The 1999 novel by Nobel Prize
winner J.M. Coetzee is a story of racial conflicts in post-Apartheid South
Africa, which continue to smoulder, even after the abolition of Apartheid in
1994, as a challenging legacy of colonialism. These conflicts particularly
include the fight for power: Power over the land the white settlers stole from
the black natives. And power over women – it was common for the white colonial
master to take black girls and women and sexually exploit them. The novel’s
main themes are that of reclaiming land robbed from the blacks after Apartheid,
and avenging the sexual exploitation of black women through the rape and
impregnation of a white woman. And there is a close correlation between the
land and a woman, based on the age-old notion of Mother Earth. Because since
time immemorial, a farmer who ploughs his fields and sows seeds in the trenches
has felt like a man who lies with his wife and impregnates her with his sperm.
The main protagonist is David
Lurie, a professor of language and literature in Cape Town, who has an affair
with his student, Melanie Isaacs. Having sex with the girl makes the 52-year-old
feel young again – and this indeed is his motive. He seduces her using his
powerful position as professor, veritably forces himself on her, and mentally
traumatises her. The affair also has a political dimension: Lurie is white,
Melanie is coloured, and Lurie believes he is entitled to have sex with her:
“ … a woman’s body does not belong to her alone. It is
part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it.”
…
Smooth words, as old as seduction itself. Yet at this moment he believes in
them. She does not own herself. (1)
This is the mentality of the
white colonial rulers, who believe they have a right to non-white women and
girls, and who frequently exploit them sexually (2). But Lurie’s sexual assault
takes place after Apartheid has ended, and it has consequences: He is dismissed
by the university. The unemployed, ageing ex-professor, who has become a nonperson
in Cape Town, flees to his daughter, Lucy, who has a small farm in the Eastern
Cape province. The farm is located in a region whose population has long been
predominantly non-white, but which was dominated and exploited by whites during
Apartheid. After Apartheid, the whites, like Lucy, have become an embattled
minority, while many blacks are prospering. One of these is Lucy’s neighbour,
Petrus, who is gaining influence, and eventually makes Lucy and her small
estate economically dependent on him, becoming her patron; by the time Lucy’s
father arrives from Cape Town, Petrus has already bought a hectare of her land.
Lucy and her father soon feel the hate of the blacks, who had been oppressed
and exploited for so long: Three black youths attack the farm, rape and
impregnate Lucy, and lock David Lurie in the toilet to prevent him from
protecting his daughter. Later, Lucy and her father recognise one of the
rapists: He is very young, is part of Petrus’ clan, and is called Pollux. To
the great chagrin of her racist father, Lucy decides to keep the child.
As he thinks about his daughter’s odious impregnator, the jealous father sees an
image in his mind comparing Lucy with fertile land:
Something about Pollux sends him into a rage: his
ugly, opaque little eyes, his insolence, but also the thought that like a weed
he has been allowed to tangle his roots with Lucy and Lucy’s existence.
(p. 209)
The seed Pollux has sown in
Lucy will bear fruit; the “weed” germinating in Lucy is Pollux’s flesh and
blood, his child.
Lurie’s comparison has a long tradition: “Attic religion clearly attests to the
fact that the sowing and harvesting of fruit was equated with human procreation
and birth, that is to say, they were seen as one,” writes Albrecht Dieterich in
his essay Mutter Erde. Ein Versuch über
Volksreligion (Mother Earth: an essay on folk-religion), still considered
fundamental to this day. Of the many examples listed by Dieterich (3), one in
particular is worth mentioning. In Sophocles’ drama The Women of Trachis, Deianira is the wife of Hercules, bearing
his children but still feeling neglected by him, as the adventurous hero is
rarely at home with her; she compares herself to a distant field, with him as
the farmer:
And
then children were born to us; whom he has seen only as the husbandman sees his
distant field, which he visits at seed-time, and once again at harvest. (4)
The archetypal image of the
field, which is female, and of ploughing, which symbolises procreation, also
inspired Shakespeare, who, in his Sonnet
3, urges a handsome young man to father a son to perpetuate his own beauty,
which fades with age:
Look in thy glass, and tell the face thou viewest
Now is the time that face should form another;
Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,
Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.
Forwhere is she so fair whose unear’d womb
Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?
The Koran also compares a wife with a field cultivated by her husband;
although not expressly stated, the archetypal analogy insinuates that sex not
only conduces to lust, but also procreation:
Your wives are a tilth for you; so approach your tilth
when and how you like …
Lurie also becomes jealous
when he catches Pollux secretly watching his daughter in the bathroom:
As
they approach the house he notices the boy, the one whom Petrus called my people, standing with his face to the
back wall. At first he thinks he is urinating; then he realizes he is peering
in through the bathroom window, peeping at Lucy. (p. 206)
Pollux is not, as first
thought by Lurie, urinating, but this idea which enters into the jealous
father’s head is important for interpreting the novel. The youngster’s urine,
which, in Lurie’s mind, trickles into the land belonging to Lucy, can be
interpreted in a Freudian sense as ejaculation – a notion which incarnates
Lurie’s traumatic memory of Pollux raping and impregnating Lucy.
