Truth, Reconciliation, and the Restoration of the State: Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians

Abstract

I never wished it for barbarians that they should have history of Empire laid upon them. --J. M. Coetzee (Waiting for Barbarians 151) In Writing History, Writing Trauma, Dominick LaCapra observes that South African and Commission (TRC) was in its own way a trauma recovery center (43) providing a social mechanism for South Africa to work through trauma caused apartheid. LaCapra's observation suggests that TRC offers a method through which rupture caused centuries of domination under a system rooted in racial and cultural inequality might be healed reconciling oppressed with oppressors. motto on TRC's home page, Truth. Road to Reconciliation, summarizes commission's ideology. singular truth here implies that an empirically verifiable truth can be found, and juxtaposition of The Road to Reconciliation with Truth suggests that publication or voicing of truth will lead directly to reconciliation in South Africa, perhaps even that for TRC, Truth and The Road to Reconciliation have become equivalent terms. TRC's goals, however, are implicitly more ambitious than either LaCapra or its internet home page indicate. TRC is a part of South Africa's Department of Justice and Constitutional Development, so one of its aims from outset has been to achieve justice in South Africa. Exposing truth, it implies, brings not only reconciliation but also a sort of justice. Although it predated establishment of TRC 15 years, J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for Barbarians anticipates and challenges TRC's conflation of quest for truth with quest for justice. Like TRC, much of criticism of Coetzee's novel sees exposing experiences of oppressed a sort of justice, but I see in novel a pointed critique: state's remembering of often fragmentary evidence of oppression amounts not to justice in reparative sense but rather to an expedient, a way to secure political legitimacy. Waiting for Barbarians articulates problem of justice in South Africa and challenges basic premises of TRC exploring, first, difficulty of establishing truth about experience of oppressed and, second, manipulation of their voices to protect interests of state. Something called restorative justice [T]he perpetrator ... should be given opportunity to be reintegrated into community he has injured his offense. --Desmond Mpilo Tutu (55) justice that TRC seeks for South Africa does not attempt to heal victim at expense of perpetrator. Rather, TRC's goal is to heal perpetrator alongside victim, to perpetrator a viable part of a new South African society that values both victim and perpetrator equally. According to Promotion of National Unity and Act of 1995, legislation that established TRC, its stated purpose is fourfold. (1) First, TRC is charged with creating as complete a picture possible of atrocities of apartheid recording both the perspectives of victims and motives and perspectives of persons responsible for those atrocities. Second, TRC serves to facilitate of amnesty to those who make full disclosure of their involvement in violations. Third, TRC is to restore human and civil dignity of victims of atrocities by granting them an opportunity to relate their own accounts and by recommending reparation measures. Finally, TRC is to construct a narrative of apartheid based on its findings that provides as comprehensive an account possible and recommends measures to prevent future violations of rights (2.3.1). Although part of its task is to recommendations about reparations, TRC's primary concern is to foster social healing that reconciles divisions in South African society and allows it to carry on a unified state. …