Concept of We and Other in waiting for Barbarian

• Name              : Dodiya Mehul Maheshbhai
• Roll No           : 23
• Enrollment No: 206910840120011
• Class               : M.A. Sem 2
• Paper Name    : The African Literature
• Question         : Concept of We and Other in waiting for Barbarian
• Words             : 1,626sss
• Percentage      :
• Year                  : 2017/19
• Email id :- svkmehul97@gmail.com
• Submitted to   : Smt. S. B. Gardi Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University.

John Maxwell Coetzee is a novelist, essayist, linguist, translator and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature.  He writes many novels. It was chosen by Penguin for its series Great Books of the 20th century and won both the James Tait Black Memorial prize and Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for fiction. It is first published in 1960. His first work of fiction was Dusklands written in 1974.The second one is Waiting for Barbarian in 1980. "Waiting for the Barbarians" is a novel published in 1980. “Waiting for the Barbarians” is about morality and it deals with human cruelty. The title is from a tone from the Greek post “Constantine P. Cavafy”. The story was about imaginary Empire.“First published in Britain in 1980, J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians was intended as an allegorical attack on Apartheid South Africa. However, by constructing the narration entirely in the present tense, and situating the story in an anonymous frontier settlement of an unnamed ‘Empire’, Coetzee eschews the limitations imposed by specificities of temporal, geographical and historical context and succeeds in attaining a universalism to which all writers aspire, but only the greatest realize. The novel details the fall from grace of an unexceptional magistrate of the Empire, and addresses the social perversions that necessarily attend to colonial and imperial projects driven by expansionist ambitions, pre-emptive philosophies and/or delirious self-righteousness.

Coetzee borrowed the title of his novel from the poetry of the Alexandria-born Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy.The poem was written in November 1898 and first published in 1904.[1] It depicts a day in an unnamed city-state where everything has come to a halt because the population is awaiting the arrival of "the barbarians", whom they plan to welcome.Coetzee understands that it is against the image of the diabolical dark barbarian that Eurocentric cultures have constructed their own fragile sense of civilization and identity. Take that away, and the proponents of the colonial mission to civilise find themselves disoriented and redundant, deserted in the desert.

The examination of the critiques raised in the book will be discussed through interpreting the characters as victims of the Empire. The first victim is the barbarian girl in which will be examined in relation to he as an outsider and as an enemy of the Empire. The Magistrate as the second victim and his self-journey will be examined in relation to his evaluation to become the other. Woman as the third victim of the Empire is the part, which discuss womenÕs silenced, and powerless  positioning in the society. Then in the following section, Empire as the victim of itself and its self-destructive power will be pointed.

we have looked at several works that have incorporated the theme of identity. One in particular, Waiting For The Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee , makes prevalent use of objectification language in establishing identity.

Concept of ‘We’ and ‘Other’

This term refers to a way of discourse when referring to ourselves and others.  The discourse of “we/us vs. them/others” is the construction of a boundary which creates a separation between groups and identities.  The “we” or the “us” in this case is the group which is included, while, on the contrary, the “them” or “others” is the excluded group.  Such language also works to create exclusionary boundaries in order to create collectivity, solidarity, and sense of belonging for the “we/us”- while excluding the “them/others” from this dominant collective identity.  In this sense, it creates a distinction between both groups and people, as well as it assumes boundaries between identities.

1) Empire

“The space about us here is merely space, no meaner or grander than the space above the shacks and tenements and temples and offices of the capital. Space is space, life is life, everywhere the same. But as for me, sustained by the toil of others, lacking civilized vices with which to fill my leisure, I pamper my melancholy and try to find in the vacuousness of the desert a special historical poignancy. Vain, idle, misguided! How fortunate that no one sees me!”

In this above  quotation we find that the Magistrate say about We and other. We means The Empire and Others mean native person or Barbarian. Empire is abstract, placeless and timeless but power operates on the innocent nomads of that town. Empire constantly living under the threat that Barbarians will attack over empire, only because of that illusion members of Third Bureau torturing Nomads of that town physically as well as psychologically. To whom we consider as Barbarians?, to those who are different from us or not part of us or an outsiders. We just used to say they are different then us and we behave with them in a different way that create the identity of ‘Other’ and we automatically create our identity as ‘We’ which discriminate people on the different grounds. Colonel Joll represents ‘WE’ that tortures Old man and Young Boy who are the representative of ‘Other’. ‘Other’ represents mute and voiceless that never raise voice against the power of the empire (We). There are many people who are considered as the Other who don’t have power to do anything as Barbarian Girl who seduced by the magistrate who sympathizes and rule over her but she can’t raise her voice against authority/Power.

