Waiting for the Barbarians 291endures the pain of betrayal but continues to love
the man in her life in spite of everything. Cleófilas
longs for the kind of romance depicted in telenove-
las while she absorbs the message they teach female
viewers: Women must suffer for love. Cleófilas’s
life begins to mimic the telenovela as her husband
becomes abusive and unfaithful. Not only does she
become the suffering woman she sees on television,
but she also starts to mirror the suffering figure
of La Llorona, or the Weeping Woman. Based on
a Mexican folktale, La Llorona is a story about a
woman who has drowned her children in a river and
spends eternity haunting bodies of water where she
can be heard weeping over their deaths. In many
versions of the tale, she is said to have killed her
children as an act of revenge against her unfaith-
ful husband. The creek outside Cleófilas’s house is
called “Woman Hollering Creek,” an allusion to La
Llorona, and as Cleófilas sits beside it with her son,
she hears La Llorona’s voice calling to her. By incor-
porating Mexican telenovelas and La Llorona into
the story, Cisneros emphasizes the cultural practices
and traditions that condone the suffering of women
like Cleófilas.
Suffering also has a religious meaning and
is embodied in one of Mexico’s most important
feminine archetypes: the Virgin of Guadalupe. In
Mexico, the Virgin appeared to the Indian Juan
Diego in 1531 at the temple where the Aztec god-
dess Tonantzín was worshipped. This coincidence
made the Catholic conversion of the indigenous
population easier, but it also endeared the Virgin
to Mexican believers who saw her as both the suf-
fering Virgin Mary and as a symbol of hope that
people pray to in time of need. In “Little Miracles,
Kept Promises,” Cisneros shows how Mexican
Catholics often leave messages on church walls for
the Virgin that contain prayers or promises made to
the Virgin. Through these ex-votos, we learn of the
community’s ailments, which range from the trivial
(a boy prays for his acne to clear up) to the heart-
breaking (a husband prays for his dying wife). The
story ends as Rosario leaves her own ex-voto and
describes how she refused to pray to the Virgin for
years because she rejected the image of the suffering,
self-sacrificing woman that the Virgin represented.
It was only when Rosario realized that the Virgin
also embodied the strength of Tonantzín that she
accepted the Virgin and understood that suffering
can lead to empathizing with others, which can then
lead to healing.
Belinda Linn RinconCOETZEE, J. M. Waiting for the
Barbarians (1980)
Waiting for the Barbarians, first published in 1980,
is the South African author J. M. Coetzee’s third
novel. Coetzee (b. 1940) won the James Tait Black
Memorial Prize in 1980 for Waiting for the Barbar-
ians, and most scholars and critics now recognize
this work as one of his best.
The novel is set on the frontier of an uniden-
tified country currently occupied by a nameless
empire. There are three main characters: the Mag-
istrate, Colonel Joll, and the barbarian girl. The
Magistrate lives a peaceful existence, managing a
small town and commanding a garrison of soldiers
within the walls of his frontier fort, until Colonel
Joll arrives from the empire’s headquarters. Colonel
Joll disrupts the quiet frontier by sending out raid-
ing parties to capture any “barbarians” found on
the land. One of the prisoners, the barbarian girl,
occupies a soft place in the heart of the Magistrate
after she is tortured by Colonel Joll and his men, and
the Magistrate takes it upon himself to care for her.
A series of decisions by the Magistrate concerning
her welfare results in Colonel Joll imprisoning and
torturing the Magistrate as a traitor.
Many themes, including cruelty, race, ethics,
freedom, identity, isolation, and suffering,
are discussed within the context of Waiting for the
Barbarians. Although Coetzee is notorious for never
directly addressing an issue, a discerning reader will
identify many conflicts within the text that are com-
parable to modern-day issues.
Colin Christophercruelty in Waiting for the Barbarians
Before the arrival of Colonel Joll, the Magistrate
in Waiting for the Barbarians seems utterly unaware
of the presence of cruelty. In the early pages of the
novel, he describes for Colonel Joll an idyllic scene
of fishing with native villagers, and when it is time