But the image also symbolises something for readers in a non-Freudian sense:
The urine moistens and fertilises the earth, i.e. makes it fertile – meaning,
in Lurie’s imagination, Pollux plays the role of a farmer, who seizes and
cultivates the land, just like he took and inseminated Lucy. And urine is what
dogs and other animals use to mark out their territory; as a representative of
Petrus’ clan, Pollux thus symbolically lays claim to Lucy and her land. This
latter interpretation of peeing as a form of designation is supported elsewhere
by the same symbolism, for example when Lurie reflects on his daughter’s
pregnancy:
What kind of child can seed like that give life to,
seed driven into the woman not in love but in hatred, mixed chaotically, meant
to soil her, to mark her, like a dog’s urine? (p. 199)
And Lucy herself feels part of
the land marked out by the three boys:
“I think I am in their territory. They have marked me.
They will come back for me” (p. 158)
The three blacks treated Lucy
like a plot of land they are entitled to possess. The rape also symbolises how
the blacks want to reclaim the land the white settlers took away from their
ancestors – something they are given the opportunity to do once Apartheid ends;
“for the black men who rape her, Lucy’s white female body symbolizes the land from
which they have been dispossessed” (5). The dealings between Lucy and her black
neighbour, Petrus, also revolve around the possession of land: She has already
sold him a hectare of her land, and when this “land transfer” “goes through officially”
(p. 124), this is “a big day for him”, which is why he organises a party to
which Lucy and her father are also invited. It is at this very party that Lucy
bumps into Pollux, and retreats in terror. This meeting is of course symbolic:
Petrus and his clan, to which Pollux belongs, are celebrating their expansion
at Lucy’s expense, and this expansion also includes Lucy’s rape, which is not
only an act of revenge, but also a demonstration of power, forcing her to
submit to Petrus as her patron.
Lurie calls the sperm
impregnating the raped Lucy “seed”:
What kind of child can seed like that give life to
… (p. 199)
The term “seed” re-emerges
when Lurie denounces himself for seducing Melanie, saying he acted “contra
naturam”, sinned, because it is against nature for old men to inseminate young
girls with their used semen:
On trial for his way of life. For annatural acts: for
broadcasting old seed, tired seed, seed that does not quicken, contra naturam. If the old men hog the
young women, what will be the future of the species? That, at bottom, was the
case for the prosecution. (p. 190)
We note that the three black
rapists impregnated Lucy, marking her body as their territory. Lurie displays
the same mentality when, in his thoughts, he describes with relish the skin
colour of Soraya, the non-white prostitute he sexually exploits:
He strokes her honey-brown body, unmarked by the
sun (p. 1)
Her skin’s brown colour does
not come from the sun - so from whom does it come? From a white colonial master
who sexually exploited her mother or grandmother, using them as his possession.
Through her skin colour, her body is marked out as the white man’s territory, and
Lurie, who sexually exploits her, feels he is the heir to this ownership right.
He is similarly stimulated by the dark skin colour of his student, Melanie,
whom he also takes advantage of sexually, leading us to agree with Laura
Wright’s interpretation: “For David, Melanie’s biracial female body offers the
opportunity to symbolically reclaim not only his youth, but also his
authoritarian position at a university where the white male professor is
marginalized by increasing demands of gender and racial diversification.” (6)
1) J. M. Coetzee: Disgrace
(London: Vintage, 2000), p. 16
2) Many interpretations consider that Lurie’s assault
of Melanie perpetuates the tradition of black women being sexually exploited by
white men, cf. for example Margaret Herrick (The Burnt Offering: Confession and sacrifice in J.M. Coetzee’s “Disgrace”,
in: Literature and Theology 2014, p. 5):
“The ‘love’ that Lurie offers Melanie, then, what he calls ‘eros’, is none
other than the colonial impulse itself, a fact which Lurie’s infuriated
colleague, Farodia Rassoul, points out during the hearing. She argues that he
has resisted making the connection to ‘the long history of exploitation of
which [his actions are a] part.”
3) Dieterich, p. 46
4) Translated by Richard C. Jebb
5) Laura Wright: “Does
he have in him to be a woman?”: The Performance of Displacement in
J.M.Coetzee’s Disgrace, in: Ariel. A review of International English
Literature (37 (4), p. 89f.
