 |
Review of Stephen Clingman’s “Bram Fischer and the Question of Identity” |
 |
 |
Clingman divided his lecture into four sections, each one of which related a different fragment of Fischer’s story, and each one of which sought to describe a different moment in the complex development of Fischer’s own identity and self-identification.
The first of these sections described the events of Fischer’s trial, under the Suppression of Communism Act, in the mid-1960s. Clingman began by detailing some of the contradictions created by the way in which the Apartheid State chose to treat Fischer. In the days before he was arrested, the Minister of Foreign Affairs decided to grant Fischer a passport for the first time in many years. After his arrest, the State then permitted Fischer to travel to London while temporarily released on bail.
At this point, Clingman quoted statements made by Fischer in the period between his arrest and his journey to London. Fischer stated categorically that he was “a son of our soil” and that he had “no intention of avoiding political prosecution.” He swore that he would return to face the court; he believed this to be both a duty and an obligation.
Fischer did return, despite the best efforts of his colleagues in exile to dissuade him, but did not in fact return to face the court. Instead he seems to have suffered a sudden change of heart and, three days before he was due to reappear in the dock, went underground. His lawyer read a letter to the court in which Fischer explained that while he was no longer willing to accept a political prosecution, he had no intention of leaving his country. His duty as an officer of the court was superseded by “the duty of every true opponent of this government to remain in this country” – a duty that was particularly felt, he believed, by an Afrikaner. A public furore followed the reading of the letter.
Newspapers across the country carried stories about Fischer’s disappearance. Heated conversations livened dinner-parties in all the best households: where had Fischer gone? And, more importantly, what did he look like? Was he daring enough to retain his features? Or had he had plastic surgery? And would anyone ever recognise him again?
The truth was somewhat less dramatic. Fischer had retreated to a farm in Rustenburg where he went on a diet, shaved his forehead to create a receding hairline, grew a goatee, and dyed his hair. He also began to smoke a pipe. The effect, as described by Clingman, was a cross between Tintin’s Professor Calculus, and Trotsky.
At the end of this process, and for the brief period of months that he remained at large, he was able to return to his chambers and ride up and down the lifts in the courthouse without being recognised. For the length of this period, at least, Bram Fischer had, as Clingman’s conclusion to this section of his lecture had it, “changed his identity.”
This statement preceded the series of “questions of identity” that Clingman began to detail in the second section of his talk, and thus provided the foundations for much of what followed. It is worth pausing in retrospect to think through some of the implications of beginning a series of questions about identity with this particular pre-emptive answer.
This statement describes Fischer’s identity as indistinguishable from its performative surface: his clothes, his hair, his accessories, his waist, and his gait. Fischer assumed a new name, a new set of (presumably forged) identification documents, and a new appearance. His identity – as it appeared to the public around him – thus changed.
As described by Clingman, this visible change of identity must be read as being the result of a relationship between Fischer and the general South African populace. It is also, perhaps more urgently, a relationship between him and the South African Police; and, as a consequence of his bravado in visiting his old place of work, between him and those colleagues of his who remained within the Apartheid legal system.
It leaves out much. It does not describe a relationship between Fischer and his close political allies – those who aided in his visible transformation, and who would have been aware of the continuity of his identity beneath this performative surface. It leaves out the psychological dimensions of Fischer’s actions: not the visible effects of going underground, but the (again, presumably) conscious decision to do so in the first place – despite his earlier and seemingly sincere intention to endure a political prosecution. And, perhaps most significantly, this account entirely omits any mention of Fischer’s family: his wife and his children. Where were they during this transformative period?
To find an answer to that question, one has to turn away from Clingman’s lecture and turn, instead, to his earlier biography of Bram Fischer. There he relates how, in the months immediately prior to Fischer’s arrest, Molly Fischer was killed in a car-crash. Bram was driving. In a letter to his daughter, Ilse, Fischer wrote: “At times I could nearly go mad with remorse and despair.
“I would have done so, I think, but for the help which you & Ruth & Paul gave me.” Ruth and Paul were Fischer’s other two children and, unlike Ilse who was still in South Africa, were living permanently in England. He visited them during his interval in London, after being granted bail and immediately before returning to South Africa – not to face prosecution, but to go underground. The actions Clingman described as taking place entirely within the ambit of Fischer’s public and political personas also took place within the context of terrible familial disruption and trauma. Clingman’s implication – in this lecture, if not in his biography – that these personal traumas had such a negligible role in the sudden shift in Fischer’s identity creates a significant lacuna in his argument.
