Sacralizing the streets: Pedestrian mapping and urban imaginaries in Teju Cole’s Open City and Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow

Abstract

This article considers how Teju Cole’s Open City and Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow, two “pedestrian novels”, imagine alternative modes of being and belonging in the postcolonial globalized city by foregrounding the mediatory capacity of indigenous African epistemologies and the sacred in what might otherwise be thought of as a secular environment. The protagonists of these novels embark upon what I term “pedestrian mapping”, as a means of resisting the isolation and marginalization experienced within New York and Johannesburg respectively. Pedestrian mapping enables us to read the incorporation of African epistemologies into the urban environment in tandem with the rituals of walking, thereby exposing the strategies of incorporation and resignification undertaken by Cole’s and Mpe’s protagonists as they establish new physical and ontological “homes”.

The sacred permeates the pages of Teju Cole’s Open City (2011) and Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001). Set in New York and Johannesburg, I argue that these pedestrian novels construct alternative modes of being and belonging in the postcolonial globalized city by foregrounding the mediatory capacity of indigenous African epistemologies, ¹ the sacred, and peripatetic ritual in what might otherwise be thought of as a secular environment. I propose that Refentše and Julius, the protagonists of Mpe’s and Cole’s novels respectively, overcome the isolation and alienation they experience as migrants by integrating the sacred into the pedestrian maps they construct, which in turn facilitates their alternative imagining of their urban locality.

Pedestrian mapping is the peripatetic and physical performance of being in the city; it revels in the extraordinary of the everyday, encompassing and exceeding the ambulatory and quotidian connotations of “pedestrian”. In these novels de Certeau’s “pedestrian enunciation” (1984: 99) is augmented and extended by the incorporation of sacred knowledge systems and ritual behaviours. There are two conceptions of the sacred operative here. First, references to Bapedi ² and Yoruba ³ cosmologies integrate the sacred into the narrative. Second, as David Chidester explains: “The sacred […] is produced through the labour of intensive interpretation and regular ritualization, which generates a surplus of meaning that is immediately available for appropriation, as people make the sacred their own” (2012: ix). Therefore, as I go on to develop in this essay through an analysis of Cole’s novel and then Mpe’s, pedestrian mapping expands the critical terms of de Certeau’s theory and enables a more sympathetic and substantive reading of these authors’ radical disruption of the ontological modalities of the globalized “secular” city, and indeed literature as a secular form.

Both senses of the sacred are vital to Julius’s and Refentše’s pedestrian mapping. The sacred is drawn into Cole’s text by the narrator-protagonist, Julius, for whom New York is built upon slave burial grounds, while the presence of Yoruba deities punctuates his experience and understanding of the city. In Mpe’s novel, indigenous South African epistemologies and the metropolis converge, as the text is narrated from Heaven, a place of transcendence where the ancestors reside and from which the stories of the protagonist, Refentše, are told once he has died.

The novelistic reflections on migration and belonging emerge from the autobiographical experience of both authors. Teju Cole was raised in Nigeria, and moved back to the US in 1992 when he was 17 (Cole, n.d.; Wood, 2011, n.p.). The protagonist of his novel Open City is a part-Nigerian, part-German psychiatrist who walks New York (and, for a short time, Brussels), interacting with the cities’ other immigrants. The novel is, as James Wood notes, “as close to a diary as a novel can get, with room for reflection, autobiography, stasis, and repetition” (Wood, 2011: n.p.), and it is from the intimacy of this account that Julius’s “feelings of isolation” and intensified “solitude” emerge as symptoms of his psychological alienation from the city (Cole, 2011: 6, 7). ⁴ Similarly, like his protagonist Refentše, Mpe moved to Johannesburg from a rural town in Polokwane, South Africa to study at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), living in the “menacing monster” of Hillbrow during this time (Mpe, 2001: 3). ⁵ Mpe was 34 when he died in 2004. He was a lecturer at Wits, but in the weeks before his death, following a long period of illness, Mpe had decided to apprentice as a Ngaka (Sepedi for healer) (Attree, 2005: 147; McGregor, 2004). In his personal life, as in his fiction, Mpe enacts a syncretic vision of modern African experience.

