WAITING
FOR THE BARBARIANS by C P Cavafy
Constantine Cavafy, the Greek
poet writing in 1898 in his adopted homeland, Egypt, understood the ebb and
flow of political events and the turmoil of change. His parents, with Greek and
Turkish heritage, had settled in Alexandria, where Cavafy was born. He learned to speak half a dozen languages.
Egypt in the 1890s was a
turbulent place. Greece scarcely better.
The British occupied Egypt from 1882 and didn’t leave until 1922, and in that
time the Mahdist War broke out, mainly due to the debts the country had
incurred. In Constantinople an Armenian
revolt was brutally crushed, and Cavafy, whose origins were associated more in
Alexandria and Constantinople than in Athens, was dealt a cruel blow when the
British fleet bombarded Alexandria and his books and letters were burned.
Cavafy later renounced his British citizenship.
Although the family left
Alexandria for England in 1872 and lived in Liverpool, where they had business
offices, Cavafy and Co as a merchant company was wound up in 1877 and the
family returned to Alexandria once more.
Essentially the Cavafy
family were wanderers, living mainly in Alexandria but visiting Constantinople
and Athens as well as England. They saw at first hand the changes that followed
from political upheaval.
Who were the Barbarians in
the poem? The English, who were heavily
involved in the fighting and cared little, it seemed, for libraries; the
Sudanese fighters allied to the Egyptian army, or the Turks crushing the
Armenian nation? What the poem captures
is the passivity of the crowd, who stand and wait, expecting something to
happen.
The New Yorker published a superb piece on ‘Waiting For The Barbarians’ and the Government Shutdown, by Daniel Mendelsohn on Feb.3rd. The parallels are well drawn. The Senate is silenced. Everyone is waiting,
silent and expectant. There is a hint of punishment to come. There is also the
promise of rewards for the right people. There is also ‘a perverse yearning for
some violent crisis that might invigorate the state.’
Sounds familiar? Cavafy
saw history repeated in his own lifetime, over and over again. He saw apathy and lack of willingness to
tackle the difficult tasks of government as dangerous inaction, and disliked
the self-serving, indolent attitudes of the rich and powerful.
In our time, present
leaders appear as barbarians and are held up as dangerous bogeymen, yet there’s
a secret wish within the population for the overthrow of the old order, no
matter what the cost.
When the bogeymen go
missing, or simply fail to appear, who can we blame? If the Barbarians don’t
put in an appearance, we’ll have to take on any changes ourselves. This could
be dangerous. Our inner barbarians are never far from the surface.