Michael Sweet

68 Wellington Drive
Farmington, CT 06032
860-655-9855
mike@sweet.net

Homage**: Paying Respect to the Loss of Identity

by
Michael Sweet

Homage by Nadine Gordimer is a story about loss. The loss of an individual’s

identity set in the framework of the loss of a beloved leader.
The setting is in Stockholm five years after the assassination of Prime Minister
Olof Palme, a crime that has never been solved. The assassin, who is reflecting on his
crime, what brought him to pull the trigger, and the consequence of that action, tells the
story in the First Person.
The narrator details his loss of identity in a vague way. This vagueness
emphasizes that he truly has no identity. His memory of his past is not of himself, but of
people stripped from their home for any number of reasons: “We leave home because of
governments overthrown, a conscript on the wrong side, no work, no bread or oil in the
shops, and when we cross a border we’re put over another border, and another.” (Pg 68)
How did the narrator become a refugee? He never says.
The narrator had become a person without a place, without papers, without an
identity. And this has left him vulnerable to those who might help him: “They find us
there, in one of these places – they found me and they saved me, they can do anything,

*
Homage by Nadine Gordimer published in New Sudden Fiction (2007), pg 68
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they got me in here with papers and a name they gave me.” (Pg 68-69) He is provided a
name and papers, but these do not provide him with a new identity: “I am nobody; no
country counts me in its census, the name they gave me doesn’t exist.” (Pg 69) For this he
has abandoned whoever he was before: “I buried my name, nobody will ever dig it out of
me.” (Pg. 69) He is no longer a refugee, but the price is to accept a contract to kill.
To emphasize this lost of identity the narrator identifies nothing. He never
identifies the person he kills, nor the city or country where it takes place. Only the
circumstances of the murder - the lack of body guards, the subway station, two shots
fired, the initial arrest of a drug dealer as suspect, the grave near where he fell - tell the
reader that this is Palme’s assassination. This vagueness accentuates the narrator’s loss of
identity, as if one’s identity is relative to the identities of others around you. And for the
narrator, even other’s around him have no identity.
He does not know who hired him, or why. They gave him papers and a name.
They put him up in a hotel, a lifestyle he seems to have never before known: “There was
free shampoo” (p 69), until it was time for him to act. Then they disappeared, never
paying him the second half of his blood money. More vagueness.
After the assassination, he lives off the initial payment, occasionally picking up
odd jobs that won’t compromise him: “Worked at the race course, and once or twice in
night clubs. Places where they don’t register you with any labour office.” (Pg 71) He has,
in fact, acquired a new identity which he adamantly refuses to acknowledge: “I would get
offers to do things, move stolen goods, handle drugs: people seemed to smell out
somehow I’d made myself available. But I am not!” (Pg 71) To insure this new person
does not become him: “I don’t take up with anybody. Not even a woman.” (Pg 71)
The narrator’s loss of identity drives this story. This loss is the consequence of his
crime. Having no identity means being cut off from the rest of the world. Yet he yearns to
connect. Witness how the story begins: “You’re sitting there, and when the train lurches
you seem to bend forward to hear.” (Pg 68) A simple involuntary movement is interpreted
as an attempt to communicate.
Ultimately he can only go through the motions of being part of society. The story
ends with him placing a bunch of red roses on his victim’s grave, mimicking others who
are expressing grief for their loss: “Now I do what other’s do. It’s a way to be safe,
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perfectly safe.” (Pg. 72) An outcast, he has no grief for anyone, as he reminds the reader
of his real motive for the flowers by concluding his narrative with “my name is buried
with him.” (Pg 72)
It is possible to read this story on a deeper level still. The narrator is one soul
plucked from a horde of refugees. According to this storyline, the assassination of Palme
in far off Sweden is a repercussion of a world that allows such inhumane conditions to
continue. Gordimer uses this unsolved crime to remind us how tangled together we all
are.