The Palimpsest of Process and the Search for Truth in South Africa: How Phaswane Mpe Wrote Welcome to Our Hillbrow

Abstract

In the last interview he gave before his death, Phawane Mpe describes how he came to write Welcome to Our Hillbrow, and discusses the esthetic, historical, and political concerns that shaped how he went about trying to represent the “truth” of Hillbrow. Though this interview is often quoted, its full significance for the growing body of theoretical work concerning how South African fiction can “represent” the complex history and present reality of South African life has yet to be appreciated. In this article, I demonstrate how Mpe’s description of how he came to write the “truth” of Hillbrow through “mapping” and “portraiture” illustrates how he discovered over the course of his struggle to write the novel that fiction was the only medium he could use to represent Hillbrow in its full complexity. Mpe’s description, I argue, both reflects a continued interest in depicting South African life realistically (building on a rich history of South African historical realism) and a somewhat more contemporary interest in other ways that fiction can be said to create its own kind of truth. Mpe’s writing 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 (in this case the truth of Hillbrow) that could otherwise never be arrived at. 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.