The world inside the South African novelist’s Waiting for the Barbarians bears striking resemblance to Trump’s racist empire.
Samuel Daniell, Boers Returning From Hunting.(Historical Picture Archive / Corbis / Corbis via Getty Images)
In Mexico City, in March of 2025, I was browsing in an English-language bookstore in Roma Norte and found a worn, secondhand copy of J.M. Coetzee’s 1980 novel Waiting for the Barbarians. I knew nothing about the book but had a vague sense that I’d been meaning to read it, and I enjoyed the idea of it as a souvenir from my trip: It was so incongruous, bringing a book by a South African Nobel laureate, written 45 years earlier, home from Mexico.
When I got home, I realized why the title was familiar: I already owned a copy. I remembered now that I’d been avoiding it because every time I picked it up and skimmed its opening, I sensed the doom and suffering steaming off its pages. Now two used copies of Waiting for the Barbarians sat next to each other on my bookshelf, like a pair of accusing eyes, watching to see when I would be brave enough to start reading.
It is especially hard to choose to read this kind of book when the world already seems so dark. Ever since Donald Trump took office for the second time, my cultural diet has tended toward the escapist and comforting. It took me nearly a year, but I finally bucked up and read the novel this past winter, and two things quickly became clear. First, it was even more brutal than I had imagined. Second, it was actually just the right book to read at that moment, holding up a fun house mirror to our current reality, the kind that distorts images slightly but also reveals them in all their true grotesquerie.
As the ICE crackdown unfolded across the country and reached a climax in Minneapolis, and people were getting hauled out of their homes and cars, beaten and shot in the streets, jailed and deported, Coetzee’s book became a kind of handbook for me, a guide to understanding how an oppressive regime wields power. But it also taught me something about resistance, and about how to hold fast to your own sanity and morality in increasingly insane and immoral times.
Waiting for the Barbarians is set in an unnamed country at an unspecified time, in an outpost of an anonymous imperial government, a place referred to as the “frontier.” The long arms of empire have reached this remote front and established a town here, complete with military barracks and watchtowers and a locked gate that keeps some people out and others in. In settling this land, the citizens have pushed the so-called “barbarians,” an amorphous, nomadic people, off this fertile spot and into the harsh surrounding deserts and plains. The barbarians are rarely seen but serve as the symbolic enemy for the people in the frontier town: the threat from without, the unknown forces that lurk at the edges of civilization, the bogeyman in the wild.
Surely the fact that Coetzee was writing from within apartheid-era South Africa informs every word of this book. But the empire of the novel is any and every empire, and the “capital,” which serves as the seat of power, is every capital. In the novel, emissaries of the government travel from the capital to the frontier to perform displays of military power and to reinvigorate the citizens’ fear of the unknown, with constant reminders that they are at war and that the barbarians are the enemy at the gates.
Our narrator is a magistrate in the town who has doubts about the actual threat the barbarians present. He is friendly with the soldiers, cooks, and servants who work for him at the military barracks, and he entertains himself by occasionally visiting the local brothel or going out for drinks with acquaintances. He also takes long walks among the ramparts of a partially uncovered structure in the desert that hints at another civilization that once occupied these lands and has been buried by the sands of time. The fragility and futility of empire runs beneath the story like a faint but steady hum.
The peace is disturbed by the arrival of Colonel Joll, the novel’s own Pete Hegseth, a warmonger from the capital, and nothing good happens after that (which is too bad, because his arrival happens on the first page). Joll makes a show of capturing, imprisoning, and torturing a band of barbarians who were supposedly plotting against the town but were more likely minding their own business and trying to survive the harsh winter. The colonel is something of a corollary to O’Brien in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four—the unrepentant torturer who believes that, as our magistrate puts it, “Pain is truth.”
