Themes in Literature/Belonging and Exile/Sights for Sore Eyes

J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians wastes little time in announcing vision and blindness as predominant themes. In the novel’s opening lines, Colonel Joll, representative of the ambiguously named Empire’s even more ambiguously named Third Bureau, has arrived in a small boarder town. Coetzee’s first-person narrator, referred to simply as the Magistrate, immediately questions the colonel’s eyewear: “Is he blind?” Joll is wearing dark sunglasses; nobody in the Magistrate’s far-flung, frontier town has ever seen anything like them. In the first lines of chapter two, we are introduced to a young ‘barbarian’ girl who is also presumed blind. Her vision has been irreparably damaged from torture, but she has not lost her sight completely. Later, after an eye-opening trip into the desert, a blinding storm, and a mirage or two, Coetzee’s Magistrate finds himself contemplating the gaze of a second authoritarian figure from deep within the Empire, Officer Mandel. Mandel doesn’t wear tinted glasses like Joll; instead, his eyes are, as the Magistrate observes, “as clear as if there were crystal lenses slipped over his eyeballs”. The described differences of these three individual’s sights allegorically align with the Magistrate’s changing perception of the Empire throughout the novel. Coetzee, using specific literal and non-literal language, forces his readers to contemplate sight while simultaneously asking them to see a perhaps unseeable truth. To discover what truths Coetzee wants his readers to see, it becomes necessary to begin with what his readers cannot see.

Waiting for the Barbarians is laden with ambiguity. As readers we are given very little information. The setting is a nameless frontier border town, the last outpost between an enigmatic Empire and unknowable barbarians. Limited names are provided. The only hints we have as to when the story takes place are the existence of sunglasses and the absence of electricity. Coetzee’s carefully crafted uncertainty likely points to the enduring existence of empires; all civilizations crumble, only to be replaced by something new. As such, the events of Waiting for the Barbarians could have taken place anywhere at any time. But perhaps this hazy setting is reference to the secrecy within Coetzee’s own empire. In his essay, “Into the Dark Chamber,” Coetzee touches on things that were hidden away from the public eye during South African Apartheid. Prisons and police headquarters could not be photographed, cameras were banned from capturing images of burning townships, and starving people were kept out of sight. He notes: “Let there be roadblocks, let there be curfews, let there be laws against vagrancy, begging, squatting, and let offenders be locked away so that no one has to see them…how much more bearable the newscasts have become!” For much of human history empires have forced their agendas not only on their subjects, but also on their opponents, whomever is deemed “other”. We see what they want us to see, read what they want us to read, think how they want us to think. By being selective with what he shows his readers, Coetzee is, in a way, taking control back from empires everywhere. Through ambiguity, Coetzee shows us only what he wants us to see, and in doing so we are presented with a question: What can we do “when the choice is no longer limited to either looking on in horrified fascination as the blows fall or turning one’s eyes away?” Perhaps the answer lies at the end of our Magistrate’s slow journey into cognizance.

By no fault of his own, Coetzee’s Magistrate begins the story blind to the true evils of the Empire. He has grown old and fat, content with his quiet life. He looks up at the stars shining brightly in the night sky and remarks: “Truly we are here on the roof of the world." The thinking here goes beyond a beautiful starry night. Life within the Empire is ascetically pleasing; summer is winding down, the trees are full of fruit, there has been plenty of game to hunt, the soldiers under his command sleep peacefully. The Magistrate knows the nature of Joll’s visit, but he chooses to reflect on the positives that come from serving the all-powerful Empire, the light that shines in the darkness. The Magistrate’s own ignorance is perhaps hinted at during the questioning of Joll’s eye health. Both he and Joll represent authority within the Empire; it’s only the Magistrate who sees himself differently. The young boy held captive in the town’s granary cannot distinguish between the two: “He stares over my shoulder, not at the guard, but at Colonel Joll beside him.” The boy looks from the Magistrate to Joll, but only sees the Empire. The setting of all of this is important. The granary, Joll’s tourture chamber, is the same dark, secluded place our Magistrate turned into his love nest during the early years of his appointment. He attributes his conquests of restless wives and sherbet-drunk young women to his sexual prowess. Coetzee’s choice of the granary as a setting suggests otherwise. The Magistrate sees himself as an individual; he can separate himself from the Empire. To the community, however, he and the Empire are one in the same. Even when he takes off his uniform in a dark room, the Empire shines brightly through him. He is, upon Joll’s arrival, blind to this fact. Ironically a half-blind barbarian girl helps opens his eyes.

