Approaches between Fanon and Coetzee: colonial violence and depersonalization in Life and Times of Michael K and Waiting for the Barbarians

Abstract

This paper seeks to demonstrate how colonial violence generates a process of depersonalization in the characters of the novels Life and Times of Michael K (1984) and Waiting for the Barbarians (1999), by John Maxwell Coetzee, a South African writer and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. For this purpose, we start from the reflections of Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist, activist, and theorist who accurately diagnoses the effects of violence suffered by colonized peoples in his main works: Black Skin, White Masks (2008) and The Wretched of the Earth (2005). The novels analyzed in the paper portray the colonial violence present in South Africa during the apartheid regime, justifying, thus, the investigation of Coetzee’s fictional writing through Fanon’s anti-colonial thought. An approach to the novels that illustrates colonial violence in its different configurations is intended: physical/psychological violence, responsible for the imprisonment and torture of the colonized body; material violence, related to the usurpation of the colonized land by the colonizer; and cultural/symbolic violence, which dehumanizes the colonized, annihilating their identity. Finally, it brings a reflection on the forms of resistance presented in the novels. The liberation of the oppressed through violent conflict, a political action prescribed by Fanon, does not happen. For Coetzee's characters, all that remains is the capacity for resilience in front of colonial oppression.