One of the justifications for arresting the members of this pitiable little tribe is that, as one of Joll’s soldiers explains, “When they saw us coming they tried to hide in the reeds…. So the officer, the Excellency, ordered us to take them in. Because they were hiding.” He also mentions that none of the soldiers could speak their language, which means the barbarians couldn’t offer a defense. It is guilt by circumstance: You are foreign and you looked scared, so you must have been doing something wrong.
The magistrate, watching all this, instantly realizes that he’s out of step with Joll and his men; it is at this moment that he begins to see, as Orwell put it in his famous anti-colonial essay “Shooting an Elephant,” “the dirty work of Empire at close quarters.” The magistrate begins to question everything and also muses on his own complicity as he continues to follow Joll’s orders, even as his loathing for the colonel grows: “The Empire does not require that its servants love each other, merely that they perform their duty.”
With every page of Waiting for the Barbarians, America was increasingly revealed to me in its political morass. The violence in the novel even unfolds against a wind-blown, wintry landscape—“From horizon to horizon the earth is white with snow”—much like the backdrop of the scenes we all witnessed in the streets of Minneapolis in January and February.
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The phrase “criminal illegal aliens” was (and still is) bandied about by the likes of Kristi Noem, then head of the Department of Homeland Security, and Tom Homan, Trump’s so-called “border czar.” Meanwhile, immigrants have been cast by Trump as “animals” and “hardened criminals,” a “massive invasion” of foreigners “poisoning the blood of our country.” These words signal the inhumanity and undesirability of undocumented immigrants, the overwhelming majority of whom have never committed a crime and are living peacefully with their families in American towns and cities. Their only “crime” is their desire to be part of this supposedly free and open nation.
Coetzee knows that in order for the wheels of power to turn, they must be fueled by hatred for some perceived enemy. The barbarians are a peaceful people who mostly appear in the frontier for the purposes of trade and resource-gathering. There is no evidence that they have ever waged war or plotted against the citizens. But if the people stay scared, they are much easier to control. And if they’ve been persuaded to disregard the humanity of a certain group, they can convince themselves to tolerate—even perversely enjoy—the government’s cruelty to that group. After all, they’re not the ones being beaten and broken.
As with the barbarians, who are paraded through the public square and assaulted in the novel, we have seen immigrants getting humiliated and hurt and disappeared by ICE in broad daylight. Our “barbarians” are Asian, African, Middle Eastern, and, most of all, Latin American. They have brown skin, and so they must be suspect. The barbarians in the novel are of nonspecific, non-white origin with Indigenous overtones—the magistrate tells us that a girl has “the straight black eyebrows, the glossy black hair of the barbarians.” Like everything else in the novel, they are stand-ins for any marginalized ethnic group in a Eurocentric world.
The Martiniquan poet Aimé Césaire says in his 1950 book Discourse on Colonialism that “in France people spoke of a civilized world and a barbarian world. The barbarian world was Africa, and the civilized world was Europe.” So it was, and so it remains. Here in America, as the cultural descendants of Europe, we have clung to what James Baldwin calls “the very warp and woof of the heritage of the West, the idea of white supremacy.” Just like those in power in Coetzee’s world, Trump and his followers legitimize this belief and invite the entire country to partake in the public spectacle of treating racialized others as slightly less than human.
But it is also true that in witnessing and passively condoning these events, we chip away at our own humanity. Coetzee shows us again and again that the real barbarians, in a spiritual sense, are not the ostensibly uncivilized “others” but those who enact their cruelties upon them. In his book, Aimé Césaire exhorts us to “study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism.”
The magistrate does everything he can to keep his soul unscarred, even as his body, after his imprisonment and torture for disobeying the regime, becomes scarred beyond recognition, a crippled mass of rags and bones. At the same time, the magistrate does not argue for his own moral superiority over the soldiers. After all, he too is part of the system and has been enjoying the fruits and luxuries of his position all his life. In thinking of Colonel Joll, he is forced to acknowledge that “I was the lie that Empire tells itself when times are easy, he the truth that Empire tells when harsh winds blow.”
