Decolonizing Beasts: The Damnés
I am not saying it is impossible to change a man into an animal. I am saying they can’t do it without weakening him considerably.
Sarte in Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth
Exploitation, rebellion, and death are the discursive threads of the bodies that live the colonial difference, the damnés. The imperative for domination fostered the irrational colonial myth of control and superiority, which ultimately subverted into the legitimate right to power, knowledge, and labor exploitation. However, coloniality has a double edge that turns against the monster since the damné “is dominated but not domesticated … is made to feel inferior but by no means convinced of his inferiority” (Fanon 2004: 16). The sign of resistance emerges as a consequence of the lived experience of violence inflicted upon the beasts sustaining the system. Juan is the beast crossed by multiple othernesses: social, economic, health-related, and most importantly, by being the bridge both with and to the Darkness. These attributes position him as an exploitable beast, a subjugated demiurge, and a monster that contains the “grotesque hybridity” (Harpham, cited in Gilmore 2003: 6) of his interspecies: man, beast, and god. Juan, the golden beast, shattered the power of the Order by decolonizing and delinking his mind, knowledge, and being.
Decolonizing, Mignolo points out, is the “ethically oriented, epistemically geared, politically motivated, and economically necessary processes, [that] has the damnés as its central philosophical and political figure” (2007: 458), because they are the ones who lack everything. These lacks lead the damnés to develop a decolonial attitude, which stems from the horror or terror before death (Maldonado-Torres 2008: 67). The decolonial attitude is based on a process of de-linking, which is “a de-colonial epistemic shift leading to other-universality, that is, to pluri-versality as a universal project” (Mignolo 2007: 453). Delinking from colonial power is not an easy task, either. It takes years, even generations, to understand the type of subjugation that one is living under because once one is immersed in a reality imposed by the colonizer, it becomes challenging to distinguish oneself from the oppressor’s culture. As a result, one assimilates the beast’s place as one’s own and learns “to remain in his place and not overstep its limits” (Fanon 2004: 15). For this reason, it takes Juan years to understand his position as a stripped and caged beast:
I don’t think you understand what it is to have nothing … I want to be able to open the Darkness when I feel like it, no dates, no obligations, no fear of dying every time … don’t ask me if I like my life or if I’m happy. I’m poor and I’m sick. I have no education, no family, no money. I don’t think I’m capable of working. I need the help you all offer me. I am a servant. (Enríquez 2022: 369–70)
In this passage, Juan has not yet developed the consciousness to distinguish between being helped and being a prisoner, so he cannot yet initiate the battle. Similarly, at the beginning of the dictatorship no one understood what was happening, “in the first days or weeks of their disappearance, confused relatives, without experience and unaware of the magnitude of the repressive apparatus, went looking for them at police stations and hospitals without getting an answer” (Mazur 2020: 4458). Both texts reveal how the colonial state gradually imposes itself, making it difficult to understand the events and leading the oppressed to resign themselves to their position of deprivation and lack of power. However, it is precisely from this deprivation that the damné draws his strength. The lack of tears opens a colonial wound that grows in the absence of self-expression and in the pain from lived experiences of subjugation, inferiority, negation, and death. The damné will fight for his freedom.
Liberation can only come from the damné. Delinking cannot emerge from an imperial and colonizing perspective because it would control the enunciation and strip away the enunciative power of liberation. Therefore, the decolonial option moves “toward a geo and body politics of knowledge … [to reach] border thinking” (Mignolo 2007: 453–5), but from the damnés. Border thinking is a critical epistemology arising from a subaltern perspective (Mignolo 2002: 71). It challenges Eurocentric narratives and offers alternative ways of understanding the world, focusing on both geographical and epistemic borders where different knowledge systems intersect and clash. The initial process of decolonization includes four moments in which the body (body-politics) and its place of experience (geopolitics) are essential: the act of disobedience, the search for knowledge, the creation of communities of resistance, and the enunciation of existence. These moments are based on an awareness of the situation and the determination of the “decolonial for” (Walsh 2015: 15), which is the pursuit of a change of state. In the novel, Juan realizes that he is not free, and he must disobey and take action to reach his freedom, so he uses his body to gain the knowledge that will defeat the Order: “Juan decided to make an offering to the Other Place and ask for something in return … to have my secrets” (Enríquez 2022: 379). The seal of secrecy given by the Other Place allowed Juan to form a community of resistance using a coded language that gave rise to the structuring of the insurgency. The Argentine people responded with acts of disobedience against labor exploitation policies by establishing labor, cultural, and social resistance, and insurrection movements. For example, in 1977, workers sought to negotiate with the dictatorship, but when it refused, they were forced to strike to fight against the work repression (Pozzi 1988: 100–22). Culturally, resistance was voiced through “subte” (short for subterráneas) outlets like the cultural magazines Nudos, Punto de vista, Marea, an in denunciatory films, such as Tiempo de revancha (Margiolakis 2011: 6–9). National rock music also served a social purpose as a covert political act, with musicians hiding hints of resistance in their lyrics (Pujol 2007). Socially, organizations such as the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo and Familiares de Desaparecidos y Detenidos por Razones Políticas emerged to fight for justice. These expressions and othernesses used a secret language, “a scar of fidelity” (Enríquez 2022: 121) among the beasts, the damnés.
