Entanglement. Sarah Nuttall

describes Africans from elsewhere as ‘sojourners’ (p 18) like himself, ‘people taking their unplanned and haphazard journeys through our world’ (p 111), and xenophobia as the work of ‘ostracizing the innocent’ (p 20). Moreover, the real heart of xenophobia, he suggests, is less the city than the village itself. (‘Tiralong danced because its xenophobia – its fear and hatred for both black non-South Africans and Johannesburgers – was vindicated’ (p 54)).

      Welcome to Our Hillbrow disavows a politics of hatred in favour of ethics of hospitality. In the stories it tells of lovers in the city, the dramas of Refentše and his friends and their relationships with women, their duplicities, betrayals and confusion, the narrative repeatedly performs an act of embrace: ‘Yes, she is. And so am I and all of us’ (p 64); ‘Refilwe was only doing what we all did’ (p 111); ‘You do not own life’ (p 67); ‘Welcome to our All’ (p 104). It is significant, though, that the story is written in the second person: the narrator refers throughout to a ‘you’, most often a device used in fiction as a way of talking to the reader directly, but here a way of talking to the dead (the ‘you’ addressed here is Refentše, who has died).

      The book begins with the words ‘If you were still alive …’ (p 1), addresses a person who is ‘alive in a different realm’ (p 67) and ends by reflecting on heaven itself: ‘Heaven is the world of our continuing existence’ (p 124). Heaven becomes a place from which to reflect on life, and the narrator uses the device of addressing his dead protagonist to achieve this self-reflexive space. The book is not directly autobiographical, but Phaswane Mpe would freely tell (before his own untimely death) how it was written at a time when he himself felt suicidal – the book, that is, becomes an extended suicide note that also comes to save his life – by giving him a renewed desire for writing: this much at least we can extrapolate from Refentše’s own recorded desire to ‘explore Hillbrow in writing’ (p 30) and the narrators observation that ‘you wrote it in order to steady yourself against grief and prejudice, against the painful and complex realities of humanness’ (p 59).

      There is much to suggest that the dead Refentše is, in part, Mpe himself, and that his embrace of a place in which one can be ‘alive in a different realm’ speaks of a search for deeper humanity, or healing. Heaven, in the book, and within Mpe’s frame of mind at the time of writing, ‘is not some far off place’ (p 47) but rather a continuum between life and death, a place of insights, from which to view and review ‘our world’. Mpe’s own sudden death in 2005 in his early thirties, and his stated desire just before his death to train to become a traditional healer are both prefigured in the novel’s unusual second-person form of address, drawing the worlds of the living and the dead ever closer together.

      For Bauman (1996) civility is ‘the activity which protects people from each other and yet allows them to enjoy each other’s company. Wearing a mask is the essence of civility.’ Masks, he argues, permit pure sociability, detached from their circumstances of power, malaise and the private feelings of those who wear them. ‘Civility has as its aim the shielding of others from being burdened with oneself’ (p 95). In order for cities to become sites of civility, Bauman argues, people need to be able to occupy public spaces as ‘public personae’, without being ‘nudged, pressed or cajoled to take off their masks and let themselves go’ (p 96).