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Article Excerpt
The migrant is an uncertain and incomplete man.
He lives in an inveterate state of unease.
Henk van Woerden
Prelude: A Fatal Unease
In a stunning literary performance, Henk van Woerden reconstructs the fatal encounter between two immigrants. (1) A "half-Greek," Demitrios Tsafendas, who was born to a Greek father and an African mother in Lourenco Marques (now Maputo), the capital of Portuguese East Africa, killed Henrik Verwoerd, the "half-Dutch" prime minister of South Africa and architect of apartheid, who was born in Amsterdam. As Tsafendas, employed as a courier in the Gape Town parliament building, approached Verwoerd on September 6, 1966, observers assumed he was delivering a message; instead, he mortally wounded Verwoerd with four thrusts of a long knife. Tsafendas struck at the man whom he saw as the cause of his nearly lifelong malaise. He saw himself as a victim of the Verwoerd-initiated racial-separation decrees. But the killing of Verwoerd had no immediate effect on racial division. The apartheid policy remained in place as Verwoerd was succeeded by the Nationalist Party's minister of justice, Balthazar Vorster, while the offic ial biography of Tsafendas (i.e., the spin the event was given in the South African press) consigned his act to the irrationality of a madman. Transferred from the place of his original confinement on Robben Island to Pretoria Central Prison, Tsafendas was "placed in a cell next to death row and forgotten." (2)
Van Woerden, as a thirteen-year-old, had experienced the disruption of Verwoerd's implementation of "racial" separation directly. A South African white and, like Verwoerd, "a half-baked Hollander" (he had emigrated to South Africa with his family at age nine), he lived in a "racially mixed" suburb of Cape Town when, in the early 1960s, his Cape Coloured neighbors disappeared. Ultimately, three to four million South Africans were "chased out of their cities." For many like van Woerden, the separation was inexplicable:
The differences between the 'poor white' Afrikaners and the Coloureds, especially, were not all that easy to make out, on either side of the colour line. Both groups spoke the same language and felt the same longing for a recognition of the wrongs done to them in the past. (3)
As van Woerden's experience attests, contrary to the conceits of Verwoerd's Nationalist Party, many of the "Whites" and "Coloureds" (to use the local idiom) shared a "structure of feeling"; what was "actively lived and felt" did not conform to the ideological underpinning of the apartheid policy. (4) What was officially articulated was disjunctive with "discordant elements in exemplary personal experience." (5) And, for van Woerden, the discord only deepened. He returned to Europe shortly after the assassination but remained unable to quench a "great thirst," a "nostalgia for the future . . . left behind." (6) By writing a Tsafendas biography, van Woerden implies that he is restoring a level of political consequence that impersonal accounts of South Africa's apartheid years have left out, "visceral forms of human connectedness." (7) The viscera in question belong primarily to Tsafendas, for shortly after the account begins, van Woerden abandons his use of the first-person as he is displaced in the experientia l narrative by Tsafendas.
How to Know a Man with the Blues: An Epistemological Interlude
Although primarily a biography, "The Assassin" is also an account of the politics of partition. To follow the global migrations of Demetrios Tsafendas--a man who found all of many venues in the planet's racial/spatial order inhospitable--is of necessity to map the boundaries imposed by state jurisdictions and the related but not coextensive ethnonational imaginaries and practices. As a result, van Woerden's focus on an individual articulates collective, transindividual implications. A migrant's "unease" is correlated with structural inhibitions and jurisdictional and normative practices. Although the vicissitudes of geopolitical events is not van Woerden's primary focus, he provides a contribution to our "knowing" about partition. To explicate this form of knowing, which arises from an account of a man with a more or less permanent case of the blues (whose desire for stable human attachments is frustrated by structural modes of exclusion), I turn to Clyde Wood's concept of "blues epistemology." (8)
Woods's investigation of the political economy of white domination in the United States, post--Civil War, particularly as it destroyed black agricultural initiatives in the Mississippi Delta region, juxtaposes "plantation bloc explanation" with blues epistemology. According to Woods, the plantation has persisted not only as a "monopoly over agricultural manufacturing, banking, land, and water" but also as a "world view." (9) From the point of view of plantation bloc, for example, the federal policies, which influenced agricultural developments in the Mississippi Delta region, enabled a capitalist enterprise with a "natural" organization structure: "the planter as the heroic master of a natural ethnic, class, gender, and environmental hierarchy." By contrast, for the "blues bloc," the plantation system is a system of exploitation and repression. Practicing the blues as not simply an aesthetic but also as an ontology and way of knowing, African American communities in the rural South (and in a state of diaspora through the postslavery period) turned to "blues epistemology" to provide a "constant reestablishment of collective sensibility in the face of constant attacks by the plantation bloc and its allies" and to reaffirm "the historic commitment to social and personal investigation, description, and criticism present in the blues." (10)
The African American blues involvement is therefore an articulation of a "structure of feeling"; it enacts a lived experience that resists the explanatory monopoly of the plantation bloc's absorption of southern agriculture into a narrative of economic development in which diasporic black bodies have no political standing. While within the locus of enunciation of white planters, agriculture is a set of issues related to "economic policy"; the issues are different when the locus of enunciation is that of displaced African American farmers. For them, as Woods puts it, "these issues meant the difference between leaving and staying." (11) Woods's political act, articulated through the invention of a new epistemological concept, consists in denaturalizing a dominant system of explanation: "the planter's mythical ethno-regional system of explanation." (12)
The politics of writing in van Woerden's biography of Demitrios Tsafendas constitutes a similar epistemic shift. Rather than rendering South Africa's apartheid policy within a discourse dominated by a state-system mode of explanation (in which geopolitical and geostrategic conceptions dominate), van Woerden focuses on the consequences of the policy for an exemplary body. His story foregrounds the ways in which the (varying) national and racial identities lent to Tsafendas at different times and in different places affect his ability to dwell, to move, to work, and to form attachments. Leaving aside, for the moment, apartheid's system of racial exclusion, the story of Tsafendas's peregrinations reveal a world of state boundaries, a normative grid that retards movement, particularly for one with an ambiguous national lineage.
On the geopolitical map, South Africa, Greece, Portugal, Egypt, Turkey, Germany, the United States, and Canada are nation-states. For Tsafendas, who resided briefly in each, they were complex zones of exclusion--at times allowing brief periods of entry and residence (as a youngster in Alexandria, a schoolboy in the Union of South Africa, and an adult in many of the world's coastal cities), at times rejecting him and at times holding onto him. The details of Tsafendas's continually arrested movements throughout four continents map a world of geopolitical constraints. One exemplary episode stands out.
After spending a month under arrest in Oporto, Portugal (because his refugee passport revealed episodes of deportation from the United States), "his putative Portuguese citizenship was investigated and confirmed from Lourenco Marques." (13) Tsafendas then sought to return to Africa. After getting no response from his family, then living in Pretoria, he took a ship to Lourenco Marques, but was denied entry after a series of negotiations with the consular office. Relating this part of the story, van Woerden writes--in one of the most poignant and telling moments in the story: "Not long after this episode the authorities returned him to Lisbon. He was trapped like an eel in a basket, it seemed he would never escape." (14)
Tsafendas did escape from the "basket." Eluding the confinements of state boundaries and their citizen codes, he eventually made his way back to Africa and...
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