Narrating the Postcolonial Metropolis in Anglophone African Fiction: Chris Abani's GraceLand and Phaswane Mpe's Welcome to Our
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Journal of Postcolonial Writing
Vol. 48, No. 1, February 2012, 39–50
Narrating the Postcolonial Metropolis in Anglophone African Fiction:
Chris Abani’s GraceLand and Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our
Hillbrow
Hilary Dannenberg*
University of Trier, Germany
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 con-
stitute 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 map-
ping 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 composi-
tional 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
Introduction
“Listen to dis story,” Caesar began.
“Oh, please, not another story. Why can’t anyone in this place just give it to you straight?”
“Because de straight road is a liar.” (Abani, GraceLand 96)
Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2000) and Chris Abani’s GraceLand (2004)
are two recent novels whose main action takes place in an African city (Johannesburg
and Lagos respectively). Fictional narratives about real-world African cities are not, of
course, the same as sociological studies or surveys of those cities. They are constructions
and interpretations of life in a city, often focusing, as in Abani’s and Mpe’s novels, on a
protagonist’s life trajectory, and migration from the country to the city. Indeed, Welcome
to Our Hillbrow has been interpreted as a new variant of the “Jim comes to Jo’burg”
*Email: hilary.dannenberg@uni-trier.de
ISSN 1744-9855 print/ISSN 1744-9863 online
Ó 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2011.634062
http://www.tandfonline.com40 H. Dannenberg
genre in which “a young man from the countryside is destroyed by city life and city
women” (Hoad 270; Gaylard 166–67; Johns 179–80). Beyond this intertextual frame-
work, as texts written by (former) inhabitants of these cities, they are also first-hand inter-
pretations of life in them (or of city life). Munro calls such narratives “creative visions”,
in which writers “are ‘mapping’ their identities within postcolonial metropolises” (39).
In particular, interpretations of GraceLand (Munro; Nnodim) have focused more on
the mapping of urban space and identity. However, if, as Munro proposes, the aim is to
read these city narratives as their writers’ respective identity maps, then I suggest it is fur-
ther necessary to read their configurations of identity in the more complex way that theo-
rizers of identity like Stuart Hall have advocated: as a dynamic positioning within
configurations of difference: “Not an essence but a positioning” (Hall, “Cultural Identity”
395, emphasis in original); “identities are constructed through, not outside, difference”
(Hall, “Introduction” 4). Thus the urban identity maps of GraceLand and Welcome to Our
Hillbrow are constructed out of an interplay with spaces beyond inner-urban spaces, in
order to produce detailed maps of both life trajectories and a vision of the wider national
and global contexts to which that character belongs. Notably, in both Mpe and Abani’s
work, the protagonists undertake three different types of journey: first from a rural to an
urban environment, then journeys within the actual city, and then journeys from the post-
colonial metropolis to another country (although in Abani’s novel this final journey is only
about to occur in the conclusion). Each city is therefore characterized in contrast to, but
also in correspondence with, different spaces. Each text, like the quotation from Abani’s
GraceLand above, tells its story of the African metropolis not “straight”, but in terms of a
series of spaces and their connections through journeys made, embedding the city in a
21st-century global perspective as well as constructing its links to the nation’s rural com-
munities. Accordingly, to negotiate these texts as identity maps we cannot simply read
them as “straight” urban narratives, but instead we should examine how they configure the
city within the larger network of connections between rural, urban and global spaces.
