Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life

"After he left, there is a debate about what to do with the teacup. The custom, it appears, is that after a person of colour has drunk from a cup the cup must be smashed. He is surprised that his mother's family, which believes in nothing else, believes in this. However, in the end his mother simply washes the cup with bleach."

Coetzee's fictionalized memoir of his boyhood days is fascinating to compare with similar works by other South African authors. Although born before the official beginning of apartheid, the legacy of racial discrimination obviously preceded that, as Coetzee's youth indicates. Although coming from a white and on the surface, well-to-do background, John Coetzee (and the book is written in the third person, to distance the 'real' Coetzee from the fictionalized version of his younger self) experiences family dysfunction, loss, sexual discovery, a keen awareness of the suffering of animals, and acknowledgement of racial and class discrimination. 

Of course, anyone looking for a factual account of apartheid and white-minority rule in South should read Down Second Avenue or Kaffir Boy for insights into the Black South African experience, but it's interesting to see the evolution of Coetzee's identity and attention to social inequality from a sympathetic white perspective. The earliest reference to racial or ethnic discrimination is in the casual anti-Semitism of Worcester, something Coetzee's supposedly 'liberal' and English-minded mother and uncles participate in. "Natives" are rare in young Coetzee's world (except for the delivery 'boy,' a man, who is seen by Coetzee's parents as representative of a wasteful new generation of 'Natives'), but clearly inhabit the shadows. The Coloured (multiracial) inhabitants of Worcester, the Karoo, and Cape Town are clearly the major Other in the text, yet presented as being closer to the 'earth' and romanticized by a young Coetzee.

The numerous allusions to impoverished Afrikaans whites without shoes (and bearing brutish behavior patterns from the Anglophile point of view of John), the Coloured children abused and beaten, the Coloured children who cannot afford to see the circus but peer through the flaps of the tent, the Coloured farm workers who are the "real" inheritors of the land yet are forced to work it for white owners, or the absurd customs that Coetzee's supposedly 'English'-minded and nontraditional parents preserve about the need to smash a teacup used by any person of color in one's home indicate how before the Nationalists took power, white society in South Africa instituted a class/color hierarchy. Coloureds were not to touch guns, nor were they given the access to education that whites possessed.

The young John's hatred of his father, life in the dusty development of Worcester, and complete breakdown of the family by his teen years (back in Cape Town, after his father's wastefulness and foolish drove the family into deep debt) presents parallels with many other works by authors exploring their childhood. The archetypal loss of innocence, death, disillusionment, and constant search for identity are present here in this short memoir. Certainly, huge themes such as the aforementioned importance of race, as well as shame, disgrace, guilt, love (is it a prison, as a young Coetzee ponders) are also suggestive for the novels Coetzee wrote before and after the publication of Boyhood in the late 1990s. 

It's touching that only in the veld, or on the farm, where John can be free, is where he seems happiest, not afraid, feeling no shame, fear, or confines of family or society. On the Voelfontein farm of his father's family in the Karoo, where anything that grows in that arid landscape is blessed, he is most happy, yet, like all children facing adulthood, he knows life on the farm is not his future. Instead, the memoir ends on a rather unfortunate note in Cape Town, where John is attending poorly staffed  Catholic school, his alcoholic father, after driving the family into debt, does not look for a job, and his mother's willingness to sacrifice herself for the family (as well as see through her love, forcing John to realize his mother is an independent being with disillusionment, disappointment, hardship) propels him into adolescence.

As a short read in the three-part 'autobiography' of Coetzee, Boyhood is undoubtedly useful for fans of Coetzee's work and for a serious reading endeavor on an era in South Africa (the Western Cape in the 1940s). For anyone interested in the rise of Afrikaner nationalism and the divisions among white South Africans, Coetzee's embellished memoir also attests to the seemingly impenetrable divisions wrought by class, language, religion, culture, nationalism, war, and race. Indeed, many Afrikaans words or phrases permeate the text, in addition to the cultural and linguistic divides that separate English South Africans from the Afrikaans-speakers. A family like Coetzee's, of Afrikaans origins yet English speakers in the home, they are caught in the interstices of white South Africa, offering a unique vantage point on the nation's looming social inequities that ushered in the Nationalists and apartheid.

