Life is hard enough. How can I face it without my privilege? Why would anyone voluntarily give up their comfort and security? Would anyone benefit if I did? It’s not that I want my privilege to be exclusive. I am happy for others to have privilege. I just don’t want to give up mine so that they can also have some.

I have a capitalist soul. I believe there is enough to go around, especially if you make more. Not enough water for everyone? Just make more. Not enough oxygen to go around? Make more. Not enough food to feed everyone? Grow more. Not enough planet to house us all? Find another one.

I cannot bring myself to see these resources as finite, as having to be shared. The notion that I am wrong about this disturbs me in a very deep place—the heart of the child who hears that monsters are real after all. I thought I had faced all my monsters when I realised that my father organised my rape. I thought the world held no further terrors for me. I was wrong. It turns out that the prospect of losing one’s privilege is the biggest terror of all.

I can feel the impulse to ridicule what this woman is saying, to call it absurd and dangerous. It rises in me like the urge to vomit. She is wrong. She must be wrong, because it is inconvenient for me if she is right. I force the impulse down. I make myself stop trying to raise objections, to exceptionalise myself, to legitimise my pain. I stop talking altogether, and listen. This is not something I am good at. I have spent so much time trying to make my voice heard that my ears are out of practice.

The sociologist continues talking about what it is like to be a poor black woman who has survived sexual assault in South Africa, and I try to listen even as the information batters my brain with unwelcome sensations.

“Don’t look at me like that,” she says. “I am not your path to self-awareness. I am not Spike Lee’s ‘Magical Negro’ who will lead you to enlightenment. But I couldn’t bear to listen to you speak about self-care another minute.”

Then the large flat-screen monitor on the wall flickers and buzzes, and we fall silent.

“This is it!” says the moderator, not even trying to hide her excitement. “The moment we have all been waiting for. John Coetzee is joining us live from Adelaide. Let’s give John a warm Constantia U welcome, everyone.”

The audience claps and whistles and stamps, as though a Hollywood celebrity were visiting, rather than a man who taught here for over thirty unremarkable years.