His/Her Man Friday

Re-righting/-writing of an inaccessible cannibal in J.M. Coetzee’s Foe

Abstract

his loss of speech organs in J.M. Coetzee’s Foe that is a rewrite of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Friday’s cut out tongue has mimicked and resisted the Western centralist mode of representation and writing that fails to represent Friday’s likes but, at the same time, he remains vulnerable to mispresentation. Friday’s tonguelessness, an innovative narrative device employed by Coetzee in the plot of rewriting, creates the crisis of representability for the narrator and the readers. The corrective process of rerighting the texts by rewriting seems limited when certain truths like Friday’s pre-island life remain inaccessible. Foe, the western writer, plans to exploit Friday’s silence and assimilate him into the colonial agenda of creating the image of a willing slave in the canonical text. Susan, the woman narrator of Foe, questions how the colonial master visualizes the imperialized lands and its inhabitants, and challenges Eurocentric and patriarchic mode of representation that is based on tongue and speech. Susan tries to retrieve Friday’s speech through his fingers and visibalize him by importing the feminist idea of resistive body and silence that may be the only alternative left to speech.