Sexual Domination: Colonial Guilt and Postcolonial Hatred in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace

Sexual Domination: Colonial Guilt and Postcolonial Hatred in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace

Janet Migoyan

Student [Should be like this. This is just to signify that the author does not represent a department] Vt 2021 Examensarbete för kandidatexamen, 15 hp Engelska

Abstract J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace was published during a defining moment in South African history in 1999. Five years earlier Nelson Mandela had been elected president after the first general election. The healing process in a country divided by race and a history marked by racial crimes, committed under long time by collective actions of many generations of colonizers, was a decisive historical necessity. Disgrace illustrates the economical and emotional mechanisms of sexual exploitation of women in post- apartheid South African society. Those socioeconomic mechanisms are fueled by postcolonial hate, making the reconciliation process difficult in the new democracy. The aim of this bachelor project is to show how Coetzee’s Disgrace contextualizes the collective humanitarian guilt and disgrace caused by sexual oppression of woman and illustrates the challenges that post-apartheid South Africa faces to reconcile with the racial crimes committed during apartheid when sexual crimes continue under the historical shadow of colonial power and postcolonial hatred.

Keywords: collective guilt, gender, race, sexual oppression, post-apartheid, colonialism, postcolonialism

Table of contents

1.Introduction 5

2.Previous research 7

3. Gender aspects of postcolonial theory in Disgrace 9

4. Racial aspects of feminist theory in Disgrace 16

5. Whose disgrace? 20

6.Conclusion 21

7.Works Cited 22

1 Introduction J. M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace was published in 1999 and is situated in South Africa during the post-apartheid period. The novel was vastly reviewed and commented and had been subject of study and attention not only by literary critics but also by academics, politicians, feminists, and journalists in general. One of the parallel plots in the novel about the rape of a white woman by three black men was highly controversial in that crucial time of South African history and was frequently condemned for exploiting racist stereotypes (Boehmer 149). Disgrace was, at the same time, praised and acclaimed by literary critics for its multilayered portrayal of the impassible questions about guilt and responsibility which was engaging the South African society in that specific period of historical turning point ( McGonegal 152).

The novel’s protagonist David Lurie, a South African professor teaching English at Cape Town university is accused of alleged “sexual victimization or harassment” (Coetzee 39) of his vulnerable student and later questioned by the university committee on discrimination, which consists of some of his colleagues and the leadership of the university he works. Lurie questions the rightfulness and validity of this “secular tribunal” (Coetzee 58). Lurie resigns after refusing to issue an apology and leaves Cape Town for Eastern Cape and stays at his daughter–Lucy’s little farm. Here in Eastern Cape, he faces a different reality of post-apartheid South Africa and the power dynamic between the races are flipped. Lurie and his daughter are attacked by three black men. Lucy is gang raped, and later Lurie detects a link between one of the attackers and his daughter’s black employee and “co-proprietor” (Coetzee 62) of the smallholding, Petrus. Lurie’s and Lucy’s reactions to the rape and attack are profoundly different. This distinctive manner of viewing the reasons behind the rape is the axis, around which the complexity of the process of reconciliation and forgiveness in post-apartheid South Africa is exposed in the novel.

By choosing to write about two acts of sexual violation, the first committed from a position of economic and social dominance with a white man’s privilege and the second committed by three black men driven by economic inequity and historical frustration,

Coetzee exposes the amplitude of gender oppression in a historical and humanitarian perspective. The ingenious plot of the novel combines historical, political, ethical, and humanitarian themes within a storyline describing a relatively short period of time in the lives of a few characters. In the novel, the sexual violations are committed against two South African women with divergent historical and colonial heritage. These disgraceful incidents of sexual abuse happen during a time when a democratically chosen government has recently replaced apartheid and the search for truth about the racial crimes committed during apartheid is on the daily agenda. This is a time when the social healing and the reconciliation process is dependent on the truth, social justice and on believe in equity. Coetzee chooses to make his protagonist the alleged violator in the one case of sexual abuse and Lurie’s daughter: Lucy, the victim of the rape in the other case and by doing that he digs even deeper into the ethical aspects of sexual domination. Lucy’s rape gives Lurie reason to reflect on his own behavior towards his young student. He is the violator in one case and the victim via his daughter in the other case.

Sexual oppression and sexual humiliation, as some of many remains from the colonial rule are forcing women to subjugation and leave humans, in a continuous state of disgrace. In the novel, this gender aspect of post-apartheid South African reality are manifested at the personal, individual level. The logically irrational and inhuman treatment of the powerless, which are represented by women and dogs in the novel, illustrates a society that fights against racism and social injustice but is too blind to see gender oppression and its consequences. Coetzee elevates the tangled problems concerning colonial dominance, racial oppression, postcolonial hatred, sexual violence and desire, our mistreatment of animals to a philosophical and humanistic level of collective guilt: to a state of collective disgrace. The thesis states that in Coetzee’s novel, the collective guilt of white men following the crimes committed during apartheid is partially caused by and partially paid for by sexual domination of women of all races. Coetzee exposes the racial and human-centered aspects of sexual oppression by juxtaposing two storylines about sexual abuse where arguably, the women of different races are victims and men of different races are the oppressors. Those two sexual crimes in the novel are committed in a pivotal point of South African history when the racial crimes of apartheid period are expected to be discussed, forgiven, and

6 forgotten but are overshadowed by sexual crimes powered by postcolonial hate. In Coetzee’s Disgrace, sexual domination of women and the disgrace it causes is the central theme and an obstacle for the reconciliation process.

