Abstract

This article investigates themes of family relations, parental responsibility, and the ethics of care in J. M. Coetzee’s “Waiting for the Barbarians” (1980) and “Age of Iron” (1990) within a relevant sociopolitical and philosophical context. Coetzee’s treatment of parental relations in his apartheid writings includes, it is argued, not only an interrogation of the damage done to such relations but insights into the ethics of parental care and responsibility inherent in any father–child or mother–child relation. Since the politics of racial segregation transformed, among other things, family relations, they inadvertently brought about alternative social bonds with relation to the oppressed other. While political unrest can disrupt family relations and lead to the formation of dysfunctional families, it can also strengthen relations of brothering and nursing among the oppressed or simply between the oppressed and those who sympathize with them notwithstanding their being complicit with the oppressor. Against the violations and transgressions of apartheid politics, Coetzee offers hope in the values of care and responsibility toward the other through literal or metaphorical birthing and parenting. As a result, typical family relations in Coetzee’s apartheid novels can be elucidated as metaphorical or allegorical modes of filiations that offer figurative alternatives to the actual disintegration of such relations.