This document summarizes key concepts from J.M. Coetzee's novel "Waiting for Barbarians". It defines civilization and barbarians, and discusses the conflict that arises from the domination of civilization over barbarians. The magistrate harms barbarian people to assert dominance, showing how civilization views barbarians as the "other". Through torture, the empire violates barbarian humanity to impose its ideology. Ultimately, the writer questions who the real danger and barbarians are, realizing that the empire seeks to eliminate otherness while committing crimes against humanity.

1. Topic: Conflict between Civilization and
Barbarians
• Name: Sonal Baraiya
• Paper No.: 14-The African
Literature
• Subject: Unit-4, Waiting for
Barbarians
- Coetzee J.M
• Submitted to: Smt. S.B. Gardi,
Maharaja
Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar
University,
Department of English.

2. What is Civilization?
• A civilization is any complex society
characterized by urban development,
symbolic communication forms, and a
perceived separation from and
domination over the natural
environment by a cultural elite.

3. What is Barbarians?
• An uncultured or brutish person
• A person without culture, refinement, or
education; philistine.
• A person in a savage, primitive state;
uncivilized person.

4. Conflict from Civilization:
• First- Magistrate try to harm Barbarian people
in very soft way
• “Barbarian girl”
• “He uses her by tending her wounds, washing
her broken feet and legs, rubbing her body
with almond oil. It is, seemingly, an
improvised ritual of domineering guilt, the
confused gesture of a confused man.”

5. • “Shall I tell you what I sometimes wish? I wish
that these barbarians would rise up and teach
us a lesson, so that we may learn to respect
them. We think of the country here as ours,
part of our Empire—our outpost, our
settlement, our market centre.”
• Is it so?
• How far can we rely on Magistrate’s narrative?

6. • He send for keep eyes on Barbarians-observer
• Identity of ‘Barbarian’ will always be regarded as
‘other’ by Imperialist system
• “Other” as “Enemy”
• Empire-Joll-Power
• “Barracks Room”- fear in human psyche
• Young Boy-Old Man
• Desire of “TRUTH”
• Torture body-torture mentality

7. • According to Coetzee, torture room is a metaphor
“for relations between authoritarianism and its
victims
• This torture, an obvious violation of the humanity
of the aboriginals, is a liberty taken by the Empire
to impose the theory that its own will and
intentions are more crucial than the rights of
those that it is conquering.
• Her deformed tortured body actually visualizes
the deformed ideology of imperialism

8. Conflict from Barbarians
• Writer himself- Empire-without name
• Who or what is the real danger?
• Who is real Barbarians?
• Sense of realization – “binary opposition”
• How far fear and anxiety can go and how far
members of society can follow a blind power.

9. • The empire seeks to eliminate the very
"otherness" upon which its own existence
depends
• Crimes against humanity
• Idea of Cavafy- “Now what’s going to happen
to us without Barbarians? Those people were
a kind of solution.”