concept of "we" and "other" in 'waiting for barbarians

Name :pipavat Gopi Roll No. : 25 Year : 2017 Paper No.:14 African Literature Topic : Concept of “We” and “Other” in

“Waiting for the Barbarians” Submitted To: Department of English

Maharaja Krushnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

About author

John Maxwell Coetzee is a novelist, essayist, linguist, translator and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

John Maxwell Coetzee's work 'Waiting for the Barbarians' is a story of the internal conflict of a magistrate who must administer the law in a small colonial town. Throughout the work, he witnesses the torture of the town's inhabitants, or barbarians as they are referred to in the work.

. The magistrate's internal conflict begins when he discovers that Colonel Joll is torturing some of the natives.

About story:

The story is narrated in the first person by the unnamed magistrate of a small colonial town

the colonists, might be preparing to attack the town

the Third Bureau conducts an expedition into the land beyond the frontier. Led by a sinister Colonel Joll , the Third Bureau captures a number of barbarians, brings them back to town, tortures them, kills some of them, and leaves for the capital in order to prepare a larger campaign

The Empire

The Empire is abstract, timeless, placeless, but through the scrim of Empire, “ Waiting for the Barbarian” renders a moment in our politics, a style of our injustice. • Precisely this power of historical immediacy gives the novel its thrust, its larger and , “universal value.”

The novel is about such an empire that “must expand, either by transforming the other, wiping it from the face of the earth.”

The “WE”- “OTHER” complex among the rules create crises in the Empire. Expansion

Empire [WE] seeks to eliminate the very “Otherness” upon which its own existence depends. They believed “Other” to be their enemies.

narrator has limited knowledge about Imperial capital and Barbarians.

Colonel Joll the representative of “WE” tortures the old man and the young boy who are the representative of “OTHER”

Instruments of pain

• Joll tortured the Barbarian Girl and her father, by extension, we can say the Empire “WE” did wrong to “THE OTHERS”.

• “WE” uses instruments of pain on the body, cutting into it probing it to get the truth out of his victims

Crime against humanity

The torture to Barbarian girl is the torture to ‘voiceless’ or ‘mute’- other.

The treatment of “WE” towards “OTHERS” is ‘crime against humanity’

When the Magistrate asked the Girl about, where she lived, her answer was ‘she lives’. She lives

Harmless barbarians

The magistrate believed the Barbarians to be harmless people who wanted to re- establish themselves as their land was taken away.

The people waited for their attack but they were not attacked

Conclusion

The Barbarians “don’t exist as the empire conceives of them.”

The lesson of “Otherness” can be learned only at the hands of empire and within its borders where the conception of the ‘Other’ takes place.