Favorite Quotes

"I'f being a Christian means singing hymns and listening to sermons and then coming out to torment the Jews, he has no wish to be a Christian." (24)

"Being a Catholic is a part of his life reserved for school. Preferring the Russians to the Americans is a secret so dark that he can reveal it to no one. Liking the Russians is a serious matter. It can have you ostracized." (26)

"Soon every one in his class knew about it: the new boy was odd, he wasn't normal. From that mistake, he has learned to be more prudent. Part of being prudent is always to tell less rather than more." (29)

"Afrikaans children are almost like Coloured children, he finds, unspoiled and thoughtless, running wild, then suddenly, at a certain age, going bad, their beauty dying within them." (56)

"There are white people and Coloured people and Natives, of whom the Natives are the lowest and most derided. The parallel is inescapable: the Natives are the third brother." (65)

"He does not see the point of having elections if the party that wins can change the rules. It is like the batsman deciding who may and who may not bowl." (68)

"With Coloured people in general, and with the people of the Karoo in particular, he simply does not know when they cease to be children and become men and women. It seems to happen so early and so suddenly: one day they are playing with toys, the next day they are out with the en, working, or in someone's kitchen, washing dishes." (86) 

Age of Iron

I read Coetzee's Age of Iron while traveling a few weeks ago, so my memory of the novel is fleeting. Nonetheless, I will share a few thoughts that lingered these past weeks. Like the last novel by Coetzee reviewed on this blog, this one is set in Cape Town during the last days of apartheid, and structured as a letter by a dying white woman to her daughter in the States, so written in second person. Stylistically and in terms of setting, it is reminiscent of Life & Times of Michael K in that the reader is treated to lengthy prose, similarly themed inner thoughts of the protagonists, and the landscape of Cape Town and its environs.  The narrator, Mrs. Curren, is a former professor who begins to befriend a homeless man whose race is not specified, Verceuil.

The title of the text refers to the 'iron generation' of black youth who are resisting apartheid while losing out on education, the innocence of childhood, and the decline of 'traditional' family life. This seemingly callous generation that is capable of great violence, shocks and disturbs the dying Curren, who sees the disillusionment, inequality, and hypocrisy of her own liberalism. Still, white South Africans have walked on the iron graves of the ancestors of black South Africans for generations, thereby causing this current generation of South African youth to lose their innocence to struggle for social equality in their country. Other themes of the novel include motherhood (Curren's relationship with her daughter, the use of motherhood to express the burdens of privilege and race white South Africans inherited long before apartheid), humanity, race, retaining humanity in the face of apartheid, death, animal rights (the graphic description of Florence's husband job of killing chickens for a living in an animal factory is quite chilling, or the power of animals as companions in the relationship between Verceuil and his likely stolen dog), as well as companionship.

Through Florence's son and his friend, children from Guguletu who are skipping their substandard schools and out in the streets resisting apartheid, Mrs. Curren is forced to examine her own relationship with white supremacy, her own complicity in the status quo. She experiences the death of Florence's son's friend at the hands of the police, witnesses the violence, roadblocks, and anger in the townships, befriends the homeless Verceuil for companionship and a friend to mail her letter to her daughter. Verceuil's race is never stated, perhaps because his ultimate role in the novel is to show the universality of the human experience and how companionship can transcend racial divisions in conditions of apartheid (although throughout the novel it is quite unclear what Verceuil's motivations are or if he will ever mail Curren's confessing letters).