Phaswane Mpe himself suggests that cities are the focus of narrative fiction because
they are dynamic sites of change: “Whether one laments or celebrates the city, one thing
is clear. Change often catches the imagination of writers, and provides impetus for their
writing” (“City” 182). The span of possible expressions about the city from lament to cel-
ebration is present in both novels: “Welcome to our Hillbrow of milk and honey and
bile” (Mpe, Hillbrow 41); “the city, half slum, half paradise [ ::: ] so ugly and violent yet
beautiful” (Abani, GraceLand 7). “[E]mergent urban textualities” as highlighted by
Ranka Primorac (“Introduction” 1) thus stretch from “creativity and vibrancy” through to
“tension and trauma”, while Irikidzayi Manase speaks of the “urban paradox” (88) and
“two worlds in one city” (90). In narratives like those of Mpe and Abani, which locate
the African metropolis within a wider network of spaces, there is an even more intense
interplay of spaces; these form ambivalent or polyvalent configurations which potentially
defy any coherent overview, but which, nevertheless, as finite pieces of narrative dis-
course, organize these spaces into a constellation of meaning. It is in the configuration of
meaning out of apparent chaos that illuminates key differences in Abani and Mpe’s nov-
els, and this is ultimately the result of the different positions given to their protagonists
in the face of the complexity of the different spaces they pass through. Despite being fun-
damentally different in many ways, the novels share key impulses, notably a tendency to
reject rural and urban polarization. In Abani’s novel, a recurrent corporeal and physical
threat which links, as opposed to differentiating, the urban and rural environments is
emphasized; in Mpe’s, by contrast, the recurrent patterns of xenophobia which polarize
groups across urban and rural cultures are strongly critiqued.Journal of Postcolonial Writing 41
Chris Abani’s GraceLand
Abani’s novel creates a pattern of geographical and cultural interconnections, juxtaposi-
tions and, ultimately for the protagonist Elvis, estrangement and dislocation. The novel
has the Nigerian capital Lagos at its heart, but this metropolis is networked with other
geographical and cultural spaces. It tells the story of Elvis, a young Igbo boy who grows
up in rural Nigeria but who, after the death of his mother (who named him after her
favourite American singer), and as a result of his father’s political misfortunes, moves to
Lagos. The sections of the lengthier Book I of GraceLand alternate between two settings
and time periods: the actional present depicts Elvis’s life in Lagos in the year 1983, but
this short and intense phase is contrasted (through alternating chapters) to his childhood
in the small town of Afikpo, far to the east of Lagos, between the years 1972 and 1981.
The rural space of Afikpo then recedes from view in Book II, the action of which takes
place solely in Lagos and its surrounding areas, leading ultimately to Elvis’s departure to
the USA using his friend Redemption’s passport.
In an interview, Abani stated that in making GraceLand he aimed at “an epic repre-
sentation of a culture, to provide in many ways all the shorthanded history one outside
the culture will need to read it” (Abani, Interview 22). The novel’s montage structure of
different texts is the major means to this end. This additional textual material between
the chapters takes the form of recipes and other notes in the style of encyclopedic entries
on the subject of Nigerian flora and Igbo customs. Some of these are apparently entries
and notes from Elvis’s mother’s journal, “a collection of cooking and apothecary recipes
and some other unrelated bits, like letters and notes” (Abani, GraceLand 11); others, such
as the notes on the kola nut ritual, seem to have a different provenance and exist in ironic
relation to the casual references strewn through the main text to the US cultural symbol
Coca Cola.1 The epic perspective offered by GraceLand’s montage of texts, however,
coheres only for the reader, because Elvis’s position, as the text emphasizes, lacks any
clarity of vision.
In discussing GraceLand I would like, in particular, to show how the innovative and
complex form of the novel consists of a significant texture of juxtapositions and contrasts
for the reader, whilst at the same time underscoring the loss of coherence in Elvis’s life.
The montage structure spells this out: as the novel’s action becomes increasingly more
grotesque, the interpolation of miscellaneous material between chapters creates the
impression of a world completely out of sync with itself: Igbo recipes for “Fish Pepper
Soup” (239), for “Jollof Rice with Dried Fish” (200), or a description of the kola nut
ritual (208), are interspersed between chapters depicting attempted organ trafficking, char-
acter retrospectives of the trauma of the Biafran war, and child rape. The brief inserts
which testify to the existence of cultural traditions at peace or in tandem with nature are
engulfed by longer passages describing the opposite – physical threats and the monstrous
corporeal hostility that contemporary life poses for Elvis, be it rural, urban or under the
influence of globalization.
The novel’s multiple spaces are depicted in many different ways, characteristic of the
chaotic impressions that structure the novel. The scenes in Afikpo range from the horrific
to the idyllic, from Elvis’s rape in a church by his uncle, to the natural world of flora
and cooking associated with his mother. Texts from Elvis’s mother’s journal, which
belong to the Afikpo world, contribute to the novel’s foregrounding of cultural traditions
and the natural world by contrast to the experience of the modern African metropolis.
