Topic: Concept of “We” and “Other” as shown in “Waiting for the Barbarians”

Name: Bhatt Urvi P.Role No. : 31

Std: M.A-2 (Sem-4)Paper no. : 14

Paper Name: The African LiteratureSubmitted to: S. B. Gardi Maharaja

Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar UniversityGmail ID: bhatt.urvi22@gmail.com

About author

• John MaxwellCoetzee is anovelist, essayist,linguist, translatorand recipient of theNobel Prize inLiterature.

• The Empire is abstract, timeless,placeless, but through the scrim ofEmpire, “ Waiting for the Barbarian”renders a moment in our politics, astyle of our injustice.

• Precisely this power of historicalimmediacy gives the novel its thrust,its larger and , “universal value.”

Empire

• Waiting for the Barbarians is all about “WE” and “OTHER”.

WE[White]

OTHER[Black]

We/ other

• The novel is about such an empirethat “must expand, either bytransforming the other, wiping itfrom the face of the earth.”

• The novel deals with the namelessnarrator governing the namelessEmpire.

• The “WE”- “OTHER” complexamong the rules create crises in theEmpire.

Expansion

• The Empire [WE] seeks toeliminate the very “Otherness”upon which its own existencedepends. They believed “Other”to be their enemies.

Elimination

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

• Borders are the great demarcation of afatal dichotomy that has guided all ofhuman history: the differentiation of “US”and “THEM”.

• Bodies and Borders imply limitation,division and separation.

Borders

• The nameless narrator haslimited knowledge aboutImperial capital andBarbarians.

• Colonel Joll therepresentative of “WE”tortures the old man and theyoung boy who are therepresentative of “OTHER”.

Torture

• “WE” investigated other cruelly. The puncturemarks on the boy’s stomach and legs showstheir, brutality.

• The “Caterpillarish” scar near the Barbariangirl’s eye reflect the ways of theirinvestigation.

• It seems as if the Barbarians were “WE” andnot the “OTHERS”.

Brutality

• The Magistrate one among “WE” criticizes the way of investigation as he says:

“I ought never to have taken my lantern to see

what was going on in the hut by the granary.”

Magistrate’s view

He thinks,

“It has not escaped methat an interrogator canwear two masks, speakwith two voices, oneharsh, one seductive.”

Dual personality

• Joll tortured the Barbarian Girland her father, by extension, wecan say the Empire “WE” didwrong to “THE OTHERS”.

• “WE” uses instruments of painon the body, cutting into itprobing it to get the truth out ofhis victims.

Instruments of pain

• The torture to Barbariangirl is the torture to‘voiceless’ or ‘mute’- other.

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

Crime against humanity

• Here, we can compare theBarbarian Girl’s muteness withFriday of the novel RobinsonCrusoe. And Friday of the novelFoe.

Comparison

• Though all three of them havetheir own voice yet their voicescease to signify, figuratively andliterally.

• When the Magistrate asked theGirl about, where she lived, heranswer was ‘she lives’.

She lives

• Magistrate thus mentions his thoughts-

“Shall I tell you what I sometimeswish? I wish that these Barbarianswould rise up and teach us a lesson,so that we may learn to respectthem.”

His thoughts

• He differentiates the feelings of ‘WE’ and ‘OTHERS’

“WE”

“OTHERS”

Think of the country here asours, part of our Empire, ouroutpost, our settlement, ourmarket center.

Thinks of us as visitors,transients… that is whatthey are thinking. Thatthey will outlast us.

Difference

Barbarians are described asBoth desert nomads and settled farmers

Both herdsman and fisher people

Both speaking known and unknown languages

Both peaceful and warlike

Both pitiable and fearsome

• The magistrate believed theBarbarians to be harmlesspeople who wanted to re-establish themselves as theirland was taken away.

• The people waited for theirattack but they were notattacked.

Harmless barbarians

• The Barbarians “don’t exist as the empireconceives of them.”

• The lesson of “Otherness” can be learnedonly at the hands of empire and withinits borders where the conception of the‘Other’ takes place.

Conclusion