Topic: Conflict between Civilization and Barbarians

• Name: Sonal Baraiya• Paper No.: 14-The African

Literature• Subject: Unit-4, Waiting for

Barbarians - Coetzee J.M

• Submitted to: Smt. S.B. Gardi, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University, Department of English.

What is Civilization?

• A civilization is any complex society characterized by urban development, symbolic communication forms, and a perceived separation from and domination over the natural environment by a cultural elite.

What is Barbarians?

• An uncultured or brutish person

• A person without culture, refinement, or education; philistine.

• A person in a savage, primitive state; uncivilized person.

Conflict from Civilization:

• First- Magistrate try to harm Barbarian people in very soft way

• “Barbarian girl”• “He uses her by tending her wounds, washing

her broken feet and legs, rubbing her body with almond oil. It is, seemingly, an improvised ritual of domineering guilt, the confused gesture of a confused man.”

• “Shall I tell you what I sometimes wish? I wish that these barbarians would rise up and teach us a lesson, so that we may learn to respect them. We think of the country here as ours, part of our Empire—our outpost, our settlement, our market centre.”

• Is it so? • How far can we rely on Magistrate’s narrative?

• He send for keep eyes on Barbarians-observer• Identity of ‘Barbarian’ will always be regarded as

‘other’ by Imperialist system• “Other” as “Enemy”• Empire-Joll-Power• “Barracks Room”- fear in human psyche• Young Boy-Old Man• Desire of “TRUTH”• Torture body-torture mentality

• According to Coetzee, torture room is a metaphor “for relations between authoritarianism and its victims

• This torture, an obvious violation of the humanity of the aboriginals, is a liberty taken by the Empire to impose the theory that its own will and intentions are more crucial than the rights of those that it is conquering.

• Her deformed tortured body actually visualizes the deformed ideology of imperialism

Conflict from Barbarians

• Writer himself- Empire-without name• Who or what is the real danger?• Who is real Barbarians?• Sense of realization – “binary opposition”• How far fear and anxiety can go and how far

members of society can follow a blind power.

• The empire seeks to eliminate the very "otherness" upon which its own existence depends

• Crimes against humanity• Idea of Cavafy- “Now what’s going to happen

to us without Barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.”