Friday, one of the main characters in J. M. Coetzee’s novel Foe, has lost his tongue under mysterious circumstances. In a story so concerned with storytelling and power, Friday’s tongue—or its absence— represents how white-authored fiction and history erases the horror of enslavement. Moreover, because Friday cannot speak for himself—and because Susan Barton, the story’s narrator and protagonist, never tries to teach Friday how to write—Friday never gets to express either his perspective or his interiority. Instead, by taking advantage of Friday’s silence, Susan gains control of Friday’s internal life as well as his external life: “I say he is a laundryman and he is a laundryman,” Susan crows, “I say he is a cannibal and he is a cannibal.” Importantly, though little is known about the circumstances under which Friday has lost his tongue, Coetzee’s novel repeatedly emphasizes the violence that must have accompanied the removal of such a tender body part. In addition to symbolizing the erasure of Black voices and experiences from the archive, then, Friday’s tongue also makes clear that this kind of erasure is inherently a violent act.
Friday’s Tongue Quotes in Foe
“Where is the justice in it? First a slave and now a castaway too. Robbed of his childhood and consigned to a life of silence. Was Providence sleeping?”
“If Providence were to watch over all of us,” said Cruso, “who would be left to pick the cotton and cut the sugar cane? For the business of the world to prosper, Providence must sometimes wake and sometimes sleep, as lower creatures do.”
I tell myself I talked to Friday to educate him out of darkness and silence. But is that the truth? There are times when benevolence deserts me and I use words only as the shortest way to subject him to my will. At such times I understand why Cruso preferred not to disturb his muteness. I understand, that is to say, why a man will choose to be a slave owner. Do you think less of me for this confession?
It is not wholly as I imagined it would be. What I thought would be your writing-table is not a table but a bureau. The window overlooks not woods and pastures but your garden. There is no ripple in the glass. The chest is not a true chest but a dispatch box. Nevertheless, it is all close enough. Does it surprise you as much as it does me, this correspondence between things as they are and the pictures we have of them in our minds?
Oh, Friday, how can I make you understand the cravings felt by those of us who live in a world of speech to have our questions answered! It is like our desire, when we kiss someone, to feel the lips we kiss respond to us. Otherwise would we not be content to bestow our kisses on statues, the cold statues of kings and queens and gods and goddesses? Why do you think we do not kiss statues, and sleep with statues in our beds, men with the statues of women and women with the statues of men, statues carved in positions of desire? Do you think it is only because marble is cold? Lie long enough with a statue in your bed, with warm covers over the two of you, and the marble will grow warm. No, it is not because the statue is cold but because it is dead, or rather because it has never lived and never will.
You err most tellingly in failing to distinguish between my silences and the silences of a being such as Friday. Friday has no command of words and therefore no defense against being re-shaped day by day in conformity with the desires of others. I say he is a cannibal and he becomes a cannibal; I say he is a laundryman and he becomes a laundryman. What is the truth of Friday? You will respond: he is neither cannibal nor laundryman, these are mere names, they do not touch his essence, he is a substantial body, he is himself, Friday is Friday. But that is not so. No matter what he is to himself (is he anything to himself? - how can he tell us?), what he is to the world is what I make of him…Whereas the silence I keep regarding Bahia and other matters is chosen and purposeful: it is my own silence.
“You say,” he said—and I woke up with a start—”you say he was guiding his boat to the place where the ship went down, which we may surmise to have been a slave ship, not a merchant man, as Cruso claimed. Well, then; picture the hundreds of his fellow slaves—or their skeletons—still chained in the wreck, the gay little fish (that you spoke of) flitting through their eye sockets and the hollow cases that had held their hearts. Picture Friday above, staring down upon them, casting buds and petals that float a brief while, then sink to settle among the bones of the dead… in every story there is a silence, some sight concealed, some word unspoken, I believe. Until we have spoken the unspoken we have not come to the heart of the story.
“If we devote ourselves to finding holes exactly shaped to house such great words as Freedom, Honor, Bliss, I agree, we shall spend a lifetime slipping and sliding and searching, and all in vain. They are words without a home, wanders like the planets, and that is an end of it. But you must ask yourself, Susan; as it was a slaver’s strategem to rob Friday of his tongue, may it not be a slaver’s strategem to hold him in subjection while we cavil over words in a dispute we know to be endless?”
“Friday is no more in subjection than my shadow is for following me around. He is not free, but he is not in subjection. He is his own master, in law, and has been since Cruso’s death.”
“Nevertheless, Friday follows you: you do not follow Friday. The words you have written and hung around his neck say he is set free; but who, looking at Friday, will believe them?”
Friday’s Tongue Symbol Timeline in Foe