At one point, the magistrate takes stock of the “warden,” his primary torturer and Colonel Joll’s right-hand man: “I find it hard to hate him in return. The road to the top must be hard for young men without money, without patronage, with the barest of schooling, men who might as easily go into lives of crime as into the service of the Empire.” Though Coetzee wrote these words back in 1980, I can imagine no better description of the men who were recruited and trained by Noem’s DHS to become ICE agents. These men, perhaps as much as anyone in America, are also victims of the crackdown, since look what they’ve had to turn themselves into to do the work they do.
In the novel, the magistrate appears to be the only dissident in the town, attempting to live in such a way that future generations can say that “in this farthest outpost of the Empire of light there existed one man who in his heart was not a barbarian.” He is an imperfect hero, but he is our hero nonetheless, simply for his refusal to stand down. This refusal takes many forms, from proclaiming truth in the face of the government’s lies, to imploring others in the town to look to their own moral compass, to actively trying to stop torture and murder as they occur, to inviting the torture upon himself.
But as I read this book and simultaneously took in the stories out of Minneapolis, one key difference occurred to me: The people resisting in Minnesota were not, like the magistrate, alone. Although in both Coetzee’s world and our own, “the soldiery tyrannizes the town,” only one of those towns was crushed beneath the boot of tyranny. The people of Minneapolis kept getting kicked and then standing up again, because—most crucially—they were helping each other to rise. By caring for and watching out for their neighbors, citizens and immigrants alike, they reminded each other (and all of us) of our common humanity—not our commonality with people of our own race or nationality, but with all people in the human race.
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This acknowledgment is not good for those in power, since it throws doubt on the justifications for their wars, and perpetual war is necessary to keep people in line. Shortly after the events in Minnesota, our government shifted its focus from a war within to a war without. We have stayed busy since then fighting a war with Iran—no one, the president least of all, knows why—and we have destabilized that entire region, so that countless lives are being lost or destroyed while we sit back and watch the mayhem unfold on our screens.
Meanwhile, the imprisonment, abuse, and destruction of the lives of immigrants proceeds steadily on our own shores. Trump has increased his calls for mass deportations, and the conditions in the ICE holding centers should make all of us ashamed. In late June, the Supreme Court, in a 6–3 decision, narrowly prevented Trump from realizing his ultimate white-supremacist dream: stripping automatic citizenship rights for all babies born on US soil. And in early July, as ICE raids once again ramped up in American cities, two people were shot and killed in their vehicles by ICE agents within six days. Through a combined strategy of intimidation, brute force, and legal challenges, the Trump administration keeps reminding Americans just who our enemies are.
What Coetzee’s magistrate wants, what all the people in the frontier town want—and likely what the people of Minneapolis and the people of Tehran want—is to return to the peaceful lives they had before the soldiers came. To live in communion with nature and with their fellow humans, including the so-called barbarians. But, Coetzee’s narrator asks, “What has made it impossible for us to live in time like fish in water, like birds in air, like children? It is the fault of Empire! Empire has created the time of history. Empire has located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe.”
America has long been an empire, asserting itself on the world stage and taking what it wanted. It used to espouse a sense of responsibility and an uplifting of other nations—notwithstanding the actual effect of some of its actions—but now even that pretense is gone. The mask is off, and it turns out we are what we have always been.
“One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire,” Coetzee writes: “how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era.” His novel suggests the irony: In fighting to maintain its power, an empire ultimately eats itself, through the corruption of its own values and the destruction of the peace of its own people. The current catastrophe—or rather the current string of catastrophes, coming one after another in blindingly quick succession—may mark the end of the American empire, or at least this phase of it. But we can decide how to fit ourselves within the shattered picture. Resistance is both an idea and an action, and sticking together is our best chance to not get snowed under by the storm.
Pamela NewtonPamela Newton is an essayist whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, the New York Times Book Review, LitHub, and elsewhere. She teaches writing at Yale University.