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The Sunday Independent, May 11, 2008
Between rural roots and urban possibility
Brooding Clouds by Phaswane Mpe
Review: Chris Dunton
It was in 2001 that Phaswane Mpe scored an overnight success with his debut novel, Welcome to our Hillbrow. Just three years later came the grievous news of his death.
As Elana Bregin points out in her preface to this posthumous collection, Brooding Clouds can be seen as “the prequel manuscript to Hillbrow, in which the characters, themes and events of the subsequent novel found their incubation”.
Some of this work has appeared before in magazines and journals; the University of KwaZulu-Natal Press has done sterling work in bringing it together to form a coherent, and fascinating, whole.
The focus throughout the 10 stories that open the collection is on black youths “caught between the contexts of rural roots and urban possibility, with their often conflicting survival imperatives and value systems” (Bregin).
The axis between the two is crucial to Mpe’s work. As one character observes, “Hillbrow’s reputation for prostitution and crime kept on ascending to the clear skies of Tiragalong, as migrants brought into the village new wild stories every time they returned home.”
The title story is set in the village, during a drought (there are “collections of bones in the shapes of cattle, sheep and goats”.) The plot turns on the necklacing of a suspected witch.
With the third story – a suspenseful piece on unspoken love and on an armed robbery in a campus bar – the shaping principle of these stories begins to emerge: they are loosely structured, mostly open-ended and written in a language that is sinewy and unadorned.
The next piece recounts the same robbery, moment by moment, from a different character’s perspective and with fresh contextualisation – a device that yields rich insights. Following that comes a longer story, Occasion for Brooding, which explores the torment of impoverished black university students. There are odd glimpses of humour here: Refentse, one of the students, hopes that the literature syllabus will feature Enid Blyton.
With much interlinking and repetition, these stories relate to each other on an elastic principle, with strands of subject matter (witchcraft, suicide) dispersing and then consolidating again.
Poems are interspersed with the stories the two in effect reflecting on and informing each other (one must bear in mind that the arrangement was not Mpe’s own). Thus, the opening poem, on a desolate Limpopo landscape, sets the scene for the first storyVisions of a Flying Man is about a Hillbrow suicide, as recounted in the preceding story (“i long to know more / of the turbulence/ that raged within his heart/ and brain.”)
The second section of the book, Love, Song and Blues, is entirely given over to Mpe’s poetry. Here there are poems written originally in English and in some cases Mpe’s own Sepedi adaptations of these.
The opening pieces are praise poems that follow the conventions of izibongo, without being in any way derivative: the tropes are as fresh as dew.
The subject matter of other poems comes close to that of the fiction. A Tiragalong homeboy is unexpectedly sighted in Hillbrow; as acknowledged throughout the book, there is “no sanctuary” in either village or city. Braamfontein hobos are “to busy to be bothered / by insignificant details like us.”
There are some very frank poems on sex and promiscuity. A powerful piece, In the Depths of Sleep, is on the desperation of lost love and on the swirling, demented consciousness of nightmare (in another poem Mpe refers to the “scorpions of the mind”.)
The collection ends with one of the last interviews Mpe gave before his death, with London-based writer and researcher Lizzie Attree. Highlights here include his accounts of how rapidly Hillbrow was written, in between periods of depression, and his decision to train as a ngaka (traditional healer).
Before the interview comes God Doesn’t Smoke Dagga, a beautiful short story that appears to be the last one that Mpe wrote. The opening is phantasmagoric: “I was asleep, not quite. You may call it a dream. I don’t know what to call it. Do we dream even when we are awake, not quite: but not quite asleep, either?”
This is a story on the attempt to pin things down. How, for instance, does one arrive at an accurate description of an orange? And then the narrator puzzles over an enigmatic figure in a drawing of Braamfontein. Does this relate to another drawing – of God – and if so, how?
The story circles and re-circles about that will emerge as its focal point, and ends in quiet anguish.
'Phaswane Mpe is an important new voice that was silenced by death before it could reach its full potential. His work is full of daring, vitality and grace. Here we come across a heart-rending voice - sometimes nostalgic, sometimes hopeful, often calm, then with a flash of anger that is soon replaced with cool-and-collected reason. This is a book I would recommend, not only for Mpe's stories and poems, but also for Bregin's Introduction, which gives us more than just the context of his writing, and is a piece of insightful critical analysis in its own right'
Zakes Mda
Real Magazine
November 2008
Reviewer: Papa Saint Molakeng
It was a tragic end to a gifted life when author Phaswane Mpe died on 12 December 2004, reportedly of HIV-related complications.
To celebrate his life, Brooding Clouds - a collection of his short stories and poems – has been published.
Mpe wrote exceptional poems about HIV/AIDS. Elegy for the Trio is about President Thabo Mbeki, Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, and Peter Makoba – who had denied the link between HIV and AIDS, and the efficacy of antiretroviral drugs.
The outspoken poem reads in part: ”hiv does not cause aids/but let the condom come/”.
Another poem, HIV Nights, refers to sexual, alcohol and music indulgences young people had in the Johannesburg inner city – where Mpe studied and stayed: ”we ate & drank with our mouths & bottoms too/… we carried our gumbas to our student rooms/where we gulped steaming semen and vaginal juices/… until the doctors looked us gravely in the eye/& said/but children it’s too late now/we still do not have a cure”.
Other writings reflect Mpe’s rural Limpopo roots and its concerns.
His novel Welcome to our Hillbrow has received awards.
Mpe was an African literature lecturer at Wits University until his health deteriorated. He died aged 34.
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