“The idea of home is overvalued”. A Case Study of the Murrays

Abstract

Zoë Wicomb’s penultimate novel October (2014) tells the story of fifty-two-year-old Mercia Murray, a woman who has lived in Scotland for twenty-five years. October mainly evolves around the concepts of homemaking, exile and return and (non)belonging. While in other Wicomb works the characters come from different families or backgrounds, most of October’s relationships are intra-familial, so it is class inequality what marks the difference among characters. In this sense, Wicomb proves in October how the opportunities the characters are given throughout their lives can shape almost opposite outcomes, even if they come from the same, or a very similar, background. Through theories such as Samuelson’s and Scully’s idea of home and cosmopolitanism (2017 and 2011 respectively), Stock’s notions of home and memory, or Spivak’s analyses of nation, belonging and social class (1988, 2007), this article aims to explore the classist attitudes displayed by the different characters, especially considering Mercia Murray. Mercia’s classism contrasts the “understandable national obsession with race” (Seekings, 2003: 55) in post-Apartheid South Africa, as well as it proves that class is an essential factor in the increase for upward mobility – a concept that has not been properly studied in postcolonial literature (which has been fundamentally focused on how race determines the individual position in society). Through the small sample of South African society Wicomb presents, this paper will focus on the concept of class as it will also explore the inferiority complex and mimicry attitudes attached to less socio-economically developed individuals.