This essay is a literary analysis of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. The secondary sources related to and relevant for the analysis of the novel in view of the main argument deal with postcolonial and feminist theory. Colonial and postcolonial South African history and the history of apartheid have formed the characters in Disgrace. Therefore, the mechanisms of sexual oppression, which the novel is dealing with, will be examined under the light of postcolonial theory. Postcolonial and feminist theoretical studies are both vast fields of social science and this essay will only touch upon a few aspects of those theories. The limits of this bachelor project confine and restrain the choice of secondary sources and by that make it impossible to mirror and reflect the whole range of critical literature which have been produced about Disgrace. Concepts such as Othering, hybridity, diaspora, and the role language plays in the reconciliation process in post-apartheid South Africa will be discussed briefly by using the works of postcolonial theorists such as Ashcroft and Chapman. The link between gender and race, the connection between the colonial and sexual oppression and the gendered aspects of postcolonialism will be discussed in general using works written by feminist theorist, amongst them – Manyard, Afshar and Skeggs. Arguing about the gendered racial oppression and the problem of sexual violence against women in post-apartheid South Africa, some statistics will also be presented.

2 Previous research Since its publication, Disgrace has been frequently studied, debated, and discussed (Attridge 315) and the number of literary reviews and literary studies about Disgrace specifically and Coetzee’s work, in general, are considerably huge. Literary critics such as Julie McGonegal and Derek Attridge, to name a few, have repeatedly discussed the concept of post-apartheid guilt, forgiveness, reconciliation, the state of grace, and the diversity of truth. Parallelly, Disgrace has been highly interesting for critics with postcolonial or feminist approaches to the novel. Critics such as Elleke Bohemer, Jayne

Poyner, Michela Canepari-Labib have studied the concepts of scapegoating (Bohemer 136), the “conscience-stricken white writer” (Poyner 2) and the connection between language and identity (Canepari-labib).

There are two main themes in Disgrace that have frequently been studied: the reconciliation and forgiving process and the notion of scapegoating. The fictional hearing of Lurie proceeding in the novel has been compared with and metonymized to the work of Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa by literary critics (McGonegal 157). The national reconciliation process, which began not long after the first universal elections in 1994 after the end of apartheid and was based on the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, No 34 of 1995 (justice.gov.za 2021) aimed at “…the production of national discourse of confession in South Africa” (157). According to McGonegal, Disgrace allegorizes Lurie’s fictional hearing in the novel with the dilemma TRC has had narrating the truth about apartheid. Those responsible for telling the truth have been disinterested in dealing with the power and advantages their privilege entails (167). McGonegal argues that Coetzee’s Disgrace, accused by some critics of being cynical about the future of South Africa (167), captures the complexity of the search for truth and displays the obstacles and limitations which the political, and juridical institutions have in constructing the truth. The obstacles which exist in the process of reconciliation in post-apartheid South Africa, a country parted by race, language, and colonial history, and the concepts of “grace” “confession”, “forgiveness” in Disgrace, are examined by McGonegal.

It has also been argued that Disgrace is a cynical picture of the impossibility of reconciliation process in post-apartheid South Africa (Attridge) and as such, it has been criticized. Disgrace is named as a novel exploiting racist stereotypes in African National Congress’s submission to Human Rights Commission’s investigation about racism in media. (Jolly 149). In opposition to this accusation, Rosmary Jolly claims that the new South African government has been reluctant to tackle the “rape epidemic” (149) and the sexual violence against South African women and have had political motives for its critic towards the novel. According to Jolly the novel is a portrayal of the

“engendered hegemony” (150) in South Africa. Focusing on the role gender plays in the process of repentant and expiation, Elleke Boehmer studies the process of “secular atonement” (Boehmer 137) in Disgrace. Boehmer argues that the gendered and animalized contrition is a recurring theme in Coetzee’s novels. According to Boehmer Lucy’s raped body plays the role of a secular scapegoat in the novel (146). Likewise, the theme of guilt for the colonial past is examined by Jayne Poyner in her article “J.M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public intellectual”. She argues that Coetzee’s protagonist is often a “conscience-stricken white writer” (Poyner 2), and David Lurie in Disgrace is no exception from this. This essay explores the intersection of sexual oppression with racial oppression in Disgrace.

