Full terms and conditions of use:

Transcription

1 This article was downloaded by: [New York University] On: 02 May 2013, At: 11:00 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: Registered office: Mortimer House, Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: The Palimpsest of Process and the Search for Truth in South Africa: How Phaswane Mpe Wrote Welcome to Our Hillbrow Benjamin H. Ogden Published online: 02 May To cite this article: Benjamin H. Ogden (2013): The Palimpsest of Process and the Search for Truth in South Africa: How Phaswane Mpe Wrote Welcome to Our Hillbrow, Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, 14:2, To link to this article: PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

2 Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, 2013 Vol. 14, No. 2, , The Palimpsest of Process and the Search fortruth in South Africa: How Phaswane MpeWroteWelcome to Our Hillbrow Downloaded by [New York University] at 11:00 02 May 2013 Benjamin H. Ogden One of the ways that things are false is when they get locked into being seen as fact, as opposed to moments of a process. 1 William Kentridge In his last recorded interview before his death from AIDS related complications at the age of thirty four, South African author Phaswane Mpe was asked some general but pointed questions about his debut novel Welcome to Our Hillbrow (WTOH). When asked why he chose to write a novel instead of another short story (he had already published several short stories, which would appear posthumously along with some of his poetry in the collection Brooding Clouds), Mpe responded, It s a difficult one to answer. In the first place I didn t sit down and reflect on whether to choose the short story form or the novel form. I actually started it, as I was writing I simply thought I was doing a portrait of Hillbrow and portrayed it in a very geographical sense. And I actually thought I was just doing Hillbrow the map and that would be it. And as I came toward the end of the novel, I realized that I m going to need a character to move around that map, so I thought back to my short stories and thought well in one moment I wrote a short story entitled Occasion for Brooding and with that story that s when I first created the character of Refentse. As it would turn out, I had had Refentse commit suicide in that short story and in my moment of depression, when I started doing the Hillbrow map, I actually thought back to that character and thought I m actually beginning to feel like my character. I m going to try to cheer myself up by trying to resurrect him somehow, so I brought him into the novel. But as I say, as I was starting, it was just going to be that first chapter, but towards the end of the chapter I realized that there were things I could still address. 2 Correspondence to: Benjamin H. Ogden, English Department, 50 Bloomfield Street, Apartment 603, Hoboken 07030, NJ USA. bogden@eden.rutgers.edu 1 Cameron, An Interview with William Kentridge, Attree, Healing with Words, 139. Ó 2013 Taylor & Francis

3 192 B.H. Ogden Mpe was asked if he were consciously trying to fill a gap that you felt people weren t writing about modern Hillbrow. 3 He insisted he wasn t trying to fill a gap but that he wanted to do the map, simply out of depression. 4 Pressed to discuss the novel s content, Mpe would say only if there is a purpose for him engaging so unflinchingly in the social and historical make-up of Hillbrow (a neighborhood of Johannesburg known for its poverty and crime), it is embedded in just my desire to map Hillbrow, contemporary Hillbrow. 5 In these comments, Mpe divulges a great deal. He tells us his subject: Hillbrow. He declares his project as a writer (that measure that he would use to judge whether he had executed well, or whether he had failed to complete the task he set himself). He gives us the esthetic terms through which he envisioned his method (portraiture and mapping), and sketches a helpful timeline of the stages of the construction of the novel. He historicizes the novel in two directions autobiographically and politically grounding the novel both in the most intimate personal expressive needs and in the most pressing social challenges (recalling a tradition of black political realism). He reveals the two hopes that guided his work: to find the proper formal means to map or write a portrait of Hillbrow to his satisfaction and to find ways of writing South Africa that are equal to the ample challenges of representation that it poses. 6 Mpe evidently believed that through writing he could represent Hillbrow as accurately and comprehensively as one can. By speaking so candidly about the task he set himself, the methods he employed to accomplish his task, and the formal adjustments and experiments that made up his undertaking, Mpe has afforded his readers the most charming of pleasures, as Henry James puts it: we can estimate quality, we can apply the test of execution. 7 This is not a frivolous pleasure. It is a way of using Mpe s description of the germ of his novel to account for its unusual form and narrative method, to identify submerged but fully developed ethical philosophies for living and surviving, and to clarify Mpe s relation to particular theoretical debates hiving around the role of the socially engaged but esthetically conscious South African novel. In applying the test of execution we can identify which formal devices bring successes, which bring failures, and so begin to see at close range the confrontation between ingenuity of literary expression and the stubbornness of South African life to be written. This is particularly important in Mpe s case, because WTOH is sometimes felt to be more of an engaging commentary on post-apartheid South Africa than an 3 Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Mpe also directs us to his short story, Occasion for Brooding, in which many of the characters in his novel first appear. Because Mpe does not give us any clues about his creative process in writing Occasion for Brooding I do not address Mpe s short story in my discussion of WTOH. However, it could be argued that, thematically and narratively, WTOH has the shape it does in part because of the relative success and failure of particular narrative techniques in Occasion for Brooding, and its companion stories Brooding Clouds and Fountains of Brooding. 7 James, The Art of Fiction, 363.