Consequently, this article investigates how Julius and Refentše overcome their feelings of isolation and alienation by cultivating a sense of the familiar and the sacred, as they construct pedestrian maps of their locality by habitually traversing, describing, and imaginatively interpreting the streets, and filtering this experience through their respective African epistemologies.

Pedestrian mapping: The sacred and the ritual of walking

In “Practices of Space” Michel de Certeau writes: “the act of walking is to the urban system what the act of speaking, the Speech Act, is to language or to spoken utterance” (1985: 129). Despite his privileging of the white, male subject, de Certeau’s explanation of “pedestrian enunciation” celebrates the creative agency of the individual, and has an additional “function of introducing an other in relation to” the walker (1984: 99). The pedestrian walking the city engages in “a process of appropriation of the topographic system” (1985: 130). As a “speaker appropriates and assumes language” through utterance, so too does the pedestrian appropriate the urban streets by walking (de Certeau, 1985: 130). Thus, the act of walking, central to Mpe’s and Cole’s novels, is not merely a physical action, it is a “taking in”, a conceptual assumption of the street facilitated by the second “uttering” function of walking which is “a spatial realisation of the site” (de Certeau, 1985: 130). The pedestrian moves through the city, at each moment gaining a new awareness of their spatial orientation, physically and imaginatively locating themselves in space. The comparison between the act of walking and the act of speaking is pertinent to understanding how the characters make sense of their urban presence. If speech brings the subject into language, then walking brings the subject into the city. In these literary narratives walking is an expression of the imminent presence of the pedestrian in the city, a physical and conceptual claim to the space, made feasible by Julius and Refentše’s interpretive and imaginative engagement with their surroundings.

When conceptualizing the sacred there are significant resonances between the ways in which de Certeau’s pedestrian seemingly constructs a version of the city by walking, and the ways in which Chidester and Linenthal claim a space is sacralized by particular hermeneutical manoeuvres that a subject makes and narrates. They state: “Characteristic modes of symbolic engagement in the production of sacred space include strategies of appropriation, exclusion, inversion, and hybridisation” (1995: 18–19). Chidester and Linenthal’s theory of the sacred, which develops from their historical account of the term, valorizes the capacity of the individual to make strategic organizational choices, similar to those of de Certeau’s pedestrian. ⁶ Just as the speech act is a materialization of language, so too is walking a materialization of the space of the city. The physical and conceptual appropriation of space is common to both pedestrian and sacralizing theories. Chidester and Linenthal’s assertion, however, that sacralization is an interpretive and imaginative appropriation and recategorization of space that enables the subject to establish a sense of control and belonging as a way to access the transcendent, goes beyond the capabilities of de Certeau’s pedestrian. What de Certeau’s theorization cannot but overlook are the echoes of sacralization in the habitual, indeed ritualized, mapping of the globalized city.

The kind of physical and imaginative engagement with the urban environment present in Open City and Welcome to Our Hillbrow moves beyond the European trope of the flâneur to consider a modern African subject’s experience of the teeming entanglements of the postcolonial city, characterized by the concatenation of globalization, modernity, and local specificity. By constructing alternative imaginaries these novels disrupt the colonial, neocolonial, neoliberal, and secular structuring of the city. The “deconstruction and/or revisualization” of the map permits what Graham Huggan has described as “a ‘disidentification’ from the procedures of colonialism (and other hegemonic discourses) and a (re)engagement in the ongoing process of cultural decolonization” (1989: 128). The sacred animates the protagonists’ cultural resistance, since the experience of sacralization that these novels narrate extends the capacity of mapping beyond the solitary pedestrian walking the streets, to pedestrian mapping that draws imaginative communion with the ancestors and an ancestral “home” into the cartography of the city.

There are echoes here of Fredric Jameson’s understanding of the postmodern subject in late capitalist society, particularly within globalized urban environments. Jameson writes that “the alienated city is above all a space in which people are unable to map (in their minds) either their own positions or the urban totality in which they find themselves” (1991: 49). Thus there are similarities between my notion of pedestrian mapping and Jameson’s cognitive mapping, which enables “situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole” (1991: 51). While the “vocation” of cognitive mapping is an ideological critique which allows the individual to conceptualize their place in systems of multinational capital and postmodern culture (1991: 54), pedestrian mapping is a hermeneutic tool which draws to the fore the protagonists’ resignification of the city and its sacred dimensions.

