Wanted: Imagination and Creativity
In
J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians we are left
with many secrets. Because some characters cannot—or will
not—express what has happened to them or what they feel, readers
are faced with a problem of interpretation that requires imagination. Here
is your chance:
- Imagine that you are part of an archaeological dig that takes place
two centuries after the action of the novel. What sort of
artifacts would you expect to uncover? Would the objects have
the same relevance to people of modern times at they did to those who
originally used them? What do these artifacts tell you about
the culture that produced them?
- We know that the Magistrate struggles
to write his memoirs. In
fact, you can even read Waiting for the Barbarians as the
memoir that he is finally able to write. But what about
the Barbarian girl? We know so little about her. How does she
feel? What was her life like before she came to the town? What
is it like after the Magistrate leaves her with strangers in the desert? Write
an excerpt from the story of the Barbarian girl, as she would tell
it, if she had the chance.
- The novel makes many references to the wooden slips that the Magistrate
discovers but is unable to interpret. If these slips were in
fact produced by the barbarian culture, what might they actually read.
