Biography
One
of South Africa's most renowned writers, J.M. Coetzee is known for his
portrayal of his native country both during and after apartheid. His
postcolonial orientation draws upon myth and allegory as freely as it does
realism. Coetzee is further distinguished by his acute awareness of
marginalization, his affinity for rural settings, and his unique take on
ethno-linguistic identity.
John
Maxwell Coetzee (pronounced "kut-see") was born to Zacharias and Vera
Wehmeyer Coetzee on February 9, 1940, the first of two sons. Although Zacharias
grew up on a farm in Worchester, a rural Afrikaans community in Cape Town, he
took advantage of the educational resources available to him and became a
lawyer for the city government while Vera worked as a teacher. The installment
of the Nationalist Party in 1948 brought grave consequences for the Coetzee
family. Because of his opposition to the legalization of apartheid, Zacharias
was dismissed as a government lawyer. At this time, John Maxwell was eight and
the family moved back to the Coetzee family farm in Worchester. There,
Zacharias farmed sheep and kept books for the local fruit-canning factory.
Although the young boy developed a fond affinity for the farm, it was during
his time in Worchester John Michael came to understand what it was like to be
marginalized.
Zacharias'
family were Afrikaners, people of Dutch South African descent. For the most
part, Afrikaners were Protestants belonging to the Dutch Reformed Church and
spoke Afrikaans, a Dutch South African dialect. Because of the political
dissent between the English and the Afrikaans-speaking white South Africans,
the school systems for whites were segregated along linguistic lines. John
Michael however did not fit neatly into Afrikaans culture. He attended
English-medium classes and claimed to be Catholic. He loved reading English
literature and never fully identified with rural Afrikaans children, who he
found to be rough, coarse, and poor. Although Afrikaans nationalism was at its
height, the people were in the midst of an agricultural depression.
The
family moved back to Cape Town in 1951 where Zacharias opened up a law firm,
which failed because of Zacharias' inability to manage money. The family became
more and more dependent on Vera's humble earnings as a teacher. As a young
child, John Maxwell was very close to his mother but had trouble understanding
the nuanced racism of South Africa. Coetzee says in his autobiography Boyhood,
which is written in third person,
[John Michael] is always trying to make sense of his mother. Jews are exploiters, she says; yet she prefers Jewish doctors because they know what they are doing. Colored people are the salt of the earth, she says, yet she and her sisters are always gossiping about pretend-whites with secret Colored backgrounds. He cannot understand how she can hold so many contradictory beliefs at the same time.
Young
Coetzee struggled to make sense of his world. On the farm, Coetzee had been
told that the Colored laborers belonged on the land their ancestors had
inhabited, yet he did not understand their unchanging subservient position. In
Cape Town, Coetzee observed how the laws increasingly restricted these people
to these low-paying jobs.
For
high school, Coetzee attended St. Joseph's and continuef to the University of
Cape Town, where he received a B.A. in English in 1960 and a B.A. in
mathematics in 1961. He worked as a computer programmer in England from 1962 to
1965. While in England, Coetzee completed a thesis on the novelist Ford Maddox
Ford and earned his masters from the University of Cape Town. Coetzee moved to
America in pursuit of a Ph.D.; he enrolled in the graduate program at the
University of Texas at Austin where he completed a doctoral thesis on Samuel
Beckett's English fiction. During his studies, Coetzee came across a 1760
account of explorations into South Africa written by one of his remote
ancestors, Jacobus Coetzee. The account latter became a seed for his first
published work of fiction. In 1968, Coetzee moved to the State University in
New York at Buffalo to pursue a job in academia; the campus, meanwhile, was
consumed by the Vietnam anti-war movement. Coetzee returned to the University
of Cape Town as a professor of literature in 1972 after being refused permanent
residence in the United States.
J.M.
Coetzee then embarked on a rich literary career. Drawing both from the
combination of his experience living in America during Vietnam and from his
ancestor's exploration accounts, Coetzee wrote his first novel, Dusklands(1974).
He followed this with In the Heart of the Country(1977) and Waiting
for the Barbarians(1980), in which Coetzee explored the themes of
colonialism. In 1983, Coetzee won his first Booker Prize for The Life and
Times of Michael K, a tale of a simple gardener who is made prisoner in a
civil war from which he seeks liberation. The work also received the C.N.A.
Literary Award and the Prix Etranger Literary Award. In Foe(1986),
Coetzee turned to Robinson Crusoe for inspiration, writing the
narrative from the perspective of mute Friday, Crusoe's slave whose tongue has
been cut out. In 1990, he wrote Age of Iron, the story of an old South
African woman dying of cancer, and in 1994, Master of Petersburg, a
fictionalized account of the Russian author Dostoevsky. Coetzee became the
first author to receive the esteemed Booker Prize twice with Disgrace in
1999. His latest novel is Slow Man (2005). Coetzee has received
recognition for his non-fiction as well, including Giving Offense: Essays on
Censorship(1996) and The Lives of Animals(1999). In 1997, he also
wrote a memoir written in third person, Boyhood. In 2003, J.M. Coetzee
received the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Coetzee
met and married his wife, Philippa Jubber, in 1963. While in America, they had
son in 1966 and a daughter in 1968. He and his wife divorced in 1980, and they
later lost their son in a car accident. Coetzee held several positions at the
University of Cape Town from 1972 until 2000 and has been a visiting professor
at several prominent universities such as Harvard, John Hopkins, Stanford and
the University of Chicago. In 2002, Coetzee emigrated to Australia, where he
lives today.
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