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CHAPTER 2

Literary City

In this chapter I consider the rubric of entanglement from the vantage point of the city. More specifically, I focus on recent novels of Johannesburg, texts which take the city as one of their constitutive subjects rather than as a backdrop to their narratives. The chapter considers the following questions: What might a Johannesburg text be? How does Johannesburg emerge as an idea and a form in contemporary literatures of the city? What literary ‘infrastructures’ are giving the city imaginary shape? Which vocabularies of separation and connectedness surface and recede? What representational forms? Citiness in Johannesburg, as it emerges in the texts below, I will argue, is an intricate entanglement of éclat and sombreness, light and dark, comprehension and bewilderment, polis and necropolis, desegregation and resegregation. Several of the texts examined here are specifically concerned with questions of racial entanglement. Some, like Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2000), explore other forms of complexity and foreground epistemological instability.

The most influential body of work on the literary city in South Africa is that focusing on the emergence of Sophiatown and its writers. Sophiatown was the vibrant and racially fluid inner-city suburb of Johannesburg that flourished and then was forcibly removed in the 1950s. Its writers fired literary critical imaginations in new directions, capturing some of the multi-sidedness of Johannesburg’s modernity, showing it to be a place occupied by the black poor, squatters and slum dwellers, and also a centre of urban black culture that, as Paul Gready (2002) has written, ‘offered unprecedented possibilities for blacks to choose and invent their society from the novel distractions of urban life’ (p 145).

Openly critical of liberalism, Sophiatown’s writers, most of whom worked as journalists for Drum magazine,¹ neither romanticised the rural nor condemned the moral degradation of the cities, contributing to a new tradition of writing which focused on black experience in the South African city. Much of their fiction tried to capture the racial landscape they inhabited: ‘the interracial frontier,’ writes Gready, ‘was fraught with contradictions and anguish, but while some like Themba later turned their back on it, others made their fictional and actual home in the quagmire of its tensions’ (p 148). They found a style of living and writing which, as Es’kia Mphahlele (1987, p 11) wrote, was ‘racy, agitated, impressionistic … [which] quivered with a nervous energy, a caustic wit’, one which Michael Chapman (1989) saw as providing a social barometer of the decade, and which tapped into the most urgent currents of life in the townships around Johannesburg. Journalism and imaginative writing, the ‘information’ of reportage and the ‘experience’ of storytelling, intertwined to produce writing in Drum shaped by idiosyncratic turns of phrase and narrative markers designed to arouse the reader’s curiosity (Chapman, p 209). In Mphahlele’s acute formulation, black politics was dramatised and, indeed, displayed theatrical style, and writers of the Drum decade found a relative freedom of expression that matched the political expression of the era (p 12). Rob Nixon (1994) has shown how, at a time when the very idea of belonging to the city was coming under increasing legislative pressure, the Harlem Renaissance helped emergent South African writers fortify their claim (p 16).

Sophiatown and its writers, then, dominated the critical imagination of the literary city, drawing the city as a subject more explicitly into being. At the same time, other writing, less focused on by critics, also gave the city voice. In Peter Abrahams’s Tell Freedom (1953), for example, the worlds of Vrededorp and Fordsburg, where he grew up, give way to an encounter with the city at large which was also the making of ‘a new kind of black person’ (p 195).

Born into urban poverty, the son of a coloured South African woman and an Ethiopian man, Abrahams begins to encounter himself in the city through the few books he can get his hands on (‘I desired to know myself … I was ripe for something new, the new things my books had revealed … I felt lonely and longed for something without being able to give it a name … impelled by something I could not explain, I went, night and night, on long lonely walks into the white areas of Johannesburg’ (pp 161-5)). Impelled by longing, but denied access to the city and a new kind of self at every turn, Abrahams finds a job as an ‘office boy’ at the Bantu Men’s Social Centre and here begins reading ‘everything on the shelf marked American Negro literature’ (p 188), a process through which he learns to interpret his reality and to propel himself out of ‘life in South Africa’. Two decades later, Mongane Wally Serote would publish his famous poem ‘City Johannesburg’:

Jo’burg City

I travel on your black and white and robotted roads,

Through your thick iron breath that you inhale,

At six in the morning and exhale from five noon

Jo’burg City

That is the time when I come to you,

When your neon flowers flaunt from your electrical wind,

That is the time when I leave you.

