J.M. Coetzee and the Idea of Africa

Abstract

There are two obvious positions in the polemics suggested by this title, which I shall begin by naming in order to open other possibilities. The first would be that in J.M. Coetzee’s writing the African subject or African humanity is under-represented and under-valued, and to this extent Coetzee’s work exhibits the mentalité of the settler colonial. The kind of evidence that is ready to hand for this argument would be that in Foe (Coetzee 1986) Friday is mutilated and voiceless; in Disgrace (Coetzee 1999) Petrus is a schemer who connives in Lucy’s rape; in Age of Iron (Coetzee 1990) the revolutionized youth and their mentors, Florence and Thabane, allow their war with the regime to become a war on the very concept of childhood. This position finds it regrettable that the novels tend to place resistance in question rather than representing it positively; where it is represented it is displaced onto faceless subjects like the barbarians, or marginal characters like Michael K. whose refusals are unrecognizable in terms that have any connection with the African experience of colonialism. Especially awkward in this view is the indubitably seedy figure of Emmanuel Egudu, the Nigerian novelist in Elizabeth Costello who manufactures authenticity by celebrating the ersatz orality of the African novel to sustain himself in the Western literary marketplace.

[M]y intellectual allegiances are clearly European, not African.

(J.M. Coetzee, Dagens Nyheter 7 December, 2003)