Conclusion: The Possibility of a Pluriversal Decoloniality
After reading Mariana Enríquez’s Our Share of Night through the lens of decolonial theory, we have interpreted the story as an allegory of the lived experience of domination, pain, and death caused by internal colonialism in the sociopolitical body. Through the genre of horror literature, Enríquez unfolds a historical and fictional underworld of beasts and monsters, both physical and metaphorical bodies that move between two worlds, through which the author explores the exercise of violence deployed upon bodies by the wickedness of the dictatorship. The figure of the monster illustrates colonial power and its rearticulation through the exercise of colonial difference during the Process of National Regeneration or the quest for the transcendence of consciousness. The monster, both in fiction and history, emerges as a metaphor for the mutilation and silencing of bodies, as a result of ontological and epistemological policies that strain and destabilize the concept of humanity. The characters of Mercedes, Florence, and the Order serve as a critique of the oppressive colonial and oligarchic system, which persists with new faces, ideologies, and policies. The Order uses silence, shadows, and concealment to reveal “the nature of power and terror under the dictatorship, which relied on strategies of concealment and violation to instill fear throughout the national space” (Colaneri 2022: 69). Therefore, the novel exhibits internal colonialism during the last Argentine dictatorship, which emerged from a configuration combining a militarized space with an external economic and political ideology, the pursuit of national development, and entrenched colonialist practices, leading to transgenerational traumatic effects.
In turn, the beast, as a fantastic metaphor of the damnés, highlights the ontological reduction of Otherness, its bestiary, and the structural violence exerted against the marginalized. The damnés invite reflection on the animalization of racialized subjects and its impact on their locus of enunciation. Enríquez incorporates elements of dictatorship and internal colonialism through the exploitation of Indigenous people and the extermination of rebels, to depict a history of institutional exploitation and extreme violence against racialized minorities. Through the figure of the beast, control of bodies and knowledge becomes palpable, and lack becomes a trigger for rebellion. The analysis of the history of the beasts reveals a struggle to epistemologically delink them from coloniality. The first step is to understand the need for critical knowledge, or border thinking, which is centered on the body and the space that the damnés occupy. For this reason, Gaspar’s words at the end of the novel, “I need time … I am learning,” are of great importance, as they acknowledge the need for knowledge to build a new decolonial paradigm. Likewise, the cartography of the colonial wound has proven essential for mapping a genealogy of violence and beginning the healing process. Thus, the confrontation between the beast and the monster reveals itself as the epistemic turning point that signifies the awakening of consciousness. In doing so, Enriquez offers a perspective on consciousness from the margins, from a state of possibility in which the body and its territorialization transform the locus of enunciation of the beast, leading it to the possibility of the re-existence as being.
Our Share of Night offers a passage to the Other Place, a border interstice that opens paths to decolonial universes, or rather pluriversal decolonialities, still uncertain, inviting reflection on life, denouncing the ravages of exploitation of state terrorism, and claiming the lives taken by a logic that ultimately reduced bodies to beasts and monsters.