… ²

Lesego Rampolokeng (2004) deliberately echoes Serote’s poem to the city in the 1990s:

Johannesburg my city

Paved with judas gold

Deceptions and lies

Dreams come here to die

Both poems draw out, with equal power, the dark eroticism, the failed promise, the intimate knowledge, like the body of a lover, the drama of entanglement, the claim to belonging (‘my city’), the inability of the city to be a home. While Serote attributes this relationship with the city to apartheid Rampolokeng suggests that such a relationship persists, like ‘judas’, into the post-apartheid present.

In contemporary literature, particularly fiction, the city emerges in an even more self-conscious way as an aesthetic, a political and an imaginary site, a vivid and explicit template for an entire array of social fears and possibilities (Gunner 2003b). The city skyline begins to appear on numerous book covers, signalling its status as subject at the centre of these narratives. While several critics (Titlestad 2003, Hoad 2004, Mpe 2003) have written about individual novels as fruitful sites for understanding city culture, the texts’ cumulative and insistent focus on the city as an idea has still to be properly explored.

Urbanist Jennifer Robinson (1998) has offered one of the more overt methodological challenges to reading the city from the vantage point of the ‘now’:

Our imaginations have lived for so long with the lines of apartheid city space, with the blank spaces in between, the deadening images of power drawn on the ground. … Can we begin to shift our experiences and our visions to capture and understand the world of always-moving spaces? What do the spaces of change and dynamism look like? In what sense was even the apartheid city – a city of division – a place of movement, of change, of crossings? (D7).

Robinson invokes the figure of Toloki in Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying (1995):

In the afternoon Toloki walks to the taxi rank, which is on the other side of the downtown area, or what is called the central business district. The streets are empty, as all the stores are closed. He struts like a king, for today the whole city belongs to him. He owns the wide tarmac roads, the skyscrapers, the traffic lights, and the flowers on the sidewalks. That is what he loves most about this city. It is a garden city, with flowers and well-tended shrubs and bushes growing at every conceivable place. In all seasons, blossoms fill the site (p 46).

Toloki passes across the lines of the apartheid city, across its cruel divides; he generates crossings, not so much, as Robinson notes, undoing the spaces of poverty as refusing to treat those spaces as one-dimensional. We are in the realm of Lefebvre’s ‘representational space’ and each time we move we potentially use space differently.

Robinson views the apartheid city from the fresh, experimental vantage that was opened up by the political transition. The new South African city is still a space where nightmarish divisions may be witnessed and where the fear of crime delimits dreams of truly public space (see Kruger 2003). But she nevertheless suggests that we think not only in terms of fixed structures but in terms of movement, journeys through the city.³

Rita Barnard (2006) writes that Mda’s shift away from an ‘earlier poetics of a grim documentation of physical surroundings to a new, more fluid sense of black urban experience’ parallels shifts in South African urban studies from a ‘near-exclusive concern with the location of physical structures and the visible aspects of urban organisation to a concern with the city as a dynamic entity’. Barnard notes, too, the difference between Toloki’s ‘proprietal strutting’ and the ‘servile, if ironic’ movements of Serote’s narrator in ‘City Johannesburg’.

In the last decade or so an international body of scholarship on the city has turned for inspiration to, but also begun to critique, the writing of Michel de Certeau (1984) and Walter Benjamin (1982). It has returned to these writers as a way of trying to name neglected urban spatialities and to invent new ones, to unearth emergent city figures to connect that which has been held apart, to draw out the city’s theatricality, its improvisations, its ironies (see Amin & Thrift 2002). De Certeau’s key insight was that people use cities by constructing who they are, producing a narrative of identity. They make a sentence or a story of particular places in the city, and the city is not available as an overview – the city is the way that it is walked.

Much of an earlier terminology of location and mobility – vocabularies of the nomad, the decentred, the marginalised, the deterritorialised, border, migrant and exile – was, by contrast, seldom attached to specific places and people, representing instead ideas of rootlessness and flux that seemed as much the result of ungrounded theory as its putative subject (Solnit 2000). Benjamin’s figure of the flâneur (the aesthetic bohemian, drifting through the city like a film director) invites us to ‘read the city from its street-level intimations, to encounter the city as lived complexity, to seek alternative narratives and maps based on wandering’ (Amin & Thrift 2002, p 11).

For Zygmunt Baumann (1996) the figures which populate the Western metropolis, in addition to the flâneur, include the tourist (for whom the city is a spectacle), the player (who knows the rules of various urban games), the vagabond or vagrant (who moves at the borders of the establishment through the practices of transgression) and the commuter (who treats the city as a place you enter, park, work and leave – an autopolis). Interestingly, he fails to include the figure of the sex worker and, like most theorists of the city, he seems uninterested in what a gender-related city consciousness – the experience of the flâneuse, among other figures – would look like.

