A blue coat: The addict and the unspeakable girl in South Africa’s colonial archive

Abstract

Can a colonial archive render up form-of-life? To what ends? This essay explores these questions through a methodological exercise that casts a specific historical subject in the role of Giorgio Agamben’s ‘unspeakable girl’. The subject is a woman identified in a 1910 Cape Town police report as a habitual opium smoker. The unspeakable girl is a philosophical construction through which Agamben develops a concept of initiated (or initiating) knowledge. At stake in my forensic re/deconstruction of this case is how a concept of the ‘unspeakable’ may help to unsettle the figure of the ‘addict’ as a stigmatised object of knowledge and paternalism, in service of more humane policy and treatment regimes in the present. The transformative potential of initiating knowledge supports current practice as the ‘come as you are’ motto of harm reduction, and as a bridge between academic analysis and the more intimate concerns of the heart.

Introduction

In a file in the Cape archives, a 1910 police report describes Cape Town’s contemporary opium scene. ¹ It identifies some of the city’s opium smokers including one Daisy Harris, a ‘European [i.e. white] woman’ who figured among the eclectic patrons of a ‘notorious opium den’ on Orange Street. Entering Daisy’s name into the electronic database, I quickly found a 1911 death notice, revealing her age (‘about 26’) and her occupation (‘barmaid’). ² Further sources revealed more information – sometimes contradictory, always fragmented: a shape-shifter. I learned that Daisy had other names and other racial profilings, and that she had died violently. A blue coat appeared on a list of her possessions, held by police.

Who was the ‘addict’ who called herself Daisy? Why did the colour of her coat manifest in my historian’s imagination as a vital ‘sign of passion’ (Bordeleau, 2017: 482), fuelling my search for her? In published research I have mentioned Daisy in passing (Waetjen, 2019: 573). Yet I have continued to feel animated by questions surrounding her. Daisy is one among several figures – addicts who (mostly did not) survive (Courtwright et al., 1989) – whose suggestive chemical biographies have not let me go. This essay explores why, and what might be at stake.

Here I propose to consider Daisy Harris as Giorgio Agamben’s ‘unspeakable girl’ (Agamben and Ferrando, 2014) in relation to: the authorities who criminologically inscribed her as colonial subject; the lover who also murdered her; and myself as a drug historian. Through this refraction, I hope to demonstrate first that the ‘colonial archive’, far from merely constraining ‘the addict’ as a reified object of sovereign power, can be a crucial resource for conferring, as a ‘mysterion' (Agamben and De La Durantaye, 2012: 95; Agamben and Ferrando, 2014: 34), an intuition of meanings and experiences. This strategy, which in one sense coincides with critical best practices of the historian’s craft, is here aligned to a political project that overlaps with concerns about dignity and recognition, to help unsettle the identity ‘addict’.

Addiction, like other medical/criminological concepts, creates subjects ontologically through local material practices and events, what Ian Hacking (2002, cited in Deb Roy and Attewell, 2018: 7–8) calls ‘dynamic nominalism’, which Rohan Deb Roy and Guy Attewell (2018) invoke as a vital rationale for ‘locating the medical’. Locating the historical processes and categories of knowledge through which a subject is identified and archived reveals how authority is produced and exercised (see, for example, Mitra, 2018: 24–7).

Yet archives also retain a potential for rendering up form-of-life, ‘as a power… antagonistic to sovereign power’ (Smith, 2016: 193), through encounters with the unspeakable that arise in the archive as empirical traces. Such experiences and intuitions constitute a useable past, set against dynamic nominalism and other determining habits of speech and thought.

‘Addiction’, in the late 19th and early 20th century, as Timothy Hickman (2004: 1271, 1280–4) notes of the United States, both expressed and produced a cultural concept of modernity by virtue of appearing as a symptom of its crisis, one that contemporaries reified against an idealised rational subject. Across various societies, normative constructions of the ‘addict’ took root in the drug talk of media panics, medical pathology and state projects of control (Berridge, 1999; Gootenberg, 2009; Hall et al., 1978; Room, 1985). The politics of inequality shaped meanings of addiction and the regulatory remedies prescribed by medicine and law, within cultures of racism and class division (Courtwright, 2001 [1982]; Herzberg, 2020; Musto, 1999) and gendered repression (Campbell, 2000; Campbell and Ettorre, 2011; Keire, 1998). ‘Addict’ in the colonial world of the early 20th century, was a label inscribed in the nationalist aspirations of local modernisers, at a time when European empires were transforming themselves from regimes of drug supply to regimes of drug control (Mills, 2003). Within a rising moral vocabulary of social threat, individual ‘addicts’ began to appear in the files of governmental archives, whether colonial and national, identified as agents of disorder or as victims of a ‘scourge’. Drug suppression, however, did not eradicate contestation over consumer meanings and practices (Chattopadhyaya, 2022; Vieira, 2022).

Through an exercise of re/deconstructing the story of the ‘addict’ with a blue coat, I suggest that apprehending Daisy, even if provisionally, as Agamben’s ‘unspeakable girl’ has current relevance, both for drug policy and for affective relations in everyday life. It aligns to constructivist approaches to addiction and substances (Fraser et al., 2014; Gomart, 2002; Keane, 2002, 2009) and onto-political studies of drug policy (Duff, 2012; Fraser, 2020; Ghiabi, 2021; Lancaster and Rhodes, 2020). Valorising the ‘unspeakable’, as an ongoing intuition of the possible, may be useful for reimagining more humane approaches, institutional and intimate.

