Dismantling Colonial Frontiers: The Partnership Word in Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians

Drawing from decolonial thinking and non-binary studies, and from Riane Eisler’s biocultural partnership-dominator approach, this paper focuses on the power of the unpredictable encounters and the dialogic wor(l)d in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. Whilst most postcolonial literary critique stresses the violent divisions at the core of the different stories in the novel, my analysis demonstrates how narrative, linguistic, cultural and historical boundaries are suspended in an unmarked territory in which the cycles of nature re-establish the sacred meaning of life, human consciousness and its relationship with all creations. Coetzee wittingly portrays the inconsistency of colonial frontiers in the Magistrate’s self-destabilising quest and his uncertain understanding of the “barbarian” systems of signs, embodied in the alien Otherness of the girl. In this sense, my analysis reads the novel as a partnership quest that reveals profound spiritual truths and dissolves the constraints of Western dominator outposts and their borders.