





































This paper is a critical examination of the gazes that 

fall on food and on those who eat in J.M. Coetzee’s In 

the Heart of the Country (1977) and Waiting for the 

Barbarians (1980). I refer to this phenomenon as ‘food 

witnessing’ and posit that they occur out of curiosity in 

‘the Other’ or in attempt to consolidate or wield power. 

The paper argues that these gazes originate from vi-

olent impulses within a complex racial and gendered 

setting, and mimic a cannibalistic desire to consume 

the Other. It further explores questions about the body 

and senses that arise from watching someone eat, and 

complicates ideas of familiarity and distance between 

‘the Self’ and ‘the Other’ as they occur in the novels. 

Introduction
 There is a common saying that one eats 
with the eyes first. This paper takes the saying 
literally as it tries to read the act of gazing as a 
kind of symbolic consumption through the re-
spective protagonists of J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting 
for the Barbarians (1980) and In the Heart of the 
Country (1977). Both novels are a first-person ac-
count of institutional violence and torture com-
mitted in historical and geographical obscurity 
and ambiguity. The narrative frame of both novels 
is set up through the reference of a protagonist 
who watches, observes, and tries to archive or 
convey their experiences through writing. With 
the advent of food photography in advertisements

and social media, food has become a sensuous object that first and foremost appeals to the gaze that 
holds the desire to ultimately own and consume the food item (Roland Barthes, Signe Rousseau, Carolyn 
Korsmeyer). In Coetzee, however, the food-related gaze falls on a person eating as a way to ultimately 
create distance from them, or to define “the Self” in opposition to them, or to absorb knowledge about 
“the Other”. If we understand consumption as a form of assimilation and absorption, gazing becomes a 
kind of consumption too, where the goal is to conquer, absorb, and obliterate ‘‘the Other”.
 This paper examines the gaze of the respective narrators of the novels, the Magistrate and Magda, 
specifically through instances of looking at food, watching others eat, or using metaphors and images of 
consumption in the novels. Food is one of the more accessible modes of expression of violence in Coe-
tzee. While forced hunger and starvation are common ways to inflict and read torture, this paper looks 
at violence inflicted in the presence of food. Food is a universally identifiable object and signifier that 
usually occupies the ‘background’ of a narrative in literature. For example, it is the central element of 
the Magistrate’s relationship with the prisoners in Waiting for the Barbarians. Since he does not directly 
intervene to stop Colonel Joll’s atrocities, food becomes a significant way in which he is able to extend 
his humanity and the hope in the Empire to the natives. Magda, on the other hand, lives a life of domes-
tic servitude and her vocabulary, therefore, consists of food objects, family meals, and the contents of

“I see what I have been dreading”: Witnessing Food 
and Violence in Waiting for the Barbarians and 

In the Heart of the Country

Nimisha Sinha, University of Hyderabad

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27 | Sinha



the kitchen. Food and its metaphors are essential to her narrative imagination. Food, then, becomes an 

easily available and manipulable signifier while depicting violence in both texts. This paper looks at the 

protagonists’ relationship with food through the idea of ‘food witnessing’.

 ‘Food witnessing’ refers to the symbolic violence that the witnessers commit on the objects of 

their gaze. The Magistrate and Magda are separated by their desires, power, and motivations and possess 

an uneasy relationship with authority. They watch people eat and describe it in their tales, both out of 

curiosity and as a way of gaining knowledge about “the Other.” This paper will examine related issues 

of body, violence, and voyeurism by locating food within troubled colonial, racial, and gendered gazes. 

Jacques Derrida, in an interview with Jean-Luc Nancy, talks of the inevitability of consuming “the Other”: 

“The so called nonanthropophagic cultures practice symbolic anthropophagy and even construct their 

most elevated socius, indeed the sublimity of their morality, their politics, and their right, on this anthro-

pophagy” (114). The following section will shed light on how food is implicated by Coetzee very deliber-

ately and very intricately into these numerous gazes, and that violence and metaphoric consumption are 

woven into it. Violence is an essential part of the act of food witnessing.

