Waiting for Barbarian

• Name: Neha Mehta• Roll No: 15• Year: 2016• Subject: The African Literature• Submitted To: Smt.S.B.Gardi Department of English Bhavnagar University

About Author

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

• Waiting for Barbarians is all about “We” and “Other”.

We

Other

Expansion

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

The novel deals with the nameless narrator governing the nameless Empire.

Here the Empire represents any and all empires and the barbarians are all cultures oppressed by colonization.

Elimination

• The empire seeks to eliminate the very "otherness" upon which its own existence depends. The "other" must become the "enemy."

• Borders are defended and attacked, questioned and crossed, made to stand for what is within and what is without.

• Borders are the great demarcation of a fatal dichotomy that has guided all of human history, the differentiation of US and THEM.

Borders

• Colonel Joll tortures the old man the young boy. The Magistrate is unable or unwilling to to hear the screams coming from the granary hut.

Torture

• Her deformed tortured body actually visualizes the deformed ideology of imperialism which perceives her other because of her “barbarian” identity.

• Washing the traces away from the girl’s body which the torturer has left is impossible, but it is impossible too, to wash away the responsibility from the torturer’s hand.

• Magistrate says,

“I ought never to have taken my lantern to see what was going on in the hut by the

granary.

He think….

, "It has not escaped me that an interrogator can wear two masks, speak with two voices,

one harsh, one seductive“.

Joll has done to the Barbarian Girl and her father, and by extension, what the Empire has done to "the other".

Joll uses instruments of pain on the body, cutting into it, probing it to get the truth out of his victims.

• The barbarian girl is voiceless and what has happened to her remains a secret to the Magistrate.

• She is the figure of the voiceless or unspeaking "other.“

Crime against Humanity

Comparison

The barbarian girl is voiceless and what has happened to her remains a secret to the Magistrate.She is the figure of the voiceless or unspeaking "other.“

Signifyfigurativelyliterally

She lives

Thinks of us as visitors, transients….That is what they are

thinking. That they will outlast us.”

Think of the country here as ours, part of our Empire—

our outpost, our settlement, our market

centre.

“We”

“Other”

Difference

as both desert nomads and settled farmers

as both herdsmen and fisher people

Both peaceful and warlike