Assignment on African Literature

Name :Chauhan Hetal M.

Roll No.:14

Year : 2017-2019

Semester: M.A ,Sem-4

Paper no.:14 ,  The African Literature

Email Id: hetalchauhan137@gmail.com

Words: 2,313

About Writer:

John Maxwell Coetzee[a] (born 9 February 1940) is a South African-born novelist, essayist, linguist, translator and recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. He relocated to Australia in 2002 and lives in Adelaide.[2] He became an Australian citizen in 2006.[3]

In 2013, Richard Poplak of the Daily Maverick described Coetzee as "inarguably the most celebrated and decorated living English-language author".[4] Before receiving the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature, Coetzee was awarded the Jerusalem Prize, CNA Prize (thrice), the Prix Femina étranger, The Irish Times International Fiction Prize and the Booker Prize (twice), among other accolades.

Themes

                The theme of a story is what the author is trying to convey, in other words, the central idea of the story. Short stories often have just one theme, whereas novels usually have multiple themes.

            

                Themes in waiting for the Barbarians.

Dream: ‘’ From horizon to horizon the earth is white with snow. It falls from sky in which the source of light is diffuse and everywhere present, as though the sun has dissolved into mist become an aura. In the dream I pass the barracks gate, pass the bare flagpole. The square extends before me. Blending at its edges into the luminous sky. Walls trees, houses have dwindled lost their solidity, retired over the rim of the world.’’ -The Magistrate’s dream

An exploration of an  idea of barbarism:

When we see or read poem by Cavafy we come to know about the poem that the poem is explores the necessity of the “other” to the function and exercise of imperial power. In it a town awaits the arrival of the barbarians, and in its final lines the people are not unsettled by the barbarians’ arrival, but another menace:

Because night is here but the barbarians have not come.

And some people arrived from the borders,

and said that there are no longer any barbarians.

And now what shall become of us without any barbarians?

Those people were some kind of solution.

            Coetzee uses his great skill to underline the irony in these final lines. The barbarians those menaces the towns are never seen, the “absurd prisoners” brought back by the Third Bureau are abject and ridiculous. We are never brought face to face with the enemy, who is able to evade the Empire’s reach. The people’s need for the barbarian is palpable. It culminates in the frenzied scene in which the people step forward from the crowd to partake in the punishment and humiliation of the barbarian men. The actual prisoners never do correspond to the imagined menace, though this menace is real enough by the novel’s end. Together the Empire and the people have created a barbarian that is a real enough threat to the town’s survival, but this enemy evades even Coetzee’s reach and can never be pinned down.

Theme of Colonialism: we can see theme of colonialism in this novel that how the people of empire torture to the people who were the actually owner of the land who were barbarians according to the Third bureau. And so it becomes most important theme in this novel.

     

Theme of Violence reflected in the novel:-

In this novel, Coetzee juxtapose his magistrate narrator- a kind of everyman colonial bureaucrat- against two other central characters. The first is Col Joll another official of the empire who serves in an intelligence agency that bears the inspired name the “third bureau”. The second character is a young barbarian woman who has been blinded by Col.Joll’s enlightened from of intelligence gathering. As with all colonial cultures in Coetzee’s literary creation all the settlers’ fear of the indigenous other that both threatens the dominant society and justifies the violence exacted in the name of a search for that always elusive state of security. As the magistrate relates: there is no woman living along the frontier who has not dreamed of a dark barbarian had coming from under the bed to grip her ankle, no man who has not frightened himself with visions of the barbarians carousing into his name breaking the plats setting fire to the curtains, raping his daughters. Here we are showing high state of violence physical as well as mental. Violence and complicity both are common theme in Coetzee’s work in his many works we are shown these theme. J.M.Coetzee’s treatment of violence in his fiction is very interesting way of looking from one angel that feature of complicity and violence of those who are not directly involved in the actual crimes committed by others.

      In “Into the dark Chamber the writer and the South African State” (1986) one of the essays in Doubling the point Essays and Interviews (1992) J.M.Coetzee interrogates the problem of representing violence in literature. He observes that many South African authors including himself, reveal “a dark fascination” with tortures and he contends that there are two reasons for their enthrallment.

             The first is that relations in the torture room provide a metaphor for relations between authoritarianism and its victims. The second reason for authors’ engagement with brutality is that the torture room is a site of extreme human experience accessible to no one save the participants. The challenge for an artist Coetzee asserts,

how not to play the game by the rules of the state

how to establish one’s own authority,

how to imagine for torture and death on one’s own terms.

The above dilemmas Coetzee carries on to explain are particularly urgent for fiction writers; they are less constraining for authors of auto-narrative: autobiographer’s personal experience of suffering and pain gives them the authority to retell those aspects of experiences. Dusk lands (1974) his first novel pursues the aim of diagnosing the sources of colonial violence. Even the title of the novel itself shows some sort of violence Waiting for the Barbarians here barbarians are specified as violated.

Barbarian means: people from other countries were thought to be uncivilized or violent. And here identity of the ‘barbarians’ will always be regarded as ‘others’ by imperialist society. Coetzee’s characterization is real essence with the help of characters he criticize society which he live especially character of barbarian girl, the relationship between magistrate and barbarian girl, who is central figure of theme of violence. For her part the unnamed barbarian woman her role is largely objective. All but adopted but the magistrate who makes no effort to cancel his infatuation with the oppression she has suffered, she represents the captive native upon whom the magistrate is able to project his colonial gaze. It is also to this young barbarian woman that the magistrate reveals a central theme of the novel: the terror of colonial paranoia. ‘Nothing is worse than what we can imagine’ he whispers in a moment of intimacy.