I must say, some of the same themes of whiteness in South Africa and disillusionment recur in Coetzee's Disgrace, even in the similarities between the two protagonists (aged white academics). Coetzee seems to suggest that in Age of Iron, however, that there is more optimism and hope for a post-apartheid South Africa, even though Curren does not make it. Moreover, it is fascinating to see Coetzee tackle an older, female protagonist as a younger male writer. Just as thought provoking or troubling, is the disagreement Curren has with Florence's cousin, Mr. Thabane, a former teacher in support of the youth embracing anti-apartheid activism, a disagreement that symbolizes the seemingly unbridgeable gap between black South Africans and sympathetic white liberals who see black South Africans as going too far. One cannot help but think of the US Civil Rights Movement and how white moderates and liberals at various times endeavored to curtail or limit black mobilizing and activism.

Perhaps one day I will return to this novel, which clearly has much more to say on the state of affairs of South Africa (and the rest of humanity) below the surface. Likewise, Curren's relationship with Verceuil continues to fascinate me, perhaps suggesting what one New York Times critic suggests is the need for white South Africans to love the 'unlovable' to find redemption. The question of white South African liberalism also remains relevant to post-apartheid South Africa, just as the plight of the homeless and urban poor like Verceuil retains relevance to the social inequities, lack of love, and maintenance of an 'iron age' impedes actual reconciliation. Check out this for a well-written essay exploring Age of Iron, too.

Life & Times of Michael K

Whoa. It's amazing how Coetzee manages to write a novel both about and not about apartheid with few overt references to race. Life & Times of Michael K is a thin book, yet requires laborious reading due to slow-moving prose. However, it's effusive and detailed, painting a picture of the Cape Peninsula I had the fortune to see part of during my time in South Africa. In addition, one sometimes feels Coetzee 'hammers' some of the central themes of the text later on through the thoughts of the 'simpleton' protagonist, Michael K (read this review and check this one out for some other interesting criticism of the novel's debts to Kafka, etc.).

Nonetheless, it's a fascinating experience to read an anti-apartheid text with such a universal message, the struggle to live unfettered in camps, behind high walls, the struggle to be free. That very same struggle seems to transcend racial lines, too, even in a minority-dominated South Africa in the midst of war and unrest. That is best exemplified by the presumably 'white' doctor at the camp in Kenilworth, who also desires to live free, to live life without being in the confines of camps, literal or metaphorical. I believe that theme, that universal struggle to be 'free' is better explored in this fine essay, the wish to escape 'all camps.' Naturally, this theme relates to apartheid South Africa in horrific ways, just as it could be seen as allusions to the earlier history of 'rehabilitation' and labor camps in World War II, the Boer War, or even the German genocide in colonial Namibia. Similarly, the ordeals and experiences of Michael K, from living in a cave to the dugout on the abandoned Visagie farm near Prince Albert (possibly where K's mother lived, he'll never know), the labor camps, the streets of Cape Town or Stellenbosch,

For another fascinating review of the novel, the recently deceased Nadine Gordimer puts things into perspective from a South African anti-apartheid activist and literary background. She emphasizes race and the political oppression and violence of state terror (apartheid) as shaping social relations in profoundly negative ways that prevent relations between blacks (including Coloureds, such as Michael K) and whites taking the shape of anything besides master-slave. She also highlights the importance of gardening and examines some of the political implications of the novel, especially pertaining to how Coetzee perceives (or perceived, at the time) the future of South Africa.

Overall, my own opinion of Coetzee's work is positive. I am always intrigued by his densely layered prose, his fervent attention to describing the veld and landscape, and, even in this novel, his keen interest in animal rights (think of the killing of the wild goat on the Visagie farm). Intertextuality in the novel also intrigues me (the Kafkaesque allusions), as well as Coetzee's penchant for universality in a specifically South African setting. Much like Michael after leaving the cave (which seems like an obvious Plato reference), we, as readers, are led on an allegorical path out of the cave to see the world beyond the shadows of tyranny, to find meaning.

J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace

"He speaks Italian, he speaks French, but Italian and French will not save him here in darkest Africa. He is helpless, an Aunt Sally, a figure from a cartoon, a missionary in cassock and topi waiting with clasped hands and upcast eyes while the savages jaw away in their own lingo preparatory to plunging him into their boiling cauldron. Mission work: what has it left behind, that huge enterprise of enlightenment? Nothing that he can see."