Agamben’s unspeakable girl

In The Unspeakable Girl, Giorgio Agamben (text), with Monica Ferrando (painting), raise up the prospect of vital force – or the immanence of being – as possessing intrinsic epistemic value. Their essay is mapped through an account of the Eleusinian initiatory drama in ancient Athens. Open to slave and citizen, induction into the Eleusis cult involved rituals – fasting, purification, procession, consumption of a sacred psychoactive drink – and guidance in life’s mysteries. The hierophant presented initiates with a stalk of wheat, emblematic of their encounter with the central figure of that mystery: the ‘divine child’ or ‘little girl’ (Agamben and Ferrando, 2014: 1–3). She is identified as Kore, the goddess Persephone, daughter of Demeter, whose abduction by Hades to the underworld and seasonal return to earth, represents the agricultural cycles sustaining life and the possibility of life itself. Kore translates as ‘vital force’ (Agamben and Ferrando, 2014: 6). She is, at the same time, a figure whose indeterminacy ‘of age, family, sexual identity and social role’ generates an ‘unsettling’ of social categories – a crucial aspect of her ineffability (Agamben and Ferrando, 2014: 3, 7). She is ‘unspeakable’ precisely because she is encountered and known through experience and intuition, uncontained by the language of identity or discourse.

Unspeakability may be understood as an iteration of what in other contexts Agamben (2000 [1993]: 1–14) calls ‘form-of-life’. Form-of-life, as Jason E Smith (2016: 189) has beautifully expressed it, is what human beings are, ‘removed from the grasp of law… never substantiated into an appropriation’. Form-of-life is distinctive from form of life, the latter (unhyphenated) phrase deployed by Agamben to reference structures, identities and status categories, which constitute the material shape of social life and political relationships (Smith, 2016: 192). Form-of-life, says Agamben (2000 [1993]: 2, 3, emphasis in original), describes ‘human life – in which the single ways, acts, and processes of living are…above all possibilities of life, always and above all power’. Form-of-life ‘is not constituted by any predication of what it is but solely by the exposure of the fact that it is’ (Prozorov, 2016: 180, emphases added). It is the exposure to, or experience of, form-of-life – ‘life for which what is at stake in its way of living is living itself’ – that Agamben asserts to be the mysterion encountered in Eleusis, which engenders ‘initiated life’ (Agamben and Ferrando, 2014: 10–12, 47). Encountering the unspeakable girl is an encounter with the ‘thusness’ of being and, simultaneously, the absence – or we may say the suspension – of identification as vital determinant.

Form-of-life, notes Steven DeCaroli (2016: 207), ‘remains in continual tension’ with form of life. In Prozorov’s (2016: 184) convincing reading of this dialectic, form-of-life is Agamben’s crucial ‘source of radical political affirmation, whereby the being of things “as they are” authorises the overcoming of the present order of things’. Form-of-life ‘does not deform let alone destroy the particular forms of life, but suspends the determinative function of these forms and instead exposes them solely in the aspect of their being’ (Prozorov, 2016: 180). Forms of life are (in Agamben’s broader account) aspects of bios (life in community). Form-of-life is zoë (animal life) but it is not the zoë of bare life/naked life, that is, a form of being, produced by sovereign power, marked for special domination or extermination in a state of exception (Agamben, 1998; Smith, 2016: 193). Intuition of the ‘possibilities of life’, to which form-of-life refers, is, for Agamben, political knowledge against the exigencies of sovereign power and its discourses. Form-of-life, Smith (2016: 193) argues, ‘emerges as a power…antagonistic to sovereign power insofar as it is capable of resisting the sovereign operation of isolating naked life from its form’.

In The Unspeakable Girl, Agamben proposes ‘initiation’ (Agamben and Ferrando, 2014: 16–21), a knowledge of mystery that comes through intuition and experience of the ‘discursively unknowable’ (Agamben and Ferrando, 2014: 12, emphasis in original). Initiation is produced through the apprehension, the recognition, of ‘form-of-life’. For Agamben, ethical agency (and its politics) appears to require ‘initiated life’ as an awareness of the provisionality of life’s forms and of their antagonisms/boundaries. He notes, for example, that:

During the initiation at Eleusis there were no sacrifices (agallein does not belong to the vocabulary of sacrifice and means, ‘adorn, give joy’) because what was in question was the threshold leading from animal to man (and god), the threshold leading from man (and god) to animal. The ‘unspeakable girl’ is this threshold. (Agamben and Ferrando, 2014: 44, emphasis in original)

Initiation notably includes emotions of joy and elation, which revelation of openness and of the ‘possibilities of life’ invariably affords. To encounter the unspeakable girl, says Eric Bordeleau (2017: 482), ‘involves ways of envisaging an absolutely immanent life on the threshold of its political and ethical intensification’. Agamben insists that the mystery facilitating ‘initiated life’ is neither secretive nor exclusive, but is rather ordinary and accessible. Agamben concludes: ‘We are to live life like an initiation. But to what? Not to a doctrine but to life itself and its absolute absence of mystery. There is no mystery. There is an unspeakable girl’ (Agamben and Ferrando, 2014: 47).

