Reading Response: Welcome to our Hillbrow

The novel Welcome to our Hillbrow is unique in my opinion in that the story telling is done through perspective of different people. You sort of stepped into different people's shoe to see the same situations in different light. It goes from seeing it from the perspective of the narrator, the author Phaswane Mpeo, the perspective of Refentse, the people of Tiragalong, south Africans, and non South African migrants. It deals with crime, poverty, and generally xenophobia in the neighborhood of Hillbrow. It basically follows the story of Refentse, while immersing you with what goes on in Hillbrow by putting you in the center of action such as when it is described that a woman can be heard screaming for help in the middle of the night, and while you were curious to take a look, you basically tried your best to ignore it, while hearing police sirens but realizing they are not for the screaming woman but instead for someone else. It’s vivid description like that among others whose perspective point of view works best than pershaps reading that Refentse heard a woman scream, its just more powerful by hearing you can hear that going on. “You try to convince yourself that the sound you had heard was a dream, a nightmare; but in your wakeful state, hard realities came home to roost….Welcome to our Hillbrow….” It deals with other societal issues in Hillbrow as well such as AIDS. Nobody there really seems to understand and comprehend where did AIDS come from, but yet the people there are ready to point fingers. Xenophobia is seen through the people believing that AIDS come from foreigners, people from other parts of Africa, West Africa. They believe that sex between men as they put it was so dirty as to create such a dirty disease. The other part where “foreigners” were looked in bad light in was shown in the example of Refentse’s mother and Lerato. The generalization being that people like Lerato were inferior. They believed that foreigners were responsible for physical decay, and moral decay such as drug dealing, AIDS, and such. It’s really a unique reading because I can’t recall a different novel where different people’s perspective were told in the novel. The stories are usually told in the perspective of the main character and the narrator but not as much by other’s in the story to the degree of this novel.