Concept of "we" and "other" in 'Waiting for barbarians'

1.  Name :pipavat Gopi
 Roll No. : 25
 Year : 2017
 Paper No.:14 African Literature
 Topic : Concept of “We” and “Other” in
“Waiting for the Barbarians”
 Submitted To: Department of English
Maharaja Krushnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar
University


2. About author
John Maxwell
Coetzee is a novelist,
essayist, linguist,
translator and
recipient of the
Nobel Prize in
Literature.

3. John Maxwell Coetzee's work 'Waiting for the
Barbarians' is a story of the internal conflict of a
magistrate who must administer the law in a
small colonial town. Throughout the work, he
witnesses the torture of the town's inhabitants,
or barbarians as they are referred to in the work.
. The magistrate's internal conflict begins when
he discovers that Colonel Joll is torturing some of
the natives.

4. About story:
 The story is narrated in the
first person by the unnamed
magistrate of a small colonial
town
 the colonists, might be
preparing to attack the town
 the Third Bureau conducts an
expedition into the land
beyond the frontier. Led by a
sinister Colonel Joll , the Third
Bureau captures a number of
barbarians, brings them back
to town, tortures them, kills
some of them, and leaves for
the capital in order to prepare
a larger campaign

5. The Empire
The Empire is abstract, timeless, placeless, but
through the scrim of Empire, “ Waiting for the
Barbarian” renders a moment in our politics, a
style of our injustice. • Precisely this power of
historical immediacy gives the novel its thrust,
its larger and , “universal value.”

6. The novel is about such an empire that “must
expand, either by transforming the other,
wiping it from the face of the earth.”
The “WE”- “OTHER” complex among the rules
create crises in the Empire. Expansion
Empire [WE] seeks to eliminate the very
“Otherness” upon which its own existence
depends. They believed “Other” to be their
enemies.

7. narrator has limited knowledge about
Imperial capital and Barbarians.
Colonel Joll the representative of “WE”
tortures the old man and the young boy who
are the representative of “OTHER”

8. Instruments of pain
• Joll tortured the Barbarian Girl and her father,
by extension, we can say the Empire “WE” did
wrong to “THE OTHERS”.
• “WE” uses instruments of pain on the body,
cutting into it probing it to get the truth out of
his victims

9. Crime against humanity
 The torture to Barbarian girl is the torture to
‘voiceless’ or ‘mute’- other.
 The treatment of “WE” towards “OTHERS” is
‘crime against humanity’
 When the Magistrate asked the Girl about,
where she lived, her answer was ‘she lives’.
She lives

10. Harmless barbarians
The magistrate believed the Barbarians to be
harmless people who wanted to re- establish
themselves as their land was taken away.
The people waited for their attack but they
were not attacked

11. Conclusion
The Barbarians “don’t exist as the empire
conceives of them.”
The lesson of “Otherness” can be learned only
at the hands of empire and within its borders
where the conception of the ‘Other’ takes
place.