As global cities, Johannesburg and New York are sites of “multiculturalism”, migration, displacement, and alienation: features that are compounded in cities which are also postcolonial. ⁷ High-growth expansion, globalization, high rates of transnational and rural to urban migration are common features of postcolonial, global cities such as Mumbai, Johannesburg, and Rio de Janeiro (Cabigon, 2010: 86). The migrant protagonists of Mpe’s and Cole’s novels are bound up in these postcolonial transnational processes. Their travels from home to the city, their struggle to find a point of identification once there, and their successes and failures as they attempt to create a sense of belonging by conceptually mapping the streets, are an articulation of the complexities and fragmentations of the postcolonial migrant subject, and their strategies of resistance. The tension between the violence of exclusion and the affirmation of resistance and creativity is expressed in Mbembe’s notion of the postcolony, where to inhabit this age is to be “rooted in a multiplicity of times, trajectories, and rationalities that, although particular and sometimes local, cannot be conceptualized outside a world that is, so to speak, globalized” (2001: 9). This multiplicity finds expression in Mpe’s and Cole’s novels where the entanglements of pedestrian, cultural, and historical mapping are interrelated as the protagonists conceptually construct a relationship to their environment.

Cole: Burial grounds and the Yoruba aegis in New York

Open City begins with mention of “evening walks” (3) and, while Julius’s daily walks propel the narrative and draw ritual behaviour into the text, it is in the incorporation of buried slaves and the sacred (Yoruba epistemologies) that his resignification of the city is cemented.

Upon finishing school in Nigeria, Julius moved to the US to complete a fellowship in psychiatry. Julius extends his knowledge and experience of the city by walking: each time a little further or following a different route. These peripatetic efforts stave off the seclusion of his home and professional life. Julius is obsessive about orientating and mapping his location, as the novel is littered with accounts positioning him within the topos of the city: “Wall Street, from where I stood on the corner of William Street”; “I walked north on Sixth Avenue as far as Fifty-ninth Street”; and “From the intersection of 172nd Street, the George Washington Bridge came into view” (47, 155, 234). The repetition of Julius’s persistent and precise mapping conveys his compulsive need to secure his place in New York to the extent that Julius’s walks become a peripatetic ritual. The transformative and appropriative dimension of ritual originates in its creative and imaginative potential; it is a way of performing, as J. Z. Smith notes: “the way things ought to be in conscious tension to the way things are in such a way that this ritualized perfection is recollected in the ordinary, uncontrolled, course of things” (1980: 124–25). Julius’s walking is ritual: an imaginative assertion of his vital and temporary presence in the city that is balm to his existential insecurity.

This feeling of uncertainty is expressed in the novel’s opening “And so”, as if the reader were entering into an ongoing conversation. Like the ostensibly inclusive welcome of Mpe’s novel, the title of Open City seems ironically to indicate an ease of access; a city that is open to all. However, initially Julius experiences the streets as an overwhelming and sacrilegious cacophony of sound: “I encountered the streets as an incessant loudness […] as though someone had shattered the calm of a silent private chapel with the blare of a TV set” (6). The mass of pedestrians walking the city with him “did nothing to assuage [his] feelings of isolation; if anything it intensified them” (6).

There are aspects of the Baudelaire–Benjamin flâneur in the intellectualized and “cultured” self-awareness of Cole’s narrator–protagonist, and certainly in his devotion to the labyrinthine city. Notably, Julius’s feelings of isolation in the New York crowd echo the masses as they appear in Baudelaire, as “the newest drug for the solitary”, and “the newest and most inscrutable labyrinth” (Benjamin, 1999: 446). Yet Julius is distinct from the secular European flâneur. His trajectory through the labyrinthine city is marked by his personal and political sensitivity to its racist history and by his integration of Yoruba deities into the urban environment. Pieter Vermeulen argues that Cole interrogates the flâneur by demonstrating how easily this figure of literary cosmopolitanism “devolves into a fugueur”: a “figure of restless mobility” (2014: 54, 42). While Vermeulen contends that “this dark counterpart of the cosmopolitan flâneur […] indicate[s] the limits of the cosmopolitan imagination” (2014: 42), Katherine Hallemeier suggests that Cole’s “literary cosmopolitanism” is “premised on neither revealing nor exploiting the reality of ‘other’ lives”, but rather on “an understanding of literary cosmopolitanism distinguished by linguistic and geographical diversity among the producers of, and audiences for, literary culture” (2014: 244). Though Hallemeier and Vermeulen take different positions, both scholars are concerned with Cole’s sceptical engagement with cosmopolitanism — that particularly urban modality that relies upon and encourages Julius’s unsettled but persistent presence in the city.