        As with all colonial cultures in Coetzee’s literary creation is above all the settlers’ fear of the indigenous other that both threatens the dominant society and justifies the violence exacted in the name of a search for that always-elusive state of security. Coetzee’s way of describing torture room, empire, barbarian girl, magistrate and his behavior with the barbarian girl, brutality, injustice all shows that how violence is represented by different ways in the novel.

Imperialism

One of the most prominent themes in Waiting for the Barbarians is imperialism. In the novel we see various dimensions of imperialist mentality and actions unveiled. The paranoia of the Empire reflects a more general existential condition of one group intending to impose its culture and political mandate on others. The creation of an enemy, or "other"—the nomad "barbarian"—reflects broader perceptions of a threat that serve to justify imperialist violence. The Empire's anxious need to constantly glorify itself sheds light on more universal narratives of imperialist magnificence and righteousness that again serve as justification of a mandate of power.

Colonialism

Distinct from imperialism, the theme of colonialism as a physical, territorial project with far-reaching implications plays out in Waiting for the Barbarians. The colonial process, as illustrated in the novel, is more than just a cultural or ideological 'imperialist' project; it is a violent physical one that plays out on the earth and on the bodies of the colonized. As it is represented in Waiting for the Barbarians, the experience of colonization impacts the many lives. We see the damage done to the tribal nomads, both in terms of the torture, trauma and violence inflicted on them as well as on the intrusion upon their migrant lifestyle. We also see the impact of colonialism on the earth, as the riverbanks burn, desertification sets in, the fisher people are uprooted and the fields are flooded. Colonialism, as it is shown in Waiting for the Barbarians, entails profound violence and disruption.

Male sexuality

One of the central themes in Waiting for the Barbarians is male sexuality. Along with being a story of colonial power and imperialism, the novel is an extended examination of the magistrate's sexuality and of the nature of male sexuality in general. In the case of the magistrate, sexuality is a socialized condition, closely linked to self-perception. In the times when he has power, his sexuality thrives. As his power wanes, so too does his libido. As existential questions begin to haunt him, his desire is similarly troubled. When he goes out on a long trek, stepping out of his society, he is the least inhibited. The barbarian girl's sexuality remains a mystery for the most part. It is the (distinctly male) sexuality of the magistrate that the novel most closely examines.

Power

Waiting for the Barbarians presents a complex and intimate analysis of power, both in terms of what it consists of and the nature of its effects. Power is clearly shown to be relational, the result of close encounters between individual bodies. The story conveys the physical implications of power, how it derives from the threat and fear of physical pain. The Empire's ultimate expression of power is through the infliction of pain on individual bodies. Joll and Mandel perform torture in public spaces, not only to display their power over their enemy, but to instill fear of suffering on all around them. In this way, they extend their power. A complex power dynamic plays out between the magistrate and the girl. Her disability makes her dependent on him for help and in this way immediately puts him in a position of power. While he doesn't physically harm her, he still takes advantage of his power, by stripping her and putting her through a ritual of strange intimacy. That she doesn't resist him, doesn't mean that his role in relation to her isn't one of power. Another dimension of power plays out in the Empire's war against the barbarians. The Empire does not have power over the nomads as a group, only individual bodies that it captures and tortures. Power is shown in this way not to have any resonant force. Instead it relies on the close physical force of one body over another.

Interrogation

The elusive nature of truth and the difficulties of pinning it down is an important topic in Waiting for the Barbarians. Interrogation is central to to the novel and interrogations take different forms. Most notably we see two competing forms of interrogation: Joll's violent method, in which the interrogative quest for truth is a pretext for cruelty; and the magistrate's soft method, in which his interrogation is persistent and his quest for truth seems sincere.

Rape

The Latin origin of the word rape is to seize, to steal. The concept seems simple, relating to the violation of theft, the affront and sense of loss that happens when a person or group seizes something from another—the taking of property. This original sense of rape frames women's sexual violation as a matter of property. But if in its origin, the concept of rape derives from a concept of theft, it needs to be asked, what has been stolen from the woman? This question is important, and it's one that the magistrate circles around in Waiting for the Barbarians. His fixation on the nomad girl is in many ways a fixation with her defilement rather than her violation. The fact that she has been maimed and defaced and that her beauty is ruined obsesses the magistrate more than her violation—the fact that she has been personally hurt and traumatized. He is obsessed with trying to imagine what she was like before, and tries to picture her in a dignified state. In this way, he conceives of rape as a form of theft rather than as the physical trauma of violence. The book presents a subtle but thorough meditation on rape, culminating in the magistrate's thought that the nomad girl's people will never take her back in as a whole woman. Above and beyond her scars, he muses, her defilement will always be known to them. She will always have had something stolen from her. Of course it is this view of rape as theft, and thus of women as property, that contributes to the prevalence of rape. By seeing the girl as lacking because of her "defilement," the magistrate himself takes or steals the girl's dignity.

Fear of the other

The novel is a close examination of the fear of the other, the foreigner, the outsider. More specifically it is a parable about the creation of an enemy that comes from that fear. The barbarian is a derogatory term that identifies a group as outsiders and vilifies them. The term is deployed effectively by the Empire to designate the nomads as different—lower, savage—and thus to define them as the enemy and justify their persecution. The hatred that grows from fear justifies the violence that perpetuates the fear—specifically of the other.