However, whilst documenting Elvis’s positive response to his mother’s world, the narra-
tive stresses his inability to really understand it:42 H. Dannenberg
She tried to explain to him that the neat beds, the soft crumbly earth, the deep green of the
okra, the red and yellow peppers, the delicate mauve flowers of the fluted pumpkin, were
important to her in ways she had no words for. He didn’t understand, but was content to
bury himself in the deep aloe of her hair. (36)
The idyllic but sketchy conception of his mother’s world which Elvis subsequently cre-
ates for himself and which is “supplemented by the fantasies he built around the things
he read in her journal” (104) is juxtaposed to the narrator’s own descriptions of the local
flora as being less manageable by contrast to the ordered beauty of ingredients for a rec-
ipe, as in the description of the orchard:
But here in the orchard, nature had its own designs, and whatever the initial order or plan
had been, it soon gave way to a tangled mass of red and white guavas, oranges, mangoes,
soursops and bright cherry shrubs. Squirrels outnumbered the fruit, it seemed, and Elvis was
reminded of his early childhood when he had hunted the squirrels with the intensity usually
reserved for bigger game. Shady and cool, the air was heavy with the scent of rotting fruit
and the buzz of tomb flies. (145)
The sense of nature and the local plants and vegetation have yielded to rampant growth
and physical decay, coupled with the human hunting of fauna. This description of nature
undermines the earlier order of Beatrice’s world of recipes and garden produce, and here
the narrative again returns to the subject of her journal:
He had brought his mother’s journal with him and he turned the pages, reading with diffi-
culty the curved, spidery handwriting. All these recipes, and yet nobody he knew cooked
from recipes. That was something actors did on television and in the movies: white women
with stiff clothes and crisp-looking aprons and perfect hair. (145–46)
Like the different vision of nature in the orchard, the journal and its entries become an
unrealistic world for Elvis, who cannot understand that the journal is a cultural haven that
Beatrice has constructed for herself as a place of order outside the real chaos of her life
with Elvis’s father, Sunday.
The description of the orchard cited above casts Elvis as the hunter of squirrels,
already introducing, in mild form, a theme that pervades and connects the Afikpo and
Lagos scenes of the novel – humans hunting humans, with ultimately the city as a mon-
ster devouring its own inhabitants. This motif figuratively connects the real rural and
urban spaces of Elvis’s world, which are both marked by physical threat. In the novel’s
Afikpo sections the most disturbing scenes cast Elvis not as hunter but as the hunted and
abused. For his father Sunday, Elvis breaks gender boundaries when, as a boy who has
already been through his first manhood ceremony four years earlier, he gets his aunt
Felicia to make him up, shortly before Sunday comes home:
Aunt Felicia and Oye took in Sunday’s approaching figure with alarmed gasps and then looked
back at Elvis’s cornrowed hair, painted face and dress, but it was too late. Elvis [ ::: ] thought
that somehow his father would like him better with the new hairdo. [ ::: ] Elvis ran straight into
the first blow, which nearly took his head clean off. As he fell, his father grabbed him with one
hand, steadying him, while with the other he beat him around the head, face, buttocks, every-
where. Too shocked to react [ ::: ] Elvis gulped for air as his father choked him. (61)
Sunday’s alarm that his son might become gay is articulated in sentences like “No son of
mine is going to grow up as a homosexual! Do you hear me?!” (62). This concern is,
however, ironically linked to the most terrible and predatory scene from Elvis’s ruralJournal of Postcolonial Writing 43
childhood, the homosexual rape by his uncle ― a scene which takes place four years
later in story time:
The man placed his hands roughly on his shoulders and forced him down on his knees. His
penis was level with Elvis’s face, a twitching cobra ready to strike. [ ::: ] a burst of fire
ripped him into two. The man tore into him again and again. The pain was so intense. Elvis
passed out. (198)
Thus while the novel’s rural and urban spaces are in many ways depicted as different,
separate worlds, they are not subject to any polarization along the lines of a city versus
country idealization. Both are characterized as dangerous environments for Elvis; more-
over, in another twist in the novel’s multiple representations of nature, the uncle’s preda-
tory penis is associated with a dangerous animal from the rural environment.
The city scenes, indeed, are characterized by the same principles of nature as those
of Afikpo. For example, in descriptions of the slum city of Maroko, where Elvis lives
with his father, the same sense of live flora and fauna is evoked in the repeated evoca-
tions of living mud under the swamp city (6; 48). The terrible side of the city is also
represented in natural terms: the city itself, including its structures and human forces, is
depicted as a monster which consumes its inhabitants. This is already the case in the
description of its road system as being like a road in the wild, with pedestrians as
roadkill victims at the mercy of cars when they unwisely choose to cross the wide
roads (56).
However, the most notable section where the rural and natural enter the city is a pas-
sage in which Abani shifts to a more magic realist mode. This is the narrative climax in
which the government’s “Operation Clean the Nation” razes Maroko to the ground.
