Discuss race with reference to 'In the Heart of the Country.'

In one of his essays preceding In the Heart of the Country  Coetzee wrote on the use of tragedy in South African writing; ‘Tragedy is typically the tragedy of inter-racial love: a white man and a black woman, or vice versa, fall foul of the laws against miscegenation, or simply of white prejudice, and are destroyed or driven into exile.’ The first example of this type of tragedy within In the Heart of the Country comes with Magda’s description of her father’s seduction of Klein-Anna, she describes it in terms of its language which she claims has direct consequences on the master and servant relationship.

Madga’s father’s sexual desire for the young coloured Klein-Anna illustrates that ‘Even the father’s desire is a desire based on the illegitimacy of the desired object.’ The relationship begins as we see ‘he finds Klein-Anna, sweeping or polishing or whatever, and stands over her, watching, saying nothing’ (65). Then  a few sections later ‘While Hendrik is out…my father visits his wife.’ ‘She is bashful. She hides her face.’ (67) At this point in the novel and in the relationship between the father and Klein-Anna, it is interesting to note that ‘She hides her face’ is said three times within sections three consecutive sections (67-69). Thus showing that Klein-Anna is obviously aware of the immorality of what she is doing and of the rules she is subsequently breaking. Where as ‘shame’ is only used once with reference to the father (70).

Magda is highly intelligent hence she is fully aware of the differences between her father and Klein-Anna. She observes how ‘the servants dread my father’s rages, always in excess of their occasion’(66), which illustrates the power structure in the household. The narrator then proceeds to question ‘But how long does he think their idyll will last, the two of them alone on the farm, an ageing man and a servant-girl, a silly child?...what can they have to say to each other?’ (72). Magda is not only fully aware that the couple are from different worlds with little in common but also that their relationship is wrong, as is shown when she writes; ‘My father is exchanging forbidden words with Klein-Anna’ (74) and ‘My father..locks the door behind him…..He lies with her and rocks with her in an act which I know enough about to know that it too breaks codes’ (75). Magda also states that ‘There is a level, we both know, at which Klein-Anna is a pawn’ (72) which illustrates her knowledge and awareness that she is above Klein-Anna.

A distinct parallel between Klein-Anna and Magda is their subservient status to the Baas’ authority; Magda is subjected to her father’s will; ‘Magda’s relationship with her father could be seen to replicate that of colonizer/colonized – essentially, that of slave to master. She characterizes this relationship in terms of the rape of the colonized ’  Whilst Klein-Anna has no power with which to reject his sexual advances owing to her race and her status as his slave. After all, all forms of racial segregation are made up of the powerless and the powerful

 ‘Coetzee does not simply give the more sociologically realistic portrayal of the white male (ab)use of black women, or the more favoured revolutionary mode in which a black male and white woman defy and overthrow social and political norms, but combines them by showing that the first leads to the second, and by analysing this progression within the dynamic of one particular familial setting so as to trace the psychic sources and results of the colonial sexual drama.’ Portrayals of sexual relationships in In the Heart of the Country certainly reflect this, with particular regard to that between Hendrik and Magda. The rape image Magda uses at the very start of the novel foreshadows her rape by Hendrik later in the text, thus also emphasising the parallels drawn in the text between her father and Hendrik.

‘One of the most common features attributed to the white woman is her ambivalent status in between the colonial master and the colonised, ambiguously asserting both her (white) colonial status and her ‘woman-ness,’ which may undermine her power as a colonial.’ This seems to have particular relevance to Magda and her view of Hendrik because at the start of the novel she speaks of Hendrik as ‘not only servant but stranger’(32) and she states ‘I keep the traditional distance. I am a good mistress’ (49) yet at one point later on she says ‘I am his equal though I am the weaker.’ (156)  Thus showing us how the differences between the two and the roles played by them as black and white, mistress and servant are eventually merged. ‘The binarisms involved remind us that ‘race’ itself depends on a series of differences, of contrasts.’ ‘The question of the black subject cannot be represented without reference to the dimensions of class, gender, sexuality and ethnicity.’ Magda is forced into the subservient position when Hendrik rapes her and she no longer has any power over him; ‘I beg you, Hendrik, I will give you anything, only please not that! Ah Hendrik please let me go, I don’t even know how!’ (206) And eventually she does bring race into her argument against him as she says ‘I am not simply one of the whites, I am I! I am I, not a people. Are you waiting for the white woman to kneel to you?’ (228) The last sentence hints at the reversal in power that Hendrik may well be revelling in, having a white person doing as he wants and says. In that same section Magda says of Hendrik: ‘He has the means but not the words, I the words but not the means.’ An open acknowledgement of the ways in which they differ and the different type of power that each holds. Magda is aware that Hendrik is physically much stronger than she is yet he is unable to voice his feelings or needs where she is in the exact opposite position; words are all that Magda treuly has.

In her four various narrations of the rape Magda continually refers to Hendrik as animalistic and ‘beast’ like, which is a likely association with his race. Examples include ‘This must be the climax of the act, this I know, this I have seen in animals, it is the same everywhere, it signals the end.’ (209) and ‘He turns me on my face and does it to me from behind like an animal.’ (221) These continual references to animals have long been affiliated with racism and the view of black people as less than human. At one point in her descriptions of the rape Magda talks of it being ‘women’s fate’ which is an interesting point in relation to the fact ‘the female body has always been crucial to the reproduction of Empire, and deeply marked by it.’  

One of the continual juxtapositions throughout the novel is that Magda is white and yet she continually refers to dressing in nothing but black (or occasionally ‘bottlegreen.’) ‘I have worn black widow weeds longer than I can remember, for all I know I was a baby in black diaper waving my rickety little legs, clutching at my black knitted bootees, wailing.’ (86) This is a sad reference because it insinuates that she has never been given a real chance and that her tragic life was predestined from the moment of her birth. Then in the next numbered section she jumps from her referce to being a baby to being a widow; ‘I am a black widow in mourning for the uses I was never put to.’ (87) ‘I am a miserable black virgin, and my story is my story even if it is a dull black blind stupid miserable story.’ (12)  Magda’s theory on her race and personality is summarised when she says ‘From wearing black too long I have grown into a black person.’ (191)

Occasionally there is also confusion for the reader in her description of her father; ‘He is turning me into a child again! …the black brow, the black eyeholes, the black hole of the mouth from which roars the great no,’ (97) which does create an image of him being black though later on Magda does describe her father’s colouring ‘his flesh is lilywhite. His face, which ought to be of the same brick-brown as his forearms, is yellow.’

By the end of the novel Magda is a relic of someone who cannot go on; trying to communicate with anyone or anything she can, speaking in incomprehensible ‘spanish’; perhaps another hint at the issues of race. As regards the other characters, a complete role reversal has occurred as we see Hendrik and Anna wearing Magda’s parents clothes and possessing more control than Magda. ‘Although Coetzee insists that he is "writing without authority" it is in his white women narrators that this non-position, outside the authority of writing and Authorship, is realised.’

Coetzee does not differentiate between truth and fiction within the multiplicity of the narrative. ‘In the course of the action people get killed or raped, but perhaps not really, perhaps only in the overactive imagination of the story teller.’ Hence the plot of In the Heart of the Country certainly does not appear to be as important or relevant as the characters and the themes within the novel, of which race is undoubtedly one of the most significant. Problems of race relations in In the Heart of the Country serve to highlight the larger human condition, and Coetzee’s characters seem to be aware of this historical significance

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