Locating Identity in Phaswane Mpe's Welcome To Our Hillbrow

Abstract

A feature of contemporary South African fiction is that it explores the intricate complicities of personal, cultural and racial identities in terms of an uneasy relation to place—in both a physical and a figurative sense. Mpe's Welcome To Our Hillbrow poses a radical challenge to notions of ‘community’, of what constitutes ‘home’ in the same instant that the narrative is generated by these notions. The novel is written in the second person, which has the disorientating effect of simultaneously distancing, but engaging the reader in the implied community signalled by the ‘our’ of the novel's title. In this paper I explore Mpe's treatment of identity as a response to place as a physical and a linguistic inscription.

Notes

M Heyns, The Children's Day, Johannesburg & Cape Town: Jonathan Ball, 2002.

I Vladislavić, The Restless Supermarket, Cape Town: David Philip, 2001.

JM Coetzee, Disgrace, London: Secker & Warburg, 1999.

J Cartwright, White Lightning, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2002.

M van Niekerk, Triomf, Cape Town: Queillerie, 1994.

P Mpe, Welcome To Our Hillbrow, Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2001.

P Mpe, ‘“Our missing store of memories”: city, literature and representation’ in H Wasserman & S Jacobs (eds), Shifting Selves: Post-Apartheid Essays on Mass Media, Culture and Identity, Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2003, pp 181 – 198. The figures I have given here are cited on p 190.

For an insightful social and historical study of Hillbrow up until the mid-1990s, see A Morris's Bleakness and Light: Inner-City Transition in Hillbrow, Johannesburg, Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1999. The statistics I have cited here are on p. 3.

Ibid, p 3.

Mpe, 2003, p 188.

Mpe, 2001, p 18.

Ibid, p 96.

The matter is far more complex than my very brief discussion here suggests. For an informative survey of ‘African philosophy’, see V Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988.

K Wiredu, ‘The moral foundations of an African culture’, in PH Coetzee & APJ Roux (eds), Philosophy from Africa: A Text with Readings, Oxford: OUP, 1998, pp 308 – 309.

O p'Bitek, ‘The sociality of the self’, C Eze (ed), African Philosophy: An Anthology, Malden, Massachusetts & Oxford: Blackwell, 1998, p 74.

Mpe, 2001, p 18.

Ibid, p 45.

Ibid, p 73.

Ibid, p 118.

Ibid, p 44.

D Parfit, Reasons and Persons, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984, p 210.

Ibid, p 217.

A MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990, p 200.

Ibid, p 199.

Ibid, p 199.

Mpe, 2001, p 49.

Ibid, p 55.

Ibid, p 69.

Ibid, p 40.

Ibid, p 39.

Thank you to Phaswane Mpe for his generous assistance here. I would go so far as to suggest that the cadences of Sepedi syntax are very close to the surface of the novel's English text throughout.

Mpe, 2001, p 71.

R Jakobson, On Language, Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press, 1990, p 390.

E Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971, p 202.

See W Waters, Poetry's Touch: On Lyric Address, Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 2003, p 2.

Mpe, 2001, p 59.

Ibid, p 124.

Ibid, p 113.

Ibid, p 104.

Ibid, p 18.

Ibid, p 113.

Mpe, 2003, p 192.