Elvis’s father, Sunday, refuses to leave, and, in his drunken torpor sees both his dead
wife Beatrice and a leopard, who declares himself to be “the totem of your forefathers”
(286). In the final moments of the bulldozer’s approach, Sunday finally takes a stand
against urban authority, and in death is transformed into a leopard:
Sunday sprang with a roar at the ’dozer. The policeman let off a shout and a shot, and
Sunday fell in a slump before the ’dozer, its metal threads cracking his chest like a tim-
ber box as it went straight into the wall of his home. Sunday roared, leapt out of his
body and charged at the back of the policeman, his paw delivering a fatal blow to the
back of the policeman’s head. With a rasping cough, Sunday disappeared into the night.
(287)
Here the rural world of tradition and the past enters the world of the city and for once tri-
umphs: it is a moment of redemption for Sunday by the forces of the natural world of
his forefathers in an otherwise bleak scenario of state-sanctioned urban destruction and
violence. Moreover, the fact that we are not meant to read the scene as pure hallucination
is underscored in the following scene some pages later, when Elvis discovers the dead
bodies of his father and the policeman in the remains of Maroko:
He scrambled down the pile of rubble, half falling, half sliding, until he came to the bottom.
He was brought to a halt by his father’s foot poking out at an odd angle. He clawed the deb-
ris away and exposed the body. There was a hole the size of a saucer in his chest. [ ::: ] He
approached the [policeman’s] body. The entire back of the head was missing and there were
claw marks all over the body. It looked like he had been mauled by some huge predator.
That was really strange, because there were no animals of that size anywhere near Lagos or
Maroko. (304–05)44 H. Dannenberg
The intertwining of the urban and rural worlds is strong in these scenes: the overall
description of destruction seems to equate man-made urban policy with the destructive
power of a natural disaster. On another level, however, the transformation and redemption
of Sunday as a natural force springing into the jaws of the bulldozer creates a narrative
transformation of the urban landscape into the spirit of the rural Igbo culture that lies
latent in other parts of the text: the natural world and Igbo spirit have their moment of
revenge upon the urban monster.
Beyond these complex links between the urban and rural, the novel creates a further
series of links which map Lagos as a metropolis in a globally connected world. The fre-
quent references to the role of US films and music in Nigerian urban culture is one such
feature, that clearly locates Lagos as under the influence of globalized American culture.
These intertextual references include The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (148), Dirty Harry
(190), the Beach Boys (210) and the Temptations (219), while the confusion caused by
cultural translation is humorously foregrounded in “H.G. Wells and his brother Orson”
(71).2 The longing for escape from Lagos to other places stimulated by these networks of
cultural influence is constantly present and also historically contextualized in the words
of Elvis’s friend Redemption: “Even during your father’s time we dey plan for abroad.
Dat time it was London, now it is America” (318).
The USA, however, is referenced as an ambivalent space, about which Elvis himself
is suspicious (318). Tellingly, as opposed to the intercultural references, the only US
character to actually appear in the novel is a tourist in Lagos who is depicted as a gro-
tesquely swollen monster and referred to as “Gargantuan Belly” (13). Moreover, as in the
depiction of both the rural Afikpo and the urban Lagos scenes, it is the physical threat
and destructive power against the human body that characterizes the mapping of global
connections between Lagos, the US and other regions. Alongside the cultural influences
on Nigeria, the novel’s map of globalized connections consists of the dangers posed by
organ-trafficking, drug-trafficking and slavery. Thus Elvis discovers in detail from
Redemption about the physical dangers undergone by the drug mules for whom he and
Elvis wrap drug packets: “Dey for export; to States. A courier will swallow dem. [ ::: ]
Dat’s why we packed dem like dat. So dey don’t burst in de stomach” (110). Even later
in the narrative, after the disastrous trip that reveals that Elvis and Redemption have
become part of the Colonel’s trade in body organs and kidnapped live organ donors,
Redemption again enlightens Elvis about these global systems:
Dis world operate different way for different people. Anyway, de rich whites buy de spare
parts from de Arabs who buy from wherever dey can. [ ::: ] Yes, dose children will arrive in
Saudi alive, den, depend on de demand, dey will harvest de parts from dem. Fresh, no dam-
age, more money for all of dem. (242–43)
The novel thus represents an image of the African metropolis tied into a global network
at its most negative – with Nigeria as a breeding ground for the global market in cheap
spare body parts.