3 Gender aspects of postcolonial theory in Disgrace Postcolonial literature has an agenda of “writing back” (Monica Popescu 121) and to expose and reveal the inequities of the past. Expressed by Robert J. Young “…postcolonialism involves the argument that the nations of the three non-western continents (Africa, Asia, Latin America) are largely in a situation of subordination to Europe and North America, and in a position of inequality”(Chapman190).Postcolonial literature is absorbed with the experiences which are the effects of colonialism. Common features of colonialization have been studied and defined as general concepts, which are part of the specific terminology used in postcolonial theory. This essay will process only those aspects of postcolonial theory regarding Disgrace that are relevant for the argument.

Born in South Africa to Afrikaner parents Coetzee is multilingual and multicultural. The reflection of his cross-cultural identity is seen in his novels. Writing about the logic of postcolonialism in Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg, Popescu writes that according to Biodun Jeyifo Coetzee is a kind of postcolonial writer, who is defined as “…‘interstitial or liminal’: an ambivalent mode of self-fashioning of the writer or critic which is neither First World nor Third World, neither securely and smugly metropolitan, nor assertively and combatively Third-Worldist” (Popescu 132). When it comes to Coetzee’s novel, which is about Dostoevsky, Popescu thus argues for “… a

9 reading that considers the similarities between the positions of the writers in relation to the field of political forces in their countries and the authors’ ethical freedom to represent their chosen material.”(Popescu 109). The same argument about the reading will be used in this essay for Disgrace. Coetzee’s novel does not try to be politically correct, provocative, or taking stands in political issues, but it undeniably has a strong relation and connection with what happens in South Africa of that time and thus it is an illustration of Coetzee’s position to the politics of post-apartheid period.

The postcolonial literary traces in Disgrace could also be defined as interstitial (Olaniyan 3), meaning that Coetzee is concerned with the space and gap which exists between races, men and women, humans and animals and tries to philosophically penetrate and explain the notion of “Otherness”. As Olaniyan writes the “Interstitial postcolonialism, on the other hand, is characterized by a sustained critique and interrogation of all binaries and of all the sides that constitute the divisions: colonizer/colonized, first world/third world, center/periphery, man/woman…” (Olaniyan 4).According to postcolonial theory, “Otherness” or “Othering” is the systematic marginalization and exclusion of a group by another group with power. Ashcroft et al write that according to Spivak’s definition “Othering” is a dialectical process because the colonizing Other is established at the same time as its colonized others are produced as subjects.”(188, original emphasis). In Disgrace, I argue that Coetzee enlarges this concept to include not only the Otherness of a particular race, but the Otherness of women.

Coetzee exposes the Otherness between women and men caused by sexual oppression. Gender Otherness is traceable in many chapters of the novel. Bev Shaw says to Lurie that he does not understand what Lucy went through referring to the gang rape. Lurie thinks: “Do they think he has not suffered with his daughter? What more could he have witnessed than he is capable of imagining? Or do they think that, where rape is concerned, no man can be where the woman is?” (Coetzee 140-141). Later, reflecting on the English romantic poet Byron’s life and “the legions of countesses and kitchenmaids Byron pushed himself into there were no doubt those who called it rape”(160), he thinks about the rape of Lucy.

Lucy’s intuition is right after all: he does understand; he can, if he concentrates, if he loses himself, be there, be the men, inhabit them, fill them with the ghost of himself. The question is, does he have it in him to be the women? (160) In the same way that colonizers from their perspective of supremacy do not have the capacity to understand the colonized, men from their position of gender dominance cannot feel the way women feel when being subject of sexual abuse in centuries. This gender Otherness is older than colonialism and apartheid, older than Byron and his “kitchenmaids”. Lurie thinks about men’s inability to understand women directly after thinking about how Byron’s love life is perceived in our time. Even though “From where he stands, from where Lucy stands, Byron looks very old-fashioned indeed” (160).This suggests that this ‘Otherness’ in relation to women is not just an old phenomenon from Byron’s time, but exists in our days. Women are still treated as objects and an economic system marked by unequal distribution of possessions and unfairness encourages this behavior. Lurie reflects about the way society handles the rape of his daughter: A risk to own anything: a car, a pair of shoes, a packet of cigarettes. Not enough to go around, not enough cars, shoes, cigarettes. Too many people, too few things. […] That is how one must see life in this country: in its schematic aspect. Otherwise one could go mad. Cars, shoes; women too. There must be some niche in the system for women and what happens to them. (98) The last sentence about the existence of a “niche in the system for women…” (98) is specifically about the way the economic system and the high sexual crime rates in South Africa (Crime statistics, South African police service 20121) are related.

