Colonizing Monsters: The Order and the Argentinian Dictatorship
the Order must go to extremes to obtain knowledge, and that in many cases this entails forgoing affection or embracing madness; it entails cruelties that are hard to comprehend.
Rosario Bradford in Our Share of Night
Enríquez’s novel reveals a world of colonial monsters, a mixture of fiction and history. It presents a secret sect, the Order, led in part by wealthy European descendants settled in the Argentine jungle, the Bradfords, and their quest to obtain knowledge from the Darkness. Also, it incorporates fragments of the horrors of the last Argentine dictatorship (1976–83), interweaving both stories into a fictional world that seems plausible and a real world that seems implausible. The story seeks to denounce and criticize the disproportionate power of the colonizer, the Order and the dictatorship, to narrate the unspeakable, and to re-signify, through other-lens, the lived experience of a history of violence and annihilation.
The novel depicts three female leaders of the Order, Mercedes Bradford, Florence Mathers, and Anne Clarke. They serve as metaphors for the leaders of the dictatorship’s “junta militar” – General Jorge Rafael Videla, navy Admiral Emilio Eduardo Massera, and air force Brigadier Orlando Ramón Agosti.
1 Although the topic of gender falls beyond the scope of this work, it is worth noting that the role of female leaders can be approached from a decolonial and critical perspective regarding gender. This topic requires a more comprehensive and precise analysis, which will be addressed in future research. These females also reveal the consequences of colonialism. Florence, being English, is the main leader of the Order because she is a descendant of its wealthy founder, as well as her aunt Anne. Mercedes, on the other hand, is a
criolla descended from the Order’s co-founder, who was merely a British bookseller. Colonialism is evident in the perpetuation of social hierarchies since the beginning of the Order, regardless of the wealth of both leaders.
In turn, the Order and the dictatorship embody colonial power through the coloniality of being, power, and knowledge. The parallels drawn between fiction and history revolve around these three spheres of domination, which are strongly interrelated and barely distinguishable from one another. The first is expressed through the denial of the value of Other’s life, the dehumanization of the Other, and the violence inflicted on its body. The second is expressed in the labor exploitation of the useful body and the repressive drive to establish a new order. Finally, the coloniality of knowledge is constructed through the censorship of the production and distribution of information. The negation of the value of life based on otherness is a consequence of the classification of bodies and the coloniality of power and being. This negation establishes the colonial difference that marks bodies as useful, and exploitable, ultimately determining their fate for life and death. The power that decides the body’s destiny is sovereign power, which is “the right to decide life and death” (Foucault 1978: 135–6). This power, self-attributed but socially reinforced by ideologies of terror imposed by any colonialist system, is one of the most tangible and Faustian narrative threads linking fiction and reality.
2 I am aware of the theoretical conflicts in introducing sovereign power’s concept used by Foucault in the development of his concept of biopower. Despite using Foucault’s concept, I distance myself from him because he ultimately ignores colonial racism by subordinating it to the development of the modern state, rather than to colonial subjects. While he affirms that “Racism first develops with colonization, or in other words, with colonizing genocide” (2003: 257), he also argues that “the specificity of modern racism … is bound up with the technique of power … and takes us far as possible from the race war and the intelligibility of history” (258), meaning colonization. In this chapter, I understand, with de Oto and Quintana, that colonies are the spaces where sovereign power is territorialized and defines the limits of the human, which turns colonies into spaces of terror (55). It is a power that sacrifices bodies to the Darkness and to the ominous construction of the
Proceso de Reorganización Nacional. The spread of horror through the negation of life highlights the monstrosity and evil of sovereign power in its quest to perpetuate life or establish a new governmental order.
As a metaphor for the brutality of the Argentine military dictatorship, the sect embodies the suffering and dehumanization of the Other, concepts on which the coloniality of power is based: the authority that denies the other and establishes the irreducible colonial difference, relegating the other to the beast, the inhuman, and the absolute Other. Enríquez portrays the dehumanization of the Other through the kidnap, torture, and rape of racialized bodies by the Order’s leaders. The first is Mercedes:
She had always preyed upon forsaken people, and there in the north she had an ideal hunting ground – poor forgotten people, so abandoned they didn’t even turn to the authorities if a son or a brother went missing. And for years now, she’d also had the detainees her military friends handed over to her … In the Order, Mercedes was the firmest believer in the exercise of cruelty and perversion as the path to secret illumination. (Enríquez 2022: 107)
This passage highlights four elements: the disappearance of subversives’ bodies, the abuse of the poor, the kidnapping of children, and the negation of the value of life. By blurring the boundaries between fiction and history, the novel denounces the disappearances, rapes, and torturing of bodies through colonial fantastic horror. Also, the northern border symbolizes the margins, the invisible to public knowledge, like the genocide, the official version of which denied the disappearance more than 15,000 people, as reported by Amnesty International in 1977, a year after the dictatorship began. It should not be forgotten that “genocide is not an inherent accident in the reordering of society, but rather the function through which the bourgeoisie [internal colonialists] unlocks the accumulation logic of the obstacles imposed by political debate in society” (Galende, cited in Serrano 2010: 188). In other words, genocide was a brutal colonialist response by the Argentine dictatorship to prevent revolutionary movements that threatened the new U.S. capitalist world order, which, as Fanon warns (2004: 26), turned colonies into markets.