While the novel’s discourse weaves this complex, epic map of spaces and montage of
texts for the reader, however, the protagonist’s trajectory on the level of the novel’s action
is rather different. Sitting at the airport waiting to fly to the USA at the end of the novel,
Elvis comes to recognize the lack of meaning in the events of his previous life’s journey
and his lack of connection to his rural roots and his mother’s world: “Reaching into the
bag, he pulled out the journal and flipped through it. It had never revealed his mother to
him. Never helped him to understand her, or his life, or why anything had happened theJournal of Postcolonial Writing 45
way it had” (320). The novel’s discourse therefore makes sense of Nigerian life for the
reader by embedding it in a greater system of references and connections. For the novel’s
protagonist, however, no such coherence and understanding is to be won. The layers of
the world Abani depicts speak to the reader and fulfil his aim of providing an epic view
of Nigeria. By contrast, as the text emphasizes, Elvis does not even know what he has
lost as he makes his way toward the USA.
Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow
Mpe’s novel is a brief but intense narrative which in separate sections focuses on the
lives of two different characters, Refentše and Refilwe, who both originally come to
Hillbrow, an inner-city area of Johannesburg, from rural Tiragalong, a fictional village
further north. The novel’s unique style, metafictional games, focus on social ills (HIV
foremost amongst them), humorous and playful tone and dramatic love stories have led
to it being read in diverse ways. It is read by Goodman, for example, as ironic and car-
nivalesque; by Hoad as melancholic; and by Nuttall as a text which “disavows a politics
of hatred in favor of an ethics of hospitality” (203).
Welcome to Our Hillbrow practices an interconnective mapping of rural, urban and
global perspectives similar to that of GraceLand. However, the novel’s playfully inclusive
coordination of multiple spaces explodes the realist framework and even stretches as far
as Heaven, where, we are told, Refentše is now, after committing suicide in response to
the drama of romantic entanglements and death depicted in the novel.3 In its inclusion of
multiple spaces, the novel shows how each nation, region or city is linked by the same
pattern of discriminatory discourses, othering and negative stereotypes which every city,
region or nation constructs about outsiders. This principle of ever-replicating-but-shifting
othering is demonstrated most clearly in the relations between Hillbrow and Tiragalong;
Tiragalong in particular sees Hillbrow as the personification of evil: “Immoral ::: drug
dealing ::: murderous ::: sexually loose ::: money grabbing :::” (46). These ostensible
extremes, however, are systematically dismantled in the course of the narrative: in partic-
ular, Refilwe gains new perspectives on the relativism of prejudice as she moves from
Tiragalong into the wider world, and ultimately returns to Tiragalong dying of AIDS,
thus now herself a representative of the urban evil constructed by the discourses of her
own village. Moreover, the binaries of city and country are further destroyed through the
novel’s dramatic plotting of character relationships: the jealous Refilwe slanders Lerato,
Refentše’s Johannesburg girlfriend, as the daughter of a Nigerian; however, it emerges
that Lerato is in fact the daughter of Piet, who is also the father of Tshepo, an inhabitant
of Tiragalong (44). Thus, as Hoad observes, “ultimately the intimate web of connections
between city and countryside reveals [ ::: ] a false opposition” (270). The novel further
conflates the supposed opposition between the “murderous” urban world of Hillbrow and
the supposedly upright rural Tiragalong by staging one of the most horrific scenes of the
novel, in which Refentše’s mother is “necklaced” (43) – that is, burnt to death – in
Tiragalong, following accusations of witchcraft. The recurrent patterns of othering are,
moreover, also demonstrated with reference to Hillbrow’s own attitude to foreign work-
ers, mainly from Nigeria, and later in the novel, with reference to the British othering of
Africans. Hillbrow thus lies in the centre of the novel’s mapping of xenophobia and pre-
judice across rural and urban South Africa and beyond to Europe.
