The complete subversion of ethical norms in these violent rapes and the female acceptance, even, to some extent, welcoming of it, is astounding.  On the one hand, Coetzee plays to traditional white colonial anxieties about black sexual aggression presenting, in Disgrace, very real South African fears of a white women’s rape by black criminals and, In the Heart of the Country, a violent vengeful rape between colonial master and servant.  On the other hand, the female victims don’t respond in a traditional way; they do not try to prevent the rapes or their future occurrence, they do not call on men to help them.  The rapes of Coetzee’s fiction allude unsettlingly to strained ideological realities.  When a group of black men brutally rape a white woman all ethical interpretations freeze up and falter.  To represent the men as violent criminals recreates the heavily fictionalized paranoia of the African sexual threat, the black savage who will defile the white woman if not kept in his place. But, to explain the rape as the expression of anger stemming from years of repression and victimization dehumanizes both the white woman and her black violators.  She becomes a martyr for the sins of her ancestors, while her violators remain as inhuman as ever, acting as unconscious stand-ins devoid of agency in a drama over which they have no control.  Rape becomes redemption, an inevitable meting out of justice, a necessary new tilt of power to rectify the old discrepancies.  I write that sentence and something in me buckles and cries out.