Can we encounter the unspeakable girl in a colonial archive? To what ends? Monica Ferrando’s paintings evoke both the vital presence and the opaqueness of unspeakability. They are studies in colour and shadow; form and formlessness; absence and (at times humorously) parochial specificity. ‘Painting silences language’, argue Agamben and De La Durantaye (2012: 96), ‘because it interrupts the signifying relation between name and thing, returning, if only for an instant, the thing to itself, its namelessness’.

The provisionality of ‘only for an instant’ is what concerns us here. For me, it is Ferrando’s use of colour that effectively raises the issue of the unspeakable as a facet of historical knowledge: the ‘vision’ of Daisy’s blue coat somehow proclaims her form-of-life as a vital presence, even if situated in a time past. Her blue coat may be placed besides poet Wallace Stevens’ blue guitar, which Prozorov invokes to illustrate Agamben’s commitment to the ‘facticity [of being] as a counter-intuitive source of radical political affirmation’. Such knowledge is ‘a tune beyond us, yet ourselves, a tune upon the blue guitar of things exactly as they are’ (Stevens, 1990 cited in Prozorov, 2016: 184).

In the following two sections, I explore unspeakability through the case of a specific historical subject. These discussions build towards an empirical account of Daisy Harris and her opium habit in time and place. But the exercise also demonstrates how an archive can be a space of unnaming, a productive silencing of language and the word, which creates a provisional condition of namelessness. Thus, what we are tracking here – as historical method – is both form and the unsettlement of form. We will then consider how this may bring us towards ‘initiated’ or ‘initiating’ knowledge, in Agamben’s sense, and where its practical and ethical value may lie, specifically in relation to the category and figure of ‘the addict’.

Unnaming Daisy: An addict in the Empire

On 10 June 1911, a woman died ‘in the streets of Cape Town’ as she was being conveyed by galloping ambulance from the Criterion Hotel at Church Square to the casualty ward on Dorp Street. ³ A death notice identified her as ‘Daisy Harris alias Birch’, an unmarried barmaid of ‘about 26’. The entry for parentage was blank. There was a list of her belongings held by police: a shilling and tuppence; a buttonhook, needle holder and two thimbles; a small mirror, broken comb, lip salve, a hat veil with three hat pins; a tin box containing powder; gold-coloured earrings and rings: a black apron, and a blue coat.

The name Daisy Harris was known to Cape Town’s police. Eight months earlier she appeared in the report of Cape Town CID detective Ernest Evans as ‘barmaid at the European hotel, Caledon Street’, and one of two ‘European women’ (the other a Mrs Holmes) who frequented the Tam Lee Laundry at number 8 Orange Street, ‘a most notorious opium den’. Here she kept company with Malay and Chinese patrons, as well as ‘a Coloured prostitute named “Georgina” [who] smoked there too’. ⁴

The investigation of Cape Town’s ‘opium dens’ was solicited by government administrators of the new Union of South Africa. In this ‘dominion colony’, formed in 1910 from two Boer republics and two British colonies in the aftermath of the South African War (1899–1902), post-war nation-builders were actively crafting a ‘white man’s country’ (Dubow, 1997). The Imperial London Home Office required Union policy to align with the Shanghai opium conference agreements of the previous year. Anti-opium temperance campaigners grafted moral alarm about opium to eugenical concerns about ‘race degeneration’ and ‘white slavery’ through the flashpoint of Chinese opium dens (Lui, 2009; Tyrrell, 1991). The sexuality of white women – which at this moment preoccupied the Union as a ‘black peril’ politics – comprised a gold standard of supremacist ideas of colonial self-rule (Martens, 2002; Scully, 1995). Thus, through Detective Evans’ 1910 report, Daisy Harris and Mrs Holmes were offered up as degraded bodies of proof, by virtue of their drug-den associations.

Almost two weeks after Daisy’s initial death notice, Cape Town bureaucrats filed another. ⁵ It introduced new information about the identity of the woman who called herself Daisy. She had been born in Kimberley as Frances Johanna Ventura, daughter of Nicolaas Ventura and Maggie Ventura (nee Barker). Such banal – if interesting – detail is insufficient to unname Daisy ‘the addict’. But it begins to shift the ground of our inquiry.

The Ventura patrilineage appears in a compendium of settler genealogies, the Suid-Afrikaanse Geslagregisters (Heese and Lombard, 1986: 169–70). Members of the Ventura family are also listed in the appendices of HF Heese’s book Groep Sonder Grense [Group without Borders] (2005), first published in 1985 as a challenge to the glib premise of racial whiteness endorsing Afrikaner nationalism and its apartheid vision. Heese documented the Creole origins of a large number of families, tracing records of marriage between European immigrants, enslaved Asians and Africans, and indigenous Cape people, from the period of the Dutch East India Company and Cape slave society. Outside of formal marital relations, the comparatively humane rulings of Dutch law about ‘illegitimate’ childbearing, along with the incorporating practices of religious conversion, contributed to fluid – though still distinct – status identities (Groenewald, 2007, 2008; Malherbe, 2008).

