You,
Refentse, in our Hillbrow, you will have love found and love lost, you will
betray, you will commit suicide. This is how the narration goes in the short
novel, “Welcome to Our Hillbrow” by Phaswane Mpe. This short novel takes the
reader, in this case you on a journey throughout a troubled neighborhood of
Hillbrow located in Johannesburg, South Africa. Throughout this journey, the
readers will experience the feeling of violence, lust, betrayal, more betrayal,
suicides, deaths, and more deaths.
As
mentioned before, the narrative point of view is unique. The narrator is
talking to you and telling you what is happening to your life. It’s like paving
the road for you, but the story already happened. The narrator tells you all
the bizarre things happening in Hillbrow, it tells you a history of the place,
a crime that went on, the xenophobia that exists, and the tragedy that has
happened. Throughout this novel, it can be noticed that “Welcome to our
Hillbrow…” or something similar to it is repeated. The “our” doesn’t only
include just “them” but also includes “you” as you are experiencing first hand
what is going on in Hillbrow.
One
thing that caught my attention was how the narration of how one’s inner body
was described. It was mentioned:
The boy in your trousers decided to
express his sympathies too. You felt your heart begin to beat quite fast.
Gentle drops of sweat began to do the rounds on your back. Your Dilating eyes
sent a subtle message of love to Bohlale, although you would have tried harder
– had you only known how – not to send such a message. It was, in its
intention, an innocent message, but the conscience of friendship required that
it should rather not be sent. (37)
The narration in this was unconventional. If the narrator is
talking to “you” how would was it possible to describe all the physiological
changes in one’s body such as dilating eyes, sweating back, or fastening of
heartbeat when it’s hard to know such changes of someone in reality.
This
book didn’t interest me much in a somehow a good way. This book is very
different than most books I’ve read. The narration is as I mentioned is
unconventional. There are different possibilities of who the narrator is; it’s
up the reader’s imagination to decide.
1 comment:
I enjoyed reading this novel as well. I really enjoyed how the authors makes us take this trip through Hillbrow and experience how life was like during apartheid. The use of different perspectives was interesting to me because I was able to understand each characters point of view which helped me understand their lives better.
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