AIDS and the Public Function of the South African Writer in Phaswane Mpe's Welcome to our Hillbrow

T. Spreelin MacDonald

School of Interdisciplinary Arts

Ohio University Athens, Ohio,

Estados Unidos

When the South African author and university lecturer Phaswane Mpe (1970-2004) published his first and only novel, Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001), it was immediately heralded as one of defining works of the post-apartheid era. Offering a trenchant view of the effects of AIDS, violence, suicide, and dislocation among young rural migrants to the Johannesburg neighborhood of Hillbrow, Welcome to Our Hillbrow provided the first testament to the tremendous identity struggles which the young post-apartheid generation has faced. Yet, in addition to the particular vision of his highly autobiographical and metafictional novel, Mpe's own 2004 death of an AIDS- related illness has generated many questions about the public function of literature in a post-apartheid era dominated by, especially, the specter of AIDS.

Based on a critical reading of Welcome to Our Hillbrow and recent field research conducted in South Africa in June and July of 2007 in which I interviewed Mpe's former colleagues at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and gained access to a number of earlier pieces of research and creative writing that he produced in his short life, this paper will discuss the manners in which AIDS, as a social phenomenon, can significantly influence the selective development of particular forms of cultural production.

One of the key dynamics of this discussion is the manner in which Mpe advocated for the public function of written literature in addressing the social chaos of post-apartheid South Africa. Notably, the protagonists of Welcome to Our Hillbrow are themselves both writers and subject to pressures to their personal and collective identities, AIDS being foremost among them. These characters, in their differing ways, react against orality, what Mpe terms as "gossip" within the novel, choosing instead to "make a positive influence" on their society through writing fiction. This choice is spurred both by the manner in which orality is linked to this tormented social context, and the perception that written/published fiction is relatively autonomous and permanent. Apparently, Mpe envisioned written fiction as the best way in which young South Africans can leave lasting positive influences in a world in which their bodies are suspect (being hyper-mortalized by AIDS, violence and suicide) and their spoken words are ineffectual, at best, if not implicated as causes of the social illnesses which prey on their speakers.

Such a portrayal of the urgent need for heightened written expression (at the expense of oral expression) is notable and somewhat mysterious in light of the fact that Mpe, himself, taught courses on orality and literacy as a lecturer at the University of Witwatersrand with a reportedly more favorable assessment of the place of oral story telling in South African culture. This paper will take into consideration these dynamics of Welcome to Our Hillbrow and Mpe's life in an attempt to offer an analysis of a particular case in which AIDS has figured prominently in the development of an artist's selective engagement with cultural production.

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