The man ‘Ventura’ arrived in a condition of enslavement to the Cape, either from Bengal or Ceylon (both are on record). AJ Böeseken (1977: 30) reveals that ‘[f]rom Lieutenant Abraham Schut, Jacob Borghorst [Schut’s replacement as Cape Commander from 1668] bought the slave Ventura for 277f’. In 1677, an entry in the church registry noted that ‘[t]he slave Ventura and slave woman Helena have accepted the Christian Faith’ (Heese and Lombard, 1986: 169; see also Heese, 2005 [1985]: 154). ⁶ In the following year, their son, Joost, was manumitted at the age of one (Schoeman, 2001: 656), shifting his Cape status from enslaved to ‘free black’ (vryswarte). This is noted, Karel Schoeman (2001: 656) tells us, in Hattingh’s list of slave transactions, along with the observation that ‘when he is old enough, he will learn a skill’. Joost became a fisherman (Böeseken, 1977: 86). In 1698, at the age of 19, he purchased and married a 40-year-old enslaved woman named Constantia ‘from the Coromandel Coast’. ⁷ Joost and Constantia’s son Abraham, recorded in 1746 as vryswarte (Baartman, 2012: 75), married Clara, a slave from coastal India. Teun Baartman shows that, in the tax lists of the Cape Burgher Council, two of Abraham and Clara’s sons are named, evidencing their rise in Cape civic status from ‘free black’ to full citizenship. One brother was Adriaan Ventura, who married Helen Picard, daughter of ‘Christina from Bengal’. The other was Abram Ventura (Junior), who married twice, both to women of mixed ancestry, and who ‘took the burgher oath in 1770 and became a member of the second burgher company of infantry’ (Baartman, 2012: 75). Adriana Ventura, born in 1750, was Abram and Adriaan’s sister (another great-grandchild of ‘the slaves’ Ventura and Helena). At the age of 20 she married a prosperous European [Venetian] trader named Jan Bellapasqua (Heese, 2005 [1985]: 96). They made their home (and owned an additional plot) in Dorp Street in central Cape Town (Smuts, 1824). Jan and Adriana were slave owners. In 1816, Adriana applied for permission to manumit a slave; ⁸ and on her death in 1824, the auction of the Ventura/Bellapasqua estate included a 22-year-old Cape-born ‘female slave named Steyn’ (Smuts, 1824). The Ventura family is, in fact, a case study in social ‘boundary-crossing’, demonstrating shifts of status and fluid identity-formations of early Cape life (fluid until around 1720–30). Identifiers of ancestry and status were long recorded in the Cape, with qualitatively different social meanings from the politics of race nationalisms and class of later centuries (Elphick and Shell, 2014 [1988]; Ross, 1999).

From estate record-keepers a century later, we learn that in 1876, Daisy’s grandmother, Cape Town-born Louisa Johanna Elizabeth Ventura, died in Kimberley. She was survived by five children, including son, Nicolaas. ⁹ This Ventura branch apparently made their home in the ‘low residences, West End, Griqualand West’. ¹⁰ Such class-description and its time-frame allows us to speculate about a Cape Town family emigrating to Kimberley to try their luck in diamond digging or subsidiary employments, following diamond discoveries from 1868.

The amended death notice of Frances Johanna Ventura (aka Daisy) points to further complexities of origin, however. The family member who signed this second document was not a Ventura at all. She was Catherine Hendricks, whose mark of ‘X’ confirmed her as Daisy’s ‘next of kin’. Hendricks’ home was on Stirling Street in District Six ( Cape Times, 1911b ), where labourers, traders, freed slaves, immigrants and artisans made up a racially mixed, largely (as officially classified) ‘coloured’ community. ¹¹ A note beneath Hendricks’ signature explained she was, in fact, the deceased’s ‘adoptive mother [who] brought up the child from age of 7 months’. ¹²

What explains the adoption and removal to Cape Town of the infant ‘Frances Ventura’, by Catherine Hendricks, and the new moniker ‘Daisy Harris’? Hypotheses can be hazarded. One is that Hendricks’ attribution of Daisy’s parentage to Nicolaas Ventura and Maggie Ventura was a falsehood, preserving the truth of a love child by Nicolaas Ventura and Hendricks herself, the move from Kimberley to Cape Town an escape from social censure. A second might relate to the politics of colour in an increasingly racialised society: if an infant showed darker features within a family that (over generations) had ‘whitened’, her adoption might protect aspirations of status. A third explanation seems, perhaps, most likely: that the infant Frances was orphaned. Her birth year of 1884 coincided exactly with a two-year outbreak of small pox in Kimberley, an outbreak that was at the time concealed by colluding doctors and diamond capitalists (Phillips, 2012: 29, 32–3). Children in this period could be ‘orphaned’, and fostered out, in circumstances such as poverty or substance use in a family.

There is yet a further complication for pinning down ‘Daisy Harris’. Cape marriage records show that a 26-year-old Daisy May Harris was wedded to Frederick Clive Aldous, a 28-year-old draper, at St Paul’s Church in the parish of Rondebosch (a Cape Town suburb) on 16 April 1911. This was two months before ‘our’ Daisy Harris dies. Were there two women of the same age named Daisy Harris? ¹³ But if this is indeed ‘our’ Daisy, why is she not named Aldous (and classed as ‘married’) in any death certificate and why should this detail fail to embellish the sensational newspaper accounts of her violent death?

