7 - Dis(g)race, or White Man Writing

Summary

How are they to be figured, this man and he? As master and slave? As brothers, twin brothers? As comrades in arms? Or as enemies, foes?

— J. M. Coetzee, “He and His Man”

My introduction to J. M. Coetzee's writing began with Disgrace, and a first reading of the novel did not dispose me kindly towards the author. I found the rendering of black South African characters truncated and skewed, Lucy's silence on her rape offensive: in short, I thought Disgrace was sexist and racist, an indulgence of a self-absorbed narrator. I fell into the camp of readers described by Derek Attridge as condemning Coetzee “for painting a one-sidedly negative picture of post-apartheid South Africa, representing blacks as rapists and thieves, and implying that whites have no option but to submit to their assaults.”

My ignorance of Coetzee's oeuvre was by design; I boycotted his writing precisely because he was Afrikaner and I rooted for the underdog, whom I saw as under-acknowledged black South African writers like Bessie Head, Alex la Guma, Lewis Nkosi, Ezekiel Mphalele, and Miriam Tlali, writers I began reading in graduate school in the 1980s at Coetzee's alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin. (My literary apartheid, however, did not extend to women writers, since I read the works of Nadine Gordimer, Olive Schreiner, and Doris Lessing.) In the 1980s, UT Austin was home to Research in African Literatures, then edited by Bernth Lindfors; the English department featured a new Third World Literature program; and replicated township shanties constructed on the quad testified to a resurgent student activism, galvanized by protests against South African apartheid and attempts to get the university to divest.