The novel’s criticism of this self-repeating animosity is strongest in its account of
Refentše’s attitudes, cutting through the binaries of the discourses of alterity, such as46 H. Dannenberg
Johannesburg’s designation of Nigerians as scapegoats for the city’s ills, as well as the
polarization of the urban and the rural:
the white superintendent [ ::: ] told you [ ::: ] that Hillbrow had been just fine until those
Nigerians came in here with all their drug dealing. [ ::: ] You, Refentše [ ::: ], had never
shared such sentiments. It was your opinion that the moral decay of Hillbrow, so often
talked about, was in fact no worse than that of Tiragalong. [ ::: ] Think about it Cousin, you
would challenge. [ ::: ] there are very few Hillbrowans, if you think about it, who were not
originally wanderers from Tiragalong and other rural villages, who have come here, as we
have, in search of education and work. Many of the Makwerekwere you accuse of this and
that are no different to us – sojourners, here in search of green pastures. (Mpe 17–18)
Commenting on this passage, Hoad observes how it contains “an assertion of moral
equivalence between city and countryside” (271).
As the excerpt above shows, at the heart of Welcome to Our Hillbrow’s innovative
and original style is the use of second-person narration. The passage also demonstrates
how the referent of the “you” can shift. The initial “you” above is Refentše, but the
“you” then shifts to quote Refentše addressing his cousin. The novel’s radical stance
towards binary oppositions is thus also reflected in its narrative form. “You” narration
challenges the traditional predominance of first- versus third-person narration and con-
structs a bridge between the two conventional discourses of narration which polarize
character and narrator identities into “I” or “he/she/they” groups.
As Ryan notes in her discussion of second-person narration, “you” narration is poten-
tially disorienting for the reader because of the multiple references the “you” may have
within the narrative: it may take a while for the reader to work out who is addressing who
as “you” (137–38). In Mpe’s novel it becomes evident that, principally, a non-character nar-
rator4 is addressing a character, Refentše. Some evaluations of Mpe’s use of the form have
seen it as disorienting; Clarkson also refers to it as “relentlessly written in the second per-
son” (452). It is, not, however, I suggest, quite as simple as that, since the text’s use of sec-
ond-person narration functions differently in different situations, just as the referent of the
“you” switches characters within the text. Moreover, the absence of second-person narration
in certain parts of the novel is also notable, although this has not received much attention.5
The reader used to conventional narration may initially have problems negotiating the
unique situation in which the dead Refentše’s life (which involves a complex and dra-
matic story of relationships connecting Tiragalong and Hillbrow) is narrated by address-
ing him directly as “you”. Once, however, the reader acclimatizes to the form, he or she
can enter the scenes of the narrative immersively; in particular in the scenes of detailed
spatial depiction of Johannesburg, second-person narration brings the reader closer to
Refentše’s experience of the city.6 This proximity-creating effect of second-person narra-
tion is, as Ryan observes, due to “our instinctive reaction to think me when we hear you,
and to feel personally concerned by the textual utterance” (137). Thus the reader becomes
a kind of avatar or alter ego of Refentše as he walks the city, empathizing with him
spatially and experientially. This can be seen in the following example, which narrates
Refentše’s first encounter with urban violence:
The first time someone took out a knife on you, it was at Hyde Park Village, near Sandton,
where you accidentally disturbed thieves stripping cars of their radio sets in the parking lot;
Hyde Park, with its lilywhite reputation for safety and serenity. You were not stabbed, but
only because you made it just in time into the courtyard of your aunt’s employee’s house,
and the butcher knife pursuing you hit the door to the courtyard just as you turned the key
to lock it. (22)Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47
By means of second-person narration, the reader occupies the space of the character’s
experience and moves with him through it. The text zooms into the detail of particular
spaces and brings them close to the reader – like the evocation of Refentše’s swift move-
ment through the doorway and the locking of the door depicted above.
However, while Refentše is the central “you” in the text, the “you”s of the novel
as a whole are varied. They are, effectively, any character whom the narrator chooses
to address directly instead of referring to in the third person. In the first sections of
the novel, minor characters are briefly embraced by the narrative as “you”. The
second-person address is therefore used to designate characters who receive either the
approval or the sympathy of the narrative. Here the “you” is used to embrace figures
who are the objects of South African prejudice towards non-South-African Africans
(Makwerekwere):
The Makwerekwere had also learned a trick or two of their own. Get a member of the
police, or a sympathetic South African companion, to help you organise a false identity doc-
ument – for a nominal fee. [ ::: ] Police bothered you less often in the suburbs, because
those were not regarded as high crime zones. (21–22)
By contrast, however, in the latter chapters of the novel, the second protagonist –
Refentše’s friend and former lover Refilwe, who moves from rural Tiragalong to urban
Hillbrow and then to take an MA in Oxford, UK – is referred to for large portions of
the narrative in the third person (see the quotation below); only when she becomes ill
with AIDS and returns home to South Africa to die does the narrative also begin to
address her in the second person. This change in address can be read as signifying the
fact that only in the final stages of her life does Refilwe fully revise her prejudices
about foreigners and outsiders; from this point she is thus embraced as “you” by the
narrator.
