Narrating the Postcolonial Metropolis in Anglophone African Fiction: Chris Abani’s GraceLand and Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow

Abstract

Critical discussions of Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow and Abani’s GraceLand have focused on the depiction of the urban worlds of Johannesburg and Lagos which constitute the main location of the action. This article, however, shows how each novel in fact constructs a much more complex network of relationships between the African urban focus and other spaces. Unlike colonial discourse, the novels’ postcolonial mapping of their different locations does not create a single metropolitan centre around which other spaces are peripheralized. Instead, the African metropolis is located within a complex network of relationships, both to the rural spaces of the specific nation of focus (South Africa and Nigeria respectively) and in turn to larger global cultural and economic systems. As novelistic discourse, both novels create their spatial dynamics by constructing a narrative around the life trajectory of a character moving through those spaces. Despite these key similarities, the novels also reveal crucial differences, most importantly concerning the role and insight of the novel’s protagonist into the relationships between the novel’s key settings and spaces and their own life trajectory. These differences are also enforced by the novels’ different narratorial and compositional strategies, which include second-person narration, in Mpe’s work, a culturally radical use of the collective pronoun “we”, and in Abani’s a complex textual montage of different discourse forms and time levels.

Keywords:

• South Africa
• Nigeria
• narrative
• city
• rural

Notes

1. See Novak for a discussion of the montage of texts, particularly her detailed reading of the different versions of the kola nut ritual which preface the novel’s individual chapters (44). On the novel’s structure and transculturality, see Eze (107).

2. See Nnodim for a discussion of these “global flows of culture infused into the Nigerian context” (324).

3. Heaven is, however, not a religious domain nor truly a traditional world of the ancestors, but a cultural construct of the living, “located in the memory and consciousness of those who live with us and after us” (Mpe, Hillbrow 124).

4. The case of second-person narration shows how the terms “character” versus “non-character narrator” are more useful than the division of narrators into two grammatical classes.

5. Interpretations of “you” narration include those of Green, who reads it by unifying it into one persona: “the author lets us overhear his address to himself as a fictionalized subject” (10), and Clarkson, who argues that “[t]he addressee (the ‘you’) in the narrated event is Mpe’s character, Refentše; the addressee of the speech event is the reader of the novel” (456).

6. See Manase for a discussion of Refentše’s “walking in the city” as a “cartographical portrayal” (90–91), and Nuttall’s discussion of Mpe’s “revised inventory of the city, composing a path along its streets” (200–02).

7. The way in which the reader interprets phrases such as “our Heathrow” constitutes the test case for an interpretation of Mpe as predominantly ironic or engaged. Thus Goodman sees the “our” as ironic (92–93), whereas (in a view which I share) Hoad sees it as an articulation of “commonality” (273), just as Gaylard stresses the narrator’s “compassionate attitude” (166).

8. See Clarkson, who sees the use of “we” and “our” as calling “up expectations of a community [ … . that] in an ideal, or even in a positively viable sense, never seems to have taken place” (455).