My Mother and Me (and J. M. Coetzee)

I was born the year J. M. Coetzee published his third novel, Waiting for the Barbarians. My mother read this dark, disturbing novel, with its many scenes of torture, as she breastfed me at night, while my older sister slept and the house was quiet. It was 1980. The apartheid government had declared a state of emergency in the face of growing internal revolt, and my parents were thinking of leaving South Africa again.

My mother nursed me in the spare room so the lamplight wouldn’t wake my father, and as she read, her somatic response to the words on the page would have coursed through her into me: elation and despair, trepidation and longing. I feel I’m still marked by that embodied encounter with Coetzee’s writing, via my mother, as a newborn. Coetzee, who anticipates everything, would say I am inhabiting action in imagining my way back to my neonate self, though even he allows for the possibility of flickerings of insight into other selves or our own younger selves.

Several years later, when I was no longer a baby and my mother was on her way to becoming the first scholar to publish a book on Coetzee’s work, I formed one of my earliest visual memories. It is of the striking cover of this same novel, which lay on the kitchen table in our home in Melbourne, Australia,