Free Beasts, or Were They Beings?

The first step toward healing is reconciliation with the past, which can only be achieved by living language and memory as an interdependent binomial. It took Gaspar years to articulate his memories, to overcome the trauma: “When a person remembers the past, their autobiographical memories are verbally accessible, which means they can relate them in words. In trauma, memories are isolated, and the person cannot access them voluntarily; that’s why Gaspar relieves them in nightmares and flashbacks” (Enríquez 2022: 469). It is essential to exorcise the words and memories of their horrific weight to reconcile one’s experience with the present. After the dictatorship, Argentinians asked: How to go on with a life stolen and massacred? How to reconstruct as individuals and as a community? The voices calling for mobilization grew louder, and new voices entered the public sphere to remember and reconstruct society through narrative. This involved a reorientation of community practice, as “narrating the impossible (i.e., the traumatic) became possible through collective storytelling and shared analysis” (van Roekel 2018: 539). Thus, groups such as the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, las Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo, Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio (HIJOS), and other organizations seek to give voice to their scars, while other channels of cultural expression allowed for recovery and reconciliation. Genres such as testimony, post-dictatorship literature, and the emerging “recordatorios” contributed to these processes.1 Recordatorios is a literary genre that emerged in Argentina after the end of the last dictatorship. They refer to the announcements that relatives of the disappeared have been publishing for thirty years in the newspaper Página 12 to remember their loved ones and to unite society in the demand for justice (Mazur 2020: 4457–60). These forms of expression are decolonial because the authors or interviewees access their own forgotten knowledge, emotions, and sensitivities, as “decoloniality is first and foremost liberation of knowledge … of understanding and affirming subjectivities that have been devalued” (Mignolo 2018: 146).

One of the novel’s most important contributions to the decolonial option is the concept/character of the Other Place. This defines a first colonial moment and a subsequent decolonial process, which is nothing more than a decentralized and autonomous place to inhabit. Initially, the Other Place was an element of coloniality, embodying the desirable resource for the benefit of the colonizer – to colonize time and space – and serving as the space through which the domination and exploitation of the beast, the damné, is produced through labor. In other words, the Other Place is a metaphor for the universal deterministic and irrefutable logic of colonial power, attributing to it the characteristics of evilness and death. As the story progresses, this character/concept becomes a decolonial Other by stepping outside the metanarrative of modernity, which the damnés corrupt to build possibilities of liberation; that is, to reconfigure and appropriate colonial concepts to rethink, subvert, and use them to free themselves from colonial power. Lewis Gordon and Jane Ann Gordon propose an interesting idea about the subversion of the colonizer’s tools, although they work from the concepts of master/slave: “Slaves have historically done something more provocative with such tools than attempt to dismantle the Big House. There are those who used those tools, developed additional ones, and built houses of their own … transcending rather than dismantling … through building our own houses of thought” (quoted in Walsh 2018: 7). In both fiction and history, resistance and resurgence movements have followed these steps. On the one hand, Gaspar fulfills the Order’s mandates and leads its members through the barren passages to the Other Place, abandoning them there for the Darkness itself to devour them, symbolizing their own evil ambitions leading to their downfall. On the other hand, Argentine rock emerged as a form of resistance, employing the platform given by the dictatorship itself to sing out loud their disagreement with the regime. The Other Place, in its decolonial stage, functions as an Other to coloniality, which in turn opens up the possibility of constructing a home to inhabit. It is at this moment that the damné could cease to be a beast if he truly delinks and constructs himself through his own self-definition and not in relation with the colonizer.

Decoloniality involves two movements: “its affirmation as an option among options [and] the conception and enactment of the decolonial option” (Mignolo 2018: 147). Gaspar has offered the Order to the Darkness and has won by choosing the decolonial option over resignation. However, this victory does not win the war; leadership must still be established to change his reality. Therefore, what has been opened up with this victory is the possibility of re-existence, which has yet to be seized. The end of the novel is significant because Enríquez presents an open panorama of pluriverses that have not yet been explored: “He liked the short, violent rains of Misiones, the rivers of red earth, the prelude to the hot, black night with its stars throbbing in the sky. A flash, silence, another flash, like an exhausted heart” (Enríquez 2022: 588). With this conclusion, the author seems to reflect on the long road that still lies ahead for the Argentine people. Decoloniality is a steep path along which we witness stories that function as counter-narratives. Yet, in each narrative, in each story, there is a micro-universe that chooses its own re-existence, and with it, its own “decolonial for” (Walsh 2018: 15). The critical proposal of the novel Our Share of Night is located in the discomfort that leads to awareness, rebellion, resistance, criticism, and reflection. It is situated in the narrative of the wound that has not yet healed and with which we must live, for how long? We do not know, “I am learning,” Gaspar confesses.