Teachers’ Day Celebration: A Literary Tribute
As part of my Teachers’ Day celebration, I created a small academic project that combines literature, technology, and creative learning. For this project, I prepared a video presentation on
“Can the Voiceless Speak? Literature and the Politics of Silence in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe.”
I also transformed the topic into a TED-Ed-style lesson to make the literary concepts more interactive and accessible. Along with the video and lesson, I created an online quiz based on the major concepts discussed and provided an online certificate of participation to make the learning experience more engaging.
This project was not simply an academic exercise; it was my way of expressing gratitude towards my teachers and professors on Teachers’ Day. It allowed me to explore how literature can be presented beyond the traditional classroom through digital platforms, while also encouraging others to think critically about important questions of voice, silence, power, marginalization, and representation. The entire project revolves around one central question: Can the voiceless truly speak, or does the power to represent them always remain in someone else’s hands?
The literary text I chose to explore this question is J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986), particularly through the character of Friday. The project connects Coetzee’s treatment of Friday’s silence with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s concept of the subaltern, leading to a broader examination of who gets to speak, who gets heard, and who possesses the authority to tell another person’s story.
👉Here is YouTube Video Link https://youtu.be/mSChGxeCfzI?si=hsTW1LbXkRp4DkGZ
👉Here is Ted .Ed lesson https://ed.ted.com/on/cnYNMcel
Introduction: Silence, Voice and Power
Silence in literature is not always simply a sign of weakness or absence. Sometimes, silence reveals the unequal distribution of power within society. It makes us ask important questions: Who is allowed to speak? Who is listened to? Who has the authority to tell a story? And who is represented by others?
J. M. Coetzee’s Foe explores these questions through the character of Friday, whose silence becomes one of the most important literary and political problems in the novel. Coetzee rewrites Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and creates a narrative in which the authority to tell stories becomes a central concern.
The novel encourages readers to move beyond the simple question of why Friday does not speak. Instead, it asks a more difficult question: Why can we not hear Friday’s voice? This difference is significant because it shifts attention from an individual’s inability to communicate toward the social and political structures that determine whose voice becomes meaningful.
J. M. Coetzee’s Foe
Published in 1986, Foe is Coetzee’s rewriting of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. The novel introduces Susan Barton as an important narrator. After being stranded on an island, Susan encounters Cruso and Friday. Later, she attempts to transform her experiences into a written narrative.
Susan believes that her story deserves to be told, but she faces a problem: literary storytelling requires authority. She therefore approaches Mr. Foe, a writer who possesses the literary skill and authority necessary to transform experience into a successful narrative.
This creates a significant tension. Susan has experienced the events, Foe has the literary authority to write them, but what about Friday?
Friday is also part of the experience, yet he does not control the narrative. His presence raises the fundamental question of whether a person can truly be represented when they cannot participate fully in the production of their own story.
What Does It Mean to Have a Voice?
The idea of “voice” should not be limited to the ability to speak verbally. Having a voice can also mean having the ability to represent oneself, express one’s experiences, participate in the creation of meaning, and have one’s identity recognized by others.
Friday’s silence therefore becomes much more than a personal characteristic. It becomes a question of power, identity, representation and authority.
Friday is physically present in the narrative, but his personal history remains largely inaccessible. We see him, but we cannot directly access his perspective. We know that he has experienced things, but we do not receive those experiences directly from him.
This creates a powerful paradox: Friday is present in the story, yet he remains absent from the authority to tell his own story.
Friday and the Subaltern
The question of Friday’s silence can be connected to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s influential essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak uses the concept of the “subaltern” to discuss people who exist at the margins of dominant social, political and cultural structures.
Spivak’s argument is not simply that marginalized people are physically incapable of speaking. The deeper issue is whether their speech can be recognized and heard as meaningful within systems controlled by dominant groups.
This leads to an important distinction:
Speaking is not the same as being heard.
A person may have experiences, opinions and a history, but if dominant structures do not provide space for those experiences to be recognized, that person can remain marginalized.
Friday can therefore be read as a subaltern figure. His position is shaped by colonial power, racial difference, social marginalization and linguistic silence. Although he is physically present throughout the novel, his perspective remains difficult to access.
The Politics of Representation
One of the central concerns of Foe is the politics of representation. The novel asks: Who has the authority to interpret another person’s experience?
The process can be understood through a simple chain:
Experience → Interpretation → Narrative → Authority
Friday has experiences. Susan attempts to understand and represent those experiences. Foe possesses literary authority and can transform experience into narrative. Finally, the reader encounters Friday primarily through these acts of representation.
The problem is that Friday does not control this process.
His experiences become subject to the interpretations of others. This raises an important ethical question: when we represent another person, are we actually allowing that person to speak, or are we replacing their voice with our own interpretation?
This question extends beyond literature. It can also be applied to history, journalism, politics, cinema, academic writing and social media.
