Ally Headings - It's My Life/Welcome to Our Hillbrow

            Unlike the other films we’ve watched where my eyes were open to new problems in this world, I had previously had an idea about AIDS. However, the extent of my knowledge was that there is no known cure for AIDS and that it’s contagious if one were to touch a person’s blood who has already contracted the AIDS virus. I never had witnessed the life of someone suffering from AIDS. In It’s My Life, it was inspiring to see Zackie persevere through the trials of having this disease and continue to be active in the fight to get better health care for not only himself, but everyone in South Africa suffering from AIDS.

As far as Welcome to Our Hillbrow goes, I’m not quite sure how to process it yet. The way Mpe laid the story out in front of us was unlike anything I’d ever read. I couldn’t figure out who the narrator was, if it was from the dead or not. But whoever it was, was telling a story of someone who was dead. And all the while I was trying to position myself as a reader to where I thought I was supposed to be while reading this book. It was almost like I was supposed to be in the position of the dead as well. I don’t even know if that makes any sense to anyone. It was a very thought-provoking book. My favorite line in the book lies on page 59. Mpe writes, “[…] you wrote your story in order to find sanctuary in the worlds of fiction that are never quite what we make of them. You wrote it in order to steady yourself against grief and prejudice, against the painful and complex realities of humanness.” Refenše wrestling with these questions and seeing him enter into Hillbrow to see the action for himself reminds me so much of Zackie. He entered into a new territory, maybe not physically, but into a realm where no one seemed to have gone before. Going before the government of a country to try to get them to change a law to obtain better medication for such a fatal disease is no small task. I imagine that Zackie, like Refenše, made this film “in order to steady [him]self against grief and prejudice, against the painful and complex realities of humanness.”