‘Daisy Harris’ was a name obscuring her Ventura origins. Yet her lover, William Birch – as we will see – called her ‘Frances’, as did adoptive mother Hendricks. ¹⁴ Daisy’s criminological profiling as a ‘white’ woman suggests she had a pale complexion. Newspaper accounts (which also sometimes call her ‘Doris’), describe her appearance as ‘slightly coloured’, ‘off-coloured’ and even ‘slightly off-coloured’ ( Cape Times, 1911a ; Eastern Province Herald, 1911; Rhodesian Herald, 1911). She was declared to be ‘rather good-looking’ and also a ‘jolly’ and ‘good tempered girl’ ( Cape Times, 1911b ). Her beauty, personality and ability to ‘pass’ as some shade of ‘white’ ¹⁵ may have offered her social leverage with employers and patrons in Cape Town’s hospitality industry. Her manner of fashion – the gold-coloured rings and earrings, a veil with hair pins, a blue coat and with cigarettes in her pocket – points to an incipient ‘modern girl’ presentation of self. It is possible, even likely, that she herself assumed ‘Daisy Harris’ in her styling of an Anglicised urban identity.

How does our initial introduction to Daisy move us towards a posture of contemplating unspeakability? We observe that ‘Daisy Harris’ initially appears in the archive as an opium addict in a criminological encounter: detective Evans profiles her as a ‘European’ frequenter of a Cape Town opium den. As noted earlier, Daisy took up opium smoking as the British Empire was shifting from regimes of opium supply to regimes of control, annexing its colonies to the new project of enforcement (Waetjen, 2019: 577–81). The white ‘addict’ arose as an object of compassion but also as a portent of racial atavism, a snag in the temporal ideas of civilisational progress. Daisy’s status of ‘barmaid’ afforded moral ambiguities in relation to sexual respectability. By identifying her as a white woman in a Chinese opium den, Detective Evans confirmed the shape – though not the scope – of metropolitan fears.

However, the prism of the colonial archive refracts such designations, in this case offering other views and speculations, without simple resolution. The point here is not to replace one profiling with another ‘correct’ social category, nor is it to deconstruct the politics of race in the turn-of-the-century urban Cape. As in a painted portrait, ‘[t]hat which is at once cancelled and displayed is nothing less than the proper name’ (Agamben and De La Durantaye, 2012: 97). For the moment, we simply perceive the being of Daisy, a person who was, and who can be named – but whose unstable classifications allow us to catch sight of an ontic residue (Adler, 2020: 21) that is poorly defined in official discourse.

‘Daisy Harris alias Birch’: Daisy in Cape Town’s underworld

Daisy moved back in with Hendricks at Stirling Street and was living there in June 1911. In late May, she had switched hotel jobs from the Britannia Hotel on Caledon Street to the Criterion at Church Square. She was fleeing William Birch, a lover with whom she had lived for 18 months ( Cape Argus, 1911a ). The figure of Birch, who would be the agent of Daisy’s death, brings into view the material realities that acutely make up ‘forms of life’.

Agamben may appear to understate antagonisms between certain forms of life (Smith, 2016: 192–3) – the forms ‘man’/’woman’ being most pertinent to flag here. Yet Agamben does not attribute form-of-life with a power to erase or overcome form of life. Form-of-life does not confer negligence or blindness to difference, hierarchies or relations of power. Our search for form-of-life in a colonial archive will reveal deadly antagonisms between social forms.

William Birch is inscribed in different ways, but primarily as a schemer and career criminal, whom police elegised as a ‘real bad man’ ( Cape Argus, 1911b ). He was also handsome and a charmer: well dressed (he died in a straw hat and waistcoat), literate (he wrote letters; brought a trunk of books to his temporary lodgings), ¹⁶ articulate (he served as his own legal defence in court), racially classified as ‘Coloured’ (all accounts) and married. In 1907, before he met Daisy, he was residing with his wife at the corner of Shortmarket and Buitengracht streets, near the centre of town. One acquaintance testified that he routinely ‘lived off the misfortunes of women’ and had a child by another woman who was being raised by a friend in Johannesburg ( Cape Argus, 1911b ). He made a varied living: as Pierrot Troupe player, tailor, carpenter, thief, fence, opium dealer, opium den proprietor – and police informant. The latter likely explains why he is not named in Detective Evans’ 1910 opium den report. It is possible that Birch himself was Evans’ escort through Cape Town’s opium ‘underworld’. ¹⁷

Birch was alleged to be a ‘confirmed opium addict’. In one account of himself, to medical doctor John McMullen, Birch claimed a 12-year addiction to opium to explain his need of a month’s supply, for tapering to abstinence. ¹⁸ In 1907, he identified himself as a recent arrival to Cape Town and, although mentioning no origins, spoke of a Transvaal friend who, before departing for ‘Australia or America’ had visited him in Cape Town, bringing sufficient opium to stave off Birch’s withdrawal for two months. Birch had since relied on clandestine deal making with doctors, druggists and chemists.

Whether as dealer or consumer, Birch showed a deft hand in obtaining opium in large quantities. He joined forces with a ‘Dr Watson’ (‘from the States’), a veterinary surgeon operating out of Caledon Street who, at 10 shillings per pound, procured many pounds of opium through an employee of Heynes Matthew pharmaceutical manufacturer. ¹⁹ This allowed Birch to run an opium den on Rose Street ( Cape Argus, 1911a ). Yet his arrangement with ‘Watson’ quickly soured and Birch looked elsewhere, before appealing to Dr McMullen.