            J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace is quite the read. Like previous novels, such as Waiting for the Barbarians, our protagonist, a college professor in Cape Town who falls in disgrace after an affair with a student gets out, like the civil magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians, becomes reduced to some of the most dehumanizing, alienating experiences one could face while simultaneously learning more about themselves and the human condition. Unlike the other novel, Disgrace is explicitly South Africa, and based on post-apartheid South Africa’s still horrid race relations. In addition, Coetzee’s novel serves as commentary on the post-apartheid state’s notorious crime rate, frequency of rape, and violence by poor black South Africans against white farmers. The ineptitude and corruption of the South African police, black rage and thugs from the still dispossessed, white racism and liberalism, sexism, animal rights, and any hope for reconciliation do not escape the novel unscathed. Indeed, the novel, published in 1999, expresses the sentiments of a white South African author disillusioned with his nation, yet still critical of white nationalist, right-wing racism. 

Nevertheless, Coetzee faced criticism and, according to some critics, his novel, focused entirely on the white college professor and his lesbian daughter, ignored the blacks’ humanity, who are portrayed as rapists, thugs, animals, savages, conniving, and suspicious. One must be skeptical of such claims regarding the author himself, whose intentions, based on his anti-apartheid stance in the past, as well as novels critical of imperialism and racism, merely represented the opinions of many white South Africans. Ettinger, the German farmer, for instance, is one of a dying breed since he believes that with his guns and barbed wire he can protect himself from the savage blacks in Eastern Cape. Other white farmers, due to the danger of assault and robbery, have already given up farming for the safety of gated communities in cities or fleeing South Africa altogether, something Coetzee himself also did by emigrating to Australia. Other white racists include the narrator himself, whose entire literary passion is based on European Romantic poetry and a conspicuous lack of interest or perhaps apathy regarding South African blacks, literary or otherwise. Indeed, the author also expresses opposition to what he terms “redistribution” or his daughter Lucy’s silence about her rape as a manifestation of white guilt over the history of apartheid and white oppression of the black majority. 

Thus, the college professor, who in some ways could be read as Coetzee, who taught at the University of Cape Town, is clearly racist and skeptical about forced “redistribution” by black “thugs” taking it upon themselves to “even the score” with whites by stealing everything and raping white women. Yes, one must oppose murder, but it is difficult to sympathize with the white South Africans whose entire existence for the 19^th and 20^th centuries in southern Africa was rooted in colonialism, theft, slavery, and apartheid. And the college professor overlooking the crimes against humanity committed by white South Africa against the black majority, as well as the present extreme poverty, rape, and assaults against blacks, presents another instance of his inability to truly see black South Africans as fellow people deserving as much of a right to live as whites like himself. The following quote below best indicates his (as well as Coetzee’s) disdain for the present state of South Africa:

"A risk to own anything: a car, a pair of shoes, a packet of cigarettes. Not enough to ago around, not enough cars, shoes, cigarettes. Too many people, too few things. What there is must go into circulation, so that everyone can have a chance to be happy for a day. That is the theory; hold to the theory and to the comforts of theory. Not human evil, just a vast circulatory system, to whose workings pity and terror are irrelevant. That is how one must see life in this country: in its schematic aspect. Otherwise one could go mad. Cars, shoes; women too. There must be some niche in the system for women and what happens to them."

Here, David Lurie, our disgraced, sexist former professor of communications, clearly believes contemporary South Africa, one of the crime capitals of the world, is victimized by the proclaimed “socialist” or redistributive policies supposedly espoused by the African National Congress and other black political organizations across Africa. He may be correct that Lucy should not have kept silent about her rape and then agree to a marriage alliance with the scheming black former hired help, but now expanding, industrious farmer, Petrus, but her ability to understand her role as a white woman in the persisting unequal social conditions of South Africa place her in a better position than her father, who still wants to look after her despite not even truly knowing her (he was not even aware that she had an abortion in the past, nor does he ever imagine himself as the rape victim to truly be in her shoes or understand how his own love affair with Melanie Isaacs was akin to rape). Indeed, his opinion of her decision to not tell the police about the obvious fact she was raped is best stated by a letter he places under her door:

“I don't agree. I don't agree with what you are doing. Do you think that by meekly accepting what happened to you, you can set yourself apart from farmers like Ettinger? Do you think what happened here was an exam: if you come through, you get a diploma and safe conduct into the future, or a sign to paint on the door-lintel that will make the plague pass you by? That is not how vengeance works, Lucy. Vengeance is like a fire. The more it devours, the hungrier it gets."