Food Witnessing: Food and Consumption Related Gazes

 The agential choice to not look in Waiting for the Barbarians stands in stark contrast with the other 

abundant scenes of looking, watching, observing (and consequently, reading or interpreting) with won-

der, discomfort, and disgust. In giving importance to the non-performance of an action, compelling us to 

critically examine the Magistrate’s difficulty with looking at and recording torture: the Magistrate strug-

gles to look at physical violence when Colonel Joll brings local people “roped together neck to neck” (29) 

and confines himself to his room to escape the sights and sounds of violence (31). While Joll deprives the 

prisoners of food, the Magistrate constantly tries to ensure their basic nourishment. In this indirect rela-

tionship with food, we can see the contradictions in the Empire and its many agents’ relationship with the 

natives. It is a nonlinear, oppressive relationship that the Empire forces upon the natives. Feeding the Oth-

er, disrupting food chains, and legitimizing consumption become some of the ways in which this dynamic 

relationship is established.

 Magda’s story, by design, is not palatable or even believable: the false stories, the dream-like se-

quence of events, and frequent inconsistencies make her tales suspect. Through the long- winded stories 

of her lonely life, surrounded only by three other people, she lurks and spies, watching through windows, 

“through the chink in the curtain” (9), “by the light of the storm lantern I see…” (25). When she cannot 

look, she employs her imagination to paint a vivid picture of the going-ons in the house. Magda is pos-

sessed by an obsessive desire to look and observe, to know, and confront things that exclude her—and 

food is an essential item in this quest. She imagines a shift in power hierarchies through ideas of food 

service: “Soon I will be bringing my father and my maid breakfast in bed while Hendrick sounds in the 

kitchen eating biscuits” (49); and she comprehends her denial of family privileges through the ‘noble’ 

family meal: “I should have been invited too. I should be seated at that table” (52). Magda continuously 

uses vocabularies of food to imagine desires, materiality, and even to confirm her own bodily existence, 

“I think of tea and rusks and my saliva flows. There is no doubt about it, I am not pure spirit” (36).

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The Possibility of Violence in Watching People Eat

 Watching other people eat can entice us, be an act of acquiring familiarity, and in Waiting for the 

Barbarians, it can even be an act of creating distance—of defining oneself against “the Other.” In the ear-

liest instances of looking at prisoners, the Magistrate notes their hunger, their fancy for ‘civilized foods’ 

like bread and tea, and most importantly, how they eat. He is aware of the innocence, helplessness, and 

hunger of the first set of prisoners. He asks the guards to give them food—using the Biblical word ‘manna’ 

for it—and writes:

 The old man accepts the bread reverentially in both hands, sniffs it, breaks it, passes the 

 lumps around. They stuff their mouths with this manna, chewing fast, not raising their eyes. A   

 woman spits masticated bread into her palm and feeds her baby. I motion for more bread. We

 stand watching them eat as though they are strange animals. (26)

 These descriptions of Others eating are impersonal and dehumanizing: those eating are Others to 

the witness. He cannot see their interiority—and so we get descriptions of external physiognomic and 

anatomical features like hands, mouths, and eyes. They do not seem to be eating like animals, but people 

look on as if they were. His account restricts description to the corporal-material.

 The difference in Magda’s descriptions of the “new wife” (1) and her dead mother in her first (false) 

story suggest that an eating body can be weaponized into a monstrous Other. In paragraphs numbered 2 

and 4, we get a description of the “new wife,” who she falsely claims her father has brought home, and of 

Magda’s dead mother (2) respectively. Both of these are part of her imaginations; at this point in the narra-

tive, it is impossible to verify any of these stories as true or false through our own reading:

 2. The new wife. The new wife is a lazy big-boned voluptuous feline woman with a wide

 slow-smiling mouth. Her eyes are black and shrewd like two berries, like two shrewd berries. 

 She is a big woman with fine wrists and long plump tapering fingers. She eats her food with 

 relish. She sleeps and eats and lazes. She sticks out her red tongue and licks the sweet 

 mutton-fat, from her lips. “Ah, I like that!” she says, and smiles and rolls her eyes. I watch her

 mouth, mesmerized. (1)

 The imagery of a woman with berries for eyes could be read as an evocation of the non-human/

demonic or of a desirable, consumable object. Magda ascribes shrewdness to the berry-eyes. Most of the 

description is based upon watching her eat and enjoy flesh; the “new wife” is made into a gluttonous, 

villainous woman because she consumes and relishes food. Martha’s imagined gaze falls directly on her 

eyes and mouth, and is fixated on this woman who eats — “I watch the full lips of this glutted woman” 

(4). The mother, on the other hand, is described as “a frail gentle loving woman” who, even as she was 

dying, was “patient, bloodless, apologetic” (2). Blood is an interesting symbol; while the new wife rel-

ishes a dead, now bloodless being, that is mutton, the mother is the bloodless being. The new wife is not 

only a replacement to her mother, but shall also devour Magda. Magda later tells us that there never was 

a new wife (16). She is the literal imagined Other.