Resistance communities were necessary as a support system for society to exercise epistemic disobedience against the dictatorial monster and its policy of terror. The dictatorship aimed to break social bonds and isolate individuals from their social and political relationships, thus depriving them of their identity (Ortiz 2023: article 761). Hence, these resistance communities used a common language as a decolonial sign. On the one hand, this language identifies members of the community, and on the other, it establishes secrecy and distortion as ways to mobilize for resistance. Juan bears the mark that the Darkness gives him, and Argentine society has “subte” expressions that allow it to resist and fight. The language of resistance and insurrection is the politics of liberating the beast that threatens the discursive order of the colonial monster.
The decolonial process can only be a violent process as it involves rupture with the monster’s violence. The monster used forced individualization, disappearances, torture, and extermination as mechanisms to spread terror and discipline society. In the novel, the leaders killed Juan’s wife, Rosario:
to ensure our protection and your commitment … It’s our way of ensuring that you will return and that you will continue summoning … [also] that you will agree to attempt the Rite with your son…what the Darkness … is giving us must not be interrupted by a whim or fleeting mania. Not even by your illness … Your wife told us that you wanted to stop, and we cannot allow that. And you know perfectly well that when something must be done for the Order, I don’t back down. (Enríquez 2022: 126–8)
Killing is a way of breaking the body to weaken the damné. According to Giorgi, death is the scenario where the power of the sovereign is exhibited in its bloody truth, specially through the deployment of the power to kill based on the exception to the law (2014: 132). Therefore, the dictatorship also uses blood to weaken society, “Annihilate the subversive criminals wherever they are found … when the Armed Forces go into operation, they must not interrupt the combat or accept surrender … Special snipers may be used to strike the heads of mobs or crowds” (Directive signed by the Chief of the General Staff of the Army, General Roberto Viola, on 17 December 1976; see Ministerio n.d.: 7). In both texts, the exercise of sovereign power is evident, which has the faculty to take lives as a means of controlling bodies and creating a monster that disregards political limits in separating protected lives from sacrificed ones (Giorgi 2014: 133).
The colonial wound grows in deprivation and pain, so that death, far from weakening it, strengthens it, and “far from breaking the momentum, …intensifies the progress made by the… consciousness” (Fanon 2004: 32). This is because the erasure of the enunciative deepens the wound while reinforcing its idea of liberation. Therefore, for the damné, “there is only one solution: to fight. He will embark on this struggle, and he will pursue it, not as the result of a[n]… analysis but quite simply because he cannot conceive of life otherwise than in the form of a battle against exploitation, misery, and hunger” (Fanon 1986: 224). The Golden God and the Argentine people, bodies sick with violence thrown into the battlefield by the expansionist force of colonial prevalence and domination, as well as their resistance and epistemic disobedience, fight without a truce.
In both fiction and history, the fight is a “subte” process. In the fictional context of Enríquez’s novel, the direct confrontation is appeased to allow the Darkness to speak and for the reader to appreciate the silent, gradual, and sustained battle that Juan fought for years, mirroring the gradual struggles of the antagonistic groups of the dictatorship to fight a darkness that is more sinister than the Other Place of the literary work. The insurgency, those “contestatory actions and historical initiatives that confront the structures, politics, and practices of power and domination” (Walsh 2018: 34), culminates in Our Share of Night when Juan obtains the knowledge that will free him, and his kin away from the Order. Similarly, during the dictatorship, the insurgency will manifest through the Marchas de la Resistencia of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, or workers’ resistance movements against economic policies (for example, trabajo a tristeza or trabajo a desgano) as well as sabotage of means of production (Pozzi 1988: 32–3). These actions, while not violating any law, undermined productivity, and the concept of legality, thus challenging the regime. As methods of resistance, they prove that the damné influences their reality and “transforms it through his praxis, his deployment of violence and his agenda for liberation” (Fanon 2004: 21). But liberation also comes with sacrifice and violence. Juan marked Gaspar with the seal revealed to him by the Darkness, but “the mark could only be made with violence: it would have to be a deep, painful, unforgettable wound” (Enríquez 2022: 413), because decolonization is always a violent option.
The decolonial process is a long one that spans generations. Juan’s death marks the beginning of the delocalization of power from the Order and the start of the next generation’s decolonial battle. Gaspar continues the fight, haunted by a grotesque and dark history, full of bodies and shadows, as “In Argentina, they toss bodies at you. Te tiran muertos” (Enríquez 2022: 559). Gaspar’s dehumanized body is a “body excluded from personhood and agency … in every way different” (Cohen 1996: 11) from a human body. Nevertheless, he defeats the sect in a silent battle, a battle of the bestialized body that leads to the monster’s disappearance. Violence and death are the only ways, because for the colonized, “life can only materialize out of the rotting corpse of the colonist” (Fanon 2004: 50). Gaspar culminates the delocalization of power from the Order and transfers it to the Other Place, because “this massacre was not his” (Enríquez 2022: 585). The Order disappears into the same Darkness it had worshipped. The beast has won.
After the end of the dictatorship, the thirst for justice not only demanded the bodies of the victims, but also the punishment of the oppressors. Justice for the Argentine people would come in time. It began with the Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas National (CONADEP), which issued the “Nunca más” report. The report greatly influenced the verdicts in the trials for crimes against humanity committed by Rafael Videla, Emilio Massera, Orlando Ramón Agosti, and more than 900 people involved in the massacre. The fight of the damnés is not usually oriented toward war, yet it often transforms into a war ethic to bring an end to wars (Maldonado-Torres 2008: 155). Through killing, dismantling, and eliminating colonial power, the damnés reorient their position in the world to live, to liberate themselves, and in so doing, relink with other communities. The beast is re-humanized and seen as such, opening to the promise of other-universe, under other-paradigm, expanding into other-possibilities.