Abstract:

Coetzee is one of the famous writers who have meticulously countered the narrative of the colonizers in colonial discourse. J.M. Coetzee in his novels has revealed the colonial machinations that the forces of the Empire used to control the native population of the colonized lands. Literature written on such a pattern is termed Postcolonial literature. It is called a counter-discourse, which exposes the hidden underpinnings in the European texts. Colonizers have portrayed the colonized as degenerate and strange nations who are devoid of any type of civilized means. Natives are shown to be uncultured and uncivilized. To deconstruct such a discourse, Edward Said theorized a concept known as 'contrapuntal reading', which he discussed in Culture and Imperialism (1993). It is a useful technique to comprehend the different methods employed by the colonial writers to represent the natives of the occupied territory. These natives were portrayed as a violent and wild creature. This gave the occupying forces a pretext to subjugate the natives by using hostile ways and means because of their savage nature. Contrapuntal reading applied to Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians (1999) helps the readers identify the real perpetrators of the crimes in the colonized world. In this novel, Coetzee shows how the aggressive forces of the Empire in the name of civilization commit the most horrendous type of atrocities in colonized South Africa to oppress the innocent natives. This work encompasses the violence used by the forces of the Empire against the natives to spread its terror among them. This study is an attempt to show the continuities of violence in colonized societies by taking Waiting for the Barbarians as a reference point for a specific type of contrapuntal and postcolonial analysis of the text.

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