Tortures In Waiting For The Barbarians By J.M. Coetzee
During the years 1948 through 1980, the South African apartheid was taking place. This act of racial segregation highlighted the rise of torture among races. This cruelly separated people and punished those who disagreed with what was taking place. Written by J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians shows the completed relationship between the “oppressor and the oppressed” during the 1980s in a South Africa empire. Obsessed with the torturer and victim relationship taken place during the apartheid, Coetzee uses this obsession to highlight hierarchy destroying critical alliances and causing a culture war that will never be won. “Under the Terrorism Act, South African police used methods of tortures such as suffocation, electric shock, sexual abuse, sleep deprivation, exposure of extreme temperatures, starvation, etc. ”. Using this list of tortures, I can see where Coetzee specifically picked out ones to feature in Waiting for the Barbarians. These tortures were psychologically meant to humiliate and strip individuals of their dignities. These victims had no hope and questioned their existence on earth.
The acts of torture that stood out in the book were suffocation, the barbarian girl going blind, and exposures of extreme humiliation. In the beginning of the book, the Magistrate is seen as a humble, wise, doubtful man. As the story goes on however, a relationship blossoms between him and a barbarian girl. Having crossed the racial border between the empire and the barbarian land, this caused trouble with the empire hierarchy, resulting in the Magistrate becoming prisoner. Here is where the torture takes place, specifically the suffocation. Because of who the Magistrate is, no mercy is shown upon him. “Someone gives me a push and I begin to float back and forth in an arc a foot above the ground like a great old moth with its wings pinched together, roaring, shouting”. This quote shows that much like the Apartheid enforcers, the torturers do not care about the extreme actions they take, instead using it as a teachable moment. Using imagery, Coetzee made it a point to include this, highlighting the victim’s reactions and giving us a sense of what it feels like to have experienced this. This act upon the Magistrate made him the laughing stock of the town. His rights, dignity, and life were taken just because he engaged in what he thought was a senseless act, but yet it defined his future much like the apartheid victims. Since he was easy to blame, the Magistrate became their scapegoat. During Colonel Joll and his men's raid on the barbarians land, they bring back prisoners including the no name barbarian girl. Because she is the minority, Colonel Joll makes her a toy. Things were did to her in front of her father and her feet were broken. Her torture did not stop there. The men forcefully held fire forks to both of her eyes. “The men bought it very close to my face and made me look at it. They held my eyelids opened”. This type of torture is evil. Colonel Joll and his men showed that they would go to any lengths possible to degrade these people of their livelihood, extending to their visual abilities. The babarbians were just doing their everyday task. I imagine that Coetzee put this form of torture in this book to propose a discussion of when enough was enough. Did they want to make her go blind? Or did they feel obligated to since she was a barbarian? I think the answer is clear. Because of her culture and appearance, the tortures thought she was disposable. She was a barbarian and they would never see past that.
Throughout Waiting for the Barbarians, Coetzee placed humiliating scenario in every chapter that never stopped. The worst humiliation occurred when Colonel Joll and his men brought back the line of barbarian prisoners to a curious crowd. To begin the beatings, Colonel Joll decides to write “ENEMY” on their back with charcoal. “The black charcoal and ochre dust begin to run with sweat and blood. The game, I see, is to beat them till their backs are washed clean”. The word enemy seems to be obvious in this situation. Everyone knows who the enemies are whether they agree with it or not. In some cases, people are brought up this way thinking that because of their parents opinions. When a girl is pushed from the crowd to participate in torturing these barbarians, they urge her on by saying “go on, don’t be afraid!’”. Especially for the young children in the empire, this type of act is part of their culture that will be instilled in them forever. It seems as if Colonel Joll knew this, making the children puppets. What else is more humiliating than getting tortured from a young girl half your size? Much like the apartheid, these two cultures were never supposed to mix. They had boundaries, and once those boundaries were crossed it cause an endless war that no sides would ever win. The last form of torture worth mentioning is the mentality of the tortutors. These men knew what they would be up against and forced to do.
From the start, they were ruthless and acted as if torturing the barbarians was nothing out of the ordinary. Instead, these torturers turned into barbarians themselves. They did not spare anyone of their beatings, they laughed at the harm they were causing, and acted like radical animals to end a culture. What they did not think of was what would happen after these beatings stop. “For the first time I feel a dry pity for them: how natural a mistake to to believe that you can burn or tear or hack your way into the secret body of the other”. From there, these torturers will have to live with the choices they made to be involved with such an event. These acts of violence did not solve anything except broaden the amount of anger the empire and the barbarians have against one another. No matter the time period, there will always be disputes about culture and which one is more righteous than the other.
Waiting for the Barbarians is much more than a book about tortures; it highlights how hierarchy states mistreat those who are less educated, proper, and adapted, and get away with it. Coetzee writes “pain is truth: all else is subject to doubt. ” Thanks to the Magistrates point of view, these interpretations of the tortures allow us to see the truth behind it all- in order to be a just empire it must all stop.