Furthermore, the direct and indirect effects of apartheid and colonial history are implied and indicated in Disgrace which is set in post-apartheid time. A short definition of the Afrikaans word apartheid is “separation” (Ashcroft et al 17). Apartheid was the policy that worked through several laws introduced by the Nationalist Government of South Africa beginning from 1948 and aimed to development of a racially segregated state. To understand the hatred and subjection Lucy fell victim to, it is important to look deeper

11 into some references to racial oppression in the novel. When Lucy asks Lurie to help her black neighbor Petrus with the dogfood Lurie says “Give Petrus a hand. I like that. I like the historical piquancy. Will he pay me a wage for my labour, do you think?”(Coetzee 77).The new owner of the smallholding and homeowner Petrus says that digging is a job, which do not need skills and that “For digging you just have to be a boy,” (Coetzee 152), Lurie thinks; “Petrus speaks the word with real amusement. Once he was a boy, now he is no longer. Now he can play at being one, as Marie Antionette could play at being a milkmaid”(Coetzee 152), and thereby explains the post-apartheid self- confidence of the historically oppressed which is as tricky and challenging for those losing power, as when a rich queen plays a milkmaid for revolutionary crowds.

Apartheid and the Otherness it has created interact and affect the mindset of people and their moral compass. While digging a hole for burying the dogs which the three rapists have killed during the attack, Lurie thinks: ”Like shooting fish in a barrel, he thinks. Contemptable, yet exhilarating, probably, in a country where dogs are bred to snarl at the mere smell of a black man. A satisfying afternoon’s work, heady like all revenge.” (110). The fact that the word “contemptable” is a synonym of “disgraceful” enhances the contrast between what the black men think of the dogs: dangerous instruments used by the oppressors and friend with the enemy, and how Lurie, with his white privileged mentality, thinks about killing them. Even here with a few simple sentences, Coetzee succeeds to further explore the effects of racial segregation laws and years of white supremacy in South Africa.

In addition to Otherness and apartheid the notion of hybridity which has a close relation with the concept of liminality is distinctive in the novel. Hybridity and existence of a diaspora are postcolonial features that are detectable in Disgrace. While Ashcroft et al define hybridity as “… the creation of new transcultural forms within the contact zone produced by colonization.” (135 original bold font) they write about liminality as a: ”…in-between space in which cultural change may occur: the transcultural space in which strategies for personal or communal self- hood may be elaborated, a region in which there is a continual process of

movement and interchange between different states”(Ashcroft et al 145 original bold font). As descendants to colonizers, Lucy and Lurie have a dual sense of self, depending on where they live. Their identity occupies an “in-between space”. They are Dutch and they are South Africans. This feeling of belonging and not belonging plays its roll in Lurie’s and Lucy’s way of reacting to the rape. Lucy wants to take root and make South Africa hers by staying after the rape. Lurie wants her to escape. Lurie, like many other white settlers in African countries, thinks about leaving when it gets dangerous. They have a choice and have the privilege to enjoy the best of both worlds. After all, it is not their country, even though they are born in South Africa they are invaders and colonizers. He believes that after the gang rape Lucy is in danger and wants to convince her to leave South Africa and move to Holland. (Coetzee 204). The Dutch cape colony originated by Dutch settlers at the end of 1600 (Leonard Thompson 33) has a long history, but the feeling of otherness and the lingual and cultural bond to Holland is still existing for the descendants of the Dutch settlers, one of which is Lucy. Lucy’s unborn child, a product of rape, forces her to take root and change her ways (she is planning to marry Petrus for protection), in the same way all children born by sexual oppression during colonial period was forced to a transcultural hybridity.

One central feature of transcultural hybridity is multilingualism. The lack of a common language in South Africa is one of many outcomes of the colonial period. The fact that the language of colonial powers is also the language of the reconciliation process has been a huge obstacle in post-apartheid South Africa. McGonegal in her book Imagining Justice: The Politics of Postcolonial Forgiveness and Reconciliation 2009, discusses the “lack of universal language” (149) and the “alternative mode of communication” (178) which according to her, Disgrace exemplifies. She argues that Lurie tries to reconcile with Melanie’s father, Mr. Isaacs,(Coetzee 171-173) and not with Melanie, the student, and that the conversation between Mr. Issacs and Lurie is Coetzee’s reference to “the silencing the victim’s voice” (149) and to the difficulties which TRC and South African society have had to tell the victims’ story. I argue that by letting Lurie reconcile with Melanie’s father Coetzee transfers the disgrace caused by gender oppression from the victims – women, to the perpetrator, in this case – the men, and at the same time

13 illustrate the silencing of women subjected to sexual oppression due to the state of disgrace the society forces them to experience.

