J.M. Coetzee and the ‘War on Terror’

Abstract

When the security police in J.M. Coetzee’s 1980 novel Waiting for the Barbarians charcoal the word ‘enemy’ on the backs of the captured barbarians and then lash them until the words are obscured by blood, the link between representation and torture — between the dehumanising definition of others and the infliction of pain — is made, as it were, graphically clear.¹ What I wish to explore here is the way in which such representations still serve, and since 2001 have served increasingly, to reinforce a system of beliefs that by defining a group of people as less than human seeks to legitimise their murder, exploitation and torture. That the townspeople in Coetzee’s scene titter and gawp at the gruesome spectacle in the square is testament to its success in denying the humanity of the ‘barbarians’ and in placing their pain beyond the reach of their tormentors’ moral imaginations. The act of torture in this case is a public one; it marks off a boundary between what is human and what is not in order to justify the infliction of pain and terror on defenceless bodies. Yet when Coetzee’s protagonist catches sight of the hammer with which Colonel Joll is about to cripple the ankles of the captives and interrupts what Samuel Durrant has called this ‘pedagogical spectacle’ (1999, 456) he seeks heroically though inarticulately and with terrible personal consequences to protest against the logic of dehumanisation: ‘Look at these men’, he implores, ‘Men!’ (Coetzee, 2004b, 117).