Regarding the abuse of the poor, internal colonialism imposes a colonial difference in the national construction by developing a white criollo consciousness that fosters a sense of superiority. According to Mignolo, white criollismo denies Europe and not “Europeanness” seeking to be American while still being European, but entirely different from Indigenous or Afro-Americans (2000: 42). Therefore, by considering themselves superior, they inscribe their practices onto the body marked by otherness. Stealing infants was one of the most heinous atrocities committed by the dictatorship. Of the more than 500 children estimated to have been disappeared, Enríquez presents a violent depiction that combines the monstrosity of the kidnapping and violation of the body as a means of perpetuating repressive power through the horror of torture. To achieve this, she employs the image of an imbunche, a child under one year old, who was kidnapped and mutilated by the Chilotan sorcerers. His monstrous appearance was due to his head being twisted almost 180 degrees and his hip being broken to allow his right leg to be sewn to his back (Rojas 2002: 138). Bodies such as this one were significant because “in the trance of their suffering, [they] manage to make god appear, and that’s when the request must be made” (Enríquez 2022: 323). Mercedes kept them malnourished in overcrowded cages, which symbolizes the negation of life and the monstrous colonial irrationality that appropriates bodies, while torture materializes the lived experience of colonialism in the colonized body. The imbunche represent the kidnapped children during the dictatorship, while the cages evoke the more than 700 detention centers that operated between 1976 and 1983 (Colaneri 2022: 56). The tunnels where the imbunches lived function as metaphors of the “detention center as a place of terror” (60). Furthermore, the narrative invites us to view these tortured and imprisoned children as fantastic tales of territories inaccessible to history, which can only be imagined through the fiction of horror.
Florence Mathers also embodies the colonial monster, one who wields sexual and emotional sadism within her lineage. She violates her son Eddie’s mind and body to awaken the state of hyperia in him, the clairvoyance characteristic of mediums, making him useful for the Order. This act symbolizes the coloniality of power through the domination of the body and the coloniality of being through the “lived experience of colonization and its effects on language” (Maldonado-Torres 2007: 130). Eddie was forced to learn the Darkness language and faced its consequences, as the god speaks in the language of madness. The relationship between the mediums and the Order is marked by boundaries of gender, race, and class, as well as limits between bodies inscribed within the borders of the animal and the bestial, but also by the knowledge of the traditional, the magical, and the mythical.
3 I am following Quijano’s arguments on Eurocentric dualism, based on Descartes’s mind and body separation. This division is amalgamated with the notion of progress, which led to the conception of the non-European as backward in time, implying primitiveness, irrationality, and a magical-mythical thought, in contrast to rational and modern scientific thought (2014: 804–7). The sovereign power of the Order undermines these bodies because of their lack of normativity through their inhuman, bestialized, and disposable lives, but even more so because of their illness. The sick body is not only the mark of the Darkness, but also a metaphor for the colonial difference that marks them as
damnés (Fanon 2004), being those condemned to abuse and violence, who fight for their lives in those spaces that organize bodies and humanities, which are the colonial nations, the nation of the Order.
Our Share of Night provides a significant commentary on the temporality and spatiality of coloniality processes, tracing a historical continuum, “every medium corresponds to their time. A peasant during the Industrial Revolution, a black woman in the British colonies before decolonization, a poor teenager in the war whose butchery went unnoticed amid the general butchery of the time” (Enríquez 2022: 347). This passage indicates how the pattern of power influences colonial history, situating it within the “us” in Argentina during the dictatorship, and in the Order, as parallel worlds that differ only in their verisimilitude.
The coloniality of power is also represented by the brutal repression aimed at establishing a new order. Disguised as development and social welfare, the colonial monster rises with its “need to transform and design institutions that would maintain the coloniality of power [already] structured and implemented” (Mignolo 2002: 83). For the sect, the new order is the transcendence of consciousness into a young body that grants them timelessness. Thus, for Mercedes, if Gaspar, son of Juan and future medium, “is not a medium capable of continuing his father’s work, it doesn’t matter anymore. If he didn’t inherit the gift, he is of no interest to us. But in a way, he is the gift!!” (Enríquez 2022: 408). For the dictatorship, the new order was the imposition of a neoliberal model promoted by the United States for Third World countries. The colonial order’s monster was erected to “conform a subject to the measure of the socioeconomic order that as to be established” (Ministerio n.d.: 14). In this regard, Videla pointed out: “The objective of the National Reorganization Process is to carry out a historic chastening. In Argentina, all the people who are necessary to end subversion must die” (Ministerio n.d.: 3). Both Mercedes’s and Videla’s speeches show three colonial constants: the struggle to preserve the colonial world order, the extended use of control mechanisms, and the exercise of sovereign power to guarantee the survival of colonial power.
Finally, the last sphere is censorship. Coloniality involves not only the establishment of physical or ontological structures for domination, but also epistemic ones. The control exercised over the produced and distributed knowledge is an inherent element of power, which is why both the dictatorship and the Order jealously guard the information that brought them to power and keeps them there. For the Order, this knowledge is found in the Book, which contains “instructions on how to achieve the survival of consciousness … [and is] in the most closely guarded place” (Enríquez 2022: 332–45). The dictatorship controlled knowledge by censoring the press and art and imposing the death penalty for crimes against public order (Ministerio n.d.: 5). These crimes were related to the production and distribution of subversive information or what the state called “anti-Argentine.”
Given this bleak scenario, the only remedy left is rebellion by searching for, as Catherine Walsh notes, the cracks in the system, “those spaces, places, and possibilities of and for decolonization” (2018: 82). However, just like coloniality, decoloniality is “always a violent event” (Fanon 2004: 1), and, if coloniality feeds its obscurity with pain, exploitation, and death, it is possible that this same obscurity is its Damocles’ sword.