In Welcome to Our Hillbrow, however, there is a further notable feature of the dis-
course, in addition to the second-person narration. By virtue of an increasing use of “we”
and its related pronoun “our”, the novel’s discourse draws in and incorporates larger
groups of humanity, just as it includes specific characters through the use of second-
person narration. When the novel shifts its focus to England in Refilwe’s journey to study
at Oxford, British prejudices towards different African nations come under scrutiny:
South Africans, black and white, were very fine people these days, thanks to the release of
Rolihlahla Mandela from Robben Island in 1990 and his push for the 1994 democratic elec-
tions. [ ::: ] She [Refilwe] was of course grateful, but not entirely happy about her privileged
South African status. Even before she arrived in our Oxford, she could not enjoy the bad
treatment that she had witnessed the Nigerians and Algerians, for example, receiving at the
hands of the Customs officials at our Heathrow. (100)
The narrator here uses the all-embracing collective “we”, which in spirit opposes the
divisions of prejudice and perceived difference referred to in the text. This is most
notable in the narrator’s cultural appropriation of British locations by his inclusive
“our” in phrases such as “our Oxford” (100) and “our Heathrow” (100). Indeed, in the
novel’s all-encompassing framework, this use of the collective pronoun even stretches
to the afterlife of “our Heaven” (124). This “we” is not, therefore, the “we” of other-
ing and exclusion practiced by the xenophobic regional identities that the novel criti-
cizes, but an all-inclusive “we” which embraces all the divided layers of global
humanity:48 H. Dannenberg
Such scenes repeat themselves frequently in our England in the new millennium, in the early
part of the twenty-first century. Nigerians and Algerians are treated like pariahs in our white
civilization. [ ::: ] Our Heathrow strongly reminded Refilwe of our Hillbrow and the xeno-
phobia it engendered. She learnt there, at our Heathrow, that there was another word for for-
eigner that was not very different in connotation from Makwerekwere or Mapolantane.
Except that it was a much more widely used term: Africans. (101–02)7
The novel’s inclusive treatment of human cultures that are embraced through the
repeated reference to a collective “we” form8 is most striking in the narrator’s phrase
“our white civilization” (101), which seems to seek to override all alterities by embrac-
ing all sections of humanity, even those which are most alien to the novel’s black South
African postcolonial centre of consciousness. In this phrase the narrator refers to the
enduring neocolonial racism as something which can also be embraced as “our” when
seen, from a global perspective, as one more of the systems of misjudged prejudice
highlighted by the novel. This stance is clearly articulated in the most overtly inclusive
use of “our” in the novel, which comes towards its conclusion: “Welcome to the World
of our Humanity” (113).
Welcome to Our Hillbrow, therefore, like GraceLand, but with an entirely different
agenda, conflates the differences between rural and urban worlds, between village and
metropolis, between Africa and Europe, which all set up their own systems of othering
and difference. In addition, the novel’s non-realistic framework gives the protagonist key
insights into the patterns of xenophobia, and the trajectory of his own life which, in a
text like GraceLand, are reserved for the interpretational level of the reader: dead and
located in the novel’s Heaven, Refentše has the “benefit of retrospect and omniscience”
(47) as he looks down at the drama of his life on earth.
Conclusion
GraceLand and Welcome to Our Hillbrow both address the postcolonial African
metropolis by developing innovative forms of novelistic discourse; both situate their
cities within a larger global network of relations as well as including the key rural
space from which the respective protagonist has moved. However, each novel’s actual
realization and spirit is quite different: Mpe embeds his South African spaces within a
larger and ever-expanding view of humanity as a species mutually afflicted by the glo-
bal cultural practice of creating systems of difference; the utopian spirit of his text,
moreover, allows his characters to gain insight into these processes before they die.
