Foe Study Guide

J. M. Coetzee was born in South Africa, where he grew up during the height of racial apartheid; though his parents were Dutch and part of the larger Afrikaner community, Coetzee spoke English at home. After graduating from the University of Cape Town, Coetzee moved to the UK, where he supported himself as a computer programmer while writing an English master’s thesis. Coetzee then traveled to America for additional graduate study, eventually getting a professorship in upstate New York in 1968. Coetzee began writing around this time, publishing his first novel in 1974 and rising to international prominence in 1980 with Waiting for the Barbarians, a novel about the evils of colonialism. While teaching literature in Cape Town and across the U.S., Coetzee continued to write prolifically, publishing novels like The Life and Times of Michael K and Disgrace as well as several lightly fictionalized memoirs. In 2002, Coetzee moved to Australia, where he currently resides. He was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003.

Much of Coetzee’s work deals explicitly with anti-colonialism and exploitation, which is no surprise given the shaping force of apartheid on his life. “Apartheid” refers to a series of segregationist laws in South Africa that were in place from 1948 to 1994; under apartheid, Black people were forcibly removed from their homes, barred from voting, and restricted from use of most public spaces. One of the major ways in which white South Africans maintained their rule was by enforcing the use of Afrikaans as an official language, even though many Black South Africans did not know it. Friday’s racialized silence thus has extra layers of meanings in this apartheid context, especially since Coetzee was always a vocal advocate against his government’s violence and segregation. Foe was published in 1986, at the height of national uprisings against apartheid; some critics hailed it as an important work of protest, while others were frustrated that it was not explicit enough in its critique.

Though Foe rewrites the narrative of Daniel Defoe’s 1719 book Robinson Crusoe—widely considered to be the first real novel ever written—there are several major plot differences in the two narratives. While Susan Barton is the narrator and protagonist of Coetzee’s work, no such character ever appears in Defoe’s novel. Though the island in Robinson Crusoe is full of cannibals and mutinies, the island Susan describes is empty and monotonous. And while author Daniel Defoe is not present in his 1719 novel, “Mr. Foe” is the titular character of Foe, which is focused primarily on who gets to claim ownership of what stories. Foe also stands alongside other postmodern, postcolonial revisions of classic texts, namely Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba.