Life and times of Michael K: an account of human precariousness

Abstract

The unbridled and unremitting search for the farm where his mother was born and the dream of a piece of land of his own for planting and harvesting lead Michael K in migration and in self-exile through a cruel and inhuman Africa, post-apartheid in which instability, exclusion and poverty seem to rule. Black, poor, slow in the head and rejected due to a physical deformity that keeps people away from him since his childhood, he is the very human refuse, that represents wasted lives, their silenced voices, the unwanted and lonely which society wants to delete. His difficulty in communicating is actually the result of the exercising of silence which he was forced from birth. Although suffering processes of deterritorialization, of disidentification and animalization, he does not abandon the initial dream. The precariousness of his language reflects the precariousness of his own life, an endless struggle and against which the only thing that seems to defend him is his ability to live on the margins, invisible as people want him to be.