Conflict between the colonization and Barbarians

Name: Savani Manisha

Paper: African Literature

Topic: Conflict between the colonization and Barbarians

Roll: 10

M.A: 2

SEM: 4

Year: 2012-13

Submitted to:

                                           Dr, Dilip Barad

                                   M.K Bhavnagar University

          Conflict between the colonization and     Barbarians

           Waiting for the Barbarians is a novel by the South African born author J. Mary Coetzee winner of the noble prize in literature in 2003. This is the allegory novel and in this focuses the conflict between the colonization and barbarians.

          The story is set in a small frontier town under the jurisdiction of a political entity known only as the empire the town‘s magistrate is the story‘s protagonist and first person narrator. His rather peaceful existence in the town comes to an end with the declaration of a state of emergency and arrival of the third Bureau, Special Forces of the empire led by a sinister colonel Joll. There are rumors that the natives of the land called barbarians are preparing an attack on the empire and so colonel Joll and his man conduct an expedition into the land beyond the frontier. They capture a number of barbarians bring them back to town, torture them, kill some of them, and leave for the capital in order to prepare a large campaign against the barbarians in the meantime the magistrate begin to question the legitimacy of imperialism and personally nurses a barbarian girl who was left crippled and partly blinded by the third Bureau‘s tortures. The magistrate has an intimate yet ambiguous relationship with the girl. Eventually he decides to take her back to her people. After a life threatening trip through the barren land during which they have sex. He succeeds in returning her finally asking, to no avail, if she will stay with him and returns to his own town. The third Bureau soldiers have reappeared there and now arrest the magistrate for having deserted his past and consorting with enemy without much possibility of a trial in wartime, the magistrate remains in a locked cellar for the first time a near complete lack of basic freedoms. He finally acquires a key that allows them to leave the makeshift jail but finds that he has no place to escape to and only spends his time outside the jail scavenging for scraps of food.

            Later colonel Joll triumphantly returns from the wilderness with several barbarians captives and makes a public spectacle of their torture. Although the cloud is encouraged to participate in their beatings the magistrate bursts onto the scene to stop it. But it subdued taking the magistrate a group of soldiers hangs him up by his arms, culminating his understanding of imperialistic violence in a personal experience of torture with the magistrate is spirit clearly crushed, the soldiers mockingly let him roam freely through the town , knowing he has nowhere to go and no longer a threat to their mission. The soldiers however begin to go and no longer a threat to their mission. The soldiers, however, begin to abandon the town as winter approaches and their campaign against the barbarians starts to fall apart. The Magistrate tries to confront Joll on his final return from the wild, but the colonel refuses to speak to him, hastily feeling the area with the last of the soldiers , with a widespread belief that the barbarians intend to invade the town soon, all the soldiers and many civilians have now departed through the magistrate helps encourage the remaining townspeople to continue their lives and to prepare for the winter there is no sign of the barbarians by the time the season’s first snow falls on the town.

                The popular book waiting for the Barbarians effort of small town’s magistrate to run his town under the Yoke of a cruel and unjust emperor. The main characters in the book colonel Joll and the magistrate demonstrate the idea the fear manifests itself in violence. As the characters perpetuate violence in their lives they snow that point that fear it leads only to injustice and cruelty.

        An oppressive regime traffics in fear, and the empire is no different fear keeps its subjects from acting out, and it keeps them scared of a race of peaceful people that they have actually never met. The empire builds this fear through violence against the barbarians, and it brings the people of empire under its umbrella for protection when the people believe that they can’t protect or help themselves.

             The magistrate is the character that Coetzee uses to primarily snow the journey of self understanding, and how a better understanding of oneself leads to an aversion to violence. At the beginning of the book, the magistrate feels as through government actions in his jurisdiction are not his problem. He allows the injustices and the violence that the state’s the main instigation of to creep into his town, all in the name of preparing to meet the barbarian threat.

               All the magistrate wants is to take up time. He is waiting for retirement when he can end his service to the state and take up a peaceful occupation Coetzee uses the theme of retirement to make point how most people under oppressive governments are passive and indifferent to the treatment of the state. When the state tries to force people to rely on them completely for protection and for rhetoric, the state takes away the ambition and motivation for people to better themselves and the world around them. An oppressive regime makes people feel as though they cannot create positive changes for themselves and the world around them. An oppressive regime makes people feel powerless, and poor less people feel as though they cannot create positive changes for themselves or for the future.

                 The more people buy into the idea that the empire is able to satisfy all their needs, the less they question the treatment of the empire, even when empire is obviously being cruel and the cruelty is apparent to all the people, if only the people had a degree of self understanding they could trust in their own judgments and they would know when self judgment was better than allowing the government to make all the decisions.

          The magistrate question s why colonel Joll tortures the boy and the man because the punishment seems so extreme. This is the first time in the novel that the magistrate actively challenges authority and where he starts to recognize that he is a government actor and he takes some responsibility for what the government does. Through his question of colonel Joll after the torture, he leans that Joll has a twisted sense of logic behind which he rationalizes torture. Joll claims that torture is the only way to get information because ‘’pain is truth ‘all else is subject to doubt Joll actually knows that he is responsible for the violence he commits but he does it in the name of service to people . The Magistrate by association feels responsible for the violence that colonel Joll perpetuates but he feels as though he must mitigate it by helping the victim of torture. The Magistrate encourages the boy tell the officer the truth in order to make the torture stop.

              It seems unlikely at this point that the truth is the only thing the Joll get out of torture of people, he has already killed the old man, and his torture of the young boy does not let up despite the fact that both individuals are very unlikely to have been involved in the raiding party, they would not have known the movements and the locations of the barbarians, so there was no point to the torture. Joll constantly torture the two individuals to achieve a false confession from the boy, because he can use the confession to demonstrate to the people just how dangerous the barbarians are.

         Coetzee thus explains the actions of oppressor and how their relationship is both complex and interchangeable. Despite all this even after helping the boy recover from his torture by cleaning him up and caring for him, the magistrate allow Joll to torture him again the next night, turning a blind eye and justifying it by saying ‘’ for a while stopped my ears to the noises coming from the hut by the granary where the tools are kept clearly the magistrate knows that the torture is continuing each night but he does nothing to stop it.

        These are the conflict between the colonization and Barbarians and hear Barbarians are right for his steep.