African cities suggest a number of other figures, which could be read back into European cities as well: one would be the figure of the sâpeur – the figure of spatial transition, operating in the interstices of large cultures, participating in a cult of appearance, especially expensive clothing; a mobile individual who, following Janet MacGaffey and Remi Bazenguissa-Ganga (2000), creates ramifying networks extending through time, space and multiple cultures as he circulates between countries, pulling off coups in otherwise invisible spaces in and between cities. Others, as we will see below, include the figure of the migrant worker, the aging white man, the illegal immigrant and the hustler.

Urban theorists, though, often tend to overstate the city as a space of flow, human interaction and proximate reflexivity. Although the figure of the flâneur draws important links between space, language and subjectivity, it leaves us with the question of whether the contemporary city based on an endless spread and multiple connections, is best grasped through the trope of wandering/wondering – or requires other imaginary means (Amin & Thrift 2002, p 14). The invocation of the flâneur in urban theory can underestimate the extent to which striating openness and flow are a whole series of rules, conventions and institutions of regulation and control, a biopolitics (p 26).⁴

In the case of Johannesburg, Michael Titlestad (2004) is correct in his observation that the city has been characterised less by practices of flânerie and drifting than by a set of divisions contrived by law, surveillance and threat, hostile to errant and nomadic meaning, to improvised selves and versions of social hope (p 29). Yet, as Amin and Thrift warn, we need to be careful about how we analyse space:

The city allows for juxtapositions at all kinds of levels – the meeting in the street, the rich and poor areas cheek by jowl, the lack of control of public spaces and so on. All kinds of forces may conspire to nullify these juxtapositions … the fact remains that the city, through these juxtapositions, is also a great generator of novelty (pp 40-41).

Jennifer Robinson, in her more recent work (2004), foregrounds a set of tensions emerging from two competing approaches, by practitioners and academics alike, to reading the city. South African urban studies, Robinson argues, is tossed between a left Marxist critique, which caricatures the present city in the resonant binaries of the past, and a form of post-structuralism which insists on seeing spaces and identities as profoundly uncertain, and always subject to dislocation (p 271). Yet at this moment in the remaking of the city of Johannesburg, both intellectually and in our political imaginations, Robinson argues, ‘something more is demanded of us’. That ‘something more’ requires, in her view, that we pay closer attention to the moment when ‘something is made’ (p 271). The challenge, she argues, is to find a view of the past through the lens of the post-apartheid present rather than through a ‘persistent apartheid optic’ (p 275). The city here, as elsewhere, both fragments and brings together (p 280).

In what follows I draw out some of the imaginary infrastructures which are constructing the city of the present. Infrastructures are most often understood in physical terms as reticulated systems of roads and grids in specific ensembles. Abdoumaliq Simone (2004) uses the term to refer to people in the city, to the ‘ability of residents to engage complex combinations of objects, spaces, persons and practices’, to form ‘conjunctions which become an infrastructure – a platform for reproducing life in the city’ (pp 1-2). I explore the imaginary infrastructures which surface in fiction – metropolitan maps, each of which tracks emerging selves in the city. The infrastructures I have chosen are the street, the café, the suburb and the campus.

The street

Phaswane Mpe’s novel Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2000) explores, via a modality of pedestrian enunciation, the inner-city quarter of Hillbrow, in Johannesburg.⁵ Mpe’s second-person narrator describes how to cross this part of the city:

Your own and cousin’s soles hit the pavements of the Hillbrow streets. You cross Twist, walk past the Bible Centred 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. Crossing the park, you walk alongside the police station, still in Clarendon Place. A very short distance later, you join Kotze Street. In Kotze you turn right to face the west (p 10).

Mpe offers a revised inventory of the city, composing a path along its streets, both tracking and breaching historical constructions of city space. Built sites symbolise specific practices, demarcate racial identities in particular ways and, in turn, determine how one walks.⁶ Thus one might feel oneself to be at the ‘edge of the city’, ‘enclosed within the lane’, ‘walking alongside’, or ‘facing west’, depending on where one is – a complex combination of built structure and felt identity.

Significantly, Refentše, the narrator, 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 colonial and apartheid epistemologies and practices, but these proper names also, as De Certeau notes (1984, p 104), make themselves available to the diverse meanings given to them by passers by in the now, detach themselves from the places they were supposed to define and serve as imaginary meeting points on itineraries. These words operate in the nature of an emptying out and wearing away of their primary role, as De Certeau sees them, and insinuate other routes into the functionalist order of movement (p105).

