Throughout the 20th century, notions such as identity, the self and the other have been constructed and deconstructed accordingly and have received new areas of interest. The notion of hybrid identity, for example, has been transformed from a technique to distinguish pure blood from infected (from a racial point of view, but not only), to one of the key elements of political correctness: nations are they have become overvalued, while cultural and regional identities have gained ground.
In this essay, I propose a closer look at the intersecting identity structures of an apartheid South Africa divided by race, religion, political and cultural opinions, etc. J. M Coetzee is indeed the typical result of this hybridization: he is an atheist Dutchman who lives in Africa and attends a Catholic school along with mestizos, Americans and Russians, not to mention that he is a man among women. He is the result of the clash of histories: Dutch, Anglo-Saxon, Eastern European and African heritage have come together in an artifact of cultural identity.
As previously stated, identity plays a leading role in the demonstration. It can be seen as a way to become aware of oneself and of the other, but, throughout history, it has been used as a means of subjugation in the name of imperialism. Usually the self (the conqueror, the Empire) is the point of origin, the genesis of civilization, while the other is the exotic, the wild, interesting enough to become dangerous for the paths of Power.
Postmodernism has brought a reversal of roles, shifting the point of view from the center to the margins, from Empire to its victims.
Power, seen by Foucault, is a way to dominate the weak. According to the French philosopher, “it has no structural relationship with a social whole nor does it presuppose an institution as the origin of its activities”, and “following Foucault’s archaeological analysis, it is also non-subjective” (Williams, 177), since it does not belong to a matter or another. The self is now seen as a subject, as a representation of the subject-ed, as controlled (left) or constituted (middle) in a Power relationship, that is, Power discourses of any kind constitute the subject (Butler, 50 -1).
Childhood… is the starting point of a series of autobiographical novels. It depicts the struggle of a boy who cannot find his own identity, but who gradually becomes a confused whirlwind of different and simultaneous versions of the same Coetzee. Each version is catalyzed by a different encounter with the other, that is, the self sees itself in the mirror of the other. It cannot exist without the other, it is the Frankenstein of imperialism. There is no egocentric “I”, there is no mirror in which you can say “I am this” or “I am that”. The mirror has become an ocean of percentages and trends.
Coetzee feels the need to maintain certain appearances to prevent his family from noticing the infection with external elements:
He shares nothing with his mother. Her life at her school is kept a secret from her. She will not know anything of what he solves, but what is stated in her quarterly report, which will be impeccable. […] As long as the report is impeccable, you have no right to ask questions. (5) The great secret of his school life, the secret he tells no one at home, is that he has become a Roman Catholic, which for all practical purposes “is” a Roman Catholic. (18)
But this other is not seen only from the perspective of the child. He has a very strong geographical and cultural valence, with a relationship between the elements that make up society, in this case, South Africa. These schizoid relationships between groups cannot be ignored when dealing with postcolonial literature.
Not only does he keep his school/social life well hidden from his parents, but also his loyalties: he has hidden a series of drawings where he would show Russia’s naval victories, because “liking the Russians was not part of the game, it was not part of the game.” permitted”. He didn’t allow himself to mix either. Society is built so that each member plays a particular role, and Power ensured that they were maintained through means such as propaganda:
There are white people and colored people and natives, of which the natives are the lowest and most ridiculed. The parallel is impossible: the indigenous are the third brother.
[…] Although, in exams, he gives the correct answers to all the history questions, he doesn’t know, in a way that satisfies his heart, why Jan van Riebeeck and Simon van der Stel were so good while Lord Charles Somerset was so bad. […] Andries Pretorius and Gerrit Maritz and the rest sound like high school teachers or Afrikaners on the radio: angry and stubborn and full of threats and they talk about God. (65-66)
Coetzee is an Afrikaner (Dutch), along with the majority of the South African population. There is a small English minority, “apart from him and his brother, who are only somewhat English” (67). He sees himself as English, even if appearances say otherwise. Afrikaners are seen as dangerous:
They wield their language like a club against their enemies. In the streets it is better to avoid groups of them; even individually they have a grim and menacing air. […] It is unthinkable that it would ever be thrown between them: they would crush it, kill the spirit in it. (124-5)
Aside from racial and national segregation, like any traditional society, South African women also have a greatly diminished status in society. Coetzee’s mother is not allowed to own a horse, and to replace it, she buys a bicycle, ignoring her husband’s adamant reproaches that women shouldn’t ride bicycles. She also cannot claim her possessions when her husband files for bankruptcy. She is the typical image of a woman’s social sacrifice, as she “spent a year in college before having to make way for her younger siblings.” (124). Coetzee finds himself caught between her parents during their fights, but although he supports his mother, he can’t be more than a (future) man.
There’s also a very strong sense of repression of sexuality: although her parents are pretty open about it (her mom actually had a book on it), school officials absolutely refuse to bring it up. When he brings the book to school, it instantly becomes study material for all the children, but when the authority discovers it, he is quietly but nonetheless violently reprimanded:
[…] her heart is pounding as she awaits the announcement and the embarrassment that will follow. The announcement does not arrive; but in each passing comment by brother Gabriel he finds a veiled reference to the evil that he, a non-Catholic, has imported into the school. (147)
Edward Said, in one of his most famous works, Culture and Imperialism, states that most of the Earth’s population has been affected in one way or another by the empires of the past (4). He adds that “imperialism did not end, it did not suddenly become ‘past’, once decolonization set in motion the dismantling of classical empires” (341). Consequently, we are faced with a very complicated equation of History and Power:
If from the outset we acknowledge the massively knotted and complex histories of special but nevertheless overlapping and interconnected experiences-of women, of Westerners, of blacks, of nation states and cultures-there is no particular intellectual reason for granting each and every they an ideal and essentially separate state. However, we would like to preserve what is unique about each, as long as we also retain some sense of human community and the real struggles that contribute to its formation, and from which they are all apart. (sixteen)
Thus, Coetzee is an eclectic result of a hybrid community, with its own identity, not belonging to any individual group, but part of all of them. Homi Bhabha defines this rhetoric of hybridity as “the location of culture”: hybridity is a limited paradigm of colonial anxiety. Therefore, colonial hybridity is a “cultural form” that “produced ambivalence in the colonial masters and as such altered the authority of power.” Furthermore, Bakthin polyphony is a very popular item in folklore and anthropological studies. (Wikipedia, Hybridity).
Coetzee manages to create a distance between himself as a character and an objective viewer by referring to himself in the third person, but, at the same time, he cannot escape himself. What he is may be impossible to define through introspection, but add the others into the equation and the result is likely to come up: JM Coetzee.
Works Cited
Coetzee, JM Childhood, Scenes from a provincial life. London: Vintage, 1998
Rohmann Chris. The Dictionary of Important Ideas and Thinkers. London: Arrow Books, 2002
Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage, 1994
Butler, Christopher. Postmodernism, a brief introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002
Williams Carolina. contemporary French philosophy. London: The Athlone Press, 2001
hybridity. wikipedia link