites (eg womb, port, kitchen, street, kindergarten, bedroom…) erratically imagined through time (eg settler history, personal memory, foetal eidolon, immediate experience…), implying that fiction is a mode in which geography and history may be realized as discourses, and that the experience of both is linked not only to the familiar racial constraints of apartheid, but also to gender.  The so-called bildungsroman foci of the narrative is just as often abruptly unsettled, creating a metatextual narrative movement in which the protagonist’s experience of her ‘mother city’ of Durban, a place with which she becomes familiar through the limits and possibilities of her own mother’s range of instruction, play, protection, blindness and even neglect, is the implicit antecedent of the repertoire of city tactics she needs to develop in order successfully to imagine integrating into a dramatically altered Durban post 1994. In this sense, the novel fulfills what Nuttall has termed the “rubric of the emergent” (2006:269), offering an “innovative reworking[ ] of citiness as a way of being in the city” which is “conceptually entangled, layered, circuitous”, rather than reliant on “simplified dualisms”.

Sally-Ann Murray is associate professor of English studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, where she teaches literature, postmodernisms and creative writing. Her research focuses are southern African literature, particularly fiction and poetry, and these are complemented by her work on contemporary art, environment, and cultural studies. Among her academic publications are "On the Street with Vladislavić, Mhlongo, Moele and Others" (2011, in SA Lit Beyond 2000), "En Fuite, on Foot, in Thought: Making the Metropolis Elusive", in Critical Arts17(2) 2005 and "The Idea of Gardening: Plants, Bewilderment and Indigenous Identity in South Africa", in English in Africa 33(2) 2006.

Besides her academic activity, Sally-Ann Murray is also a writer. She has published two collections of poems - Open Season (2006), and Shifting (1992), which was the winner of the Sanlam Award and the Arthur Nortje Award. Her novel Small Moving Parts (2009) won both the M-Net Literary Award and the Herman Charles Bosman Prize in 2010, and in the same year was short-listed for the University of Johannesburg Prize as well as the Sunday Times Fiction Prize.