4 Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 193 esthetically satisfying novel in its own right; that is, it is sometimes read as a novel of ideas in which fiction is a mere vehicle for thematic discussions, not as a novel that turns such political and social concerns into an organic part of its innate esthetic machinery. As Michael Green writes, Downloaded by [New York University] at 11:00 02 May 2013 It must be said that such a utopian reading cannot, however, be carried through into the overall shape of the novel. The narrative cannot sustain the broadening of its setting, for example: the Oxford episodes in particular come across as tacked-on illustrations of the universal nature of national and continental chauvinism, and it is left finally for the issues that drive the story to carry it home rather than effective shaping or plotting. In this, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, like far too much postapartheid fiction, seems to earn its fame more for the topicality of its themes and, even more worryingly, the socio-cultural positioning of its author, than its actual achievement as fiction. 8 Green s position is not a mere matter of taste. It suggests that post-apartheid fiction is characterized by an inability to incorporate socio-political themes into its esthetic structure, and that such a failure marks post-apartheid writing as immature and amateurish. Furthermore, it suggests that Mpe s disjunctive, grammatically odd, occasionally cliché ridden way of writing is not his unique style as an artist, but is what belies his limitations as a writer and as a stylist. I do not necessarily disagree with Green s assessment. There are moments when Mpe s novel unabashedly and rather clumsily deals in the rote catalog of postapartheid social issues. However, as I demonstrate below (with a greater focus on the nuances of Mpe s style than Green provides), WTOH s fragmented style must be understood as the result of the many stages of Mpe s writing process; the finished product that is WTOH can be traced back to the many different ways in which Mpe tried to create a true map of Hillbrow. By examining the stages in Mpe s writing process, one can see WTOH as a palimpsest of process, by which I mean a work whose somewhat garbled formal surface achieves greater esthetic unity only in relation to the multiple layers of writing that lay beneath it, and that remain as traces in the text. The picture Green and others paint of the novel as a medium in which esthetics and thematics must be neatly reconciled is fundamentally challenged by a novel that must be read and interpreted as a palimpsest of creative processes. There is also a broader context to Mpe s description of how he came to map Hillbrow. Mpe s comments come at a transitional moment in South Africa s history and must be read as part of a long-standing debate about how literature can represent the historical and political reality of South Africa. He is well aware that the relevance of his remarks is due partly to how they relate to both a tradition of black South African protest writing and to an emergent vein of post-apartheid thinking. Historically, black political literature has been associated with historical realism, with black writers deemphasizing self-conscious stylistic experimentation because it was considered bourgeois and ornamental. Instead, anti-apartheid 8 Green, Translating the Nation, 13.

5 194 B.H. Ogden writers favored writing that accurately reported the empirical truth of political and social life (a literary form of journalism). In this tradition, writing was politically valuable to the anti-apartheid movement when it was mimetic and realist; its utility was as a means of documenting the full horror of segregation. However, the radical changes in South Africa throughout the States of Emergency, after the first democratic elections, and in the wake of the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, precipitated a shift away from a realist notion of truth toward a conception of truth that is considerably more varied. Much of contemporary thinking on South Africa is engaged in exploring other kinds of truth, and other ways that things can be said to be true (or real) other than through historical realism. Mpe s description of how he wrote WTOH both reflects a continued interest in depicting South African life realistically, and a somewhat more contemporary interest in other ways that literature can be said to create its own kind of truth. This is not to read Mpe s comments as anti-realist, but to see them as indicative of the process by which a writer comes to see the limitations of historical realism, and to discover in the course of writing how fiction becomes its own reality and how this reality reflects the truth of life lived within past and present social systems. My project, then, is to use Mpe s description of how he came to write a map of Hillbrow as a way of structuring my own thinking about how WTOH and Mpe s theories about writing contribute to the growing body of theoretical work surrounding the representation of South African life. However, WTOH also belongs to a complex tradition of literary cartography, with Mpe s Hillbrow at the nexus of Western, post-colonial, and South African traditions of mapping. It gestures back to the great maps of Western literature those of Sterne, Balzac, Dickens, and Joyce. It also has a place in a no less substantial tradition of imperial mapping (such as in Defoe s Robinson Crusoe and Kipling s Kim), and in the history of European imperialism. In a context specific to South Africa, we see these issues forefront in Sol Plaatje s Mhudi, Thomas Mofolo s Chaka, and Njabulo Ndebele s Fools and Other Stories, to name only a few. Though in literature maps are often used to think through the role that geography plays in apportioning political and cultural power, mapping also serves as a metaphor for verbal representation and is a way for writers to engage with the theoretical issues surrounding realism and mimesis. As such, Mpe s mapping can be read within a separate but related cartographic tradition that bears upon the theories of representation I discuss in this article. 9 This is to say that my reading has consequences not only for theories of South African representation, and for the centrality of understanding Mpe s writing process to such theories, but for the place of Mpe s work in a very rich history of literary cartography. 9 For an excellent summary of the theoretical background to the study of literary maps (covering Bakhtin, Said, Moretti, and others) see Bulson s, Novels, Maps, Modernity. For a good place to begin in examining cartography in the postcolonial tradition see Hogan s, Decolonizing the Map. And for a more general discussion of the history of cartography in relation to the dissemination of power see Harley s, Maps, Knowledge, and Power.

