J. M. Coetzee’s Foe retells the story of Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe through the perspective of a white Englishwoman named Susan Barton, who was stranded on a desert island with Cruso. As Susan narrates both her time on the island and her return to London, her stories are filled with mentions of Friday, a young Black man who was the only other survivor of Cruso’s shipwreck. Friday has mysteriously lost his tongue, and his silence is a source of both frustration and excitement for Susan; sometimes she is desperate for a conversation partner, while other times, Susan takes Friday’s lack of speech as an excuse to order him around or invent tales about his history. Even though Friday is present in nearly every moment of Susan’s story, the story never reveals anything about his life—only towards the end of the novel does Daniel Defoe (or Mr. Foe, as Susan calls him) point out that the ship Friday and Cruso were on was almost certainly a slave ship, that Cruso was probably a slave trader, and that hundreds of enslaved Black men and women were drowned in the wreckage.
Susan’s omission of this crucial detail is telling: by erasing the obvious purpose of Cruso’s voyage, Susan also erases both the brutal fact of slavery and her own subjection of Friday. Furthermore, though Susan is baffled by the fact that Cruso never taught Friday to write in all their years together, she too is hesitant to hear Friday’s actual perspective; she pushes back when Mr. Foe gives Friday writing lessons, and demeans the music and drawings with which Friday expresses himself. Friday is silenced both literally (by the slaveholders who cut out his tongue) and metaphorically (by Susan, who denies him expression, and therefore interiority, in her narrative)—even Susan admits that Friday’s lack of voice in her story is a way to keep him bound to her orders, just as “it was a slaver’s stratagem to rob Friday of his tongue.” Friday’s silence in Susan’s tale thus exemplifies the way that historically, white authors have obscured the violent truth of slavery, an erasure that allowed enslavement to persist for centuries beyond Robinson Crusoe’s publication.
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Enslavement, Silence, and Erasure ThemeTracker
Enslavement, Silence, and Erasure Quotes in Foe
One day [Cruso] would say his father had been a wealthy merchant whose counting-house he had quit in search of adventure. But the next day he would tell me he had been a poor lad of no family who had shipped as a cabin boy and been captured by the Moors (he bore a scar on his arm which was, he said, the mark of the branding iron) and escaped and made his way to the new world. Sometimes he would say he had dwelt on his island in the past 15 years, he and Friday, none but they having been spared when their ship went down. […] Yet at other times, as for instance when he was in the grip of the fever…he would tell stories of cannibals, of how Friday was a cannibal whom he had saved from being roasted and devoured by fellow cannibals…So in the end I did not know what was truth, what was lies, and what was mere rambling.
“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.”
When I reflect on my story I seem to exist only as the one who came, the one who witnessed, the one who longed to be gone: of being without substance, a ghost beside the true body of Cruso. Is that the fate of all storytellers? Yet I was as much a body as Cruso. I ate and drank, I woke and slept…Return to me the substance I have lost, Mr. Foe: that is my entreaty for though my story gives the truth, it does not give the substance of the truth (I see that clearly, we need not pretend it is otherwise). To tell the truth in all its substance you must have quiet, and a comfortable chair away from all distraction, and a window to stare through; and then the knack of seeing waves when there are fields before your eyes, and of feeling the tropic sun when it is cold; and at your fingertips the words with which to capture the vision before it fades. I have none of these, while you have all.
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?
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.
I must go, Friday. You thought that carrying stones was the hardest of labours. But when you see me at Mr. Foe’s desk making marks with the quill, think of each mark as a stone, and think of the paper as the island, and imagine that I must disperse the stones over the face of the island, and when that is done and the taskmaster is not satisfied (was Cruso ever satisfied with your labours?) must pick them up again (which, in the figure, is scoring out the marks and disposed them according to another scheme), and so forth, day after day; all of this because Mr. Foe has run away from his debts. Sometimes I believe it is I who have become the slave. No doubt you would smile, if you could understand.
A painter engaged to paint a dull scene—let us say two men digging in a field—has means at hand to lend alert to his subject. He can set the golden hues of the first man’s skin against the sturdy hues of the seconds, creating a play of light against dark. By artfully representing their attitudes he can indicate which is master, which slave. And to render his composition more lively he is at liberty to bring into it what may not be there on the day he paints but may be there on other days, such as a pair of gulls wheeling overhead, the beak of one parted in a cry, and in one corner, upon a faraway crag, a band of apes. Thus we see the painter selecting and composing and rendering particulars in order to body forth a pleasing fullness in his scene. The storyteller, by contrast (forgive me, I would not lecture you on storytelling if you were here in the flesh!), must divine which episodes of his history hold promise of fullness, and tease from them they’re hidden meanings, writing these together as one braids a rope.
I forgot you are a writer who knows above all how many words can be sucked from a cannibal feast, how few from a woman cowering from the wind. It is all a matter of words and the number of words, is it not? Friday sits at his table in his wig and robes and eats pease pudding. I ask myself: did human flesh once pass those lips - truly, cannibals are terrible; but most terrible of all is to think of the little cannibal children, their eyes closing in pleasure as they chew the tasty fat of their neighbors. I shiver. For surely eating human flesh is like falling into sin: having fallen once you discover in yourself a taste for it, you fall all the more readily thereafter. I shiver as I watch Friday dancing in the kitchen.
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?”
“But since we speak of childbearing, has the time not come to tell me the truth about your own child, the lost daughter and Bahia? Did you truly give birth to her? Is she substantial or is she a story too?”
“I will answer, but not before you have told me: the girl you send who calls herself by my name, is she substantial? You touch her; you embrace her; you kiss her. Would you dare to say she’s not substantial? No, she is substantial, as my daughter is substantial and I am substantial; and you two are substantial, no less and no more than any of us. We are all alive, we are all substantial, we are all in the same world.”
“You have omitted Friday.”
But this is not a place of words. Each syllable, as it comes out, is caught and filled with water and diffused. This is a place where bodies have their own signs. It is the home of Friday.
He turns and turns till he lies at full length, his face to my face. The skin is tight across his bones, his lips are drawn back. I pass a fingernail across his teeth, trying to find a way in.
His mouth opens. From inside him comes a slow stream, without breath, without interruption. It flows up through his body and out upon me; it passes through the cabin, through the wreck; washing the cliffs and shores of the island, it runs northward and southward to the ends of the earth. Soft and cold, dark and unending, it beats against my eyelids, against the skin of my face.
