Reading Response 11/3

Reading Response 11/3

Phaswane Mpe, author of Welcome to our Hillbrow, takes us on a rough journey through Hillbrow, one of Johannesburg’s suburbs that is dominated by violence. He shows how living in South Africa during apartheid was brutal and unfortunate by exploring the issues of violence, AIDS, and death in this novel. When I began reading this novel, it was a bit difficult for me to understand who the narrator was because it felt like a different person was speaking every time I entered a new section. As I continued reading, I realized that there are different narratives speaking. I really enjoyed reading this novel, especially the first chapter Hillbrow, The Map. Mpe illustrates a detailed picture of Hillbrow and I was able to visualize how it looked. The naming of the streets and the directions that were given to get to the University were very specific (6). Even if you have never been to Johannesburg, Mpe is giving us the opportunity to envision the neighborhood which was really interesting.

The narrative point-of-view is mixed with characters' points-of-vie­­w in a very fascinating way. The actual author of the novel, Phaswane Mpe, writes in a second-person narrative throughout most of the text. The author within the novel, Refentše, is already dead by committing suicide. While Mpe addresses and tells the dead Refentše what he did, Refentše’s noticeable influence as a character is revealed and our own manipulation by the writer. Refentše writes a short story about a woman who contracts AIDS and is later despised by her community. I think a major point that Mpe wants to draw attention to is that we come to view people as they are, based on either what we have heard about them or as an outcome of the beliefs that we have about them, as individuals or as a group of people. The perspectives of the rural people were different from the city people because of the environment they grew up in and their beliefs. At Tiragalong, Refentše’s mother believed that Johannesburg women were all shameful, evil and destroyers of men. Because of this belief that she had, she opposed the relationship between Refentše and Lerato, a Johannesburg lady, who she has never met (39).

Refilwe’s point of view did change throughout the novel. Her trip to England to read for her Master’s at Oxford caused her perception to change. She was able to see past her biased stereotypes: “Hillbrowans were not merely the tiny section of the population who were brown and grew up in our Hillbrow, but people from all over the country, and other countries—people like herself, in fact—who entered our Hillbrow with all sorts of good and evil intentions” (96). She was exposed to the impressions and opinions of others toward Africans and South Africans, and she obtained a more considerate and open-minded understanding of the people she had once disliked as foreign. The author’s use of different perspectives in his novel helped us understand all the characters point of views which allowed us to see why their reactions and opinions were different from one another.