Mpe’s novel is therefore very different to Abani’s in terms of the systems of coherence
that are constructed. Mpe grants his protagonists epiphanic insights and enlightenment;
likewise, he offers the reader an impossibly coherent and panoptic vision of the inter-
connected rural-urban-global spaces of the novel, and this panoptic view is exemplified
by the idea of Heaven where the characters are reunited after their deaths and from
where they look down on Earth. GraceLand’s strategy is very different: in the montage
of discourses, time levels and spaces, it offers the reader an epic but fragmented view
of Nigerian culture, and also of the darker connections of globalization; in the shared
references to violence and natural forces, however, it links its urban and rural spaces
and only offers brief moments of comfort when, for example, Sunday redeems himself
by opposing the bulldozers that represent the oppression of the urban state. However,
on the level of the story’s protagonist, the novel stresses Elvis’s disorientation and lack
of ability to construct a coherent whole out of the multiple spaces and experiences of
his life.Journal of Postcolonial Writing 49 Notes 1. See Novak for a discussion of the montage of texts, particularly her detailed reading of the dif- ferent 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 con- text” (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). Notes on contributor Hilary Dannenberg is Professor of English Literature at the University of Trier, Germany. She has a PhD in German Literature from the University of Cardiff and a higher doctorate (Habilitation) in English Literature from the University of Freiburg. She has published articles on postcolonial Anglophone literatures, on American and British film and TV, and on British fiction in Sprachkunst, Journal for the Study of British Cultures, ZAA, Poetics Today, Current Writing and Interventions. Her study Coincidence and Counterfactuality: Plotting Time and Space in Narrative Fiction (2008) won the Perkins award for the best book in the field of Narrative Studies in 2009. Works cited Abani, Chris. GraceLand. New York: Picador, 2004. ———. “Interview with Sherry Ellis. “Coming to Elvis: An Interview with Chris Abani.” Blooms- bury Review 25.1 (2005): 22–23. Clarkson, Carrol. “Locating Identity in Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow.” Third World Quarterly 26 (2005): 451–59. Eze, Chielozona. “Cosmopolitan Solidarity: Negotiating Transculturality in Contemporary Nigerian Novels.” English in Africa 32.1 (2005): 99–112. Gaylard, Rob. “Stories and Storytelling in Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow.” Words Gone Two Soon: A Tribute to Phaswane Mpe and K. Sello Duiker. Ed. Mbulelo Visikhungo Mzamane. Pretoria: Skotaville, 2005. 164–70. Goodman, Ralph. “Textuality and Transformation in South African Parodic-Travestying Texts: Wel- come to Our Hillbrow.” English Academy Review 20 (2003): 88–97. Green, Michael. “Translating the Nation: Phaswane Mpe and the Fiction of Post-Apartheid.” Scru- tiny2 10.1 (2005): 3–16. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. Ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. 392–403. ———. “Introduction. ‘Who Needs ‘Identitiy’?” Questions of Culturual Identify. Ed. Hall Stuart and Paul du Gay. London: Sage, 1996. 1–17.
50 H. Dannenberg Hoad, Neville. “Welcome to Our Hillbrow: An Elegy for African Cosmopolitanism.” Urbanization and African Cultures. Ed. Toyin Falola and Steven J. Salm. Durham: Carolina Academic P, 2005. 267–77. Johns, Timothy. “The Novel Architecture of Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow.” Emerg- ing African Voices: A Study of Contemporary African Literature. Ed. Walter P. Collins, III. Amherst, NY: Cambria P, 2010. 177–216. Manase, Irikidzayi. “Mapping the City Space in Current Zimbabwean and South African Fiction.” Transformation 57 (2005): 88–105. Mpe, Phaswane. “‘Our Missing Store of Memories’: City, Literature and Representation.” Shifting Selves: Post-Apartheid Essays on Mass Media, Culture and Identity. Ed. Herman Wasserman and S. Jacobs. Cape Town: Kwela, 2003. 181–98. ———. Welcome to Our Hillbrow. Pietermaritzburg: U of Natal P, 2001. Munro, Ian. “Mapping the Postcolonial Metropolis: Three Recent Novels from Nigeria.” Repre- senting Minorities: Studies in Literature and Criticism. Ed. Larbi Touaf and Soumia Boutkhil. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2006. 38–54. Nnodim, Rita. “City, Identity and Dystopia: Writing Lagos in Contemporary Nigerian Novels.” Primorac 321–32. Novak, Amy. “Who Speaks? Who Listens? The Problem of Address in Two Nigerian Trauma Novels.” Studies in the Novel 40 (2008): 31–51. Nuttall, Sarah. “Literary City.” Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis. Ed. Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2008. 195–218. Primorac, Ranka, ed. African City Textualities. Spec. issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing 44.1 (2008). ———. “Introduction: City, Text, Future.” Primorac 1–4. Ryan, Marie-Laure. Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001.
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