6 Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 195 I now return to Mpe s interview in order to demonstrate how the unique esthetic of WTOH is the result of the process by which Mpe came to discover that mapping and portraiture would never yield the sort of true representation of Hillbrow that he was trying to create. Initially, Mpe was only to do a portrait of Hillbrow in a very geographical sense. 10 At this point, we can imagine that Mpe was writing a realist description of the physical world of Hillbrow, with no fictional character serving as protagonist or focalizer. Mpe was toward the end of the novel 11 before he considered having a protagonist and so presumably had not introduced an experimental esthetic to what to this point must have been a fairly conventional realist depiction (a geographic map) of Hillbrow. Evidently, Mpe initially believed that a certain type of realism could produce a physical map of Hillbrow that would be the true Hillbrow. This was the stage of historical realism. And yet the very thing that Mpe hoped to achieve by representing Hillbrow in writing could not be achieved by mapping the area. Mpe realized that I m going to need a character to move around that map. 12 A map could not be the likeness ( portrait ) that Mpe aimed to create because it lacked a protagonist. A true likeness of Hillbrow is unimaginable as a geographical map of the locations and people of Hillbrow. Mapping lacks the perspective and subjective selfconsciousness to create a true representation. Mpe must have realized as he was completing his map that an honest depiction of Hillbrow will not only include its objective exterior, but will register how that multi-faceted exterior is experienced, understood or misunderstood, contended with or submitted to, by the individuals who live there. This shift from the objective to the subjective is clearly reflected in Mpe s movement away from the objective term mapping to the more esthetically subjective (but still mimetic) term portraiture. It is interesting to note that Mpe s short story God Doesn t Smoke Dagga, which was written after WTOH, is similarly organized around a map that is also a portrait: I looked at the picture that Lesedi had drawn. A portrait of Braamfontein, she told me. It could not have been obvious to anyone unfamiliar with this suburb what she was up to. Even I, who had spent nearly fifteen years here as a student and a resident could not fathom what the portrait could have stood for. Perhaps it was the rough manner in which she did it. No one doubted that she could have drawn a much better picture, if precision and accuracy could be said to be the most desirable features of an artwork. She had drawn pictures with utmost precision and accuracy before. What is more, she had added color to them; different shades that enabled anyone to see that this was the inner-city 10 Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, Attree, Healing with Words, Ibid.

7 196 B.H. Ogden Johannesburg, Jozi; that, Braamfontein; and that over there, Hillbrow. Buildings stood out recognizably. But this time around for the first time since her university studies in Art, she told me she chose to make only a rough portrait. 13 Downloaded by [New York University] at 11:00 02 May 2013 Here we see the abandonment of the empirical for the deeply personal; the portrait has replaced the map. Lesedi has come to see that the rules of art she has been taught in school produce artwork that is faithful to reality but not to her experience of that reality. Art is something you experience. What it means to you, it means, she told me. 14 After recollecting this discussion, the narrator (who has been thinking about Lesedi in a half-dream) goes out onto his balcony, looks out over Braamfontein, and produces a long description of his neighborhood: a portrait of the place he lives in, as he experiences that place. This is the narrator s own rough portrait. Still, the true Hillbrow is not a settled synthesis of the subjective and objective, but an embodiment of irreducible contingencies and on-going processes. For the map to be accurate it must render an array of subjective experiences to identical geographical features and social issues without allowing the concrete reality of the neighborhood to dissolve under the refractory power of individual perspective. Refentse cannot simply be inserted into a preexistent map, with his insertion providing the missing esthetic element that will turn a rigid map into a more artistic portrait. Certainly, one of the effects of inlaying Refentse onto the map was that it turned an objective map into a more subjective portrait. But a portrait is still a mimetic representation, one that is an inadequate blending of the staid binary of subjective and objective. If the introduction of the term portraiture conveys Mpe s understanding that his map would need an additional esthetic dimension, it also conveys his continued reliance on terms of representation to describe his novel. It becomes clear (and this is the point I have been coming to) that Mpe struggles to describe his project (toggling waywardly between portraiture and mapping) because, as he came to discover, he actually did not want to represent Hillbrow. He wanted to recreate it. Mapping and portraiture are ultimately insufficient terms because they are terms of imitation. They imply representation, and no representation, no matter how accurate and detailed, can be Hillbrow. Mimesis is a red herring. Mpe had fallen into the trap of thinking that novelists imitate reality in the same way that painters and cartographers do. But of course this is not true. Novels do not work as descriptions of the real. Even the most dedicated realism does not merely transcribe reality. Novels embody their own reality in their form. Because Mpe is a novelist and not a painter or cartographer, even the most accurate and faithful representations ring false. The interview makes it clear that the only truth that would satisfy Mpe is one that is discovered through the process of creating Hillbrow by remaking it in language. Mpe did not choose the novel form. The novel form was an inevitable, but unforeseeable, destination in a search for literary 13 Mpe, Brooding Clouds, Ibid., 182.

