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Colonizing Monsters and Decolonizing Beasts: The Case of Mariana Enríquez’s Our Share of Night
Alba Devo Colis
… le colonisateur, qui, pour se donner bonne conscience, s’habitue à voir dans l’autre la bête, s’entraîne à le traiter en bête, tend objectivement à se transformer lui-même en bête.
Aimé Césaire, Discours sur la colonisation (1955: 8)
1 “The colonizer, who, to ease his conscience, gets used to seeing the other as a beast, trains himself to treat them like a beast, and objectively tends to transform himself into a beast” (my translation). Our Share of Night (2022) by Mariana Enríquez is a fantasy horror novel that tells the story of a secret sect called the Order, which seeks to seize the knowledge of a god called the Darkness. To achieve this, they enslave powerful mediums from racialized lower classes who establish contact with the god. The turning point comes when the last medium, Juan, weary of a life of subjugation and exploitation, rises against his oppressors, embarking on a life-and-death battle to reclaim his freedom and protect his kin. Enríquez shapes a narrative that critically confronts the last Argentine dictatorship (1976–83), making the novel an allegorical fractal that can be viewed through a decolonial lens. From this perspective, both the Order and the dictatorship uphold European values of domination and colonialism, perpetuating the division between the white man and the Other by creating a Manichean separation between colonizers and the colonized, between domination and exploitation, and between bodies that exploit and bodies that are exploitable.
In this chapter, I analyze Our Share of Night as an allegory of colonialism. In doing so, I highlight the figures of the monster and the beast as metaphors for both the colonial and decolonial worlds, while examining the effects of internal colonialism. I argue that the monster embodies colonial mechanisms of racialization and animalization, while the beast represents the subject marked by colonial difference. The beast, from the wound of their dehumanization, develops border thinking, along with critical and decolonial knowledge, that stimulates their desire for liberation and, with it, the possibility of their re-existence as a being.