Indeed, Julius’s ritualized conceptualization of an alternative locality depends upon his knowledge of the city and its history: he locates himself within the city by locating the city within his knowledge of its history. On one of his evening walks Julius comes upon a monument, the inscription identifies it as:

a memorial for the site of an African burial ground […] in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the site had been large, some six acres, as far north as present-day Duane Street, and as far south as City Hall Park. Along Chambers Street and in the park itself, human remains were still routinely uncovered. But most of the burial ground was now under office buildings, shops, streets, diners, pharmacies, all the endless hum of quotidian commerce and government. (220)

Setting the limits of the burial ground along the boundaries of contemporary streets transposes the burial ground, memories of the Middle Passage, and the bodies of long-dead Africans, into the present-day. Through this communion with the dead, Julius maps the transcendent onto his urban environment, positioning the sacred as a vital facet of his personal construction of the city. It is insufficient for him to map the streets; he must also create a narrative of their history, and in doing so reinvest the city with its dead with whom he identifies as part of the Black Atlantic. The burial ground, a sacred palimpsest in the city’s public space, is inflected with the layering of Julius’s knowledge of its history and his experience of the present, echoing the ways in which cities are “congested with material history and the spiritual traces of those histories” (Cole, qtd. in Hemon, 2014: n.p.). Thus, attuned to the material and spiritual excesses of New York, it is the combination of walking and resignifying the streets that gradually permits Julius to feel as if he has a fulcrum of identification within the alienating sprawl.

Cole’s sacred urban palimpsest also has a psychological dimension, as is evinced by the ever-present dead in Julius’s narration. Returning from Brussels, and seeing New York from the window of the aeroplane, he experiences a “metal transposition”, in which “the plane was a coffin, and the city below was a vast graveyard with white marble and stone blocks of various heights and sizes” (150). In this moment the metropolis below appears to Julius as a graveyard, the buildings transfigured into gravestones. The mental transposition reminds Julius of his own mortality and historical links to the exploitative physical labour that built the city. He does not experience this constant somatic history as morbid or threatening; rather, it is essential to how he constructs his presence in the city.

Thus, it is possible to identify Julius’s pedestrian mapping of these streets as sacred, in part through the constant presence of the dead, which blurs the boundaries between the real and the transcendent, and partly because Julius’s recasting of the city is founded on his understanding of the pantheon of Yoruba deities. He employs them now as he reimagines New York as the site of his belonging, by investing the Western city with the presence of Olodumare “the owner of the Spirit”, “the owner of life”, the Supreme Being who created the other deities in the Yoruba aegis (Idowu, 1996: 39), and Obatala, “the creator of man” (Beier, 1980: 14). On another evening walk Julius is discomforted by the sight of a disabled man and later a blind man. He draws from the familiar and finds an explanation in Yoruba cosmology. Julius’s matter of fact explanation of the interaction between two gods undercuts the mysticism of the account, coolly positioning this mythical account in a “secular” city:

I got the idea that some of the things I was seeing around me were under the aegis of Obatala, the demiurge charged by Olodumare with the formation of humans from clay. Obatala did well at the task until he started drinking. As he drank more and more, he became inebriated, and began to fashion damaged human beings. The Yoruba believe that in this drunken state he made dwarfs, cripples, people missing limbs, and those burdened with debilitating illness. (25)

The Yoruba worldview of Julius’s childhood in Nigeria is transposed onto New York’s urban landscape, insistently locating the transcendental Yoruba episteme in Julius’s immediate world. The rationality of Obatala’s drunken creation of “misformed” or damaged humans comes to him in this moment, as a conceptual thread linking Nigeria and New York. Not quite the coextensive spheres to be seen in Mpe’s novel, it nonetheless draws the Yoruba pantheon and their creation myths into the New York train station to explain the presence of these two figures, and Julius’s unease at seeing them.