            Therefore, David Lurie, though resembling the author in some ways, as well as being a white South African male endowed with all the privileges laden in those identities, should not be used to justify accusations of racism against Coetzee himself. His focus on the worldview of so many white South Africans while seemingly ignoring the humanity of blacks in the novel is also specious. One can see that his focus on the cruelty of society toward animals in the novel, especially dogs, may be perceived by some as placing the suffering and abject poverty of black South Africans as below that of animals. Furthermore, the text contains numerous references to “primitive” practices of the blacks such as muti and poking fun at the English spoken by Petrus, a middle-aged African hired help eager to takeover Lucy’s land. Indeed, blacks are not presented as “sophisticated” people. However, their humanity and inner thoughts, though not explicitly stated, remain absent referents for the white racist views of South Africans such as David Lurie. Indeed, Petrus’s enigmatic responses to Lurie regarding his knowledge of the perpetrators of the robbery, rape of his daughter, and nearly killing him, illumine his intelligence. Instead of showing deference for the whites or immediately giving up the youngest of the attackers, a relative of his second wife, Petrus later has the youth taken in on his own neighboring farm, even though he could be the father of Lucy’s future child. Petrus represents a new black South African peasantry no longer afraid of whites, reluctant to continue the old paternalism of relations between white landowners and black laborers. His intelligence, despite lacking formal education, as well as industriousness, pays off in terms of acquisition of additional property, tools and technology for modern agriculture. However, he defense of his rapist relation, Pollux, and views on marriage clearly show his patriarchal tendencies, as well as his suspected scheming in orchestrating an attack on Lucy solely to hasten his land grabs, clearly lead one to conclude he is far from an ideal, man. However, one could argue this best represents his humanity as David Lurie or Lucy, since, like whites, blacks in post-apartheid South Africa are just as culpable in the extreme deprivation and oppression of each other and other representatives of the animal kingdom, the hordes of unwanted animals that must be put to sleep by Bev Shaw. 

            Indeed, as one can clearly see, Petrus’s well-rounded character of hard-working, dedicated and skilled farmer contradicts the narrative of white South Africa of “savage” blacks. In spite of this, most blacks in the novel do not receive the same degree of development or even hints of their inner thoughts outwardly expressed. Furthermore, most of the characters are whites, which may be interpreted by some as reinforcing the white supremacist narrative of post-apartheid South Africa. In truth, Coetzee’s well-written, short novel best represents the disgraced state of humanity itself in the terrible conditions prevailing both in South Africa and abroad. His narrow lens in the text focusing on whites itself is a criticism of those views that perpetuate this aforementioned disgrace, whether its victimhood or perpetrators inflicting rape and other forms of violence on each other and animals around them. Moreover, this story also indicates Coetzee’s consistent critique of the state's role in upholding this disgrace, which is of course a result of internal decisions compounded by societal structures that enhance rape, racism, and other forms of disgrace. In the end, David Lurie accepts his disgrace by, in the opinion of this blogger, letting the dog he grew fond of be "put down" instead of prolonging its inevitable death and suffering. Likewise, one would like to think he finally accepts his disgrace by no longer exerting his force onto his daughter and others, allowing Lucy to make her own decisions about her rape, and the child born of it. David says it best:

 "In my own terms, I am being punished for what happened between myself and your daughter. I am sunk into a state of disgrace from which it will not be easy to lift myself. It is not a punishment I have refused. I do not murmur against it. On the contrary, I am living it out from day to day, trying to accept disgrace as my state of being. Is it enough for God, do you think, that I live in disgrace without term?"