The need of new modes of communication is urgent but the construction of a language that can be—“relied on” will take time, which is a message in the novel. Lucy is silenced after the rape and refuses to confront one of the three rapists who is a relative to Petrus and lives with his family. Petrus has invited Lurie and Lucy to a party at his home and Lucy has bought a bedspread as a present for Petrus’s wife. Petrus calls Lucy a ‘benefactor’ in English (129). Lurie’s reaction to the word is very much expressive about the way the truth is lost in the ‘big words’ (129) of the colonial language and the barriers which exist for communication between the colonizer and the colonized. A distasteful word, it seems to him, double-edged, souring the moment. Yet can Petrus be blamed? The language he draws on with such aplomb is, if he only knew it, tired, friable, eaten from the inside as if by termites. Only the monosyllables can still be relied on, on not even all of them. What is to be done? Nothing that he, the one-time teacher of communications, can see. Nothing short of starting all over again with the ABC. By the time the big words come back reconstructed, purified, fit to be trusted once more, he will be long dead. (129) The ingenious and surgically precise choice of the word ‘benefactor’ by Coetzee tells us not only about the hidden ways of communication but also about the profoundly deep trace colonialism can leave in a language. A trace which is noticeable even after apartheid is over.

Nevertheless, the country is changed. Apartheid is ended by law and the law is clear; race should no longer have a bearing in peoples’ lives, but gender still does. Lurie and Mr. Issacs both have daughters who had been sexually violated and both are frustrated. They communicate their frustration. Mr. Issacs talks to Lurie and Lurie eventually talks to Petrus about his suspicions (139) even though he cannot believe that Petrus has hired the attackers, he thinks: …it would be too simple. The real truth, he suspects, is something far more – he casts around for the word—anthropological, something it would

take months to get to the bottom of, months of patient, unhurried conversation with dozens of people, and the offices of an interpreter. (118) To understand Petrus’s motives to protect one of Lucy’s rapists—she is after all a woman he calls a benefactor—, Lurie needs a deep, mutually understandable conversation on an individual, personal level considering Petrus’s personal history. The same is true for understanding the hatred driven by racial crimes.

In comparison, women must conceal their frustration and their real identity to survive sexual oppression. The female characters in Disgrace signify this idea in different ways. Lucy is pregnant and the father of the unborn child is one of her rapists. She wants to stay in her smallholding and marry Petrus for protection. “It is a new world they live in, he and Lucy and Petrus. Petrus knows it, and he knows it, and Petrus knows that he knows it” (117). Lucy is victimized by men and needs to reconcile with a man who protects one of her attackers in order to be safe. Parallelly, Soraya, the prostitute which Lurie regularly calls in, must adapt her real identity to her customers to make a living, ” No doubt with other men she becomes another woman: la donna è mobile” (original italic, Coetzee 3). This is the reality of women’s lives in post-apartheid South Africa described in Disgrace and this reality is lost in the process of moving from apartheid to post-apartheid. As Michela Canepari-Labib mentions in her article about “Language and Identity in the Narrative of J. M. Coetzee”: Because of the distance language interposes between lived experience and individuals, they become alienated from their ”real selves” and the surrounding reality, the isolation and inability to communicate on a deep level that are induced by their alienation lead them to a withdrawal into themselves which Coetzee seems to believe is at the basic of any policy of racial, sexual or other discrimination. (125) Lurie, Lucy, Petrus, and other characters in Disgrace, all struggle to articulate their lived experience with each other. The gang of three who rape Lucy cannot communicate their hate and frustration. The alienation makes them rape Lucy and kill her dogs. Lucy and Melanie do not communicate their feelings about the abuse they have experienced. Lurie tries to communicate his repentance to Melanie’s father first after his “lived experience” of his daughter’s rape gives him a cause to think about his way of conduct.

This is the basic of all kinds of discrimination in Coetzee’s work according to Canepari- Labib. This is also the basic of sexual abuse in Disgrace.

4 Racial aspects of feminist theory in Disgrace Sexual oppression is a question of power. The power ranking is determined not only by race and socioeconomic status but also by gender. The hierarchical order among women and men of different races are cemented and established during the long history of colonization according to the white man’s norms. By so called “civilizing systems” (Skeggs 109), women of different races have been divided into civilized/uncivilized, respectable/unrespectable based on their skin color, culture, and sexual behavior. Those civilizing systems have often described the women of the powerful race as proper and superior and the others as inferior. The sexual domination of women is a major strategy from the colonial period that continues in the postcolonial period as a weapon manifesting the power struggle between races.

Gender and race are identities that are interrelated in Disgrace. As Mary Maynard writes in the introduction of The Dynamics of “Race” and Gender: “…each is implied in and experienced through the other…” (21). Racism and colonial oppression are suffered in a gendered way. Black feminists have claimed that there is a qualitative difference between the black women’s experience of gender subordination with the white women’s experiences (Afshar et al 13). The reason behind those qualitatively different experiences is racial. During the long colonial history and apartheid in South Africa, it has been a profound difference between the socioeconomic situations of a black woman compared with a white woman. Disadvantages, which are the consequences of a poor education, substandard housing and healthcare result in more abuse, more exploration, and more violence against the black women (21). Undoubtably, despite the brutal sexual abuse Lucy experienced in the novel, she has more advantages in terms of economic resources and social status to manage her future life than Soraya has. Another example of racially different experiences of gender oppression is the passages about Petrus’s wife. She is young and pregnant. Petrus says “We are praying for a boy” because the boys can teach their sisters how to behave and because girls are expensive(Coetzee 130) and by saying that he reveals the economic and social rank of South African women like his wife. According to undated statistics

