| Gil Courtemanche's A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali , Bapsi Sidhwa's Cracking India and J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace depict periods of intense violence: the Rwandan genocide, the Partition of India, and post-apartheid South Africa. While these authors bring rape to the foreground as they explore massive social change and systemic brutality, Courtemanche, Sidhwa and Coetzee differ significantly in their treatment of sexual violence. Courtemanche decries physical violence but fails to acknowledge more subtle forms of abuse, constraining the voice of the raped female character. Examining Partition from a child's perspective, Sidhwa exposes some of the injustices faced by a survivor of rape, yet this survivor never talks about her experience. Coetzee's protagonist suppresses the voice of the woman he abuses, but insists that his daughter speak up when she is assaulted: her silence complicates the idea that speech about rape is necessarily progressive. An examination of these texts' treatment of speech and silence surrounding rape will test the possibilities for pro-survivor narratives of sexual violence within a rape culture. |