J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians

"Let it at the very least be said, if it ever comes to be said, if there is ever anyone in some remote future interested to know the way we lived, that in this farthest outpost of the Empire of light there existed one man who in his heart was not a barbarian."

J.M. Coetzee, the first author to win the Booker Prize twice, is one of South Africa's best known writers. A white man of Afrikaner descent, he is also one of few African writers to receive the Nobel Prize, in 2003. His short novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, has some unsurprising parallels with Beckett's Waiting for Godot in that the novel focuses on a frontier town of an empire preparing for a barbarian invasion that never comes. Much like Godot, the people of the town, partly due to propaganda and misinformation (in addition to excessive punitive measures taken, such as raids on the nomadic barbarians) from the Empire, actually fear an invasion by the united peoples of the desert and mountains beyond the frontier. The narrator, an unnamed magistrate comfortable in his middle aged, corpulent body and a life of peaceful relations with the "barbarian" nomads, he resists the Empire's warmongering and dehumanization of the barbarians, whose land the Empire seized unjustly during its own expansion anyway. 

The irony of it is the barbarians, despite the lies and insanity of Empire bureaucrats and military officials from the distant capital, never evinced any sign of military aggression. Indeed, when pursued and attacked by the foolish army led by Colonel Joll, the barbarians simply led them further and further into the desert and mountains during the winter months, letting nature take care of the true barbarians, the Empire. The civil magistrate of this frontier settlement nevertheless loses power, is publicly shamed and tortured, and imprisoned for several months after making an unauthorized visit to the barbarians in order to return a lover he took from the prisons, a young woman who was partly blinded due to the torturous practices of the Empire. The rest of the novel focuses on the suffering of the town and its abandonment by the military in the face of an expected "barbarian" invasion by nomadic peoples who never come. Indeed, at the novel's conclusion, one is forced to accept that everything that transpired was avoidable, but imperialism, which relies on dehumanization of the Other and fictional notions of nationalism which manifest in reality through an unnecessary military, created the conditions favorable for human self-destruction and violence.

Coetzee skillfully avoids the obvious flaw of presenting the narrator as a blameless, sinless individual forced into the Empire's genocidal mania. Though he resists futilely the Empire's torture and inhumane practices on barbarians, he also takes advantage of the so-called barbarians himself, essentially using one as a sex slave. The rest of the frontier town become complicit in the extreme actions taken by the Empire, including joining in the beating of captives and, when the narrator finds himself shackled, participating and cheering over his public beatings and suffering. In fact, at one point the soldiers who have taken over the town invite a child to beat 4 "barbarian" captives in the square! From all this one can see that Coetzee is exploring the nuances of human oppression by illustrating how even those who seem to be the "victors" or non-oppressed are also fundamentally worsened morally and socially by the extreme violence they partake in or accept as part of the human condition. This has striking relevance to the Holocaust, for instance, or, given Coetzee's South African origin, the history of white European colonialism and apartheid. Like the fictional, unnamed locale and empire in Waiting for the Barbarians,   the Cape Coast of South Africa was settled under the direction of the Dutch East India Company, which then blossomed into expansion of the Cape Coast colony at the expense of local Khoikhoi pastoralists, slavery, and trickery. 

These aforementioned raids and colonial land grabs led to later conflicts with the voortrekkers, whites from the Cape Coast who, traveling with wagons and animals, pushed further north until the new frontier led to border conflicts with the Xhosa peoples, and eventually, pushing further northeast until inevitable conflicts arose with other South African peoples, such as the Zulu in the 19th century. Though lacking the obvious political centralization of the Empire in Coetzee's novel, the white Boers or Afrikaners, adopting a semi-nomadic farming lifestyle while stealing land and resources from other peoples, formed Boer republics in the 19th century to escape British rule in the Cape Colony and continue the practice of slavery. Needless to say, white South Africans, represented by the Empire in Coetzee's novel, are the ones oppressing the "barbarians" who have been pushed gradually further and further into inhospitable land, representing the Khoikhoi, Xhosa, and other South African peoples. Where Coetzee complicates this narrative, however, is through the almost entirely focused plot on the people of the Empire, thoroughly exploring the nuances of their own oppression due to the Empire's mismanagement, abandonment, and desire to create war for the sake of perpetuating it's own existence. 