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 The narrative frames of both texts ensure that descriptions remain corporeal, even visceral. In both 

Magda and the Magistrate, we see the desire to comprehend the Other—to read and interpret them—be-

fore they reject the idea, and the desire is transformed into violence, as seen in the above analysis. Sheila 

Roberts argues that In the Heart of the Country looks like Magda’s personal locked diary—one that she 

writes in to “rediscover her possible ‘mothers’” (23) as an ironic or temporary subversion of the Electra 

plot. Magda, writes Roberts, like most women and unlike the colonized, has no memory of “any utopian 

existence of living in equality side by side with men” (23), and so the images she uses typically come not 

from memory but fiction. Familiarity and distance play a fundamental role in how one imagines interper-

sonal relations with the Other, but is complicated by the consequences of the desire to watch the Other 

eat. It suggests an irreducible distance between the witnesser and the witnessed

Distant Familiarity with the Eating Other

 Coetzee constructs a paternal, pitiful, and enquiring gaze in Waiting for the Barbarians that grad-

ually turns destructive with increasing self-awareness. One could posit that the bodily familiarity it pro-

vides is what later fuels the desire to reinforce distance. This is most clearly seen in people’s reactions to 

the prisoners: what starts with wonder and curiosity in the barbarians—the Others—eating civilized food 

finally ends in it becoming another nuisance: “For a few days the fisherfolk are a diversion with their 

strange gabbling, their vast appetites, their animal shamelessness, their volatile tempers. . . . I stare down, 

invisible behind the glass. Then, all together, we lose sympathy with them. The filth, the smell, the noise 

of their quarrelling and coughing become too much” (28). The ‘distant familiarity’ of watching the Other 

eat sublimates into violent desires and brutal prejudices for the Magistrate, and the next section shows its 

transformation into the need to punish, erase, and obliterate the Other. The Magistrate’s gaze is shroud-

ed in the violent language of the Empire. In one scene, he partakes in gazing and staring at the prisoners 

along with a big group of people who watch the natives with lecherous intentions, perverted desires, or 

an idle curiosity. He “spend[s] hours watching them from the upstairs window (other idlers have to watch 

through the gate)” (27). He seems to always be watching them from his window above, even watching the 

other onlookers, and observing their food choices, appetites and other private rituals. Curiosity combines 

with surveillance as these displaced natives are displayed in the yard. A similar fixation on watching and 

trying to comprehend is repeated in his relationship with the Barbarian girl. He obsessively tries to deci-

pher the marks on her body, trying to recreate and imagine the brute force on her feet, her eyes, and her 

sense of self.

 In his many nights with her, he cleans and massages her feet and falls into a torpor, reflecting on 

his declining sexual desires and prowess. Despite living in proximity, she remains an Other that he sim-

ply cannot comprehend. The Magistrate writes, “But with this woman it as if there is no interior, only a 

surface across which I hunt . . . how natural a mistake to believe that you can burn or tear or hack your 

way into the secret of body of the other” (59). The desire to burn or tear or hack into her body to discover 

some secret is not very different from Joll’s belief in some truth hidden to be forced out of the Barbarians.

 Eating is largely considered to be a personal experience because it uses the relatively private 

senses of taste and smell, making it difficult to hold stable universal standards for it. In our contemporary 

world of food tourism and social media, the sense of sight has been implicated in a new form of 

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consumption via extravagant images of food and consumption. Watching someone eat is much like 

an inquisition into the Other’s interiority and culture; following from Derrida, we can insist that the 

food-related gaze also assimilates and consumes the Other. However, in the texts before us, we see that 

food witnessing is ultimately a limiting exercise in knowing the Other. What one eats does not always 

tells us who they are:

 Sundown after sundown, we have faced each other over the mutton, the potatoes, the pumpkin, 

 dull food cooked by dull hands. Is it possible that we spoke? No, we could not have spoken, we 

 must have fronted each other in silence and chewed our way through, time, our eyes, his black 

 eyes and my black eyes inherited from him, roaming blank across their fields of vision. (3)

 The word “fronted” is interesting. “We must have fronted each other” means that they have faced 

each other every day, and made themselves visible to each other. However, to put up a front also means 

to conceal the reality behind appearances. Food becomes a medium which transforms confrontation 

into a fronting: the possibility of action is substituted by chewing, which is an infinite repetition through 

time. The gaze ‘roams blank’ in the face of irreducible distance. The family meal is not a ritual of love 

or care; in In the Heart of the Country, the family meal is the performance of duty and subservience of 

brutal coexistence.

