Metafiction in Mpe's Welcome to our Hillbrow - African Literature ...

Thus, metafiction brings awareness to its own fictionality and explores
the nature of fiction while also exploring the reality within fiction and the fiction
within reality. It is important, however, to use caution when applying Western
aesthetical terms to African texts. In fact, despite some examination of Mpe’s
self-referential literary technique, hardly any critics apply the term metafiction in
order to describe it. Evan Maina Mwangi explains that this hesitation is present
because critics see that “the post realist fiction in African languages derives
from indigenous oral literature rather than from Western postmodern aesthetics”
(5). Welcome to Our Hillbrow, for example “is informed by an oral tradition
particular to the communal life of the South African pastoral area of Limpopo”
(Negash 1). Therefore, to employ the term metafiction has the potential to leave
out this reference to the African oral tradition.
Even so, metafiction does not necessarily have to be devoid of
connotations to African tradition.
According to Mwangi’s definition of metafiction in Africa Writes Back to Self:
Metafiction, Gender, Sexuality (2009), the notion has African aesthetic roots.
In my application of the term metafiction to Welcome to Our Hillbrow, therefore,
I will use the term as a textual practice not to be distinguished from the African
literary practice nor as a purely Western postmodern invention. Mwangi
explains, “I view metafiction not as an exclusively Western phenomenon but
as an aesthetic practice that has grown simultaneously in different parts of the
world” (6). In fact, an exploration of indigenous African languages supports
the growth of metafiction outside of the West. In the Kishwahili (or Swahili)
language of Africa, for example, the term bunilizipuku means “imaginative
creation that extends beyond the conventions of fiction, fiction beyond fiction,
fiction that outdoes fiction in its fictionality.” The term is connected to bunilizi
rejelevu, meaning “fiction that refers back to itself, self-reflexive fiction”
(Mwangi 6). Mwangi’s exploration of the ideas behind metafiction available in
African languages supports the idea that the term metafiction can be used in a
context extending beyond Western aesthetics. To apply the term metafiction to
African literature, specifically Welcome to Our Hillbrow, a definition established
by Mwangi is appropriate: “I use the term metafiction to describe that form of
African literature that is self-conscious, self-reflexive, and self-referential” (6).
Mpe’s use of metafiction in Welcome to Our Hillbrow comes through
when his first protagonist, Refentše, begins his initial walk through Hillbrow.
Michael Green describes Hillbrow in his study of South African literature:
By the 1990s, Hillbrow was considered either a sophisticated
melting pot of culture, class, and ethnicity or a decaying
cityscape of violent crime, drugs, prostitution and AIDS”
(334). Refentše’s depiction of Hillbrow focuses on the second
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