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

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wish to find” (335). He adds, “The one location to which we are never welcomed in the novel, it should be noted, is South Africa” (336). Like decolonization, zealous nationalism can only lead to violence for Mpe. His depiction of this one act of violence stemming from a national victory invokes images of decolonization and nationalism, calling attention to South Africa’s colonialist past without direct reference to the West. The violence of Mpe’s Hillbrow, and all of South Africa, stems from the ever-present xenophobia of the people. Although Mpe does not explicitly connect xenophobia to the nature of the postcolonial state, the connection is there implicitly. Hlongwane explains: “in a country where the black majority is severely poor and where unemployment rates are high, the welcome that these outside Africans receive is a very cold one. This xenophobia. . . is undoubtedly tied to apartheid’s racial hierarchies” (76). In Mpe’s South Africa, fear of the “Other” is mainly directed toward non-South African blacks but also the urban and suburban poor South Africans. Xenophobia comes through in the beginning of the novel when Refentše criticizes Cousin of “being a hypocrite because his vocal support for black non-South African teams, whenever they played against European clubs, contrasted so glaringly with his prejudice towards black foreigners the rest of the time” (17). As a police officer, Cousin is allotted the opportunity to act on his xenophobia in a way other South Africans are not. After describing how Cousin tortures the suspects he arrests, the narrator informs us, “Together, with his colleagues, [Cousin] would arrest Makwerekwere. Drive them around Hillbrow for infinite periods of time” (21). Mpe leaves it up to the reader’s imagination to picture what the police do to Makwerekwere suspects during these long rides. Cousin’s hypocrisy, however, is learned honestly through the attitudes of the community of Tiragalong. The emergence of AIDS has only added to the community’s xenophobia: “This AIDS, according to popular understanding, was caused by foreign germs that travelled down the central and western parts of Africa. . . There were others who went even further, saying that AIDS was caused by the bizarre sexual behavior of the Hillbrowans” (3-4). Such a mysterious and unexplainable disease needed to be attributed to a cause, and Tiragalong attributes it to the Other. Even when Refilwe, one of their own, develops AIDS, she becomes separate from the community: “Now she herself was, by association, one of the hated Makwerekwere. Convenient scapegoat for everything that goes wrong in people’s lives” (118). The string of personal deaths in the novel is also a result, in a way, of xenophobia. After Refentše caught Lerato cheating on him, he falls into a deep depression and has no one to comfort or help him. Even his own mother is not there to console him because of her xenophobia: “She hated the Hillbrow 142
women with unmatchable venom—a human venom so fatal it would have put the black mamba’s to shame” (39). Her intense hatred causes her to disown her son after he refuses to stop seeing Lerato, and Refentše knows he cannot turn to her in his time of grief. Overburdened with depression, Refentše commits suicide, and his suicide then leads to string of death like his mother’s burning and Lerato’s own suicide. Xenophobia does not end with Refentše’s death, however. Mpe, again calling attention to the act of writing, displays the harsh realities of xenophobia in South Africa as Refliwe plays into the Tiragalong people’s fear of the Other: Refilwe could not rewrite the death of your mother; but she rewrote the version of your suicide. In this version of things, you had been bewitched indeed—but not by your mother; by a loose-thighed Hillbrowan called Lerato. . . And your suicide was taken for the hard evidence of the dangerous power of Makwerekwere women. (44). Although she has not technically written down a word, Refilwe rewrites Refentše’s reality, mixing in fiction. Mpe highlights the irony surrounding Refentše’s situation through metafiction as well: “Love. Betrayal. Seduction. Suicide. It was such things as these that you might have written about” (38). And, in fact, Mpe is writing about such things. By drawing our focus to the surrealism and fictionality inherent in the violence of the postcolony, Mpe makes this violence all the more real. Also, by not explicitly pointing a finger at the colonizers and writing about the xenophobic South Africans, Mpe avoids creating over-simplified binaries and placing blame solely on the West but also looks inward to show the South Africans their part in the violent system as well. As remnants of colonialism are present in Mpe’s metafictive novel, apartheid remains a reality in post-apartheid South Africa. One cannot imagine the “post” without remembering what came before, and referring to the apartheid condition in terms of fiction makes us, as readers, question the difference between fiction and reality. As Hlongwane explains, the lines become blurred: “in a novel that troubles the line between fact and fiction. . . we are encouraged to be suspicious of both fact and fiction” (81). The ultimate act of metafiction in Welcome to Our Hillbrow deals with the reality of apartheid present in post-apartheid South Africa. In order to relieve his “heart’s load of love and guilt and grief,” Refentše decides to write a short story about Hillbrow (54). Refentše then has the protagonist of his short story write a novel. Even further, he has his character “write a novel about Hillbrow, xenophobia and AIDS and the prejudices of rural lives” (55). Basically, Refentše’s character is writing Welcome to Our Hillbrow. Samuelson explains how this act of metafiction 143
Page 1 and 2: Explorations of Reality: Metafictio
Page 3 and 4: half of Green’s description when
Page 5: consciousness” (29). Elements of
Page 9 and 10: The reviewers in the novel represen
Page 11 and 12: of adultery and suicide. All of the
Page 13 and 14: Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the

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