A recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003, South African novelist and critic J.M. Coetzee has been described as a bleak writer but not a pessimistic one.
Set in apartheid-era South Africa, his novel Age of Iron is in the form of a letter from Mrs. Curren, a retired classics lecturer dying of cancer, to her daughter in the U.S. In this excerpt from Chapter One, Curren reflects fiercely and bitterly on the rulers she loathes. Her metaphorical invective is artfully fragmented as she searches for meaning in the dead language of Latin.
The Reign of the Locust
from Chapter One of Age of Iron by J.M. Coetzee*
Television. Why do I watch it? The parade of politicians every evening: I have only to see the heavy, blank faces so familiar since childhood to feel gloom and nausea. The bullies in the last row of school desks, raw-boned, lumpish boys, grown up now and promoted to rule the land. They with their fathers and mothers, their aunts and uncles, their brothers and sisters: a locust horde, a plague of black locusts infesting the country, munching without cease, devouring lives. Why, in a spirit of horror and loathing, do I watch them? Why do I let them into the house? Because the reign of the locust family is the truth of South Africa, and the truth is what makes me sick? Legitimacy they no longer trouble to claim. Reason they have shrugged off. What absorbs them is power and the stupor of power. Eating and talking, munching lives, belching. Slow, heavy-bellied talk. Sitting in a circle, debating ponderously, issuing degrees like hammer blows: death, death, death. Untroubled by the stench. Heavy eyelids, piggish eyes, shrewd with the shrewdness of generations of peasants. Plotting against each other too: slow peasant plots that take decades to mature. The new Africans, pot-bellied, heavy-jowled men on their stools of office: Cetshwayo, Dingane in white skins. Pressing downward: their power in their weight. Huge bull testicles pressing down on their wives, their children, pressing the spark out of them. In their own hearts no spark of fire left. Sluggish hearts, heavy as blood pudding.
And their message stupidly unchanging, stupidly forever the same. Their feat, after years of etymological meditation on the word, to have raised stupidity to a virtue. To stupefy: to deprive of feeling; to benumb, deaden; to stun with amazement. Stupor: insensibility, apathy, torpor of mind. Stupid: dulled in the faculties, indifferent, destitute of thought or feeling. From stupere, to be stunned, astounded. A gradient from stupid to stunned to astonished, to be turned to stone. The message: that the message never changes. A message that turns people to stone.
Selected Works by J.M. Coetzee
- In the Heart of the Country, novel (1977)
- Waiting for the Barbarians, novel (1982)
- Life & Times of Michael K, novel (1983)
- Age of Iron, novel (1990)
- Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life, memoir (1997)
- Disgrace, novel (1999)
- Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II, memoir (2002)
- Slow Man, novel (2005)
- Diary of a Bad Year, novel (2007)
* J.M. Coetzee's novel Age of Iron was first published by Random House in 1990. It is currently available in a paperback edition published by Penguin (1998).