Inclusions of Yoruba deities in the narrative are particularly interesting when set alongside the enclosed religious space of New York churches. On two separate evening walks Julius comes to churches that are closed. There is simply no point of entry through the walled perimeter: “Going around Rector Street, I came into Trinity Place, where an ancient wall hemmed the church in […] There were chains on all the gates, and I could find neither a way into the building nor anyone to help me” (49–51). Julius is unable to reach the church; instead, he is able to walk on Rector Street and Trinity Place. This division is a material reminder of the secularist separation of religious and public space, as the street names ironically signify what the urban geography denies Julius.

Julius’s wish to pray in a church and his use of Yoruba deities are two sides of his attempt to overcome his feelings of non-belonging by finding the transcendental and the numinous in his urban environment. In an illustrative inversion, Julius describes Wall Street station as if it were a grand cathedral:

The vaults strengthened this impression, and what came to mind was the florid Gothic style of England […] not that the station replicated the stone tracery of such churches. It evoked the effect, rather, by means of its finely checkered or woven surface, a gigantic assemblage of white. (46)

The enclosure of urban churches leaves Julius to find traces of the numinous in unlikely, mundane places — an incomplete transfer of the architectures of spirituality into this public secular space.

Julius’s transposition of Yoruba deities into his conception of New York’s urban landscape seems to be the singular successful attempt to generate meaning and order, and is a significant part of his conceptual, historical, and pedestrian mapping of this city. At all other turns his attempts crash against the boundaries of the secular global city. In a city that is twice defamiliarized, once by his immigrant status and once as the religious spaces of the city close to him or alter, Julius’s pedestrian map resonates as an act of incorporation. Julius integrates select urban localities into his life, and in turn insists on his inclusion into those spaces — even if this inclusion is hard won.

The imagery of birds migrating and meeting their deaths, “as they strike” the Statue of Liberty, that “monument of American hope and the promise of possibility” (258–59), bookends the narrative and is symbolic of the centuries of imperial transplantation and migration of which Julius’s diasporic wanderings are a part. The flight and ease of movement that Julius perceives as he watches the birds speaks to his own migration but also to the transience and rootlessness that he feels. He does not experience an ease of movement unless he is walking, for in these moments he has immediate access to the city he is mapping and resignifying. It is unsurprising, then, that his evening walks begin after seeing the migrating birds from his apartment window. His pedestrian exploration is an attempt to know the city better, to orientate himself securely within the metropolis and to assert his belonging.

This pursuit is not without its dangers: on one of his walks he is mugged. This instance of overt violence serves to further isolate and alienate Julius from the urban environment and the volatile inequality it engenders. After the attackers have left and Julius has pulled himself to sit on the curb, a man passes him, not noticing or caring to notice that he has been beaten (214). There is no Good Samaritan to help him to his feet, and while he makes a police report there is little hope of an arrest, so Julius retreats back to his apartment and the safety and seclusion of his personal space. This incident comes towards the end of the novel, after many of his explorations of the city, and after his return from Brussels. While it does not deter him or undermine his knowledge of the city, there is a realization that while he may walk, map, and know the streets of his locality, and this may offer a sense of identification, the city’s legion inhabitants may challenge his presence. The vulnerability of the “public” streets is contrasted with the enclosure of religious spaces — spiritual comfort and community is fenced off while the streets remain a site of potential conflict and incorporation.

Julius’s recasting of the city emerges from an African epistemology similar to that in Mpe. While Mpe’s training as a Ngaka suggests that the world imagined in his fiction is perhaps more closely related to his own worldview, it is also a successful narrative strategy. Similarly, Cole’s references to the Yoruba aegis are as a much a literary and mythical allusion as they are a way of interpreting what Julius sees before him in the streets of New York. In The African Imagination, F. Abiola Irele shows that the literary use of epistemological and mythical sources is a complex endeavour. With reference to Wole Soyinka’s use of the Yoruba deity Ogun “as an organising symbol”, Irele (2001: 60) asks whether Ogun functions as a “master trope, a formal category of his system of images, or an authentic agency of the writer’s imaginative grasp of the world, constituting, therefore, a principle of conduct in that world?”. Cole’s narrative functions as a formal category or inquiry, while Mpe’s construction, as we shall see, falls into the last category.

