“I am a miserable black virgin, and my story is my story, even if it is a dull black blind stupid miserable story, ignorant of its meaning… I am a I.”
Is the story my story because I am the one living it or is it my story because I am the one telling it. Is the story about me or am I about the story. Does my story begin with me or do I begin with my story.
“I am hole crying to be a whole”. My present is a sum of absences. I am nameless, yet I have a name. I am homeless, yet I have a home. I am lifeless, yet I have a life. Whose body am I in, and who is this in my body.
I hear a voice (at times, voices) - it cannot be mine because the story is, I have no voice, yet it is coming from me, therefore it must be part of me. It makes my murmurs into words. It is no language, though, as I have no language; it “was subverted by my father and cannot be recovered.”
Who is listening to my story. Who is hearing my story. Did I create my story or did my story create me…
It is easy to get lost in Magda’s heart, a heart with a faint, irregular pulse, a heart withIn the Heart of the Country. Coetzee’s Magda is not a character in this novel, she is the novel. In being that, she embodies what the novel says and what the novel does. She is complex, she is confused and confusing, everything about her existence is questionable- the boundaries between what’s real and what’s story are blurred beyond repair. She has a made-up identity yet she has had little participation in the making of that identity. Her made-up identity begins to make her into a new identity, which at the same time rejects and embraces its maker.
I wonder if these "questionable" boundaries you refer to extend not only to the boundaries of reality, but the impossibility of the boundaries between colonized and colonizer, even perhaps between man and woman. Just as Magda blurs the line between what is real and what is fantasy, so she blurs the line between colonized and colonizer by inviting Hendrik and Anna into her home, by sharing intimacies (of various kinds) with them that break down the strict, but artificial codes of conduct that separate them. And then, I wonder if she also blurs the lines of gender - her outward role is so limited as a woman, as a daughter, she is confined to their portion of the desert and condemned to a life of servitude to her father and yet her vivid inner life, her sense of rebellion - they seem to point to a blurring of those roles. She longs for more, for freedom, for agency, for power - all things that are allowed white men in her society, but not her.
ReplyDeleteNina Ahn