 Magda’s gaze is effectively piercing. She is able to find the truths about others through her own 

private surveillance efforts, or at least the truths that are good enough for her narrative. She keeps a 

watchful eye over everyone in the house, their routines and rituals, comings and goings. In describing 

her father’s routine, she writes about his mealtime, “Before meals he washes his hands with soap. He 

drinks his brandy ceremonially, by himself, from a brandy-glass, of which he has four, by lamplight, 

sitting in an armchair” (31). This routine and its knowledge are important to her, because it is deviations 

in these everyday behaviors that alert her to his deviancy. She quickly catches digressions from these 

observances, for example, when he when he pushes his food away, asks her to leave during the meal, 

or makes his tea himself. She is able to confirm his “guilty thoughts” about Anna when he breaks his 

private ceremony, and “pecks his glass of brandy not sitting in his armchair but pacing about the yard in 

the moonlight” (33).

Changing Expressions of Consumption

 In Waiting for the Barbarians, consumption is linked more closely with bodily reactions rather 

than sensory experiences. For example, the Magistrate watches the blind barbarian girl eat, and writes, 

“I watch her eat. She eats like a blind person, gazing into the distance, working by touch. She has a 

good appetite, the appetite of a robust young countrywoman” (41). Watching her eat becomes a feeble 

attempt to gain access into her interiority. Watching someone, especially watching someone eat, can be 

an act of familiarizing ourselves with them through the recreation of visceral reactions in our own bod-

ies. In arguing for the aesthetics of food, scholars such as Kevin Sweeney, Carolyn Korsmeyer, and Emily 

Brady have noted the difference in treatment of the more objective and universal senses of sight, sound, 

and touch as opposed to the more personal senses of smell and taste. In Sweeney’s “Can A Soup be

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Beautiful?” (2009), he argues that this is one of the reasons why food has been denied the category of the 

beautiful in eighteenth century aesthetic traditions. The focus of these arguments has generally been on 

the divide between the universal and personal senses in creating complex aesthetic experiences, but I 

wish to point to the use of sight and touch by Coetzee in describing consumption.

 The first-person narrative of Waiting for the Barbarians implies that the Magistrate can write only 

about the sensory experiences that he can look at in others when they eat. Therefore, sight and touch are 

used almost exclusively to represent consumption of food. In a peculiar teasing of the senses, Coetzee 

complicates and contorts the familiar idea of consumption through the narrative framing of the text. Even 

when consumption is defined first-hand, the text shifts attention to the bodily reaction to food rather than 

the taste and smell of food. In In the Heart of the Country, there is a suggestion of a more complex notion 

of consumption that suggests an aesthetic of eating, “The sun is setting, the sky is a tumult of oranges and 

reds and violets. Up and down the stoep struts Klein-Anna mastering the shoes. If only we could eat our 

sunsets, I say, we would all be full” (85). The bright colors in the scenic image excites the eye, and con-

sumption of beauty is compared to a metaphoric eating of a sunset.

Gaze, Consumption and/of the Other: Obliterating the Other

 Finally, I want to talk about how the gaze, in both texts, exploits food to successfully obliterate the 

Other. The Magistrate, earlier, only “[passes his] his gaze over their surface absently, with reluctance” (34) 

but when the girl lives in close proximity with him, the surface of the barbarian body becomes reflective, 

“When she looks at me I am a blur, a voice, a smell, a centre of energy” (41). The blind barbarian girl 

cannot return his gaze. But when his own gaze reflects and falls back on him, it begins to diminish him. 

