The Root of Lucy's Attack: An Internalization of South Africa's Painful History

I must say that I have enjoyed reading Disgrace more than any other novel that we have studied over the course of the semester.  What struck me most about the novel were the recurring hints that the main character David Lurie gave as a possible explanation for the reasoning behind his and Lucy’s attack on the farm.  I believe that Coetzee gives Lurie’s own reasoning behind the attack to demonstrate the painful history of race relations in South Africa, and how the internalization of pain and suffering resulted in wrong and misdirected violence on two innocent people.  Lurie first hints at the cause of their attack when he tries to change her mind about not reporting the crime when she states, “Vengeance is like a fire.  The more it devours, the hungrier it gets…Do you hope you can expiate the crimes of the past by suffering in the present?”  (112) When Lurie finally succeeds in getting Lucy to open up about the rape she says “It was so personal.  It was done with such personal hatred…But why did they hate me so?  I had never set eyes on them.” (156)  In response to her sentiments Lurie says, “A history of wrong.  Think of it that way, if it helps.  It may have seemed personal, but it wasn’t.  It came down from the ancestors.”  (156)  Clearly, Lurie views his daughter’s rape by these men as a result of South Africa’s complex history or race relations and disparity in power.  These men have taken out their internalized anger and frustration on two innocent white people who have not directly caused them any harm.  While I was researching more information on rape in South Africa, I came across an interesting blog post that touched on the question of whether Coetzee was racist for having the main role of a black man in the novel be to rape a white woman.  In Coetzee’s defense Nigerian scholar Chielozona Eze states on his blog, “Well, the truth is that rape is not an African word and it wasn't invented for the African. Another fact is that African men do rape, and if blacks raped a white woman in the post Apartheid South Africa there are many ways to understand it, which of course, does not limit its horror…There is no doubt that the years of oppression and apartheid in South Africa left their imprint on the minds of average South African men, just like the years of military oppression did to the average Nigerian. People take laws into their hands. There is perhaps an internalization of the mechanism of oppression, which, unfortunately, expresses itself in various forms of violence directed against the weaker ones in society. In Nigeria, people turn against one another, shout at one another, exert all imaginable forms of violence on each other. In South Africa, violence appears to become a second nature to the segments of society that sees itself as the emasculated victims of the historical injustice of apartheid: men.”  I agree with Eze’s stance here.  I do not think Coetzee was being racist in his novel- he was trying to draw attention to the impact of South Africa’s painful history upon its citizens- black and white. 

The link to Eze’s blog is: http://chielozona.blogspot.com/2009/03/south-african-women-fall-victim-to.html

In my research on rape in South Africa I also learned that in addition to the issue of rape as a means of vengeance, “corrective rape” is also used as a tool against lesbian African women.   Since Lucy is lesbian, I thought that her attack could have also been used as a means of corrective rape against her. 

Here’s a link to an interesting article on rape against lesbians in South Africa: http://abcnews.go.com/International/south-africa-task-force-fight-corrective-rape-lesbians/story?id=13528169#.T4PJjK5NOQ