Welcome to Our Hillbrow by Phaswane Mpe is a second
person narrative that follows Refentse, his friends and how they deal with
violence, xenophobia and betrayal. One thing that caught my eye was the dialogue.
Despite the fact there is no traditional dialogue, you can usually tell who is
talking and it doesn’t take away from the book. Although it is hard to tell if
it’s Refentse talking and reflecting on his life from the heavens or if it is
the author talking to you, the reader, about his life. I think there are times
you can tell who is talking though because of the other accounts in the story.
How could Refentse know how anyone else felt without being there? The book is
written in a way that makes you feel like you are the Phillipe Bourgois of the
area. The difference is that you can actually insert yourself into this story
while in Phillipe Bourgois’ account; you can’t because you know it’s his
account of the things that happen.
Early on in the book Refentse has a conversation
with his cousin and the cousin says that the foreigners are to blame for all
the crime and moral decay in the Hillbrows. Refentse opposes this idea and says
that while the foreigners are partitially to blame, that you should not forget
that many people in Hillbrows are there for their own agenda. You must not
forget that a large percentage of bring their problems with them and that the
people there are killing each other indiscriminately. Each of these people had
their own point of view and passed it on as truths. It reminds me of the
traditional narrative that the Spaniards have told for centuries about their conquest
in Latin America. The usual ‘a few hundred Europeans went to the new land and
dominated empires that had hundreds of thousands of natives’. How is such a
thing possible if you do not skew the facts and create false information about
it? The Europeans had their own agenda and their own view point. Sadly, decades
later this story would even be accepted by some native scholars.
1 comment:
I agree with your blog post, i think that the way Mpe wrote his novel does make you feel as if you are the one witnessing these events in Hillbrow. I also took notice on the conversation Refentse had with his cousin about foreigners. But also Mpe goes into the perspective of the people of Tiragalong in order for the reader to understand their fear for foreigners. As you mentioned, Hillbrowans feared foreigners because they thought their crime and moral decay was a result of them being in the city.
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