Themes in Literature/Belonging and Exile/Loss Grants Freedom

Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M.Coetzee is a beautifully sculpted novel that touches on topics like colonization and its effects on the colonized. The main character that we follow throughout the story is the Magistrate, who slowly begins to see that the government he has served faithfully for many years, The Empire, arent the benevolent leaders they want their citizens to view them as. In order to come to this realization, he must see through a blind girl’s eyes, find freedom while behind bars, and lose his position to attain true power. Coetzee begs the question, why does the Magistrate’s worldview begin to change only after he is forced to see himself through the eyes of a blind girl and loses everything? Perhaps purging himself of the comforts provided by The Empire causes his rose-colored glasses to shatter, and allows him to truly see the world for the first time.

Imagine being taken from your home, having to be tortured, and being blinded by your oppressors who are convinced you pose a threat for just existing. This is the harsh reality that the barbarian girl in the novel faces. However, it is through her blindness that she helps the Magistrate truly open his own eyes and see the world around him for the first time. He is obsessed with her blindness, often waving his hand in her face and asking her if she can see. It is during his time with her that he begins to realize his role not just in her torture but in The Empire’s colonization process. He states at one point, “I behave in some ways like a lover I undress her, I bathe her, ― I stroke her, I sleep beside her but I might equally well tie ― her to a chair and beat her, it would be no less intimate.” From this point in the Magistrate’s mind, we see him slowly realizing that despite him not physically torturing her he is also complicit in her pain as the viciously cruel Colonel Joll, who was the cause of her blindness, to begin with. He struggles to accept this truth shown to him by the barbarian girl, which we see when he says,

“I shake my head in a fury of disbelief. No! No! No! I cry to myself...There is nothing to link me with torturers, people who sit waiting like beetles in dark cellars. How can I believe that a bed is anything but a bed, a woman's body anything but a site of joy? I must assert my distance from Colonel Joll! I will not suffer for his crimes!”

At the start, the Magistrate’s main concern is to distance himself from the heinous crimes committed in the name of the Empire, yet as the novel progresses, and through the self-reflection caused by the presence of the barbarian girl and her lack of sight, the Magistrate goes from trying to push away the guilt and blame, to accepting it and trying to change.

The idea of being tossed in a jail cell would normally send shivers down any “sane” individual’s back. Yet when confronted with this, The Magistrate has a completely different reaction. He says:

“There is a spring in my walk as I am marched away to confinement between my two guards. "I hope you will allow me to wash," I say, but they ignore me. Never mind. I am aware of the source of my elation: my alliance with the guardians of the Empire is over, I have set myself in opposition, the bond is broken, and I am a free man. Who would not smile? But what a dangerous joy! It should not be so easy to attain salvation.”

This passage shows how far the Magistrate has come, from being fearful of showing the smallest of sympathies for the Barbarians to being a staunch supporter of theirs. To the Magistrate, going to jail means that he no longer has to pretend to agree with what The Empire is doing. He is free to speak out against their tyranny, free to tear down the facade they have tried to feed their people, free to call them what they really are: conquerors, murderers, and torturers, searching for an enemy that does not exist. He himself doubts the danger the barbarians pose when he says, “Of this unrest, I myself saw nothing. In private I observed that once in every generation, without fail, there is an episode of hysteria about the barbarians...Show me a barbarian army and I will believe.” All stories about the horrors of the Barbarians are heard from the Empire. How unusual that the tales and gossip come from the city, and not from the desert where the supposed Barbarians live.

Now that the Magistrate has successfully broken away from the mindset of the Empire, the final piece of the puzzle is to lose what The Empire has given to him, the source of his power and the final link in the shackles of his imprisonment. Losing his role as “The Magistrate” means losing his authority, and his tie to the Empire as their servant, complicit in their destruction. To anyone looking at this from the surface, it may seem like a dire loss, yet digging deeper we begin to realize that this is what allows the Magistrate to gain control of his life, as well as give him power that no one can surpass. We see this in the exchange between the Magistrate and Colonel Joll after he returns from his expedition to find and hunt the Barbarians, “I have a lesson for him that I have long meditated. I mouth the words and watch him read them on my lips: "The crime that is latent in us we must inflict on ourselves," I say. I nod and nod, driving the message home. "Not on others," I say: I repeat the words, pointing at my chest, pointing at his.”

Joll is the kind of man who is constantly hurting others to feel like he is in control. Unlike the Magistrate, who at one point has the love of the people, Joll must get his power through fear and violence. The meaning behind the words the Magistrate says to him is simple: the hurt we feel deep in ourselves should be dealt with by ourselves, not through inflicting it on others, for if we do, karma will most certainly come back a thousandfold. Joll learns this the hard way after coming back from his journey with virtually nothing left to his name. His torture of innocents and his crimes against other humans come back to haunt him in the form of losing most his men. By finding nothing in the desert, he returns empty-handed and to a man like Joll: it is a loss worth than death. Meanwhile, the Magistrate, who has no position, and no control, has gained more by, as cheesy as this sounds, treating others with basic decency and respect, no matter where they come from.

Loss is what gains the Magistrate his freedom, his sight, and his power. It is a hefty price to pay, but it is what allows him to sever his ties and servitude to the Empire. By taking responsibility for his actions and his involvement in the mistreatment of the fisherpeople and the Barbarians, he grows as a person. Coetzee does an incredible job of writing a main character that in many ways can represent the reader themselves. The lack of a concrete setting, place, or time period permits us to fit the story to our own current events, and in the current state of the world, we may all find that a bit of the Magistrate is in each of us. While we may not be at risk of losing our jobs, or living on a frontier, we must all ask ourselves this: are we willing to lose our rose-colored glasses and be confronted with the cold, harsh uncomfortable truth of ways that we’ve been complicit in allowing the world to reach the point it has? Or will we continue to live blindly, oblivious to the pain and suffering around us?

--Alessandra Ventura