8 Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 197 truth. Mpe rejects the notion that literature is historically and objectively verifiable in relation to reality, when in fact literature, as J.M. Coetzee has said, operates in terms of its own procedures and issues in its own conclusions. 15 Mpe s process speaks to the limitations of imagining literature to be straightforwardly mimetic, and testifies to the way that literature seeks out and embodies a truth that could otherwise never be arrived at. Moreover, it illustrates how Mpe s process embodies both apartheid and post-apartheid conceptions of how literature can depict the complexities of South African life. It demonstrates that the two traditions are not mutually exclusive; they can coexist through artistic process. And yet, once written, the Hillbrow map could not simply be superseded or erased. Mpe wrote it, and he evidently wanted to keep it. Mpe s goal was neither to hide the stages of composition and reconceptualization that had gone into the novel to this point, nor was it to achieve a finished portrait of Hillbrow that was a polished and seamlessly integrated synthesis of the interpersonal, geographical, and autobiographical. For it is the process as a whole the phases in the maturation of Mpe s understanding of his subject that constitutes a particular form of truth, a truth about Hillbrow that is reflected in process and in those changes in understanding and feeling that are most visible in process. The truth is not in arriving at a burnished final product, but in the tracing of a line. This focus on the truth that exists in moments of process, and the ability to express such moments as efforts at depicting a kind of truth, is a hallmark of post-apartheid fiction and much thinking on contemporary South Africa. Accounts of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, for instance, almost always presuppose that a report limited to historical facts never communicates the essential truth of the victim. The victim is always in the process of trying to communicate the truth of their experience, above and beyond the facts of their experience. As victim testimony repeatedly attests, victims struggle to supplement the historical facts by incarnating their stories in their bodies and in their performance of language. Ubu and the Truth Commission, Jane Taylor and William Kentridge s multi-media play about the TRC, demonstrates that truth is nearest at hand when there is a confluence of historical facts, moments of enunciation of those facts, and a foregrounding of the material body. 16 Shane Graham s focus on the palimpsest as a way to tackle the interrelated problems of memory and the spatial legacy of apartheid 17 and Anthony O Brien s hope for performance spaces like the Durban Center for Culture and Working Life 18 are just two models for addressing contemporary South Africa that trumpet forms of cultural production predicated on artistic process, not finalized products. WTOH is a quite unusual novel, and its atypical form illustrates how Mpe attempted to integrate the intersubjective into the objective without effacing the evidence of process. The novel opens, 15 Coetzee, The Novel Today, Taylor and Kentridge, Ubu and the Truth Commission. 17 Graham, South African Literature, O Brien, Against Normalization.