He begins to avoid the girl, and soon after, passes the girl when crossing over the kitchen:

 Through wraiths of steam I see a stocky girl seated at a table preparing food. “I know who that is,” 

 I think to myself with surprise nevertheless, the image that persists in my memory as I cross the 

 yard is of the pile of green marrows on the table in front of her. Deliberately I try to shift my mind’s 

 gaze from the marrows on the table in front of her. Deliberately I try to shift my mind’s gaze from 

 the marrows back to the hands that slice them, and from the hands to the face. I detect in myself a 

 reluctance, a resistance. My regard remains dazedly fixed on the marrows, on the gleam of light 

 on their wet skins. As if with a will of its own, it does not move. So I begin to face the truth of 

 what I am trying to do: to obliterate the girl. (64)

 The green marrows become a substitute for the girl, a way to shift gaze; this is a tacit acceptance 

of the fact that looking away is marked by brutality, not least the brutality of indifference. He does not 

wish to see the girl, because now his gaze falls back on him. The girl is stocky but when he looks at her, 

he only sees her hands or her face at a time, already fragmenting her body. The gleam of the skin of the 

marrows also strangely mirrors her skin, possibly gleaming from the wraiths of steam.

 The series of events leading up to and following Magda shooting her father are intricately linked 

with items and vocabularies of the kitchen. She holds her gun “like a tray”; this innocuous metaphor forc-

es a reconciliation of the image of a serving dish and of a weapon. She decides to kill her father after a

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dramatic night of violence and abuse, “[she] has had enough, tonight, of listening to the sounds that 

other people make” at the kitchen table and in their bedrooms. While shooting her father, she shuts her 

eyes to avoid not the sight of her patricide but “to keep me from seeing my father’s nakedness” (63). 

She continues to describe him, his movements, his stupor in vivid detail as narrative time slows down. 

Standing over him, she describes the scene as follows:

 125. The cups have not been washed.

 126. There are flies in my father’s room. The air is heavy with their buzzing. They crawl on his 

 face and he does not brush them away, he who has always been a fastidious man. They cluster 

 on his hands, which are red with blood. There are splashes of dried blood on the floor and the 

 curtain is caked with blood. I am not squeamish about blood, I have made blood-sausage on 

 occasion, but in this case I am not sure it would not be better to leave the room for a while, to 

 take a stroll, to clear my head. However, I stay, I am held here. (65)

 She stands over his dead body and describes in detail his room and body, and the surfaces where 

the blood has begun to dry. The image of blood returns, but this time she is responsible for it. She is sur-

rounded, perhaps even covered in her father’s blood, which she compares with blood sausages. Blood 

sausages are usually made from pork, dried pig’s blood, and suet. While the odd and unsettling compar-

ison between human and pig blood made through the example of food does not suggest a cannibalistic 

desire in Magda to literally consume him, but it points the reader towards a much more complex web of 

metaphoric relations of consumption in the novel.

Conclusion

 Images of food or metaphors of consumption are strategically placed in the narratives to help 

express non-food related desires. The idea of consumption also includes the possibility of consuming the 

Other, thus, making the Other into a consumable object that can be conquered and absorbed. To con-

sume also means to use up a resource. If Derrida says that consuming the Other is inevitable, this paper 

has tried to examine the processes and consequences of this kind of assimilation and appropriation of 

the Other. Shifting gazes between people and food, the subsequent conflation, and the borrowed lan-

guage allows the protagonists to successfully consume the Other.

 Food in literature has a dynamic presence. It is not limited by issues of survival or nourishment, 

and it does not serve the function of realistic embellishment alone. The meaning of food may differ for 

readers across the world, through space and time. It is impossible to fix a single allegorical meaning 

for food. In this paper, I have tried to demonstrate a food-related gaze in Coetzee that falls on an eat-

ing Other. The motivations for watching people eat are numerous: it is a curiosity in the Other, a way to 

create both bodily familiarity and distance, a way to distinguish ourselves from the Other, and a way to 

consolidate power. The racial/colonial/patriarchal gaze falls on the eating body to create Otherness and 

monstrosity, and Coetzee uses this to portray complex ideas of consumption. The violence of food wit-

nessing vaguely mimics a cannibalistic desire to consume the Other: erase them, destroy them, or inflict 

brutalities on them. The impossibility of returning the gaze and the irreducible distance between the

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witnesser and the one being witnessed is testament to the imbalance in power between the two parties. 

Finally, I tried to show that the food-related gaze does not excuse itself, and gradually turns inwards to 

look back at itself in obsessive and futile attempts to confirm one’s own materiality.

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