No matter however times you read 'Waiting for the Barbarians', every time you come up with new ideas. If we read the novel from feminist or postcolonial perspective, the unnamed magistrate also emerging out as a cruel colonizer.

1. #Who are the real
Barbarians?
 Paper no.14 The African Literature
 Sem-4
 Email id: italiyaminkal@gmail.com
 Batch: 2018-2020
 S.B.Gardi Department of English,MKBU
“WaitingForThe
Barbarians”

2.  Waiting for the
Barbarians
 James Coetzee not only talks
about engaging narrative stories
but also takes up social- political
issues in his work as well as he
stands against apartheid
movement.
 It sets in imaginary Empire, set in an
unspecified place, yet recognizable
version as a universalized or that
allegorized version of South Africa
during the Apartheid.

3.  Waiting for the Barbarians
‘I have never seen anything like
it: two little discs of glass
suspended in front of his eyes
in loops of wire. Is he blind?’
~ Magistrate
Colonel Joll:
Representative
of Empire,
Third Bureau
The Magistrate:
Narrator, civil
servant of
Empire
Warrant
Officer
Mandel:
servant of
Empire
Barbarian Girl:
nomad girl,
tortured by
civilized people
 Arrival of Colonel Joll
 The Magistrate Befriends with Girl
 The Magistrate Becomes a Prisoner
 Transformation of Magistrate
 Plot line

4. #Barbarians
 Statistically around 119 times the word Barbarian
comes into view in Coetzee’s novel.
 Who are Barbarians?
 Do really they exist?

5.  Construction of #Other
 “Other” – encounter between
Colonizer/European settlers and Colonized/ the
indigenous colonized people.
 It is effect of colonial expression which was
created by people in power who are
considered as superior
 Nomad people are considered as an “Other”,
barbaric people by Empire
 “Blind girl” – “other” as a barbarian and woman
in patriarchal culture
 #Nomad/native = #Barbarian

6.  Colonel Joll/Warrant officer Mandel
Representative of Colonizer
 His harsh, cruel, torturesome treatments
towards natives/barbarians
 Older man dies due to his torture
 Younger man: falsely admitted to knowing
about barbarian uprising
 Suspected nomadic prisoners as barbarian
tribes
 More and more prisoners die under his
torture
 Barbarian girl: victim, tortured, blindness

7.  The Magistrate:
Stand against the
third Bureau
 ‘Torture of innocent tribesmen be stopped because it is a crime against
humanity’
 His attempts to catharise his sense of guilt by acting as a
restorative, remedial and hospitable support to blind girl after
she was tortured by the atrocities of the Third Bureau.
 His act of living into the alien territory, apart from
Empire suggests that he is not barbaric as colonizer.
What is the
first
impression
of the
Magistrate
pop up in
your mind?

8.  Feminist Perspective
 She lies on the bed and I rub her body
with almond oil. I close my eyes and
loose myself in the rhythm of rubbing,
while the fir, pilled high, roars in the
grate.
- Magistrate (Waiting for
the Barbarians)
 It seems that the very act of helping
slowly and steadily gave birth to the

9.  Blind girl: ‘Body politics’
 Many articles suggest that their act of intimacy was a
respecting act of Magistrate’s respect and love
towards others’ land.
‘…in the desert of the otherness, their bodies wipe away
the inhibitions and became hospitable towards each
other’s jouissance’
 Ultimately Magistrate started to dominate nomad girl.
Neither it is the act of Magistrate’s love towards girl
nor it is an act of his respect towards. It seems that the
body of the girl was dominated/colonized by colonizer.

10.  Marginalization of girl
 It is not act of ‘being-for-others’, in fact an act of
girl’s body was being colonized by colonizer.
 Once again blind girl was marginalized and
authorised because of her menstruation.
 Even the servants treated her as untouchable.

11.  Conclusion
“Human kind Cannot bear very much reality”
-T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
 Colonizers including the magistrate are emerging out
as barbaric people.
 Though they are in power position, they didn’t sustain
without colonized people, consequently the act of “otherness”
is a fundamental act of construction of the self.
“There’s a man
all over for you,
blaming his
boots the faults
of his feet.”
-Beckett,
Waiting for
Godot

12.  References
 Coetzee, James. WAITING FOR THE BARBARIAN. 1980.
<https://archive.org/stream/waitingforbarbar01coet/waitingforbarbar01coet_djvu.txt>.
 Sarkar, Jayjit. "Construction of the other in J.M. Coetzee’s waiting for the Barbarians." International
Journal of Applied Research (2016): 3.
<http://www.allresearchjournal.com/archives/2016/vol2issue3/PartE/2-2-166.pdf>.