Mpe: Mapping Johannesburg from Heaven

Suggestive of Bapedi epistemology, the coextensive worlds of Welcome to Our Hillbrow incorporate the sacred into the recounting of the narrative. In imagining an alternative urban modality the narration of the novel is ingenious, as the story is told retrospectively to Refentše by an ancestor, after he has died. This narrative construction enables Mpe to enact in his fiction a particular cultural knowledge in which the dead, the living, and the unborn inhabit coextensive spheres (Mbiti, 1990: 24). The coherence of the narrative structure provided by the sacred is juxtaposed with the instability of place and the difficulties of belonging. Refentše tries to establish a place for himself in Hillbrow, yet it is only in Heaven that he finally finds the sense of collective belonging he yearns for — a desire successively denied as the earthly places in the novel become unstable.

Refentše moves from his rural home Tiragalong to Hillbrow, while his friend Refilwe, the novel’s second protagonist, follows him but goes on to Oxford to further her studies. Both carry with them the places they have been: “Hillbrow in Hillbrow. Hillbrow in Cape Town. Cape Town in Hillbrow. Oxford in both. Both in Oxford. Welcome to our All” (104). The multiple locations of the novel are imaginatively conflated by the characters that travel between them: Hillbrow, Cape Town, and Oxford become coterminous as the stories of migrants quilt them together. Ronit Frenkel contends that the most productive reading of the “relationship between space, place, and transnational connectivity” in this novel is palimpsestic, and further, that Mpe writes the “city as a type of situated transnationalism where the local and the global exist as coeval discourses of signification” (2013: 26). In this way Mpe’s migrant narratives overlay one city space with another, and another. Characterizing Johannesburg as a globalized city with porous boundaries and coeval significations, inhabited by xenophobic people paranoid about HIV/AIDS further contributes to Mpe’s alternative construction of the city, and Refentše’s isolation from it and desire to walk and map it as a migrant. While there are similarities between Cole’s psychological and spatial excavation of New York’s historical sedimentation and Mpe’s layering of the local and global, what is extraordinary about these novels is the way the authors create a palimpsest, not only of the urban and the sacred, but also of the text and the sacred.

Mpe’s narrative begins when Refentše arrives in Hillbrow. He is due to begin his studies at the local university, where he will stay on as a lecturer. He lives in Hillbrow: a once middle-class inner-city suburb of Johannesburg that is now home to immigrants from the rest of the African continent, as well as migrants from rural areas in South Africa. During this time Refentše dates Lerato, a woman from Johannesburg of whom his mother disapproves because she is not from Tiragalong. The discord between Refentše and his mother causes him to pull away from home and to rely more on his life with Lerato in Hillbrow. When Refentše discovers that Lerato has been unfaithful to him with their mutual friend, the stability he briefly found in Hillbrow is lost and he commits suicide. Refentše’s suicide is caused partially by the disintegration of his personal relationships, and partially by the impossibility of secure belonging in a city defined by its situated transnationalism and transurbanism: “You discovered, on arriving in Hillbrow, that to be drawn away from Tiragalong also went hand-in-hand with a loss of interest in Hillbrow. Because Tiragalong was in Hillbrow” (49). The cultural alienation Refentše feels has additional existential implications: the precariousness of his psychological position triggers his yearning for the transcendent security offered by his pedestrian map.