McMullen himself, however, stood accused by the Cape Medical Board of prescribing amounts of 2–10 lbs of opium to his clients (Waetjen, 2016). As a bid to retain professional standing, McMullen sent a written account of Birch’s visit to the colonial Medical Officer of Health (MOH), Dr Alfred John Gregory. It provided names and addresses of opium-supplying pharmacists, fingered by Birch. McMullen’s intelligence did not save his own skin. Working closely with police, Dr Gregory found and interviewed Birch himself. Keen to convict corrupt medical personnel, Gregory sought details about ‘Dr Watson’, and the evidence to convict McMullen. Gregory now offered Birch protection from arrest for illegal opium trading. In the affidavit taken by Gregory, William Birch was transparent about his drug dealing, citing specific occasions and amounts procured from various Cape Town medical professionals.

Daisy met ‘Willie’ ²⁰ two years later, probably late in March 1909 when Birch was in court charged with the burglary of a prominent tailor – a haul of fabrics, haberdashery and garment pieces worth £140, a crime locally dubbed the ‘Hodges Affair’. ²¹ The stollen stock was found in Birch’s home.

Daisy ‘took a keen interest in the [court] proceedings and was in constant attendance at the criminal sessions’ ( Cape Times, 1911a ). It is unclear when Birch left his wife and moved in with Daisy, but reports suggest it was after his unexplained acquittal. It was as Birch’s ‘common-law wife’ that Daisy Harris was, on her initial death notice, ascribed the ‘alias Birch’.

The documents in the archive situate Daisy as an opium user in her relationships with Birch and with others. She was part of a legal if semi-clandestine intoxicant subculture. It does not appear to have affected her reputation and employment: hotel management thought her ‘respectable in manner’ ( Cape Argus, 1911a ). While Detective Evans writes of ‘ill-reputed’ opium den proprietors, he attributes the patrons – depicted as dreamily lounging in these (in fact) intimate, domestic spaces – with signs of respectability. Against the lurid visual and textual portrayals of opium dens in global circulation, Evans’ descriptions of Cape Town’s opium smokers are of well-dressed, working-class individuals, topping up their energies during lunch breaks.

Birch called Daisy ‘Frances’, and by the endearments ‘Chummie’ and ‘Mammie’. Someone ‘intimately acquainted’ with both parties denied the claim ‘that they had ever lived happily together’: Birch had ‘led Harris a dreadful life’ ( Cape Argus, 1911a ). Catherine Hendricks was protective of her daughter and unhappy about the match: ‘They were always quarrelling’, she testified ( Cape Times, 1911b ). Sometime in May 1911, Daisy left Birch after considerable domestic strife, characterised by violence, as well as by ‘financial problems’. While in her earlier Britannia Hotel barmaid post, Birch ‘made a savage attack’ on Daisy in her workplace. The public display of violence may have cost her that job. She laid a charge, and Birch was fined £5 ( Cape Times, 1911b ).

We can piece together a timeline of what would prove the last week of their lives, showing Birch’s unravelling control. Although she had apparently determined to have ‘nothing more to do with him’, still, on Monday, 5 June 1911, Daisy and William checked into the Forrester Hotel as a couple. Yet on Wednesday evening, she was with Catherine Hendricks in a horse-drawn cab heading to their Stirling Street residence. Birch now appeared beside them and mounted the carriage, shouting accusations at Hendricks for ‘interfering’ and demanding she ‘return’ him the £5 he had been fined. Passers-by ‘prevented him from striking the old woman…[but] in the end the three of them continued on their way in the cab’ ( Cape Times, 1911b ). After this, presumably for security, Daisy stayed over ‘at a private house in the neighbourhood of Strand Street’ ( Cape Argus, 1911b ).

In what was later reported as his suicide note, dated Thursday, 8 June, William Birch appears to look back on a respectable personal past. He accused Frances of destroying that life:

I had a happy and comfortable life with a[nother] woman who, although I did not truly love, has been so kind to me for over thirteen years. Then I met this woman who lured me on until I loved her as a man can love but once. She professed that she loved me and I believed it for eighteen months. Then she grew tired of me, or at least the woman who brought her up started interfering. I have begged her [Hendricks] to leave me and Frances alone as I cannot be parted from her. I have actually prayed and cried to her [Frances] in the name of our Maker, but she has turned a deaf ear. I have been crying the whole day and it has driven me mad. ( Cape Times, 1911b )

Birch later wrote a letter to Daisy, signed ‘your broken hearted and dejected Willie’. This included an appeal for money to ‘get to the States, where I may carry on my trade’, asking her to recall the days ‘when you loved me as you said you had never loved before’. That Thursday night, he was apparently waiting for Daisy to return to the Forrester Hotel: ‘This woman has fooled me in many ways, even up to this evening’, he wrote. ‘She promised faithfully that she would come and see me. I have waited until dark.’

Between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m. on Saturday, 10 June, Birch came looking for Daisy at the home on Stirling Street. He removed a panel in the back door. Daisy was not there, but the household dog awakened Hendricks, who saw that Birch was ‘none the worse for liquor’. Hendricks refused his demands for money and for Daisy’s whereabouts. ‘You old ___, I’ll kill you tonight’, Birch shouted at her. Hendricks fled: ‘he was in such a state that [she] became frightened and made her escape by the front door’ ( Cape Times, 1911a , original omission of expletive).

