Every postcolonial piece of literature gives readers an idea of how the suppressor and the subjugated nation coexisted in one time and place. These works are always accompanied by protagonists and antagonists who raise the problems of slavery, inequality, migration, and marginalization of certain groups. Disgrace – a novel by J. M. Coetzee, published at the end of the 20th century – portrays the lives of South Africans after Apartheid. Instead of depicting the socioeconomic effects of segregated policy, the author shows them through David Lurie’s prism, who struggles while fighting his weaknesses. Disgrace demonstrates how literature describes nations as desperate to find salvation or ruin their lives due to colonialization.
The novel’s protagonist is David Lurie, a divorced and retired white professor in South Africa whose socially inappropriate actions set the plot in motion, highlighting the importance of the novel’s name. To elucidate, disgrace is connected to desperation when someone loses control over emotions and stops hoping. Lurie’s presence makes several people disgraced throughout the story, thus, causing them to decide about their future fate. Thus, each of them has two options: fighting or losing.
The first character who becomes disgraced is Melanie Isaacs, the twenty-year-old black student. Interestingly, the writer chooses such an intelligent victim for his protagonist since Melanie makes significant remarks during the lectures and admires feminist writers such as Alice Walker (Coetzee 13). Hence, this idea of depicting a young black girl as sexually attracted to the older man shows the nation’s shame when even the most educated fall under whites’ influence. Melanie’s desperation is illustrated through her hysteria when she comes to the professor’s house. This episode justifies how complex and confusing relationships between two characters make a girl feel miserable and distressed. However, she makes an irreversible decision, which is vital in making Lurie disgraced next (Coetzee 38). She decides to fight instead of ruining her life, thus, filing a complaint, which makes readers believe that some people still hope for the best, even in disappointing situations like hers.
The author makes Lurie disgraced through the sexual assault of black women, which hints at the female subjugation in South Africa after colonialization. For example, a young prostitute Soraya is sexually exploited to satisfy the needs of men like Lurie. Her description as “small and thin, with close-cropped black hair, wide, almost Chinese cheekbones, large, dark eyes” makes readers pay attention to Chinese cheekbones, the humiliating way to describe people of African origin (Coetzee 11). It proves that Lurie dismisses non-whites and treats them inadequately. Even the fact that Lurie does not apologize for his rape of Melanie justifies the unjust relationship between the dominant and dominated, or men and women. For Lurie, his sex and skin color make him superior, while women become inferior in the racially oppressed society, making the conflict between the colonizers and colonized a central topic of postcolonial literature.
When Lurie moves to his daughter’s farm after being accused of rape, Lucy becomes disgraced. Three man rapes her, and as a result, she becomes pregnant. Since Lucy and her father are desperate to hide her disgrace, she marries her assistant, Petrus, which signals that she is desperate to find salvation (Coetzee 138). Her character serves as the central moral when women accept their rape in the African context, making readers believe that it is the price that every white person pays for the price of staying on African soil. It makes Melanie’s and Lucy’s cases manifestations of male cruelty, forcing women to suffer and fight.
However, this desperation is accompanied by a more exciting detail, which makes the novel racially complex. For example, the three men who rape Lucy are social violators and are represented as barbarous savages. Even the narrator draws a connection between Lucy’s rape and racial inequality: “He speaks Italian, he speaks French, but Italian and French will not save him here in darkest Africa” (Coetzee 95). It means that the professor’s intelligence is useless regarding the non-white villains. It happens due to the biases readers usually hold toward Apartheid when non-whites are placed at the bottom of the wealth distributions, making them look like illiterate criminals. Therefore, the writer intentionally puts in the foreground white people whose lives are disrupted by violent Africans, which becomes a critical feature of this postcolonial text.
To conclude, Disgrace by Coetzee is a literature work describing South African citizens’ lives after colonization. The author touches on female subjugation, racial biases, and violence through the characters, making them disgraced by different situations. The desperation faced by Melanie, Lucy, and Lurie is a common feature of all postcolonial pieces of literature as each character decides to fight for salvation or lose to the unjust political and social systems. Melanie fights while Lucy, another female rape victim, accepts her fate. However, the protagonist’s decision remains undiscovered, so each reader predicts for himself. Historically speaking, non-whites were marginalized, oppressed, and discriminated against, which is discussed implicitly by Coetzee.
Work Cited
Coetzee, John. Disgrace. Harmondsworth, Pinguin Books, 2000. Web.