Refentše’s desire for a concrete, bounded place comes to the fore at the beginning of the novel, as the narrator offers a pedestrian map of Hillbrow. Mpe imagines Hillbrow enriched and made vibrant by the numerous African inhabitants and their cultures. The impulse to construct Hillbrow as a place which celebrates its multiculturalism and intersectionality, a place strengthened by its differences, is indicative of Mpe’s optimistic but troubled attempt to generate a successful community. Emma Hunt explains that, “[f]or Mpe, the new mobility between Johannesburg and other spaces enabled by the opening of South Africa’s borders after apartheid can be harnessed to build an inclusive city and a heterogeneous society” (2006: 104). Yet this “broad vision of allegiance based on a common humanity” (Hunt, 2006: 105) only materializes in Heaven, while Hillbrow remains a place of highly contingent inclusion, derelict buildings, and governmental and police neglect. In particular ways, Johannesburg has followed the neoliberal forms of urban restructuring observed in other global cities (Didier et al., 2013: 122). Gentrification of inner city areas of Johannesburg like the Maboneng Precinct (meaning “Place of Light”) and Newtown have further isolated the suburb of Hillbrow and its impoverished and overlooked inhabitants. Mpe does not shy away from representing the dangers of postapartheid Johannesburg, or the ways in which the English and Afrikaans street names signify the legacies of racist urban planning. However, part of Mpe’s postsecular reimagining of Johannesburg is his celebration of what Sarah Nuttall has called the “citiness of cities”, for in this pedestrian novel Mpe extends the idiom of “city-culture” by narrating the “intricacy of the city as a spatial formation, its density as a concentration of people, things, institutions and architectural forms; the heterogeneity of lives juxtaposed in close proximity” (Nuttall, 2004: 740).

In an attempt to account for this richly entangled experience and to demarcate the suburb, the opening chapter is named “Hillbrow: The Map”. The title and refrain of the novel, “Welcome to Our Hillbrow”, is at once a bifold gesture of problematic inclusion as the reader and Refentše are introduced to the perils and intolerance of Hillbrow and Tiragalong, and an instantiation of place, as the notion of Hillbrow is articulated for the first time. The ironic “welcome” of the title signals an inclusion that only materializes in Heaven. The possessive “our” defines Hillbrow as a communal space, a definition reiterated as Hillbrow is described by its inhabitants as “that locality of just over one square kilometre, according to official records; and according to its inhabitants, at least twice as big and teeming with countless people” (1). There is no consensus as to where the actual boundaries of Hillbrow lie, and Refentše’s explorations and descriptions of the city further confuse these limits. The imperial measurement of geographical space, “just over one square kilometre”, expands immeasurably as the postapartheid city is made to absorb its visitors, along with their desires and fears. In the chapter following this description of Johannesburg the reader accompanies Refentše as he walks the streets between Hillbrow and Wits:

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. (11)

Like Julius’s New York, the persistent and obsessive references to street names and the direction of movement provide a map of the streets of Hillbrow, and Oxford later in the novel. Like grids on a map, or measured steps, the paratactic rhythm resounds with certainty, and the ease of local knowledge — a journey marked by street names and neighbourhood landmarks. The compulsive cartographic references are a reaction to the situated transnationalism and existential precariousness in the novel. The compulsion to walk, according to de Certeau, to map by walking, is by necessity to lack a site, yet it is also the impulse to overcome this absence. Though Refentše’s attempts to claim a space for his living-self in Hillbrow fail, he now inhabits the world of the ancestors and it is from here that he is able to construct a pedestrian map and a narrative of his life and death. The retelling and reinterpretation of his story from the sacred space of Heaven provides Refentše with a stable place of identification, with which he wants to and does feel a sense of belonging. Since the Heaven of the novel is imaginatively constructed and made possible through such stories, Refentše’s narrative is one part of the fabrication of this sacred space.

Much of the novel finds Refentše poised between the chaos of Hillbrow and the order of Heaven. Heaven allows Refentše to see not only the errors of his life, but the follies of his still-living friends and family. The “benefit of retrospect and omniscience” (47) that Refentše and the narrator provide draws the intermediary nature of Heaven into the structure of the novel, as spatial boundaries deteriorate. As he sits in the “lounge of Heaven”, Refentše

pondered the complex paradox of life, death and everything in between, you seemed to see, simultaneously, the vibrating panorama of Hillbrow and all its multitudinous life stories, conducting themselves in the milk, honey and bile regions of your own expanding brain. (79)

