Arabic Modes Of Storytelling In Waiting For The Barbarians

Reflecting on Arabic modes of storytelling woven into Salih’s prose, Benita Parry’s Reflections on the Excess of Empire (2005) accentuates the coexisting stories of Mustafa and the narrator as “told in the hieratic oral style of a hakawati”, in which the narrative mimics the mu-cirada literary form “meaning opposition or contradiction in which at least two voices participate, the first composing a poem that the second will undo…reversing the meaning” (74). A reworking of the traditional oral style, Salih’s narrator assimilates fragments from what is spoken and conferred, compiling the unarticulated truth from the spoken lies and threading the absences together to form a noticeable presence. Mustafa remains in perpetual oscillation between two cultures, failing to “make his mark” but producing the unspoken truth of hybridity that Bhabha explains as “the anxiety of the irresolvable borderline…problems of identification and diasporic aesthetic…at once the time of cultural displacement and the space of the untranslatable.” (Young 25). Speaking from a place of untranslatability scrutinised in Coetzee’s writing, Mustafa’s narrative is only legitimised through the gaps in his pretence; the narrator beholds a unique position of understanding the untranslatable on his own terms, asserting a new consideration of hybridity that necessitates a revision of the reader’s mode of processing. The easily disregarded interstices between fabrications of cultural identity is where Coetzee locates Mustafa’s truthful narrative. During a drinking session in Sudan, Salih’s narrator becomes attuned to the discrepancy in the space between Mustafa’s fictional illusions and the authentic story. Whilst vision characterises the impenetrable characters in Waiting for the Barbarians, Salih’s narrator is permitted a fleeting moment of connection with Sa’eed: noting how “his eyes gave me the impression of wandering in far-away horizons”, he starts reciting English poetry with an “impeccable English accent” (14). The dream-like quality of such passages isolates Mustafa and the narrator in a subliminal encounter that only they are privy to. If the story identifies with the experience of its listeners, then the listeners are located in the same apertures; the absence of translatability ceases to function solely as a mediator of alienation but offers itself as a potential agent, by which, animating a new form of the cultural community.

Waiting for the Barbarians also envisages the possibility of galvanising a new, all-encompassing community that would not be reliant on the affirmation of identity or monotony but founded on an appreciation of our infinite difference. Coetzee does not reimagine history as a fully narratable subject, but like Salih, bears witness to it by refusing to solidify the suffering produced by colonial oppression by writing it into historical discourse. In sustaining a testimony that “takes place in the non-place of articulation”, the novel contains anti-historicist ethics characterised by a tribute and an ethics of testimony conceived by Giorgio Agamben (39). At the most intense depiction of physical suffering, the Magistrate produces bellows of agony, leading an onlooker to exclaim “That is the barbarian language you hear” (133). An involuntary testimony to the Magistrate’s transformation, the onlooker accentuates an altogether new subjectivity: a space between cultures produced through abjection beyond the social order, which gains the Magistrate access to the sphere of the uncategorisable inhuman. A prelinguistic realm outside the binaries and categories of language, he becomes a privy bystander to the untold and untellable suffering of the barbarians. Coetzee’s writing perpetually aligns itself with poststructuralist thought, particularly in its breakdown of the broader binary factions of ‘coloniser’ and ‘colonised’. As for Frantz Fanon in his seminal work, The Pitfalls of National Consciousness, the focus remains on the nuanced network of power imbalances that lie in-between, unaddressed and untranslated. At the novel’s denouement, the Magistrate, who previously defined himself as “a storyteller losing the thread of his way”, still considers himself as having “lost his way long ago but presses on along a road that may lead nowhere” (48,170). The Magistrate’s experience of dislocation between cultures is inexpressible and discursive means continually evade him. Having left behind the familiarity of his interpretive community, the identity mapped and constructed by the Empire, he proceeds towards uncharted terrain: the possibility of a non-appropriative encounter with the other, in which he surrenders the “locutions of a civil servant with literary ambitions” (168). Nevertheless, it remains unknown as to whether the Magistrate transgresses his liminal state as a witness or lies suspended in a two-world system simply gesturing towards a higher prospect of hybridity based on the idea of “an inessential commonality” that affirms difference rather than identity (Agamben 17).