Waiting for the Barbarians

Samah Hamzat

Waiting for the Barbarians

J.M Coetzee

“Let it at the very least be said, if it ever comes to be said, if there is ever anyone in some remote future interested to know the way we lived, that in this farthest outpost of the Empire of light there existed one man who in his heart was not a barbarian.”

J.M Coetzee addressed the novel in an amazing way that makes you feel you're living among them not just reading it. The novel begins with a wonder over sunglasses, which give us the fact that this man has been away from civilization or as they claim to have. The narrator who is Magistrate the administrator at one of the Empire colonies, he lived there for almost thirty years. He lived peacefully with the people town and with the Barbarians who come at the winter to trade things. Through certain events such as the Colonel Joll starts to investigate with an old man and a younger boy who has been captured, later on the man is dead under torture and the boy has been their guide in order to capture more barbarians but instead they captured some fishermen with their women and children and started to beat them up in order to talk; We could easily recognizes the nature of Magistrate and how he doesn't blame the Empire but blame the nature of some people and how he explain that the barbarians are not who they live in the woods with black skin, the true savages and barbarians are the ones who act in filthy bloody ways with others with no reason. The Colonel left to the capital to give his report, so Magistrate took the chance to free the prisoner and send them back to their homes. But one girl stayed in town, she is half blind by the soldiers' torture. Magistrate noticed her and took her in and started to take care of her. During all that he lived in an understandable situation concerning not making any move toward the girl. I think at the first he thought that she has been tortured enough from people of his kind, so he didn't want to make it worse for...