9 198 B.H. Ogden If you were still alive, Refentse, child of Tiragalong, you would be glad that Bafana Bafana lost to France in the 1998 Soccer World Cup fiasco. Of course you supported the squad. But at least now, you would experience no hardships walking to your flat through the streets of Hillbrow that locality of just over one square kilometer, according to official records; and according to its inhabitants, at least twice as big and teeming with countless people. 19 Downloaded by [New York University] at 11:00 02 May 2013 Mpe uses second-person singular narration to create a temporal framework, and a form of address, that could not be achieved in first or third-person narration. 20 The effect of the opening hinges on being aware that the phrase If you were still alive implies that Refentse is dead, when in fact Refentse is not dead. He is alive in death, living in heaven. The apostrophe together with the second-person address (on top of everything we will soon discover about the world of the novel) communicates this perfectly; style carries the paradox of life in death. The narrator is not apostrophizing to an abstraction; he is speaking directly to someone who can hear him, while relaying to Refentse and the reader information that neither one necessarily knows. The opposition, then, is not between alive and dead, but between alive on earth and alive in heaven. To say if you were alive to someone who is, in a sense, alive is to render the concept of alive meaningless. It needs to read If you were alive on earth to make any sense. And yet this is the brilliance of the sentence. The opening sentence can only make sense once we do away with the distinction between life and death and reinstate the possibility of two forms of aliveness. This is precisely the work that goes on inside the novel, which itself upends traditional conceptions of linear time, and the relationship between the living and the dead. 21 Written in any other form, the opening sentence would fail to do this impressive work. Here is how the opening would read if it were written in third and first-person singular narration, respectively: If he were still alive Refentse, child of Tiragalong, would be glad that Bafana Bafana lost to France in the 1998 Soccer World Cup fiasco. If I were still alive I would be glad that Bafana Bafana lost to France in the 1998 Soccer World Cup fiasco. Everything that Mpe achieves in his opening is lost in these spurious openings. They are simple contrary-to-fact statements that do nothing to complicate the relationship between life and death. In third-person narration, the narrator vanishes as a substantive character with a celestial, intimate relationship to Refentse. He 19 Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, For further discussion of Mpe s use of pronouns, see Clarkson, Locating Identity, Mpe s deconstruction of the opposition between alive and dead is also a reflection of the cosmology of many Southern African people, who believe that their ancestors live on in a spirit world that can still be contacted through ritual and traditional belief. A Pedi or amazulu reader would likely not find the idea of communicating with the dead so confounding or surprising. In this respect, the novel moves between Western and traditional Southern African paradigms.

10 Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 199 becomes a typical omniscient narrator. In first-person singular, the sentence becomes a hokey, noir voice from beyond the grave. Nonetheless, the fact that Refentse was introduced at a late stage in the writing process is not suppressed. The second-person singular narration, and the heavyhanded way that Refentse is adhered to the map, makes the phases in Mpe s process visible. The repeated use of the present unreal conditional form ( you would be glad, you would experience, you would remember ) turn Refentse s movements on the Hillbrow map into imaginary simulations, with the second-person singular narration highlighting the narrator s role in dictating these simulations. These are not vague descriptions of scarcely imaginable theoretical situations, but (due to the narrator s heavenly knowledge) vivid and detailed recreations of Refentse s interactions with dynamic environments. The result is that the integrity of the Hillbrow map with which Mpe began is not compromised; the opening could be rewritten as an empirical description of an objective event. The conspicuous repetition of you would, on top of the map that is uncompromised by the presence of a protagonist, collude to create an esthetic that could be achieved in no other way because it retains the marks of progression and development. The scars of revision are inlaid into the once free-standing map of Hillbrow through ingenious, but heavy-handed, rhetorical suturing resulting in the supremely vital and authentic portrait that Mpe had been trying to create. However, Mpe s technique is not infallible. One of the effects of Mpe s style is that Refentse at times feels partially functional as a character, a useful puppet made to move over the Hillbrow map like a toy soldier, maneuvered and positioned at will. Refentse can seem contrived as a character without the opportunities for social commentary and physical descriptions that his movements and relationships provide. This is evident in the passage below: You would remember the last occasion in 1995, when Bafana Bafana won against Ivory Coast and, in their jubilation people in Hillbrow hurled bottles of all sorts from their flat balconies. A few bold souls, boasting a range of driving skills, swung and spun their cars in the streets, making U-turns and circles all over the road. You would recall the child, possibly seven years old or so, who got hit by a car. Her mid-air screams still ring in your memory. When she hit the concrete pavements of Hillbrow, her screams died with her. 22 Though the narrator claims this is what Refentse would have remembered were he alive, the scene is not written as a subjective memory. Nothing about what Refentse would have recalled is unique to Refentse or to his experiences; nothing about the language is individualized. This is little more than a description from the perspective of an omniscient narrator. Though the young girl s screams still ring in your memory, we never hear her screams, never are told where Refentse was in relation to the girl when she was struck, what he did or thought the moment he heard her cries. The statement her screams died with her is not Refentse s experience, but the narrator s flourish. At such moments, Refentse cedes any semblance of a fully 22 Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, 1.

