J. M Coetzee, a
white South African writer, invents a sort of history that creates a catharsis
in people about issues of Apartheid and South African oppression. His
intentions are not to entertain his readers with fictional story of life in South Africa.
Instead, he has the intention of giving to his readers a new perspective on the
life if certain figures who struggle to overcome the chains that tie them to
colonization and the governmental power of the European minority in South Africa.
Coetzee’s, Life and Time of Michael K, which fetched a Booker Prize in 1983,
tells of a bare-lipped simple gardener, Michael K, trying to run away from the
South African war during the apartheid era. His journey started from Cape Town with his ailing mother, who wanted to go back to
the more rulal Prince Albert,
her girlhood home.
The main setting
of the story takes place in apartheid era South Africa, sometime in the
1960’s-1970. The story moves between places such as the urban wasteland of
Capetown to the rural town of Prince
Albert. During the novel, K travels from Cape Town east, through Paarl Worcester, Touws River
and Laingsburg and finally arrives at Prince
Albert. At the end of the story K returns to Cape Town. In this
geographical are/ he creates necessary atmosphere such as destruction of
society, participation, silence and anarchy which are important to explore the
intimations of freedom. This atmosphere set an ambiguous story line and gives
the reader a sense of liberation.
Loosely based on
reality, the author makes the country of South African into a Police State in
order to set the story. The military is fighting rebels and all the civilians
are caught in the cross fire. A tangle of papers and signatures is needed just
to travel around the country.
Life
and Time of Michael K starts in the village of sea point where Michael K, a
disfigured, coloured man lives with his mother. Michael at the age of 15 has
worked as a gardener in a public park in Cape
Town. He decides to take his mother on a long march
away from the guns toward a new life in the abandoned country side. He builds a
crude hand-drawn vehicle to restore his mother to a lost place that has become
the frail ephemeral Eden
of her illness, where she remembers having once been happy in childhood. This
patch is only five hours away, however, in this critical condition of the
country, without a permit they may not go by train. No permit arrives. They set
out clandestinely, the young man having the weight of his old mother in the
cart, dodging military convoys, hiding, the two of them repeatedly assaulted by
cold and bad weather and thugs with knives. To Michael K at the start of the
journey, brutality and danger and stiffness of limb and rain seem all the same;
tyranny feels us material an ordeal as the harshness of the road.
On the road his
mother deteriorates so piteously as that Michael K must surrender her to a
hospital. There he is shunted aside and she dies. Without consultation her body
is cremated and given back to him, a small bundle of ashes in a plastic bag. He
holds his mother’s dust and imagines the burning halo of her hair. Then still
without permission he returns her to Prince
Albert, the place of her illumination, and buries her
ashes. It is a grassy nowhere, a guess, the cloud rack of a dream of peace, the
long abandoned farm of a departed Afrikaners family, a forgotten and unrecorded
spot falled through the brute mesh of totalitarian surveillance.
At Prince Albert
begins the parable of Michael K’s freedom and resourcefulness; here begins
Michael K’s brief bliss. He is Robinson Crusoe, he is the lord of his of his
life. It is his mother’s own earth. It is his motherland; he lives in a
womblike burrow; he tills the fruilful soil. Miracles sprout from a handful of
discovered seeds: “Now two pale green melons were growing on the far side of
the field. It seemed to him that he loved these two, which he thought of as two
sisters, even more than the pumpkins, which he thought of as a band of
brothers. Under the melons he placed pads of grass that their skins should not
bruise.” He eats with deep relish, in the fulfilment of what is ordained: the
work of his hands, a newfound sovereignty over his hands and the blessing of
fertility in his own scarp of ground.
However, his
freedom does not last for a long time. A whining boy who is a runaway soldier
takes over the farmhouse and declares himself in need of a servant. A group of
guerrillas and their donkey pass through by night and trample the seedlings.
Michael K flees; he is picked up as a “parasite” and confined to a work camp
called Jakkalsdrif. After spending
sometime there, he escapes from the camp and goes back to the visage residence.
He is eventually found by the polite, assumed to be providing information for
the enemies of the war. He is then sent to the refugee camp at Kenilworth.
At Kenilworth
the second part of the novel takes place. And this part is narrated by the
refugee camp doctor, who knows that Michael K is innocent and wants to help him
survive. In the refugee camp, K cannot eat, cannot swallow, cannot get
nourishment. “May be he only eats, the bread of freedom,” says the doctor. His
body is “crying to be fed its own food and only that”. Behind the wire fences
of a politics organized by curfew and restrictions, where essence is smothered
by law and law is lie, Michael K is set aside as a rough mindless lost unfit
creature, a simpleton or idiot, a savage. It is a wonder, the doctor observes,
that he has been able to keep himself alive. Thus the judgement of benevolent
arrogance-or compassion indistinguishable from arrogance- on the ingenious
farmer and visionary freeman of his mother’s field. After much time, news is
out that the war is getting worse and rehabilitation camps are turning into internment
camps. Soon after, Michael K escapes from the camp.
The last past of
the novel centres around Michael K’s return to Seapoint. He meets up with some
travellers who offer him a place with them. K also has a sexual encounter with
one of the women involved in the group. After this experience, he returns to
the room that he used to stay in before leaving from Sea Point. He ends with a
thought about the possibility of having to share the room with someone else and
imaging an old man whom he would take back to the country with him.
In the book,
Michael K strives to insulate himself from the despair of war that rages around
him in South Africa
that is ravaged by apartheid. Eventually, he succeeds in distancing himself
from the hostile atmosphere around him. Through the geographical and political
setting and atmosphere, Coetzee is deeply successful in creating a clear and
succinct comment against the arbitrariness and absurdity of war.
Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K, represents
a struggle in which the main character journeys through a life of torment and
ignorance in order to explore the intimations of freedom.