16 from South African Domestic Workers Union (SADWU) 90% of domestic workers in South Africa are women of color working in white households (M. Matlanyane Sexwale, 197). Those women, both black employees and the white employers have been subjected to gender subordination by men but there is no doubt that race and socioeconomic status are factors which change the elements and degree of this gender subordination . Even though “race” as a scientific notion is not defined(Afshar et al 10) the racialized sexual abuse of women during colonialism have had a huge impact in the way sexual domination is experienced by women of different races(Maynard 21). Racial identity influences the experienced gender oppression.

Coetzee’s description of the racial identities of the female characters in Disgrace is very subtle. It has been argued by McGonegal (156) that Coetzee’s “muting of race” when describing the women in Lurie’s sexual life (the prostitute Soraya and Melanie, the student he allegedly rapes) in Disgrace intents to “ examine confessional discourse metafictively” (156). Even though Coetzee only sparingly describes their appearances, he tells the reader about their socioeconomic status more generously. Soraya, mother of two boys with her “lustrous hair and dark eyes” (6) is “owned” by the Escort company she works for, like a slave.

For a ninety-minute session he pays her R400, of which half goes to Discreet Escorts. It seems a pity that Discreet Escorts should get so much. But they own No. 113 and other flats in Windsor Mansions; in a sense they own Soraya too, this part of her, this function. (2)

No doubt, the one part of Soraya and the “function” which the Discreet Escorts owns is her sexuality. These few sentences in the novel are very expressive about the racial and economic inequities, which make it possible for white men like Lurie to exploit women of subordinated races in a society like South Africa. Melanie, on the other hand, does not need to sell herself to strangers. She is a student, and her parents live in a house which is”…part of a development that must, fifteen or twenty years ago, when it was new, have seemed rather bleak…” (163), but she is in a position of dependency and respect towards her older teacher Lurie. When Lurie has sex with her, “She does not

17 resist. All she does is avert herself: avert her lips, avert her eyes” (25). After the act Lurie thinks:

Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core. As though she had decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration, like a rabbit when the jaws of the fox close on its neck. So that everything done to her might be done, as it were far away. (25)

The choice of the word “avert” which is a synonym to “avoid” and to “turn away” and the metaphor of fox’s jaws around the rabbit’s neck describing Lurie having sex with Melanie are strong pieces of evidence of the dominance Lurie exercises on Melanie and the powerless situation Melanie finds herself in. This metaphor also illustrates the power imbalance which exists between sexes and the way women “avert” in order to survive.

The silence and humiliation which comes after the sexual abuse is a phase which Coetzee brings to attention in Disgrace. As McGonegal writes, “The novel subdues the racialized elements that inform confessional discourse in post-apartheid South Africa, transmuting them into questions of gender” (McGonegal 156). Reflecting on her daughter’s mental state after the gang rape Lurie gets an insight into yet another aspect of sexual oppression, which is the forced silence. Lucy, a young woman who apparently has had the confidence and opportunity to express herself with her “ethnic weaving, ethnic pot decoration” (115) does not want to go to the market anymore.

She would rather hide her face, and he knows why. Because of the disgrace. Because of the shame. That is what their visitors have achieved; that is what they have done to this confident, modern young woman. Like a stain the story is spreading across the district. Not her story to spread but theirs: they are the owners. How they put her in her place, how they showed her what a woman was for. (115)

The rapists own the story. They put a confident woman down. Lucy is violated and dominated, and she does not own the story about her sexual abuse, she is left in disgrace by the actions of those men who raped her, and she is silenced.

In conclusion, racial identity is a factor in both parallel storylines describing sexual abuse in Disgrace. Coetzee is imprecise and vague about the race of the women Lurie sexually exploits, even though he indicates that both women have black hair and dark eyes (Coetzee 6, 11), their ethnical or racial identities are not revealed. Despite this fact the reader “knows” that they are not white and do not belong to the absolute privileged top of the social hierarchy due to their opinions and actions in relation to Lurie. Soraya is “… offended by tourists who bare their breasts (‘udders’ she calls them) on public beaches; she thinks vagabonds should be rounded up and put to work sweeping the streets” (Coetzee 1), Melanie “clever enough, but unengaged”. (11)does not fight back during the alleged rape and only surrenders. Melanie and Soraya are according to McGonegal “implicitly racialized marked by an eroticized and eroticized, orientalized appearance” (156). The sexual exploration they are subjected to is structural, systematic, and distinctive as one of many mechanisms for postcolonial domination through the history. Lurie, from the viewpoint of his social position, does not see anything wrong with paying for sex with Soraya or having sex with a young student who is dependent on him. Lucy on the other hand is white, with the confidence this racial privilege has given her in the South African society. She is free and independent enough to live in her smallholding with Petrus as neighbor. Petrus describes her in this way to Lurie: “…Your daughter is different. Your daughter is as good as a boy. Almost!” (130) and by that make her “almost” as precious as the black boy which he wishes that his wife will give birth to. The rank order in Petrus’s world is white man, black man, white girl, black girl. Petrus’s world is post-apartheid South Africa.