The next morning, Hendricks and Daisy filed a formal report with police about the break-in. Daisy then headed to the Criterion Hotel and took her position at the ‘buffet bar’. Birch walked in several minutes later, just as a customer left, and tried to force her to read a letter. Witnesses did not hear the content of their exchange, which escalated into a physical struggle as Daisy rebuffed him. Birch threw her down in a corner, pulled out a Webley revolver, and shot her twice in the head. When a ‘Coloured youth’ working there tried to interfere, Birch threatened him but then turned the gun and shot himself through the heart. He died, falling on Daisy’s still-breathing body. An ambulance was summoned, but the wounded woman died upon arrival at the casualty ward.

Birch’s suicide note read ‘May god forgive me for what I am about to do’ and ends asking that his body be buried with his parents and his possessions sent to his stepmother. He did not act on the evening the note was dated, and his further efforts to acquire money suggest he still contemplated other options. Two letters were found: it is unclear which he had wanted Daisy to read. His intentions, as he entered the hotel bar, may still have been unresolved.

Public accounts of these events retain some pervading silences – not all of the same nature or of the same purpose and making. The archive itself imposes silences, through its politics and dearth (Trouillot, 1995). The story creates other silences, including muteness in the face of horror – a silence described by Agamben and De La Durantaye (2012: 95) as ‘privation of speech’.

But neither the paucity of information nor the ‘impossibility of saying’ (Agamben and De La Durantaye, 2012: 96) concern us here. We have encountered in Daisy as an opium smoker, barmaid, lover, victim of gender-based violence, adopted daughter, descendant of enslaved South Asians and European settlers – all identifiable forms of life. Where is that silence of the ‘face’ – the sign of passion – that is encountered, both as ‘unnamed and over-named’ (Agamben and De La Durantaye, 2012: 97)? To now pose Agamben’s question: ‘how are we to conceive of a silence not concerning things, but the silence of language itself?’

Where, if at all, do we encounter an unspeakable girl?

A blue coat: Daisy as the unspeakable girl

In my research process, the name Daisy Harris first identified a white woman and habitual opium smoker through a 1910 CID report. It next appeared in a death notice. There I saw a blue coat listed with other personal effects. Who can explain why that object radiated in my imagination as a translucent cobalt? My initial response to this ‘thought image’ was empiricist curiosity (i.e. what fabric pigments existed for Cape winterwear in this period?). But an experience bracketed that question in favour of ‘mystery’: the blue coat appeared in a nocturnal dream, beyond my waking thoughts. While I explored other names appearing in Detective Evans’ report, the colour blue seemed continually to ‘shine’ in my mind.

Subsequent research produced the outlines of Daisy’s story and her opium-infused world. Yet, in important ways the facts also increased Daisy’s mystery. This, as I have argued, is not merely an effect of archival ‘silences’ (Trouillot, 1995). The colonial archive is itself, of course, a historical artifact, both an effect of power and evidence of its means and aims (Mishra, 2007: 34; Stoler, 2009). Part of the knowledge to be derived here is constituted by the trace nature of ‘Daisy Harris’, the ‘addict’. While one response to archival silences is undertaken by some historians through a method of ‘critical fabulation’ (combining archival evidence and fiction to remedy archival deficits) I wish to argue for a different strategy and form of knowledge.

Within a commitment to critical academic history and its ethics, the concrete realities of Daisy’s life and death preclude analysis in the register of allegory or moral fable. Daisy’s death does not render her – through a figurative translation – as Kore (Persephone), abducted by Hades. Nor do we find unspeakability in her victimhood, the rendering of her form of life (e.g. as woman) into exterminable bare life (in this case by a shunned male lover). We do not encounter ‘form-of-life’, or initiation, in the stigma ascribed her through the criminalising conception of addict, delivered up to Imperial ‘sovereign power’. Agamben himself is clear on this. Smith (2016) has defended Agamben against accusations that he conflates the figure of homo sacer (a being reduced to bare life) with a source of social salvation. Agamben’s notion of ‘sacred’, ‘stigmata’ and ‘sacrifice’ does not convey any sense that it may translate into an emancipatory agency or redemptive force. He rejects ‘elevating naked life, in its abjection, to the level of a superior principle, “sovereignty” or the sacred itself’ (Smith, 2016: 194). An encounter with the unspeakable is not an encounter with what is designated for sacrifice, or marked by stigma, in such a sense. Daisy’s trace of form-of-life, the ‘ontic residue’ that – provisionally – ‘shines’ as a form of knowledge, is a different sort of mystery. ²²

Relatedly, I am not at all suggesting that ‘initiating’ knowledge should be elevated above other knowledge, or that in archival silences we find a more authentic, ‘deeper’ truth. Archival silences and invisibilities are a central problem for producing critical history and for the progressive aims of inclusive accounts of the past. To pursue the unspeakable girl is not to replace pursuit of the empirical, nor a perverse attempt to resolve its undemocratic nature. What I am exploring here, as method, holds its own value and is complementary to other ways of knowing.

