'Foe'

J.M. Coetzee re-creates Daniel DeFoe's Robinson Crusoe with a girl involved. Naturally, she ends up getting screwed by every guy in the book (Crusoe, DeFoe). All except poor Friday.

Coetzee weaves another stellar tale from the existing story to paint an allegory for what was happening in his native land of South Africa.

The division of race is told through the idiom of language -- how those who have it (and share it with many others) are able to succeed whilst those without it are mired in inequality and substandard existence.

It's this absence of language and Miss Barton's overwhelming and desperate need to give Friday a language (while most were OK with him not having one) that brings to question the entire debate of race and equality.

On one level, the lack of language deprives Friday (the representation of all indigenous or people of color) of the opportunity of being equal. It gives the whites (or the slaveowners) the power.

Despite Miss Barton's apparent good intentions are rooted in the entire idea of power and wielding that power. Basically, once the cat was out of the bag (see: slavery), there was no going back nor was there any real way to repay or provide restitution on any level. Somehow, those people (black, Indian, whatever) have never quite been able to get back.

No matter how many laws are passed, no matter how many generations of humans are raised to accept and love one another, 500 or 600 years ago whenever they decided to trap and enslave the people on the continent of Africa, it made thousands and thousands of years of ripples that'll outlast us and our great-great-great-great grandchildren.