Consequently, the colonized men have lived in a state of disgrace because the colonizers have sexually violated their women throughout history. They have not been able to protect them from sexual exploitation. Their vengeance now, when apartheid is over, and the table is turned is to put the white men in the same state. Lucy is gangraped and when Lucy finally talks about her feelings about the rape, she has been subject to, it is not the sexual violence which has chocked her, it is the level of hate. “It was so personal,’ she says. `It was done with such personal hatred. That was what stunned me

19 more than anything. The rest was…expected. But why did they hate me so? I had never set eyes on them”( 156).The question asked by Lucy is the same question I see Coetzee trying to answer in his novel. The hatred Lucy feels during the rape is personal, but it is also racial in its origin. Lucy is not guilty of the racial crimes committed towards the gang of the three, not by herself. It is not rational to hate Lucy for past crimes, but the hatred exists and grows by the lack of communication. The rapists let Lucy pay the price and carry the colonial sins. Boehmer argues in her article “The gendering of contrition in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace” that Coetzee uses “animals and women’s bodies” as secular scapegoats and carriers of the “community sin”( 136,146). This idea of collective sin and a debt which must be paid is discussed by Lucy and Lurie. Discussing whether if it is safe for Lucy to stay in her farm after the rape or would her staying be an invitation to the rapist to come back, Lucy says:

But isn’t it another way of looking at it, David? …What if… what if that is the price one has to pay for staying on? Perhaps that is how they look at it; perhaps that is how I should look at it too. They see me as owing something. They see themselves as debt collectors, tax collectors. Why should I be allowed to live here without paying? Perhaps that is what they tell themselves. (158)

Lucy must pay the historical debt for staying in South Africa. Writing about the Yoruba culture’s tradition of sin-carrier bodies, Boehmer (136) writes that in Disgrace the killed dogs, the goat with infected genitals and Lucy—carrying a child concepted by rape, are used by Coetzee as embodiment of the collective sin. In the eyes of the men who rape Lucy the white woman becomes the scapegoat who carries the colonial sin.

The novel attempts to explain the mechanisms behind sexual violence in the light of domination and suppression during colonial history. Lucy asks Lurie if the sexual violence towards women ”doesn’t feel like murder, like getting away with murder?” (158), and when Lurie argues that she talks about slavery and that the three black men “ want you for their slave”(159), Lucy says: “Not slavery. Subjection. Subjugation” (159). Lucy uses the words “subjection and subjugation” as synonyms for the rape she has been subjected to, and as an alternative for the word “slavery”. Lurie now has come

20 to believe he can understand how it feels for a woman to be violated. “The question is, does he have it in him to be the woman?” (Coetzee 160). This question can also be valid for the process of reconciliation in postcolonial South Africa. They who were benefitted by white privilege during apartheid are able to understand the racial discrimination, but they cannot be the racially suppressed. Similarly, Lurie can understand how an abused woman feel but not be the woman.

The sexual violence against women in South Africa when Disgrace was published in 1999 was extensive. In “Going to the dogs: Humanity in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, The Lives of animals and South Africa’s TRC” Rosemary Jolly argues that one of the reasons Disgrace was swiftly labeled as a novel that exploits racial prejudices towards black men was the unwillingness of the political establishment in post-apartheid South Africa to admit the quantity of sexual insult and violence towards women (Jolly 149). According to the official South African Police Service statistics an average of 46000 reported rapes were committed annually during the two decades of the second millennium (saps.gov.za). Jolly writes that “Coetzee, from Dusklands (1974) to Disgrace, has consistently portrayed the role of discourses of engendered hegemony as key factors in a methodological brutality that is nonetheless sexualized for being racialized”(150). The sexual abuses pictured in Disgrace have their derivation in gender domination and racial oppression. The selected time for the release of the novel could surely be perceived as quite provocative in a society that has finally overthrown the racist apartheid regime and struggles to defeat and overturn the historically cemented prejudices and bigotries towards the blacks. Coetzee chooses to write a novel about a cruelly committed rape by three black men of a white woman living in the end of the century in post-apartheid rural South Africa when racial crimes of the past are in focus. I argue that Coetzee’s philosophical view of the situation in South Africa is not from a racial standpoint but from a humanitarian standpoint. The portrayal of the white privileged professor Lurie, who has very hard time seeing his own role in the sexual exploitation of women like Soraya and sexual abuse/rape of his young student, represents the attitude and mindset of the colonial masters and the mindset of men who sexually have dominated women. The gangrape of a powerless white woman as payment for the sins committed in colonial time is also the mindset of men who

21 sexually dominate women. As the “conscience- stricken white writer” (Poyner 2) he is, Coetzee takes a stand for the collective guilt of humanity for committing racial crimes and for gender oppression. Racism and sexual abuse born by the desire to dominate, continues as a consequence of collective attitudes and ethical values in a society. If women and dogs are the carrier of collective sins, the men (in the context of sexual domination in Disgrace) are the collective sinners.

