“Welcome to Our Heaven”

Hospitality and Storytelling in Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow

Abstract

In this article, I offer a reading of Phaswane Mpe’s influential 2001 novel, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, which focuses on the depiction of hospitality in the novel. While I draw on Derrida’s influential theorisation of hospitality, I do so in order to show that Mpe’s focus on the role of storytelling allows him to offer a vision of hospitality that, although it is somewhat reminiscent of Derrida’s ideas, also complicates them in ways that are decidedly informed by an African understanding of the power of stories. For Mpe, stories are neither purely fictional, nor are they uncritical evocations of the real, as the experimental nature of the text makes clear. Stories therefore act as an aporetic site where the impossible can be imagined and enacted. That is to say, storytelling becomes a site of becoming for the impossible task of unlimited hospitality. I end this article by considering how this conceptualisation of story might gesture at an aspect of African literature that might be unique within the global literary imaginary.