Throughout Mpe’s novel the streets are marked by ‘incidents’; things happen with greater intensity or regularity in certain streets, and the situation of the danger spots is a matter of great contention (‘the notorious Esselen’, ‘the notorious Quartz’ (p 6)). The coming of what Mpe calls ‘black internationals’ into Hillbrow invokes the streets and their names as ‘receptacles for other routes’. If Mpe doesn’t know who Edith Cavell or Wolmarans were, he knows, or chooses to remember, that the Hillbrow Tower is really called the J G Strijdom Tower, and recalls the ‘civilised labour policy’ of the 1930s as well as the historical irony that Hillbrow is now a largely black neighbourhood (author interview 2003).

Hillbrow, for Mpe, is figured as a partial and now patchy inventory of the old apartheid city and as a revised inventory of a largely black, highly tensile, intra-African multiculture. At the beginning of his book Mpe makes clear that the novel’s preoccupation with writing the map, navigating the streets, has much to do with the figure of the migrant itself: ‘Your first entry into Hillbrow was the culmination of many converging routes. You do not remember where the first route began. But you know all too well that the stories of migrants had a lot to do with its formation’ (p 2).

These migrant ‘routes’ refer to those who gravitate to the city from South Africa’s hinterland, but can also be taken to refer to the cross-border migrants from elsewhere in Africa to which the novel increasingly refers and who now make up much of the demographic outline of Hillbrow. The figure of the migrant comes to overlay the earlier trope of race (whites seldom appear in the novel, nor is race conflict a theme or major subtext of Mpe’s writing) and even dominates the urban spaces the novel explores. Hillbrow is a city of strangers, in which the terms of civility and incivility have to be negotiated. The novel sets up a tension between xenophobia – the hatred of the unknown, the ‘foreign’ – and ‘humanness’, invoked throughout the book. Many of these tensions are played out on the street itself.

Of course migrants are not necessarily ‘always-moving’ figures, but may instead be forced to follow well-beaten tracks. In the case of Johannesburg it may rather be the new black middle classes who are really ‘on the move’ in the city. Nevertheless, in fictional representations, migrants are shown, thus far, to be quintessentially ‘moving’ figures. Alan Morris (1999) has found that while race and racism in Hillbrow are still beset with contradictions and anomalies, most inhabitants say that racial barriers have broken down and that acts of overt racism are not common. On the other hand, the more than 23 000 Congolese and 3 000 Nigerians living in Hillbrow faced xenophobia and ‘political racism’ in a context in which the anti-apartheid struggle did not breed a pan-Africanist consciousness, or an instant ethos of international solidarity or respect for diversity (p 316; see Simone 2000), but which is nevertheless leading to the unofficial forging of the highly tensile beginnings of an ‘Afropolitanism’.

Neville Hoad (2004) reflects on how Welcome to Our Hillbrow, in its title and its content, invokes both a geographical specificity and a ‘form of worldliness’. It invokes, that is, the geographical place to which we are being welcomed (in the oft repeated title phrase, ‘welcome to our Hillbrow’) and the potential expansiveness of the ‘our’. Hillbrow has long been a place which has given its inhabitants an experience of urbanity and vivid street life, both of which offer possibilities, he shows, for different kinds of relationships to oneself and to strangers (what Lauren Berlant has called ‘stranger intimacy’; a form of citizenship). Hoad traces Mpe’s descriptions of possible connections between strangers in ‘our Hillbrow’. Thus, for example, despite Refentše’s cousin’s warning that ‘you do not go around greeting every fool in Hillbrow’ (p 12), he ‘again responds’ to an elderly, poverty-stricken man living on the street, with whom ‘you had become friends without ever saying anything to each other’ (p 16).

Moreover, Hoad argues, bodily fluids like tears, sweat, semen and blood provide transpersonal yet deeply personal metaphors between people – lovers – in the city. Some of these fluids are also the primary means of transmission of the HIV virus, just as they are ‘also deeply symbolic of the human capacity to feel, to create and to work’ (p 7). This vulnerability of the body, Hoad suggests, becomes the ground for both community and intimacy, and the terms of the welcome become clear: ‘to be embraced by the hospitality of the cosmopolitan is to accept the invitation to share the work of mourning’ (p 10).

Mpe is engaged in an act of renegotiating the terms of recognition set up on the street. Whereas many black South Africans in Hillbrow (themselves migrants from the villages and towns of the hinterland) see foreigners as ‘makwerekwere’ (‘kwere kwere’ being a derogatory imitation of unintelligible foreign languages), Mpe’s narrator 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).