Waiting For The Barbarians Essay

A Body Contested A contested space, as defined on the first day of class, is fought over for ownership by two or more groups of people. This can be as simple as one fighting with a sibling over closet shelves for clothing storage, or as complex as the division of Europe after World War II. Contested spaces need not exist in the form of land, for they might exist as people too. African Americans, for example, became contested spaces when they came to America as slaves. Similarly, Coetzee uses the body of the Barbarian girl as a contested space in his novel Waiting for the Barbarians. One sees his usage of the girl’s body through both the dehumanizing way the Magistrate looks at her and the untold story of her torture. Coetzee’s incorporation of this contested space gifts the reader insight to the conflict through another point of view. It also allows the reader to gain a sense of the history of conflict within the story. Often times when a person or group fights over a contested space, they dehumanize their opponent in an effort to find

There live many differing opinions on the matter, likely due to the untold gaps of the aporias. This lets people interpret their own parts of the story, which provides for unique conclusions. Clearly, though, the girl fears the Empire and was even physically pained by the soldiers. The Empire thought they had the right to do this, yet the Barbarians persisted in obtaining revenge for this action later in the novel. This girl was most evidently fought over by the two groups as a contested space. She significantly represented the Barbarians as strong and intelligent people in opposition to what the Empire told its people about them. In the end, she speaks for herself and returns home; which is the justice the novel searches for in its truest sense. If all contested spaces spoke for themselves, the world would be a much more just