Entanglement. Sarah Nuttall
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