Book Review
Hats off to Reflexive Sociological Texts: Undressing Durban (2007)
by Shafinaaz Hassim
Having earned worldwide acclaim as the home of various international festivals in support of art, culture, literature and film, to name but a few, the city of Durban is also a prime tourist attraction for many visitors, both local and international, having been enticed by word-of-mouth and other postcard appeals to partake in the wonders and delights of a historically vibey coastal locale.
However, just like any town or city inhabited by a multiplicity of people making their way through often unglamorous lives, in order to truly understand the essence of place and the diverse networks of social features that can be found to prevail within and around the structure of the city requires that we look behind the sandy beaches and tourist rhetoric.
By implication, we need to delve into the lives of the man on the street, the common traders, the vendors and shack dwellers, the street children and gangsters, the lives of families carefully confined in suburban cocoons and the overcrowded prisons and health clinics. Then we need to look at the taboos and the forbidden territories of sex workers and drug lords all the while reminding ourselves not to lose sight of the obvious and mundane in our quest for spectacular pathos. 'Undressing Durban', a visionary project by a dedicated group of social scientists achieves this goal most commendably.
Edited by Rob Pattman and Sultan Khan, both lecturers in Sociology at UKZN, the collection of essays allows the reader a guided tour behind the scenes of Durban's tourist façade in order to reach beyond the one-dimensional lure of tourist-getaway brochures.
'Undressing Durban' effectively undresses Durban as a metaphor of SA-tourism in order to uncover the theatres of challenge within the city. While Durban is easily construed as urban demon to those who must visit and negotiate its streets with care for even a short time, it is remembered with a certain melancholy for it's richly flavoured past devoid of the violent crime and neglect prevalent in some areas, most notably its once vibrant core, the Central Business District. This cosmopolitan city can lay claim to a diverse display of the local, while having straddled the fine line in enabling global discursive practice into its socio-cultural sphere.
Each of the written works shares much of the writers' emotive engagement and self-reflection of what it means to be part of the theatre of events in this diverse construction of Durban, past and present. Some of these essays are reflective, others contemplative of often grave concerns regarding the spiral of destruction that could erupt if the mechanism of the city is left to its own resources. Durban is presented as an organism, living and breathing, with a refreshing childhood and a potentially spurious and diseased future, unless the pitfalls and ailments are adequately diagnosed, and their effective treatment undertaken. But it is also celebrated as the benefactor of a legacy of cultural and social memory that must lend much nostalgia to those who have partaken in the life of the city, created habitat in its spaces, found solace and spirit within its varied shelters and buried loved ones beneath its pavements.
The images presented by this cacophony of essays and analyses are by no means an ideal and romanticized notion of city living, as the reader must often take with a pinch of salt, the display of pitfalls and disappointments, and the views of crime and discord between the varied social elements. Normalizing life is certainly not a tribute to glamourized poetry; the prose is real and fierce in its portrayal of the ever-presence of poverty, death, and the plight of the masses. But the human spirit in its darkest times is able to employ resilience, and we see these rays of light fighting for breaths through the threatening cracks. Works such as these must sit on the bookshelves of avid readers, social analysts and students of life, and then must encourage the writing of narratives that share such vivid recollections of real, unadulterated biography. 'Undressing Durban' has yet to reach the furthest corners of the reading world that will be most enticed and quenched by this suggestiveness. And with this goal in mind, it is yet to find its way into the greater sphere of the book market, where its absence will become increasingly apparent if this challenge is not immediately taken up by the publishers and editors.
'Undressing Durban' then, is a work of preliminary importance in dissecting largely relevant socio-economic issues, and opens itself to much human deliberation having been written by people who have either been nurtured within the warmth of Mother KZN's womb from birth, or had the occasion to delightfully play in her lap for some memorable time span. It presents itself as a remarkable memoir of bare survival and accomplishment in a city that is home to a vast number of patrons who may form part of its tapestry but whose lives are unlikely to intersect. The isolation implicit in this illustration is what makes seminal works such as 'Undressing Durban' of great relevance, and emphasizes the need for narratives in similar thread to be encouraged amongst various disciplines within and beyond the social sciences.
This is compulsory reading for anyone who has been touched by the rays of a path lit by culture, the arts, literature depicting human drama in its varied hues of darkness and delight, and engendered understandings of what it is to be an actor in the theatre that is city life, and of what it is to be human.
Read the official weblog at: http://undressingdurban.blogspot.com
Shafinaaz Hassim is a lecturer at the School for Sociology & Social Sciences, UKZN