Abstract
Erik Peeters
WHEN THE MISFIT COMES HOME: A COMPARATIVE READING OF J.M.COETZEE'S LIFE AND TIMES OF MICHAEL K AND ZAKES MDA'S THE HEART OF REDNESS
J.M. Coetzee's novel Life and Times of Michael K has become, arguably, a doubly impossible text – not only was it conceived as an enactment of an only possible future at its inception, but it has turned out to be an enactment of a future that never came to be. Now that its central conceit, a South Africa riven by civil war, has been overhauled by history, can the narrative of the physically disfigured and socially outcast Michael K still be fruitfully explored as anything other than a curious historical document? It will be the contention of this paper that it can, and that it still has much to offer a reader.
Michael K can be read as the classic outsider figure – disfigured by a hare-lip, cast adrift in a society that views strangers with grave suspicion if not outright hostility and that must eventually destroy him. Yet his almost perverse insistence on refusing the help of others while equally perversely refusing to die marks an insistent refusal to submit to their attempts to construct him as a scapegoat, a figure who will assure and anchor their self-narration as the benevolent oppressor or the heroic resistance fighter. As such, Michael insists on his right to be other and to remain so, even at the risk of his survival.
His refusal to become what others want to make him, read already as an “ethics of refusal”, still chimes loudly in a post-Apartheid South Africa riven by unequal struggles over the right to define a new South African subjectivity. However, his refusal, eloquent in its silence, is only part of the struggle. Simply the refusal of hegemonic oppression and subordinated subjectivity leads to a stasis figured by the enigmatic ending of the text with Michael huddled in his mother's usurped room under the stairs. After the refusal an assertion of something else is needed, some way to be that is neither oppressed nor oppressive, neither subordinate nor hegemonic.
This fragile process of assertion figures large in Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness , in part the narrative of another outsider. Camagu, a returned exile and academic too proud to dance the “freedom dance” in the approved manner to gain employment, almost by accident drives not to the airport to leave the country but to the small amaXhosa community of Qolorha-by-Sea, a community still riven by the conflicting interpretations of the prophecies of Nonqawuse and Nonkosi 150 years before that promised liberation and brought famine instead. Equally accidentally, Camagu begins a process of transformation both in himself and in the village, not through overt political action guided by a particular ideology but through the simple reality of his presence. The community that the narrative dares to dream answers in part the question left hanging at the end of Life and Times , a question still vitally importance to South Africa in its “rainbow” newness: after the refusal of subjection and the end of violence, what comes next?