11 200 B.H. Ogden realized character. He exists to service the mapping of Hillbrow, functioning as the character to move around that map that Mpe needed. This esthetically clunky quality opens the novel to accusations that it is a novel of ideas whose sole purpose is to report journalistically on the new South Africa. Mpe s struggle to be both politically responsible and literarily effective manifests itself in precisely this way: Undisguised editorializing about South African life is accompanied by the receding of Refentse as a fully-developed character, while the foregrounding of Refentse s inner life signals Hillbrow s dissolution as a dynamic character in its own right. The two demands wax and wane in tandem. For example, when Refentse and Cousin discuss the role of foreigners in Hillbrow, their conversation does not come across as a staged debate about xenophobia but as an argument that says as much about Refentse as it does about local conditions. The reader learns a great deal about Refentse as a person that he is educated, passionate and well-informed, that his awareness of social complexities and his refusal to stigmatize anyone without reason brand him an anomaly. Circumspection, sensitivity, and an aversion to provinciality distinguish him from Cousin and others like him, and this apartness is not lost on Refentse or on the reader. The effectiveness of the scene is a result of Mpe s way of writing the scene. The argument is recounted in the simple past tense. We are told (speaking of Refentse and Cousin, respectively) that, You and he had had many disagreements, and that you often accused him of being a hypocrite. 23 Mpe also uses believable free-indirect discourse ( And while we re so busy blaming them for all our sins, hadn t we better also admit that quite a large percentage of our home relatives who get killed in Hillbrow, are in fact killed by other relatives and friends ), 24 which has the effect of having Refentse s eloquence contrast sharply with Cousin s less stately diction; this brands each character as a member of a particular social class. Refentse s intelligence, however, is both an advantage and a hindrance; though it lends his argument an impressive air of mastery, it marks him as different. Refentse s skillful debating serves as a reminder to himself and his cousin that he is not a part of things, The difference between you and Cousin was he was a policeman. If you had no problems with Makwerekwere, then that was fine On the other hand, being a policeman, there were many things that Cousin could do. And he did them 25 Refentse s growing awareness of his powerlessness tells us more about him as a character than any number of programmatic editorials on the state of South Africa. It is in scenes like this one that Refentse becomes a substantive protagonist with a legitimate internal life, with Hillbrow relegated to a supporting role. However, this novelistic moment is cut short. Abruptly, we move back to facile editorializing and historical summarizing. Refentse again becomes a vehicle for traversing the Hillbrow map. To segue into a sweeping historical disquisition, Mpe has his narrator once again speak through Refentse, 23 Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., 20.

12 Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 201 You would want to add that some Makwerekwere were fleeing their war-torn countries to seek sanctuary here in our country, in the same way that many South Africans were forced into exile in Zambia, Zaire, Nigeria and other African and non-african countries during the Apartheid era. You would be reminded of the many writers, politicians, social workers and lecturers, and the endless string of South Africans hanging and jumping from their ninth floor prison cells because the agents of the Apartheid government wanted them to do so 26 Downloaded by [New York University] at 11:00 02 May 2013 Here the novel loses some of its novelistic unity. This passage is in no way integrated into the logic of the conversation that precedes it, and scarcely tries to disguise the fact that it is little more than a jaunt through fifty years of South African history. You would want to add is as artificial a transition from fiction writing to non-fiction exposition as one could imagine. It is also an esthetically forced way to bring process to the forefront. It is no wonder that WTOH is sometimes read as less a novel than a prolonged social commentary. In places, that is exactly what it is. Where all of Refentse s particularities and personal dramas vanish, the novel can be something of a social treatise. However, what is notable about WTOH is that those places where Refentse is no more than a puppet are not always the moments of esthetic failure. With Mpe, lapses in esthetic unity sometimes bring about stretches of writing that are strikingly unique because in those moments the palimpsest of the writing process is most visible. WTOH is filled with formal affectations and infelicities that both grate and ingratiate the reader. Mpe could be said to have failed to execute as a novelist because his solutions are textual Frankensteins rhetorical tropes are stitched together with the stitches remaining as conspicuous black zippers in the text. Or Mpe has succeeded because of his poor stitching. How can we criticize Mpe for so cumbersomely patching the character onto the map when this messy soldering is the inscription of the fullest expression of the life world of Hillbrow? It is the stages of artistic creation that embody the full complexity of the project of writing Hillbrow, and an honest portrayal of such growing pains will mean examples of demoralizing revisions, not effortless segues. This is one difficulty of evaluating contemporary South African writing. Process is anathema to tidily packaged truths and neatly stylized esthetics because process is a record of failure. There is ugliness, and an unappealing laboriousness, to drafting and revising. Not all parts of a process are amenable to presentations of process. And yet process can deliver a kind of truth that does not appear in a finished product that has dutifully covered its tracks. A great deal of the success and failure of contemporary South African literature hinges on the author s ability to stage process without being overrun by it, and to select the parts of a process that will best represent what that process communicates. A Country of My Skull, 27 Ubu and the Truth Commission, and J.M. Coetzee s Diary of a Bad Year all succeed not as cohesive products but as accomplished presentations of process, whether that be 26 Ibid., Krog, Country of My Skull.