5 Whose disgrace? Being in a state of disgrace is a repetitive topic in the novel. The question is who is in disgrace and for doing what? An analysis of the contexts in which the word “disgrace“ appears in the novel gives us an interesting and revealing answer. Of course, “disgrace” is the title and this choice by the author tells us about the bearing the word has for understanding the novel. The next time the word is used is when Lurie has left his job and moved to his daughter’s smallholding. Lucy asks him to contact Bev Shaw to help her with the dogs: to “put them down” (85). Lurie is reluctant and skeptical about Shaw and the whole “animal refuge” (72) business but he goes. He asks Bev:”…Do you know why my daughter sent me to you? She told me you were in trouble” Lurie says: “ Not just in trouble. In what I suppose one would call disgrace” (85). At this point Lurie seems to use the word—disgrace with sarcasm, thus downplaying the crime he has been accused of. He has previously refused to show “A spirit of repentance” (58). Later, after he and Lucy have been attacked, Lucy is raped, and two policemen go through her story. Lurie listens: …Words are beginning to take shape that have been hovering since last night at the edges of memory. Two old ladies locked in the lavatory/They were there from Monday to Sunday/ Nobody knew they were there. Locked in the lavatory while his daughter was used. A chant from his childhood come back to point of jeering finger. Oh dear, what can the matter be? Lucy’s secret; his disgrace.(109, original italics) In this context, the disgrace he feels is real, deep, and honest. He feels disgrace for not being able to save Lucy and maybe even for what he has done to Melanie, or for both: for sexual domination of women. Afterwards, “disgrace” becomes a physical and mental state in the novel. When Lucy does not want to go to the market Lurie knows it

22 is “because of the disgrace”(115). The men who attacked Lucy have put her in a state of disgrace, but the disgrace is not Lucy’s. Earlier it was “his disgrace” (109) and now it is “the disgrace”: a disgrace that exists not because of Lucy but because of something which is done to her. Lurie uses the word disgrace once more when he goes to meet Melanie’s father, Mr. Isaacs. He says: I am being sunk into a state of disgrace from which it will not be easy to lift myself. It is not a punishment I have refused. I do not murmur against it. On the contrary, I am living it out from day to day, trying to accept disgrace as my state of being. Is it enough for God, do you think, that I live in disgrace without term? (172) Here “the disgrace” has developed to “a state of being” and a punishment for his sins. This idea could be translated into the condition the post-apartheid South Africa, with its high rape statistics, is experiencing. In the novel the reconciliation process for the racial crimes of the past is obstructed and complicated due to this state of disgrace.

6 Conclusion

This essay has argued that by choosing to write about two parallel stories of sexual abuse committed by racially different males against racially different female victims, Coetzee adds a humanitarian and gender dimension in addition to the racial dimension of post-apartheid reality. Coetzee’s Disgrace enhances the struggle people of South Africa experience to cope with the racial crimes of colonial past when the sexual oppression and violence continues. Disgrace was published when truth about past crimes, confession, forgiveness, and reconciliation were crucial elements for a peaceful development of the post- apartheid South African democracy. In the novel, Coetzee describes a post-apartheid South Africa which struggles with the process of reconciliation and the concept of collective guilt for the colonial past. In Disgrace, the ambition of building a society based on equity and justice clashes with the existence of sexual and gender oppression.

The novel is, as many critics have claimed about forgiveness, sacrifice, scapegoating and giving but it is also a statement about the necessity of dealing with all kinds of

23 oppression and inhuman treatment of other livings. Coetzee not only, as some critics argue, allegorizes the work of the TRC (McGonegal 2009) but first and foremost displays the victimization of women in a male dominated society. Disgrace shows that this victimization continues independently of the political changes in the country. The notion of being in a state of disgrace due to the sexual abuse of women is frequently repeated in the novel. Not only the collective guilt for colonial past but also men’s collective guilt for sexually dominating and victimizing women are what make Coetzee’s protagonist “conscience-stricken” and put him in a state of disgrace.

The novel shows how Otherness, hybridity, language barriers and racial oppression and discrimination— the heritage from South Africa’s colonial past— are part of the gender oppression women of different races are objected to. Additionally, Disgrace illustrates that colonial oppression is not only suffered in a racialized but also in a gendered way. The colonial crimes create hatred and the desire for retribution and vengeance. The sexual crimes create a state of disgrace, a condition that disables reconciliation. The gender aspect of colonial history and post-apartheid reality brings forth a collective guilt and a humanitarian disgrace which needs attention and consideration.

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