Where, then, is unspeakability encountered? And what exactly might ‘initiation’ mean? The socially transformative, or decolonising, impulse I wish to locate is (partly) suggested in the moments we are able to sense Daisy’s experience of, and commitment to, the fact of her own being. Returning to Bordeleau, we can consider how the name ‘Daisy Harris’ forms part of an ‘occultural process’, protecting an internal, undisclosed domain of self – the unspeakable as ‘life in hiding’ – which evades capture in definition and discourse. From the documents available, as I worked towards some account of her, Daisy emerged increasingly as ‘her own person’. I perceived something of this in her mobility between social and cultural settings, in her adventurous interest in the criminal charmer Birch, but also in her strong impulse towards self-preservation (which Birch extinguished). Daisy’s independence is demonstrated by her action – twice that we know of – in reporting Birch to CID officials, and in leaving him. That same spirit resides also, twisted by misogyny, in Birch’s accusations of her and, more directly, in her physical struggles against his assault. She navigates various identities.

I do not raise these points in service of a particular political reading of Daisy. I am instead suggesting that such traces help raise up the issue of (her) ‘form-of-life’. They point to an internal aspect of being that remained undisclosed by, or to, agents of ‘sovereign power’. They prompt us to consider how official uncertainties surrounding her identity may be – in part – an unsettling effect attributable to her own agency and will. ²³

Intuition of unspeakability is not an outcome of evidence-gathering and of inevitably ambiguous findings. There is a subjective experience that involves the reflexive emotions of an encounter with a person (historical or living), in research as in life. My own entry point was in the ‘vision’ of a blue coat. For me, it illuminated the ‘mystery’ of a historical subject, the presence of her (past) form-of-life. I encountered the unspeakable girl.

Conclusion: The addict and the unspeakable girl

Agamben asserts an ‘essential connection’ between the literary form of the novel and the Eleusinian mystery cults, in part because the novel ‘best conveys the meaning of the mystery’ presented in an invented character’s life, which readers ‘are meant not to explain so much as to contemplate, as one would an initiation’ (Agamben and Ferrando, 2014: 33). Meaning is not a direct effect of sign in this domain, but a ‘precarious’ knowledge acquired as a dream-like ‘hesitant movement through darkness and half-light…in an indistinct and perplexing realm, where distinction between the high and the low, shadow and light, walking and sleeping, have grown uncertain’ (Agamben and Ferrando, 2014: 32). The novel, argues Agamben, ‘places us before a mysterion in which life itself is at once that which initiates us and that into which we are initiated’ (Agamben and Ferrando, 2014: 34, emphasis in original).

Inasmuch also as this initiation involves the action of seeing (vision, spectatorship), Agamben proposes, too, a kinship between the visual arts/painting and the mystery cults (Agamben and Ferrando, 2014: 35–9). Ferrando’s paintings help relate this idea. In painting, form and content coincide, in the sense that what we are given to contemplate is ‘pure appearance’, undetermined by doctrine (Agamben and Ferrando, 2014: 37). The Eleusinian mysteries are ‘not “mysterious” because they have a concealed doctrinal content that the agility of the interpreter must bring to light but because in them form and content…have become indistinguishable’ (Agamben and Ferrando, 2014: 35). The unspeakable girl ‘shows herself’ in that ‘pure appearance’.

If initiating knowledge is found in these literary and visual domains, then it seems possible to propose an initiation with the ‘unspeakable girl’ in relation to a historical human subject, as encountered through fragmented files in a colonial archive. The knower initiated in this case is the one beholding a document or photograph, where analysis is arrested or suspended, left open to appearance without doctrine. As with a blue coat cited in a death notice, it may come in an ‘image of thought’. And the ‘addict’ we were looking to situate in her historical context becomes ‘a mystery wherein that which cannot be discursively presented shines for a moment out of the ruins of language’ (Agamben and Ferrando, 2014: 39).

Of what practical value is such initiating knowledge? What can Agamben’s unspeakable girl offer to the concerns of, and about, ‘the addict’, or about drug policy and treatment in the current moment?

‘Addict’ is a form of bios, situated historically. We know that people so-classified have been, in different places and at different times, integrated (into the archive, as into society) as the stigmatised objects of medical or criminological discourses and institutions. One point is that Daisy’s story sheds doubt on the capacity of a state at a particular moment to fully capture ‘addict’ as colonial subject. This is important as one resonance with the will and action of subjects themselves, which moves us towards the creation of a better world. This may be an ordinary point, but one in which unspeakability serves as a powerful mechanism.

Another point is that the addict and the unspeakable girl are forms of knowledge in tension with each other: one does not necessarily prevail over, or subvert, the other. But unspeakability is the pause taken to question the certainties and confidence through which we deploy positivist identity categories that often circumscribe human beings as objects, whether in regimes of condemnation or regimes of treatment. Unspeakability authorises a reimagining of what may be, and the transformation of what is. Initiating knowledge holds out ‘form-of-life’ (its shining possibilities), suspending – even if temporarily or provisionally – an enclosing grid of other forms (criminological, psychological or medical). It works in support of capabilities approaches and constitutes the ‘come as you are’ motto of harm reduction.

This exercise, of using words to present a life (lived in the past) as a pathway towards unspeakability, has utility as a demonstration. I have aimed to reveal how cracks in specific knowledge can signal where form-of-life might be glimpsed or intuited. Bordeleau posits strategies of occulturation as safeguarding bios through inhabiting a ‘life in hiding’, being beyond the reach of sovereign power. Initiation is a continual process and is where recognition, care – and love – are nurtured.