This private aspect of Fischer’s identity remained unrecognised throughout the remainder of Clingman’s lecture. Molly Fischer was spoken of only on the occasion of their marriage; their daughters were not mentioned; and their son only mentioned on the occasion of his youthful death – and then, strangely, only in the context of the impact of his death on Walter Sisulu, an old friend of the Fischer family. Clingman quoted Sisulu as saying that he had felt the boy’s death as like the death of his own child. Fischer’s response was not noted. Without ever once explicitly dismissing the impact of the personal or ever once clearly placing it outside of the ambit of his analysis, Clingman’s speech seemed to erase all traces of Fischer’s private identity, the identity displayed in the private spaces of family life, of friendship, of close companionship. Only the public presentation of his identity seemed worth examining.
The remainder of Clingman’s lecture did little to dispel that impression. In the second section of his lecture he developed some of the questions of identity he had implicitly raised in the first part: as a consequence of the presentation of this narrative, and of the absence of all personal identity, the conclusion of this section of questioning was strikingly impersonal. Identity, Clingman argued, could be best diagnosed by observing first the way in which an individual articulated his concepts of the nation in which he lived, and second the way in which he moved between one place and another. “Place” in his formulation seemed to be primarily the nation-state, secondarily a sense of belonging or of displacement, and finally a mental condition of perpetual dis-comfort in any given society. In this scheme Fischer could be described as having the identities of a revolutionary, an organiser, and a lawyer. But not the identity of a father, or a husband.
He could, however, been seen as being a son. In the third part of his lecture, Clingman turned to the development of Fischer’s political persona, and began by describing the political careers of Fischer’s fervently nationalist grandfather, and less-fervently national father. He argued – convincingly – that the first signs of Fischer’s later rebelliousness came from his period as a Rhodes Scholar in the 1930s. This literal displacement challenged a parochial understanding of politics, derived from his patriarchal heritage. Following this, Clingman launched into a lengthy series of metaphors for the evolution of Fischer’s layered identity. A selection of these metaphors:
The map of self and society that Fischer was developing. Identity as a process of adjacency. Fischer sought to find his place in the world. His sense of being at home was challenged. His identity was displaced, or dislodged. The 1960s brought a hardening of identity, forcing it into more fixed positions. A boundary had been crossed. He was an alien within his own country; he was at home in a country he imagined. Displaced again.
Running through this narrative of Fischer’s history was a sense of his identity as not merely inextricable from geo-political discourses, but in fact as so closely identifiable with them as to be indistinguishable. Identity wholly resides in political choice.
A more nuanced version of this was present by Clingman in the fourth, and final, section of his lecture. Here he turned away from Fischer’s own identity and tried to generalise out from his earlier observations. Identity is always on the threshold of the symbolic: a person is always in the process of becoming a symbol. And, as Clingman noted, there is a price to pay for becoming a symbol: a sacrifice of the merely human.
Clingman also presented a fascinating case for considering identity as having a grammar, and as being articulated with a care and a subtlety similar to language. It is notable, however, in the context of the above points, that the particular parts of grammar that he chose to highlight were metonymy and metaphor: could identity be read as a metaphor for another source of power (the nation, the state)? Or did it instead possess a metonymous relationship to that source of power, repeating it in miniature? Neither of these, it should be clear, goes any way towards opening up the familiar and familial senses of identity, or personality, and of self – self-presentation, self-understanding, and self-identification. It is difficult to recognise anyone, let alone Fischer, in this final scheme.
One of the earliest rallying cries of the present wave of identity and identification, most clearly seen in the global rise of identity politics and of identity studies in academia, was “the personal is political.” Our contemporary, everyday, understandings of the meaning of identity – of what constitutes it, the practices by which it is constituted, and the limits upon its articulation – are all premised on this simple to state, but difficult to fully comprehend, cry. Clingman’s lecture did not seem to fall within this.
Instead, the premises upon which his questioning of identity was founded seem to be somewhat older. There was certainly a framework in which a man’s identity could be simply described by his conscious political affiliations, by his positioning within a global geo-political network of states and nations, and by his impact on the development of a national history. A man’s wife and his children were irrelevant to this part of his identity, although they might provide interesting material for anecdote. This framework carries the name of its exemplary figure: the Great Man. A Man – almost always male – who stands above the world, strides between countries, and who changes the world around him. He is too busy in the world to be merely human.
Bram Fischer may have been a great man, but he deserves better than to be called a Great Man. Clingman’s biography presents a subtle and nuanced account of his rich, full, and human life. But when Clingman turned that life to the questioning of identity in the current world, its human dimensions disappeared. And with its disappearance, the richness of Clingman’s understanding of human identity became fatally abstract and dry.
|
|
|
 |
Tribute to Harold Wolpe plus links to selected seminar programmes |
|
