Time and tide: Scenes from a stage adaptation of the novel “Waiting for the Barbarians” by Nobel Prize-winning South African writer JM Coetzee. (Photo by Raphael GAILLARDE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
Time waits for no one, giving it meanings unimaginable when the first words were spoken.
Consider the Greek word “barbaros” – literally, “stammering” – an encapsulation of how other languages sounded to the Greek ear.
“We only hear ‘bar-bar'”, we can imagine the ancient Greeks joking among themselves in an Athenian tavern thousands of years ago.
From a semi-linguistic marker, “barbaros” evolved to describe a “barbarian” – someone who is not Greek – and later a person who is neither Greek nor Roman, in short, a foreigner.
But a stranger was not to be confused with a stranger, or the strange, “xenos” in Greek, from which “xenophobic” and “xenophobia” come.
It was along the lines of barbarians as non-Romans that the poet Constantine P Cavafy wrote one of his best-known and most celebrated poems, “Waiting for the Barbarians”.
First published in a private pamphlet in 1904, it begins by asking: “What do we, assembled in the forum, expect?”
The answer is immediate: “The barbarians must arrive today.”
The senators, the emperor, the two consuls, the praetors, the orators wait all day for the barbarians to arrive. Then night falls and the streets and squares of this poetic Rome empty, the population returning home “lost in their thoughts”.
“And some of our men, just returned from the border, say/that there are no more barbarians.”
Cavafy now offers us a brilliant reflection on the “problem” of the foreigner: “And now, what will happen to us without barbarians?/ These people were a kind of solution.”
Current policy in South Africa presents the “foreign national” as a scapegoat, the “answer” to multiple shortcomings and failures entirely due to South Africans themselves.
But of course it is easier to blame the outsider than to admit one’s own responsibility and guilt.
Expect more of this toxic hatred as venal and greedy politicians try to scam people into voting for them in the 2024 election.
Showing confidence in the cultural references of readers, JM Coetzee published “Waiting for the Barbarians”, a novel, in 1980. He does not refer to Cavafy’s poem, but, in any case, his chronicle of a end of empire gives resonance and particularity to the title.
Coetzee explores some of the questions raised by Cavafy’s poem, replacing speculation with grim elaboration. To the ironic idea that barbarians are a solution of some sort, Coetzee offers a terrifying realism.
“I think: ‘I wanted to live outside of history. I wanted to live outside of the history that the Empire imposes on its subjects, even its lost subjects.
“I never wanted barbarians to have the history of the Empire imposed on them. How can I believe that this is a cause for shame?'”
These are the thoughts of the unnamed Magistrate who narrates the novel.
In his post, a small frontier settlement, he for years collected taxes and tithes, administered the communal lands, supervised the small garrison and its officers, monitored local commerce, and was the law of the land twice a week.
It is a quiet life in the service and on the fringes of the Empire. Retirement is looming and “for the rest, I watch the sun rise and set, I eat and I sleep and I’m happy.”
Into this lost hole, where the hand of the Empire has only been indirectly evident, arrives Colonel Joll of the Third Office of the Civil Guard. Fears in the capital that “barbarian tribes” from the north and west are regrouping prompt the presence of the “vigilant guards of the Empire”.
Contrary to their innocuous name, the Third Bureau, these officials are rather similar to the Spanish Inquisition, detecting sedition here, rebellion there, and having the keenest nose for the truth.
What constitutes truth for them is very different from the truth – it’s what they want to hear to fit into the larger narrative of unrest on the border and the impending attacks on the Empire from of a new allied and daring enemy.
These bureaucrats are “devoted to the truth, doctors of interrogation,” writes the Magistrate. In simpler terms, they are torturers who embody the tyranny of the Empire.
The Magistrate collaborates with Joll, while trying to emphasize that the two men he plans to question cannot have been part of a group of looters. One is old, a “gray bearded man”, the other his young nephew.
Giving in to his innate dislike for Joll and the injustice of the men’s situation, the Magistrate begins to argue for their innocence.
Questioning the old man, he discovers that the two were going to the colony to consult a doctor about the young man’s injured forearm, bloody evidence which becomes evident.
But Joll – a horrible-looking creature with