The Road Not Travelled: Tracking Love in Frank Anthony’s The Journey: The Revolutionary Anguish of Comrade B

Abstract

The Journey (1991) is a virtually unknown “struggle” novel by Frank Anthony (d. 1993), a senior member of the African People’s  Democratic Union of Southern Africa (APDUSA), who was  incarcerated on Robben Island for six years. The novel and its author  have been elided from South African history as a racialized  literary establishment and the defensiveness of the resistance organization of which he was a member reinforced each other in  tacit censorship. Anthony’s novel presents revealing insights into the  repression of the personal in the anti-apartheid movement, which  reflected the “liquidation” of love in leftist discourse of the period.  The importance of love, especially romantic love– the highly volatile  emotion which is often boundary-breaking and radically  transformative–has been recognized in contemporary postMarxism  and critical race theory. Blindness to the potential of love in  dominant struggle politics is reflected in the protagonist of The  Journey, whose passion for social justice leads, paradoxically, to  repression of the empowerment and emancipation of self(lessness)  through other(s), enabled by eros.