13 202 B.H. Ogden the process of trying to come to a complete sense of what is true (Krog), or the process of staging the embodied drama of a Truth Commission (Taylor and Kentridge), or the process of rethinking the novel genre (Coetzee). Less successful works may fail to present the palimpsest of process in a way that retains some semblance of esthetic lucidity and coherence. Still, it may be that Mpe s palimpsest of process confounds the hypothesis that some presentations of process are successful and others unsuccessful. That is, a palimpsest, though it is an esthetic object, is something that by its very nature cannot be judged esthetically in any simple way. A palimpsest is a living document; traces of earlier writing may emerge or fade over time; one author may build upon or further erase a previous author s work; certain old blemishes or mistakes may be, ultimately, indelible. Can we judge a palimpsest as less esthetically unified because its buried strata have surfaced in ways that we do not find esthetically pleasing? In some sense, the beauty of a palimpsest is incidental, is a matter of how the various stages of history come to appear. This may be why a record of a creative process is so appropriate to Mpe s stated project in a palimpsest, the esthetic coherence or message of any single layer is secondary to the esthetic unity of all the layers of meaning together: not only the overall esthetic impression of the overlapping layers, but also the iterations of historical patterns, and the significance of the palimpsest as a metaphor. In this sense, Mpe s highly unorthodox writing style is a perfect vehicle for a mode of literary representation that is significant as an historical document, a socio-political commentary, a work of literary art, a map, a portrait, an autobiography, and so many other things. Viewed from a certain perspective, WTOH may be beyond judgment in the way that palimpsests are beyond judgment. Theoretically, we may need a different set of terms for assessing the esthetics of Mpe s novel. On the other hand, why should Mpe s writing be allowed to skirt esthetic judgment when the writing of other authors is glibly submitted to such judgment? Is a palimpsest an explanation for Mpe s style, or an excuse for it? These questions deserve further consideration, not only in terms of Mpe s work but also in terms of post-apartheid literature generally. The concept of a palimpsest of process has important consequences for theories of South African representation. Much scholarship surrounding South Africa centers on developing a new method of reading South Africa that can register what remains of the past, and how we relate to both the past and its remainders, or its traces in the present. 28 Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall have written of the crisis of representation affecting the human sciences, which arose principally from postmodern challenges to the disciplines ability to describe an objective world and to understand meaningfully any lived experience. 29 The difficulty of writing South Africa is to describe an objective world while also being able to understand meaningfully any lived experience. 30 A representation is meaningful 28 Nuttall, City Forms, Mbembe and Nuttall, Writing the World, Ibid.

14 Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 203 when it does more than depict a subjective experience of South Africa in relation to a series of outdated concepts; it is meaningful when the languages of life are able to depict a life world, which is not only the field where individuals existence unfolds in practice; it is where they exercise existence. 31 Where old categories have been surpassed by new demands made on language by reality, new language must be developed to depict this life world. This requires different modes of discourse, a different writing. In light of this need for new language to represent the life world of South Africa, it is more important than ever to pay attention to those archives still at times undervalued and, in any case, underwritten by historians and anthropologists in South Africa. One of these archives is that of the city and the literary itself. 32 Literature, which is neither pledged to a single discipline nor to the objectively real, is a natural place to look for new forms of capturing the true contemporary South Africa. And WTOH is by any measure an effort to address the crisis of representation facing anyone attempting to write the now in South Africa; it contends with the realities of Hillbrow on their own terms while recognizing that the legacy of segregation is also a legacy of conceptualization; it employs unlikely narrative techniques and formal styles (a different writing ) to better represent an objective world alongside lived experience ; it places South African society within a larger postcolonial and global context. Although I wholeheartedly agree with Nuttall that literature is as fruitful a place as any to look for glimpses of how South Africans experience South African life, it seems that too often literature is understood as a vehicle for theorizing contemporary life or proposing new methodologies this would be the fiction as ethnography paradigm that Nuttall endorses. Though literature can do this kind of straightforward thematic work, literature can also engage with social issues in ways that other modes of writing cannot. This is not to attribute to literature some fanciful or unverifiable power. It is to say that literary writing can present a reality that is not translatable to other genres. Literature produces ideological meaning in a way that is different from, but not entirely divorced from, other modes of writing. So if we are to appreciate the value of the literary archive to contemporary South Africa, we must try to read literature as literature, and in doing so hope to come to understand the relationship between literary form and representations of social, cultural, and political reality. Underlying this is the presumption that a great deal of political and social ideology is registered in literature without being overtly thematic. In order to demonstrate how the literariness of WTOH illuminates its sociopolitical meaning, I will look at Nuttall s reading of a passage from Mpe s novel, and then try to see what it would mean to understand the same passage within the context of the novel as a whole. Nuttall gives an insightful, but nonetheless thematically minded, reading of the scene when Refentse and Cousin walk the streets of Hillbrow. Mpe writes, 31 Mbembe, On the Postcolony, Nuttall, City Forms, 739.