By taking advantage of the "barbarians" image as the despised and dangerous Other, the people of the town accept the necessity of war while at the same time becoming pawns of the Empire. Likewise, white South Africans, accepting white supremacy and the propaganda supporting their own cultural superiority (ignoring the fact that as a frontier settlement, the town the magistrate works in is distant from the imperial capital and more of a fusion of multiple frontier identities, like white South Africans multiple European, African and Asian influences) begin to internalize it and accept white rule and apartheid. However, Coetzee's novel has universal dimensions, since this story of human oppression pertains to human relationships beyond South Africa. The predilection for torture and excessive violence in the novel has obvious connotations to everything from the Holocaust to slavery, for instance. Furthermore, the narrator himself is reminiscent of Schindler and other non-Jews who resisted the Holocaust, while simultaneously bearing moral culpability since the narrator, like Schindler, also gained privileges and rights over the subjugated Other. 

Unfortunately, the "barbarians" of the novel are never fully explored. Their perspective on the history of relations between themselves and the Empire which seized their land, is never fleshed out, save for the lover taken by the magistrate who abandons him immediately when given the chance to return to her people. The barbarians encountered then, armed with short bows and ancient muskets, become vacuous shells of developed characters whose own culture and way of life as "barbarians" seems to focus entirely on subsistence and nothing else. Coetzee's troubling reduction of the barbarians to seemingly animal-like existence, though done through the lens of the narrator, nevertheless lacks the appropriate, nuanced approach to give depth to the barbarians. Indeed, all the reader really learns is that, due to the magistrate's amateur archaeology, there was a civilization in the region in the distant past with it's own script, the area used to be far more fertile but the lake near the settlement is becoming increasingly saltier and the land less arable, and the barbarians used the land previously for pasturage. The fact that there was a "civilization" in the region in the past inevitably conjures the story of Great Zimbabwe and the obvious fact of black civilizations and advanced cultures in southern Africa, a powerful contradicting factor in the historiography of southern Africa written by Afrikaners and whites of English descent, which necessitated a mythological history of ancient white or Semitic-speaking settlers who constructed the zimbabwes across Mozambique and Zimbabwe.  

However, since the novel's focus is on the Empire and the narrator as an official for the oppressive side, Coetzee's novel focuses on depicting the "barbarian heart" of the so-called civilized Empire. Interestingly, since the novel was published during apartheid and Coetzee himself opposed the insidious institution, the novel can also be read as Coetzee's critical self-reflection on white opposition to apartheid and apartheid's dehumanization of whites themselves, since the real barbarians quickly become the white oppressors and proponents of imperialism. Anyway, Coetzee's novel is fascinating and actually a dark comedy in its denouement, with the incoming marauding hordes of "barbarians" never coming. The actual prose is descriptive, accessible, and, since the novel's location is not rooted in any known time or continent, could be almost anywhere (though we know the barbarians have long hair and distinct eyes differing from those of the Empire). One does not have to read the novel through South African lens, but given Coetzee's own background and the contemporary system of apartheid when it was written, it certainly appears to be a powerful critique white-ruled South Africa and imperialism more broadly. Furthermore, Coetzee's novel explores the inner psyche of a person compelled to live in the most horrendous environment, with huge consequences for the narrator and everyone else. Nobody wins in war, nobody truly wins through racism or colonialism.

Another great quote!

"But my torturers were not interested in degrees of pain. 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. They did not come to force the story out of me of what I had said to the barbarians and what the barbarians had said to me. So I had no chance to throw the high-sounding words I had ready in their faces. They came to my cell to show me the meaning of humanity, and in the space of an hour they showed me a great deal."