J. M. Coetzee's Foe: A Culmination and a Solution to a Problem of White Identity

Abstract

By G. SCOTT BISHOP Ngugi wa Thiong'o, in Language of African Literature, argues that African children should be taught African literature in their own African languages to preserve the cultural identity that colonization sought to destroy. A paradoxically similar assertion can be made for students of English literature. If by studying English literature we are studying our cultural identity, then we must also read postcolonial literature written in English. As Michel Foucault, Edward Said, and many feminists including Nina Auerbach, Margaret Homans, Sandra Gilbert, and Susan Gubar have shown, our cultural identity has resulted in our seeing the non-Western, nonwhite, nonmale, nonChristian, non-English-speaking as other, as deviant. The Western, white Christian world, so confident of its identity, has imposed itself on the of others, and from that a new Englishlanguage literature is emerging. In contrast to Ngugi's concern that the colonial mind, through the literature of the colonizers, is being to images of his as mirrored in the written languages of his colonizers (LAL, 18), the colonizer is now, in his or her own language, being exposed to images of the usurper and the usurped as mirrored in the literature of the colonized, the oppressed. Postcolonial literature shows us the postcolonial world's way of looking at the at its place in the making of that world (LAS, 21). If it is not our moral duty, it is at least our duty as students of English literature to study postcolonial literature. J. M. Coetzee's novels offer the privileged, predominantly white an illuminating if not disconcerting picture of the political and moral entanglements in the complex postcolonial world. Coetzee is an Afrikaner born in Cape Town in 1940. He was educated in South Africa and the United States and is now a professor at the University of Cape Town. He has written five novels: Dusklands (1974), In the Heart of the Country (1977), Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), The Life and Times of Michael K (1983), and Foe (1986). He has won a number of prestigious awards including South Africa's premier literary honor, the CNA prize, as well as the Geoffery Faber Memorial Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Booker McConnell Prize. Coetzee's success is significant, I think, because it can be attributed to our ability, as members of the privileged world, to identify more readily with Coetzee, who is an Afrikaner, a descendant of colonizers, than with black Africans who are writing and publishing alongside Coetzee. Besides his political sympathy for blacks, his work reflects a concern for the whites' precarious position at the top of the social order. In the 9 March 1986 New York Times Magazine Coetzee's article Tales of Afrikaners appeared. In it he said, Many Afrikaners, more moderate than their stereotype, still don't understand that they live on a lip of a (19). That volcano encompasses South Africa's political realities. These political realities, which necessarily mediate the conscious voice of any writer in South Africa, direct Coetzee's voice, a voice in conflict with itself. Coetzee reveals the power of language as a political tool, but at the same time he questions the validity of that power. He tells the story of oppression without pretending to speak for the oppressed. As a white man, an Afrikaner, he illustrates and questions his own voice as spokesman for the oppressed. Coetzee's doctoral dissertation, English Fiction of Samuel Beckett: An Essay in Stylistic Analysis, explores why Beckett gave up English to write in French. During Coetzee's analysis of Watt he says: