In Greek poet CP Cavafy’s best known and most memorable poem, Waiting for the Barbarians, which inspired JM Coetze’s novel of the same name, an unspecified society, possibly that of the ancient Roman empire in its decline, waits in fearful apprehension for the coming of the dreaded barbarians.
All daily activity comes to a standstill, put into suspended animation awaiting the advent of an unknown, unseen adversary. The Emperor has his throne placed outside the city’s gate and awaits the coming of the barbarians upon whom he will confer all the treasures and honours of his domain.
Composed in question-and-answer form, the poem has the resonance of liturgical chant, a catechism, with a recurring refrain affirming the imminent and inevitable coming of the barbarians.
“What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum? /The barbarians are due here today. / Why isn’t anything going on in the senate? / Why are the senators sitting there without legislating? / Because the barbarians are coming today. / Why don’t our distinguished orators turn up as usual/ To make their speeches, say what they have to say? / Because the barbarians are coming today.”
The poem builds up to a crescendo, a drum roll of impending doom. And then comes the devastating denouement.
“Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion? /… Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come. / And some of our men just in from the border say/ There are no barbarians any longer. / Now what is going to happen to us without barbarians? / Those people were a kind of solution.”
Cavafy was born in 1863 in Alexandria, Egypt, to Greek migrants from Turkey. His father ran an export-import business which took the family to Britain where Cavafy took British nationality. Financial problems brought them back to Alexandria, where Cavafy worked as a journalist and later a civil servant.
However, his true vocation was poetry, which he published in newspapers and obscure journals. His itinerant, chance-ruled life, his exposure to different cultures, his promiscuous homosexuality of fugitive passion in seedy bars and dark alleyways, and his poetic vision of an uncompromising individuality of style and sensibility made him the archetypal Outsider, the nowhere man who, as the English novelist EM Forster put it, saw everything from “a slight angle to the universe”.
When he died at the age of 70, Cavafy left behind a corpus of 155 finished poems, mostly written in Greek, which are haunted by an ambivalent sense of isolation and the universality of the human condition, both equally inescapable. We are alone, and to mask our solitariness from ourselves we invent an imaginary Other, whose Otherness invests us with an affirmation of our own unifying identity.
The Other can be represented by a creed, or caste, or race, or ideology, different from that of our own. The Other is the Barbarian whose coming we await.
But what happens when realisation dawns that there is no Other, no Barbarian out there? That’s the world-changing question posed by the poet, an Outsider who stole his way into the secret labyrinths of the human heart.
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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