Before returning to the Capital, Joll ventures into the desert to find more barbarians. Among the detainees is a young woman, about twenty years old. Her vision has been damaged from the colonel’s questioning; her ankles broken. The Magistrate sees her begging in town after he forced the rest of Joll’s prisoners return to the desert and brings the barbarian girl into his protection under the guise of eliminating vagrancy (how South African of him). The Magistrate’s relationship with this barbarian “other” is strange. At times he is attracted to her sexually, but he is hesitant, and in his ambivalence, he refuses her advances. He, like Joll, wants information. He wants to understand her, her culture. He wants to know what Joll did to her. The Magistrate wants to decipher her in the same way he wants to decipher the wooden tiles unearthed in the ruins outside the city walls. Initially she is quiet in his presence, having little trust of authority. She had already lost her father, the ability to walk, and much of her vision at the hands of an overly inquisitive member of the Empire. The Magistrate, unsatisfied with her silence, tries to read her physically through almost ritualistic nightly body rubs. These massages resemble a blind person reading braille, once again forcing doubt of the Magistrate’s sight and perception. The barbarian girl isn’t fully blind; she can see peripherally. The men of the Empire appear the same in her damaged eyes. This realization is a terrifying eureka moment for the Magistrate: “With a shift of horror I behold the answer that has been waiting for me in the image of a face masked by two black glassy insect eyes from which there comes no reciprocal gaze but only my double image cast back at me” (italics added). The Magistrate unearths a real perception; one he finds horrifying. He and Joll are, in many ways, the same. It is only after realizing this truth that he can distance himself from the Empire.

Free from the blinders of empirical complacency, the Magistrate now understands what the Empire is capable of. He decides to return the barbarian girl safely home to her nomadic people beyond the city gates. The journey into the desert becomes an almost vision quest for all involved. Coetzee alludes to sight along the way making use of powerfully evocative language. At the start of the trip, the Magistrate struggles to find his bearings: “Standing on a dune-top, shielding my eyes, staring ahead, I can see nothing but swirling sand." This desert blindness early on the trip reinforces the Magistrate’s inability to see at the start of the novel. The further the party travels away from the Empire, the better the Magistrate’s understanding. Ten days into the trek the party first glimpses the perceived barbarians, or so they think. The Magistrate wonders aloud: “Are they reflections of us, is this a trick of the light?” He is so close to a full understanding. The ‘barbarians’ are not barbarians. They are just people, just like the people of the Empire. The Empire is the light. A light that manipulates perception. A light that at times glares so savagely from the surface of the world that one must shield their eyes.

The Magistrate’s newfound understanding is reflected in the crystal, clear gaze of newly arrived Officer Mandel. Back in the border town, the Magistrate is arrested for conspiring with the enemy—an enemy created by the Empire. This creation becomes literal when Joll brings back another group of people living outside the realm of the Empire. Joll uses a piece of charcoal to write the word “Enemy” on the backs of a dozen prisoners wired together through their flesh. Joll invites townspeople to beat these prisoners until the word enemy is washed with blood from their backs. In one foul swoop Joll labels this group of “other” as the enemy and motivates the town to take part in these tribal acts of violence. It’s too much for the Magistrate. He stands up for the prisoners and is in turn beaten.

Empires excel in the labelling of the “other.” It is part of the control exhibited by empires the world over. The Magistrate’s self-awareness gained from venturing outside the limits of empire is not something easily done. As readers we are deeply engrained ourselves. We are truly incapable of reading this novel without looking through the lens of empire. This is one of the main focuses (unfocused as it may be) of Coetzee’s masterpiece. He begs us to look outside of empire, knowing fully well, that we cannot. It stems from a lack of agency. Agency, as defined by Bill Ashcroft in Postcolonial Studies: Key Concepts, “refers to the ability to act or perform an action…it hinges on the question of whether individuals can freely and autonomously initiate action, or whether the things they do are in some sense determined by the ways in which their identity has been constructed." We cannot act outside of empire. By and large we are all confined by empirical parameters: calendars, time, boarders, language, culture. Theses parameters might differ, but the empires that define them are largely the same. How can one take off empire-tinted glasses? The answer is that we can’t; not without being swallowed up by the empire itself. We flutter about, like moths, drawn to the light of our doom. Coetzee’s Magistrate attempts to shed his “spectacles of cruelty,” only to be labelled a barbarian himself by those still blinded.

Perhaps a glimmer of hope lies within the novel’s final pages. The personified barbarity of empire has withdrawn back to its lair within the confines of the capital, and our broken and bruised moth of a Magistrate searches for something, anything to put hope into. He sees a group of children playing in the snow in the empty village square and watches as they pick out the final touches for their snowman: a nose, ears, a mouth, and eyes. Future generations have the capability to pick out a new perception of things. It won’t be as simple as building a snowman, but in this powerful lasting image Coetzee suggests change is possible. We will never be able to see without the lenses of empire; like the Magistrate we will “leave the scene feeling stupid,” but there is always hope for the future.

--Michael Ferrin