Injustices In J. M. Coetzee's Waiting For The Barbarians

The Horror of Injustices in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians and Age of Iron

- B.Bexel,

Asst. Professor of English,

Nesamony Memorial Christian College,

Marthandam

Abstract

J. M. Coetzee, through his writings has brought forth the African colonial conditions and revealed the damaged and deformed South African life under apartheid. The present paper aims to analyze Coetzee’s novels in the lights of apartheid. In this respect, the study deals with the effects of racial segregation affected the lives of people in South Africa South Africa is one of the most brutally and violently exploited territories. The blacks are doomed to live in slums in terrible conditions while whites lived in the most modern areas and conditions. While Africans

M. Coetzee is probably the most complex intellectually engaging contemporary writer of high profile on the international literary arena. Writing in a country where banning and exile was a common reality for writers till recently, Coetzee’s works unite the aesthetic and the political dimensions. His novels resonate with allusions from European literature and the writers he is fond of. His novels mirror the oppressive regime of South Africa and take it to the global notice. His novels are a strong testimony to the fact how a novelist could achieve his political aims without being a propagandist.

Coetzee’s peripatetic and often reclusive life has served his fiction by giving him a certain distance from the troubles of his home country. The trauma of apartheid haunts his novels; even they appear to be set in a country other than South Africa. In Coetzee’s novels emotions like shame, guilt and fear surge beyond rational discussion just as cruelty emerges out beyond bearable depiction. In the words of Abdulrazak, Coetzee’s writing is, “firmly rooted in South Africa realities, in its history and its political complexities and ironies, in the failure of human sympathy that is the consequence of colonialism and apartheid” (qtd. in Sharma 69). The basic theme of all of the Coetzee’s novels is apartheid. Apartheid system to the black man reminds that he is a helpless stranger in his own

Race is particularly pertinent to the rise of colonialism, because the division of human society in this way is inextricable from the need of colonialist powers to establish dominance over subjects’ powers and to justify the imperial enterprise. Looma is of the view, “race has thus functioned as one of the most powerful and yet most fragile markers of human identity, hard to explain and identify and even harder to maintain” (121).Today skin colour has become the privileged marker of races which are, as Miles points out, “either ‘black’ or ‘white’ but never ‘big-eared’ and ‘small-eared’. The fact that only certain physical characteristics…‘races’ are socially imagined rather than biological realities” (qtd. in Looma 121). The basic myth of racism is white skin brings with it cultural superiority that the whites are more intelligent and more virtuous than the black by the mere fact of being