15 204 B.H. Ogden Your own and cousin s soles hit the pavements of the Hillbrow streets. You cross Twist, walk past the Bible Centered Church. Caroline makes a curve just after the Church and becomes the lane of Edith Cavell Street, which takes you downtown; or, more precisely, to Wolmarans at the edge of the city. Edith Cavell runs parallel to Twist. Enclosed within the lane that runs from Wolmarans to Clarendon Place (which becomes Louis Botha a few streets on) is a small, almost negligible triangle of a park. On the other side of the park, just across Clarendon Place, is Hillbrow Police Station, in which you take only minimal interest. 33 Nuttall responds: Downloaded by [New York University] at 11:00 02 May 2013 Mpe offers a revised inventory of the city, comprising a path along its streets, both tracking and breaching historical constructions of city space. Built sites along the streets symbolize specific practices, demarcate racial identities in particular ways and in turn determine how one walks. Thus one might feel oneself to be at the edge of a city, enclosed within the lane, walking alongside, or facing west, depending on where one is a complex combination of built structures and felt identity. Significantly, Refentse takes only minimal interest in the Hillbrow Police Station, one of the most notorious sites of apartheid police repression in the city. Street names, too, mark the trace of the colonial and apartheid epistemologies and practices but these proper names, as de Certeau notes, also make themselves available to the diverse meaning given to them by passers-by in the now 34 I do not necessarily dispute Nuttall s observations. Certainly, Mpe is calling attention to the extent to which apartheid era markers still organize post-apartheid movement and thinking. However, it is also true that Mpe s description, though nuanced and presumably accurate, is disorienting and difficult to follow. The map is no easier to navigate for being detailed. Only a few pages earlier, Hillbrow is a menacing monster, threatening to its neighbors ; we are told that the lure of the monster was, however, hard to resist and that it had swallowed a number of the children of Tiragalong. 35 Hillbrow is not just a neighborhood, but a dangerous labyrinth. Refentse is traversing the Hillbrow maze, and it is unclear if any amount of local knowledge will be enough for him to find his way out unharmed. Mpe is insistent that local knowledge serves as much to bind us to decaying areas as to remove us from them. To become local is not simply to become street-wise and privy to tacit social codes, but to become indelibly imprinted with the traditions and customs of that place. Often being a child of a particular place and therefore wedded to its practices even when you no longer believe in them can be personally disastrous. The description of the map of Hillbrow conveys a sense of vertigo and unease. To map Hillbrow is not to render it walkable, knowable, or harmless. 33 Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, Nuttall, City Forms, Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, 3.

16 Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 205 Mpe s descriptions of geographic navigation underscore the other forms of social navigation that Refentse will have to learn if he is to survive Hillbrow. To get from point A to point B is only one part of becoming a child of Hillbrow. Other forms of navigation materialize. After Refentse and Cousin s walk together, Refentse fails to properly navigate social customs when he greets a beggar. Cousin scolds Refentse, Hey you! You do not go around greeting every fool in Hillbrow. 36 Refentse must confront the same beggar on his return home, On your way home to Vickers, at the cream and brown wall of Usindiso City Shelter, you again respond to the old man s Aibo! Again, he thanks you for your generosity. You are persuaded to search your trouser pockets for a cent or two 37 It is now clear that what Refentse had thought were simple pleasantries are a beggars ruse to cadge loose change. The elision with which the scene ends links this moment to the long list of Hillbrow crimes cataloged a few pages earlier, each of which is connected by elision ( Two women were raped and then killed in Quartz Street Three Nigerians who evaded arrest at Jan Smuts Airport were finally arrested in Pretoria Street for drug dealing Street kids, drunk with glue, brandy and wild visions ). 38 Still, Refentse s relationship with the huckster beggar does not end in exploitation but in friendship, It was during your second month as lecturer that you saw your friend from the shelter being wheeled away in a wheelbarrow, in the direction of Hillbrow Hospital in Klein Street. He did not say Aibo! this time. This pained you. In the five years you had known him, you had become friends without ever saying anything to each other, except for the mutually warm greetings. 39 This is a touching moment. Cousin may have been right that the homeless man had greeted him in the hope of scoring a few rand. And the elision was undoubtedly an indication that their meeting was another example of the depravity and duplicity that govern life in Hillbrow. But despite his cousin s admonishment, in time Refentse and the beggar become friends without ever saying anything to each other. The elision, which had marked their relationship as sullied, disappears. The form mutely conveys that local knowledge like Cousin s is not always correct; often it is steeped in uncalled-for paranoia. If we look back to the opening of the novel we see that Mpe had initially framed knowledge in a particular way, But at least now, you would experience no hardships walking to your flat through the streets of Hillbrow that locality of just over one square kilometer, according to official records; and according to its inhabitants, at least twice as big and teeming with countless people. 40 There is only local knowledge and official knowledge, locally named streets and officially named streets. However, we see knowledge of a different sort in Refentse s friendship with the beggar. This is individual knowledge acquired through personal experience. 36 Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid, Ibid., 1.