Power of one

JUL 12 -

I spent the month of June rereading novelist JM Coetzee’s work for a seminar in North Carolina led by the philosopher Robert Pippin of the University of Chicago. Although I had taught Coetzee’s novels and memoirs, I hadn’t discussed the political, philosophical and ethical implications of his entire oeuvre with more than a dozen of my academic colleagues from all over the United States.

Coetzee’s work obsessively raises the issue of ethics of power and the hierarchy that imbalance of power produces—and also how certain individuals, at once the beneficiary of power and capable of conscience, subject themselves to a process of dishonour, humiliation, shame, suffering and torture because they find themselves complicit in oppression and injustice.  So, in my letter I wrote, among other things, the following: “I have been trying to figure out how the mind of privilege works. Since 2006, when the Maoist Party joined the peace process, abandoning the path of violent insurgency, the work of reconciliation and restructuring of the feudal state in Nepal has been difficult and delayed (the Constituent Assembly hadn’t dissolved when I wrote this).  And nobody knows where this attempt to reconcile opposing forces as a substitute for total war will lead or whether reconciliation between the marginalised and the powerful is at all possibl e given the refusal of traditional forces to reflect, acknowledge past injustices and agree to their eradication, let alone lead the way. Very often, many among the privileged don’t even see that injustice has occurred. My writing about the political process has been a kind of experiment to know the power of discourse to effect transformation through peaceful means. I want to know if a philosophical discussion of Coetzee’s work will help me understand better the psychology of the ruling class/caste and the process of redemption and regeneration.”

What I couldn’t say was that my belief in discourse to persuade those whose hold on power is entrenched would be badly shaken as a result of the failure of the CA. When I was first challenged in 2010 by an anonymous reviewer of a scholarly journal about whether my belief in discourse as a transformative tool in Nepal wasn’t a little too naïve—because various stakeholders in power have entrenched political interests they won’t give up by public discourse alone—I had dismissed it as too radical and academic. While I could see the point of the reviewer, I couldn’t agree because many of the changes in the ethnically diverse countries had occurred through peaceful means so that former opponents and enemies could live together in a changed scenario. Gandhi’s movement in India, the transition in South Africa and Martin Luther King’s Civil Rights movement in the United States were successful examples of what a combination of activ ism and persuasive discourse could achieve in an iniquitous world.

Coetzee’s novels present protagonists who—despite being white and identified with the colonial, oppressive state—disengage themselves from it through the long experience of living in it as its beneficiary, induced by their liberal humanist orientation. They subject themselves to humiliation, dishonour and shame because they empathise and want to expiate for the inequities that the oppressive regime inflicts on the marginalised, of which they also consider themselves a part. 

The question, however, remains: do the characters’ individual sufferings to atone for the collective oppression and injustice offer insights into the process of redemption?  More importantly, can a magistrate at the imperial outpost or a cancer-stricken retired female professor of classics in Cape Town—by subjecting themselves to humiliation and suffering because they find themselves directly or indirectly party to the imperial oppression or the apartheid regime—end the collective suffering of the marginalised and the oppressed?  Or, is their suffering a futile, individual gesture filled with complicity and self-deceit? 

This is the biggest liberal humanist dilemma that Coetzee’s works present without providing an answer. For example, in Waiting for the Barbarian (1980), the magistrate who has lived for 25 years at the colonial outpost administering the natives disagrees with the aggressive policies of the newly arrived Colonel Joll. When the latter orders a raid into the nomad territory, brings back prisoners and tortures them to extract a confession about the brewing rebellion, the magistrate finds a tortured and blinded young woman and washes her body, feet and scars, talks to her and, finally, while Colonel Joll is away, organises an expedition to take the girl back to her people, even consummating sexual intercourse with her. Later the magistrate is charged with treason and put through the extremes of torture and humiliation. He submits without protest because we readers know that he, guilt-ridden, is driven by liberal humanist imperatives. However, the end of the novel leads to n o specific resolution to the problem of empire. 

Similarly, in The Age of Iron (1990), the oppressive apartheid regime and the black revolutionaries are violently at each other’s throats, killing and maiming. The cancer-ridden classics professor reluctantly takes in a homeless non-white man and equally reluctantly lets herself into the world of her maid and her world of the angry black township near Cape Town called Gugulethu (In 2008 when I visited Gugulethu, it was going through transformation despite the pathologies of post-apartheid South Africa). Under death sentence by cancer, she decides to get involved in the violent lives of her maid’s teenage son and his friend to save them and finally loses herself in a cardboard tent after the two black boys are murdered by the apartheid regime. But does her experience of shame and suffering aroused by her liberal humanist conscience contribute to ending the apartheid regime in an age of iron when the warring sides are equally inflexible and aggressive? These are qu estions left unanswered in Coetzee’s novels.

Coetzee, an Afrikaner himself, like other Afrikaner writers, such as Breyten Breytenbach and Andre Brink, always morally opposed apartheid and ridiculed the vulgarity of the racist Afrikaans. Yet, his extreme fidelity to literariness prevents him from giving voice to the black South Africans, which his fellow compatriot Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer has done.  Ultimately, Coetzee’s work reveals the complicity and self-deceit, though not totally useless and without purpose, of the liberal humanist project that privileges the individual and ignores the social because we now know that apartheid ended through a combination of forceful pressure and gesture of reconciliation. 

So, the question for us is: can substantial change come through peaceful means in Nepal?


Source: http://www.ekantipur.com/2012/07/12/oped/power-of-one/356973/