Refentše’s god-like perspective of his life and the lives of others is overwhelming — the panorama vibrates with biblical promise (milk and honey) and the bitter bile of fear, xenophobia, and urban sprawl. Refentše grapples with these “infinite fragments combining and recombining in the containing frame of your head” (79). Although Heaven is the only place in the novel which is permitted to maintain its borders, it is disconcertingly described in earthly terms as Refentše sits in the lounge, the meeting area in Heaven. While Heaven is certainly described as a transcendent place, “the world of our continuing existence” (124), a stage or sphere beyond that of mundane experience, it is also linked in profound ways to earthly realities since it is constructed by the stories of those still living and inhabited by those recently dead. Thus Heaven is explained as an archive:

the world of our continuing existence, located in the memory and consciousness of those who live with us and after us. It is the archive that those we left behind keep visiting and revisiting; digging this out, suppressing or burying that. Continually reconfiguring the stories of our lives, as if they alone hold the real and true version. (124)

An archive, but also an archival construction, Heaven and its inhabitants are the product of memory — of the violations, intrusions, and reconstructions of memory. Like burial mounds dug, visited, and refashioned, Heaven is the site of memory and of its making. The “personal immortality” of the ancestors depends upon the remembrance of the living (Mbiti, 1990: 82). Ancestors are “the guardians of family affairs, traditions, ethics and activities”, acting as intermediaries between the living and the spirits or God (Mbiti, 1990: 82). The protagonists and the narrator of the novel inhabit Heaven, the sacred home of the ancestors. It is from this transcendent place that the narrative is told. Thus Mpe’s novel locates fiction in a space marked out by African epistemologies; indeed, he resituates fiction in the sacred. The temporal strangeness of the novel, as it is told in the present tense despite both protagonists being dead, means that Heaven is present in the text from the first line, and what the reader experiences is a “linguistic trip” (68) through the Hillbrow of Refentše’s imagining.

Where Refentše once orientated himself, it is now the narrator who positions Refentše in the narrative and in Hillbrow. The identity of the narrator is unknown; however, the persistent second person narration which simultaneously distances and engages the reader enacts the complexity of Refentše’s search for belonging (Clarkson, 2005: 452). This persistent double positioning of the protagonist means that he is constantly orientated and reoriented as the narrator tells his story, a representation of Refentše’s search for a sense of identification in an unfamiliar place. While this cartographic intention can be seen as a form of resistance to the isolation and alienation that Refentše feels, it is only in Heaven that his intention is fulfilled. For once he is in Heaven and granted an omniscient perspective, Refentše is able to map not only the streets of Hillbrow, but the networks of his fellow migrants. With this bird’s-eye view of the kind usually associated with contemporary cartographic technologies, Refentše is able to trace the connections between places and people, and to better understand his position within it all. From Refentše’s posthumous pedestrian narrative, to the archival construction of the sacred space of Heaven, to the structural enactment of coextensive worlds, Mpe viscerally constructs a mode of being in the city that is at once sacred, postcolonial, and modern — a culturally polyglot, postsecular urban subject.

What we encounter in these novels are the inclusions and exclusions necessary to the “citiness of cities”. The alienation and isolation felt by Julius and Refentše as they emerge into strange urban environments is compounded as they come up against the enclosures of once public areas, the brutality of crime and violence, and the callousness of anonymity and neglect. Cole and Mpe’s narratives do not stall against these multifocal estrangements; rather, their urban imaginaries allow for alternative strategies of signification and integration. In these pedestrian narratives where the pace of walking and access to the city allows for the incorporation of sacred knowledge and the time for ritualized behaviour, the protagonists are able to work themselves and the sacred into the city.

Julius is obsessive about articulating his physical orientation in the city, laying claim to the streets as he incorporates the Yoruba deities and his own knowledge of the city into a point of identification with the city itself. For Refentše, the careful cartographic map he constructs of Hillbrow from the sacred home of the ancestors is an attempt to stabilize the fragmentation of place and, in doing so, find a firm point of personal identification and belonging. Thus Refentše and Julius resignify the streets of their respective cities, in part by constructing their pedestrian maps, and in part by construing Johannesburg and New York as spaces in which various versions of modernity and migrant experience can coexist. Thus pedestrian mapping foregrounds Cole’s and Mpe’s use of peripatetic narrative, African epistemologies, and the sacred in their alternative imagining of the city and modes of urban belonging.