Language and Racism

Only seventeen pages into J.M Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians and it already echoes parts of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Okay you probably could have seen striking similarities between the two stories after a glance at each stories respective first pages, but the similarity I am talking abut goes a bit deeper than the brutally animalistic way white people view nonwhite races in the stories. The similarity that stands out to me is the role that both writers give language in their particular brands of racism. Conrad and Coetzee both use language as a defining characteristic of the inferiority of the nonwhite race. When reading Heart of Darkness we discussed the extreme infrequency that Conrad bestowed the English language on the blacks. Coetzee uses the spoken language of the outpost in a similar fashion. When the fishermen are brought back to the outpost as prisoners Coetzee describes their inability to really communicate with any of the towns people through language. This rift proves to solidify their image as zoo pets for the towns people to look at, mock openly and laugh at. It also allows the narrator of Waiting for the Barbarians to portray the fishing people as inferior to the other nomads because he can not communicate with this brand of wild people. I find the emphasis that both writers put on the ability to communicate and language to be a very interesting way of expressing the racism the two groups of white people demonstrate. Personally, in a modern sense I do not witness or even think of language as a racial barrier as much as it is a cultural barrier. This observation lead me to wonder if Conrad and Coetzee heavy emphasis on the language barrier between races is a result of their understandably high regard for language, or was language once a central characteristic of racism?
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