Expansion and Elimination

The novel is about the Empire that must be expanding at any cost either by transforming Other or wiping it from the face of the earth. In this novel, Nameless narrator governing the unknown empire which expands by removing nomads or barbarians from that town. Empire (We) seeks to eliminate the Otherness upon which their own existence depends, they believe that ‘Others’ are their enemies. The empire exists only in relation to Barbarians. If Barbarians exist or 'Other' are there then Empire gain power to rule over them.  Existence of the empire is depended on the existence of barbarians. If barbarians are not existed then who know that empire is powerful or who say that empire has the whole power control. It means. If barbarians are existed then and then empire will be existed in the world. (Bhatt)

Torture and Brutality

Torture has exerted a dark fascination on Coetzee and many other South African authors. Coetzee suggests, ‘The true challenge is how not to play the game by the rules of the state, how to establish one's own authority, how to imagine torture and death on one's own terms’. It is about the impact of the torture chamber on the life of a man of conscience". This man of conscience, known only as the Magistrate, is the chief administrator of a small village on the frontier between the civilization of the Empire and the wastelands inhabited by the nomadic Barbarians. As Joll interrogates and tortures Barbarian prisoners, the Magistrate becomes increasingly sympathetic toward the victims. When the Colonel leaves the outpost, the Magistrate takes a Barbarian woman, crippled as a result of her torture, into his house and bed. Coetzee's references to contemporary literary theory suggest the authorial impotency of the novelist who attempts to write about torture, oppression, and-in his particular case-South Africa. The Magistrate's storytelling thus represents Coetzee's own way of solving the first moral dilemma of the author writing about torture. The narrator also comments on the specific technique to be employed when the Magistrate tells Joll, 'They [the tiles] form an allegory. They can be read in many orders. Further, each single slip can be read in many ways. Together they can be read as a domestic journal, or they can be read as a plan of war, or they can be turned on their sides and read as a history of the last years of the Empire-the old Empire, I mean' " (112) (Van Zanten and M)

By this torture on nomads as well as on the Magistrate later on make them Other. Even Magistrate had lots of torture that his life became like the dog because he save Barbarian girl from the torture but Magistrate himself has created feelings of Otherness for the Barbarian girl by seduced her which create women as Other.

Conclusion

Our human methods of understanding involve primarily language. Truths realized with a certain degree of dramatic (i.e. emotional) impact tend to have more poignancy. By choosing to use objectification language, Coetzee is trying specifically to cause an emotional response in the reader. We are supposed to be appalled, but in the end, we remain detached from the suffering because we know that it’s only fiction, even though it relates to the very real plight of those suffering under Apartheid. We are thus left wondering just how exactly we are supposed to feel about suffering that we don’t “know.”J.M. Coetzee’s novel is notable for taking on the issue of inevitable objectification when dealing with the suffering of the “other.” His use of objectification language is poignant because it is necessary. We, as readers, are just as guilty of objectifying the barbarians, and thus detaching ourselves from their suffering as the Imperials in the book.

Works Cited

Shahedadpuri, Komal. Concept of 'We' and 'Other'. 3 April 2018. 6 april 2019 <http://komal1311.blogspot.com/2018/04/paper-14-african-literature-assignment.html?m=1>.

urmi, bhatt. Concept of "We" and "others" in Waiting for Barbarians. 12 March 2015. 12 April 2019 <https://www.slideshare.net/bhatturvi/31-urvi-bhatt-waiting-for-the-barbarian-ppt>.

"Jm Coetzees Waiting For The Barbarians English Literature Essay." UKEssays.com. 11 2018. All Answers Ltd. 04 2019 <https://www.ukessays.com/essays/english-literature/jm-coetzees-waiting-for-the-barbarians-english-literature-essay.php?vref=1>.