Who Controls Friday’s Story?
Susan Barton wants to tell her own story and attempts to understand Friday. She recognizes that Friday is an important part of her experience, but she struggles to understand what his silence means.
Mr. Foe represents another level of authority. He has the literary power to transform experiences into a narrative that can reach readers.
Friday, however, has his own experience without having the same narrative authority.
This creates an unequal relationship between experience and representation. The person who experiences something is not necessarily the person who gets to define its meaning.
In this sense, Foe makes readers question the relationship between voice and power. Who gets to write? Who gets to interpret? Who becomes the subject of a story, and who becomes its author?
Silence as Resistance?
Friday’s silence can be interpreted in several ways. At first, it may appear to represent powerlessness. However, Coetzee does not provide readers with a complete explanation of Friday’s silence.
This uncertainty is important.
Because Friday cannot be completely interpreted, Susan and Foe cannot fully control the meaning of his character. His silence therefore becomes a problem for those who want to explain him.
In this sense, silence can be understood as a form of resistance—not necessarily because Friday deliberately chooses silence as a political strategy, but because his silence prevents others from achieving complete access to his identity and history.
The reader is therefore forced to recognize the limits of interpretation.
Friday does not become completely knowable. This challenges the assumption that literature can always provide complete access to another person’s inner world.
The Paradox of “Giving Voice”
One of the most important ideas emerging from Foe is the paradox of “giving voice” to marginalized people.
We often hear expressions such as “giving voice to the voiceless.” Although this may appear positive, Foe encourages us to question the phrase itself.
If I speak for someone else, whose voice is actually being heard?
If I tell another person’s story, am I helping that person communicate, or am I replacing their voice with my own interpretation?
This creates a paradox:
Giving Voice ↔ Replacing Voice
Representation can provide visibility, but it can also reproduce existing power relations. The person doing the representing may become more powerful than the person being represented.
Coetzee does not offer an easy solution to this problem. Instead, he makes readers uncomfortable with the limitations of representation. Friday cannot simply be turned into a speaking subject by Susan or Foe because doing so may once again place his identity under someone else’s control.
Beyond Foe: Literature and Power
The questions raised by Foe are not limited to literature. They remain relevant in contemporary culture.
In cinema, we can ask whose perspective the camera privileges and whose perspective remains invisible.
In news media, we can ask who gets to define an event and whose experiences are excluded.
In politics, we can ask who speaks on behalf of marginalized communities and whether those communities have opportunities to represent themselves.
In academic writing, we can ask who has the authority to produce knowledge and whose knowledge is considered legitimate.
Even on social media, visibility is not equally distributed. Some voices receive enormous attention, while others remain difficult to hear.
Therefore, the problem of Friday becomes a much broader problem: the relationship between voice, power and representation.
Bringing the Ideas Together
The central ideas of this project can be understood through four connected concepts:
VOICE → POWER → REPRESENTATION → AUTHORITY
Voice is connected to power because not everyone is equally able to make themselves heard.
Power influences representation because those with greater authority often have more opportunities to tell stories about others.
Representation is connected to authority because the person who controls the narrative can influence how others understand an individual or community.
Through Friday, Foe exposes this entire process.
The novel encourages readers to ask not only “What is being said?” but also:
Who is allowed to say it?
Who is being represented?
Who is speaking for whom?
Whose voice remains difficult to hear?
These questions make Foe particularly significant from a postcolonial perspective because colonialism is not only about political control. It is also connected to the control of knowledge, language, identity and representation.
Conclusion: Learning to Listen Critically
J. M. Coetzee’s Foe presents silence not simply as the absence of speech but as a complex problem of voice, power and representation. Through Friday, Coetzee asks readers to reconsider what it means to speak and what it means to be heard.
Friday is physically present in the narrative, yet his own perspective remains difficult to access. This makes him a powerful figure through which we can understand the problems of marginalization and representation discussed by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
The novel also reveals the paradox of representation. Speaking for marginalized people may sometimes help make their experiences visible, but it can also replace their voice with the interpreter’s own understanding.
Therefore, Foe does not provide a simple answer to the question “Can the voiceless speak?” Instead, it asks us to become more critical listeners. It encourages us to question who speaks, who is spoken for, who controls the narrative, and who has the power to be heard.
My Teachers’ Day project gave me an opportunity to explore these questions not only through a literary text but also through digital learning. By creating a video, a TED-Ed lesson, a quiz and an online certificate, I tried to transform a literary discussion into an interactive learning experience.
Ultimately, this project became more than a Teachers’ Day activity. It became a reflection on the purpose of education itself: to learn, to question, to listen, and to recognize voices that are often difficult to hear.
Works Cited
Coetzee, J. M. Foe. Secker & Warburg, 1986.
Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. 1719.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, University of Illinois Press, 1988, pp. 271–313.
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