“What has made it
impossible for us to live in time like fish in water, like birds in
air, like children? It is the fault of Empire! Empire has created the
time of history. Empire has located its existence not in the smooth
recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged
time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe. Empire
dooms itself to live in history and plot against history. One thought
alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how
not to die, how to prolong its era.”
“When some men suffer
unjustly, it is the fate of those who witness their suffering to
suffer the shame of it.”
During a tumultuous period in the
history of apartheid, the government in Pretoria, morally isolated
by the international community, committed some of the worst excesses
of violence against the native tribes whom it had subjugated and
humiliated for more than two centuries. In the midst of this
bloodletting, J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians
was published in 1980. The novel clearly indicts the apartheid
government for crimes against humanity, though Coetzee was clever
enough to set his story in the horse-and-wagon days in a frontier,
far away, long ago. Also, intelligently, Pretoria, South Africa, even
the Magistrate of this frontier town are never outright named, so
that the injustice it dramatizes could be anywhere in the world.
Technology might evolve, but Man's abominations only change form or
flags or color.
Our
narrator, the Magistrate, does not rule nor think like a despot, but
trusts in the Law, even when he doesn't agree with it (as he explains
to a young deserter he is sentencing, “All we can do is to uphold
the laws, all of us, without allowing the memory of justice to
fade.”). His days progress uneventfully with dull bureaucratic work, he hunts (but
sometimes lacks the nerve to kill his prey), reads the classics,
visits the outpost's demimonde once a week, and collects artifacts of
the desert from past civilizations. He has “not asked for more than
a quiet life in quiet times.”
This
tranquility is disturbed by a Colonel Joll, a man who hides his eyes
behind dark glasses and is investigating a “disturbance” caused
by some barbarians. There are two prisoners, a boy and his
grandfather, hardly “terrorist” types, but without due process
and under the duress of torture (in which the old man dies) the boy,
traumatized and scarred, concedes a barbarian plot in the works. The
Magistrate, who loathes the Colonel's methods, nevertheless
rubber-stamps
a reconnaissance
expedition into the countryside. A week later, prisoners are sent
back, aboriginal
fisherfolk, arrested for simply existing. After Joll returns to the
capital the Magistrate has the prisoners released to return to their
land.
But
one young woman doesn't leave. Her father had been killed in Joll's
interrogations and she has had her ankles broken and her corneas
burned so that she can only see penumbra forms. She is begging for
food, and the Magistrate taking pity on her, invites her to work in
the kitchen, and she becomes something of a concubine. But he doesn't
sleep with her-- he washes and dresses her wounds and caresses her
body, but doesn't go any further. The actions of the Magistrate seem
to embody liberal guilt: the white man feels bad about the
unfairness of the power structure, but as he yet benefits from such
relationships, hesitates to go any further than cosmetic aid.
Eventually, accompanied by a guide and two soldiers, the Magistrate
undertakes a harrowing journey to return the woman (she, too, never
named) to her people.
When
he returns, he finds a charged atmosphere in his sleepy outpost. The
Magistrate-- accused of conspiring with the enemy regarding the
government's intended campaign-- is stripped of authority and
imprisoned, while Joll assumes despotic rule. In the process of
losing everything: his authority, his reputation, his comfortable
life, the Magistrate moves beyond pity and compassion into outrage
and rather than apologize he determines to protest and provoke the
Colonel, until he is then stripped of his last vestige, his dignity,
when severely tortured: “They were interested
only in demonstrating to me what it meant to live in a body, as a
body, a body which can entertain notions of justice only as long as
it is whole and well, which very soon forgets them when its head is
gripped and a pipe is pushed down its gullet and pints of salt water
are poured into it till it coughs and retches and flails and voids
itself.”
The
Magistrate is so humiliated authorities don't even bother locking him
up anymore. He is allowed to roam the yard like an animal, begging
for scraps, his self-respect annihilated. For all his concepts of
social justice, he is no revolutionary; he merely wants to survive,
even “to be fat again.” The crisis for the Magistrate comes when
he cannot offer a credible alternative between Joll's fascist
maneuvers and the only truly righteous scenario: “Justice:
once that word is uttered, where will it all end? Easier to shout No!
Easier to be beaten and made a
martyr. Easier to lay my head on a block than to defend the cause of
justice for the barbarians: for where can that argument lead but to
laying down our arms and opening the gates of the town to the people
whose land we have raped?”
Through
it all, the Colonel doubles down on the settlers' worst fears
regarding their “enemy.” He is invisible, just outside the walls,
lurking: “There is no woman living along the frontier who has not
dreamed of a dark barbarian hand coming from under the bed to grip
her ankle, no man who has not frightened himself with visions of the
barbarians carousing in his home, breaking the plates, setting fire
to the curtains, raping his daughters.” The soldiers, drunken,
carousing parasites on the town, are thus bandied as the last defense
against the much ballyhooed “barbarians.” Never mind that many of
the settlers have never encountered or been directly threatened by
this invoked Boogeyman. Their emotions are merely fomented by the
most obvious physical differences in “us-and-them” adversarial
relations. And it can be hopeless
talking them out of their fears and prejudices: “How do you
eradicate contempt, especially when the contempt is founded on
nothing more substantial than differences in table manners,
variations in the structure of the eyelid?” Of course, it doesn't take much effort to realize that the titular barbarians we await are not necessarily the "other," but a kind of monster within, surfacing when we give in to our prejudices, self-interest, and fear of the unknown.
The writer, J. M. Coetzee
Before
his fall from power, the Magistrate is queried by a military officer
as to the intentions of the barbarians. The answer is simple, but
actualization seemingly impossible. “They want an end to the spread
of settlements across their land. They want their land back, finally.
They want to be free to move about with their flocks from pasture to
pasture as they used to.” We could be talking Tibetans,
Palestinians,
and the Aboriginals, to name but a few indigenous peoples whose lives
were uprooted, reconstituted in poverty and neglect, and sentenced to
live a second-class existence. That is the most poignant reaction to
Coetzee's novel-- that he has dramatized the violence of power
structures, to guide our outrage and compassion, reminding us of the
complex bravery choosing to stand for social justice, all the while
being faithful to universal truths in beautiful, clear prose. It
is not every day that a reader discovers an overlooked masterpiece.
