Unusable Pasts: Life-Writing, Literary Nonfiction, and the Case of Demetrios Tsafendas

Abstract

On September 6, 1966, a parliamentary messenger named Demitrios Tsafendas stabbed to death Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd in full view of South Africa’s all-white House of Assembly. Tsafendas, the apartheid judiciary soon declared, was insane and without political motive: “a meaningless creature” who had acted on instructions from a tapeworm inside him. Often written off as a “freakish footnote” within the liberation story, his unsettled and complex life has nonetheless compelled a wide range of literary and artistic treatments: from memoir and microhistory to avant-garde fiction and filmic montage. Concentrating on Henk Van Woerden’s (auto) biography A Mouthful of Glass (1998, trans. 2000) and Penny Siopis’s short film Obscure White Messenger (2010), I hope to explore what valence one can give to avowedly speculative or formally experimental encounters with the archive and to trace how such a “useless life” (in the words of a presiding judge) might disclose the uncanny remains of South African history.