J. M.
Coetzee’s booker prize winning short novel Life
and Time of Michael K is a story of a man caught up in a war beyond his
understanding, but determined to live his life minimally on his own terms. It
is a story of survival and isolation, the individual struggling against a
society gone awry -- and struggling to survive in nature. This novel focuses on
the central character of this novel Michael K and his experiences in South Africa
during a time of civil unrest. Coetzee depicts Michael K, a hairliped
unattractive simpleton who embodies the power of the human spirit and need for
freedom, despite tremendous setbacks. Coetzee here shows how Michael K strives
to insulate himself from the despair of the war that rages around him in South Africa
that is ravaged by apartheid.
In the apartheid
system of governance that supports a legalized racial segregation policy
dismantles the human rights of the people and makes people victim of utter
negligence and deprivation. People started leading a life of an outcast. We
find a clear picture of this when Michael K starts his long arduous journey
from Cape Town to Prince Albert along with his ailing mother.
When Michael K
pleaded to the railway for earlier departure, the railway police clerk told him
that he had to wait two months for the permission to travel with train. But
Michael’s request on the state of his ailing mother could not constitute any
sympathetic grounds in the heart of authority rather the clerk disregards the
condition of his dying mother cruelly. The police in Michael K’s world have no
need for such personal stories. Suffering is not the true aspect when those
without power utter it. The “permit” will be granted only to those willing to
make their stories conform to official paradigms. After failing to untangle (to
make sth easier from complication) the bureaucracy required getting a travel
permit, K had to build a rudimentary art out of scrap and began the journey on
foot.
On the way his
mother deteriorates so piteously that Michael K must surrender her to a
hospital in Stellenbosch. In the hospital Michael was interrogated by the
authority about his religious denomination, place of abode, about travel
documents. Michael was shunted from his dying mother. Eventually his mother
died without his presence and she was cremated without consultation and given
back to him a small bundle of ashes in a plastic bag very whimsically. This
phase of this novel draws our sympathy and affection for a helpless child I the
midst of utter civil disorder.
On his way to
Prince Albert to bury the ashes of his mother’s death body, Michael was
encountered by two policemen in the street who checked his suitcase and after
checking the addressed Michael as a thief. One of the soldiers also ransacks
his belongings and the money he had in his purse. Michael asked the soldier:
“what do you think the war is for? For taking other people’s money?” In the
apartheid system of society there is no value of such question.
When he reached Worcester, he found a straggling
(to spread in an untidy way in different directions0 line of people. Michael
inquires a woman about the queue of people but the woman turned away her face
without any response. It was because of his physical deformity that made him
encounter the public negligence. Later, he made out that it was a check post
where police were seeking green card to let people ahead crossing the border.
Michael is a man without green card and he was taken in the company of fifty
strangers driving towards railway yards. The train carrying Michael and other
strangers reached a place where the track is blocked with heap of rocks and red
clay. Michael K found men in that spot struggling like ants to roll a
mechanical shovel out of a track. K also found himself assigned to a gang
working on that track. Michael asked a man in the labor gang: “why have I got
to work here?” the man replied like a conformist to the apartheid system. He said: just do what you’re told. The man
also said; “don’t be so miserable. This isn’t jail. This isn’t a life sentence.
This is just a labor gang.” But to Michael that place was not an ideal one
because he had his determination to reach Price Albert to fulfill the dream of
his mother. Hence he resolved to flee away from that labor gang camp.
Eventually
Michael arrived the farm in the Prince
Albert that his mother desired to reach. Here he
buries the ashes and begins to cultivate some patches of land as he has a
profound connection to the earth and his desire to grow his own food which is his sole purpose of living to
overcome the physical obstacles in the discovery of self. Soon, however, his
proprietorship is disturbed by the arrival of the grandson of the Visages, an
army deserter. His return to that farm offers an ironic parallel with the
fulfillment of his mother’s dream of return. Driven away by the visage’s
grandson Michael K is picked up by the authorities and after a stay in hospital
he is taken to Jakkaldriff camp in which unemployed workers are interned to
labor pool. But Michael K gain escapes and returns to Prince Albert farm, his ideal comfort zone.
Returning there, he again cultivates new crop of pumpkins and melons to which
he regards as his brothers and sisters. This time his task of cultivation is
destroyed by the arrival of small revolutionary force and they suspected him as
an anarchist collaborating with rural guerrillas and interned him in the Kenilworth camp.
In the Kenilworth camp the doctor seems genuinely attentive to
Michael K as a person but with the figure of doctor-narrator, the process of
coercion puts on a genteel mask. The doctor wants to know something about
Michael K, so tries repeatedly to persuade K to talk. The doctor wants to know
the story of his life. But the story he is given is not one K expects. Soon the
doctor’s complicity with apartheid authority emerges as he demands Michael K
tell the police something. “you want to live, don’t you? Well then, talk, make
our voice heard…” The reiteration of “polite civilized gentlemen” underscores
the extent to which situation is a mockery of the ideal conversation. The
doctor becomes increasingly exasperated and he proposes fabricating a necessary
story for the report.” The doctor’s story is a montage assembled from its and
pieces of the meta-narrative that keeps the South African apartheid system
going. The doctor’s story is the sort of narrative the government expects. By
providing it, he is in fact substantiating the apartheid government’s view of
reality.
Michael K
accepts the impoverishments that his life’s story represents. He discards the
food provided by the hospital because he wants to enjoy the “bread of freedom”.
His own true story, like pumpkins he raises for his own survival cannot be
integrated into the global system and thus are worthless to the authorities.
In a land of
brute totalitarian surveillance (close observation) there is hardly any scope
of expressing the hearts inner tale. In the following quotation told by Michael
K articulates the human condition in an apartheid era. Michael says, “They want
me to open my heart and tell them a story of a life lived in the cages. They
want to hear about all the cages I have lived in, as if I were a budgie or
white mouse or monkey.” The brutality of totalitarianism has dissolved the
possibility of a conversation of democratic equals and keeps every Michael in South Africa
apartheid society as an outcast. However Michael k manages to escape back to Cape Town, where he
settles down from where he started, realizing his life, and his connection to
the earth.
