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“But how to speak of such things?”:

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decolonial love, the coloniality of
gender, and political struggle in
Francisco Goldman's The Long Night of
White Chickens (1992) and Jennifer
Harbury's Bridge of Courage (1994) and
Searching for Everardo (1997)
a
Cornelia Gräbner
a
Department of European Languages and Cultures, Lancaster
University, UK
Published online: 23 Oct 2014.

To cite this article: Cornelia Gräbner (2014) “But how to speak of such things?”: decolonial love,
the coloniality of gender, and political struggle in Francisco Goldman's The Long Night of White
Chickens (1992) and Jennifer Harbury's Bridge of Courage (1994) and Searching for Everardo (1997),
Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 20:1, 51-74, DOI: 10.1080/14701847.2014.965885

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14701847.2014.965885

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 Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 2014
Vol. 20, No. 1, 51–74, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14701847.2014.965885

“But how to speak of such things?”: decolonial love, the

coloniality of gender, and political struggle in Francisco
Goldman’s The Long Night of White Chickens (1992) and
Jennifer Harbury’s Bridge of Courage (1994) and Searching
for Everardo (1997)
Downloaded by [USC University of Southern California] at 07:35 13 March 2015

Cornelia Gräbner*

Department of European Languages and Cultures, Lancaster University, UK

This article presents an analysis of works by Francisco Goldman and Jennifer

Harbury, which deal with “cataclysmic moments” of recent Guatemalan
history. It explores gender relations in these works with reference to three
themes: storytelling, communication and affective relationships. Conceptually,
I draw on the notions of decolonial love, the coloniality of gender, and the world
gender order as categories of analysis. I take Chela Sandoval’s methodology of
the oppressed as a guideline for my analysis, and look at the ways in which
different types of storytelling perpetuate or question the coloniality of gender,
at the consequences of intercultural misunderstandings produced by different
readings of the coloniality of gender and the world gender order, and at the
significance of a critical and liberatory practice of gender roles for decolonial
love. The practice of decolonial love is an alternative to what Tzvetan Todorov
has called “the dreadful concatenation,” which is a result of cultural encounters
during the conquest of the Americas and which conceptualizes as “love”
a feeling that sidesteps equality, an exercise in destruction and possession.
The coloniality of gender and decolonial love are explored through their
interactions with masculinities and femininities across the different case
studies.
Keywords: coloniality; decolonial love; methodology of the oppressed; world
gender order; coloniality of gender; storytelling; guerrilla struggle

“But how to speak of such things?” Tzvetan Todorov posits this question as a
frame for his enquiry into how Spanish sources articulate “the discovery self
makes of the other,” in his seminal analysis The Conquest of the Americas (1984).
Todorov himself approaches this question “by telling an exemplary story (this will
be the genre chosen), i.e. a story that will be as true as possible but in telling which

*Email: c.grabner@lancaster.ac.uk

q 2014 Taylor & Francis

 52 C. Gräbner

I shall try never to lose sight of what biblical exegesis used to call its tropological
or ethical meaning” (1984, 4). In this article I wish to reconsider the question of
how to speak of the “things” that surface in the encounter between Self and Other,
with specific reference to intercultural encounters and gender roles in late
twentieth-century Guatemala in cataclysmic situations (I borrow this term from
writer Francisco Goldman), and with reference to three different types of stories:
Jennifer Harbury’s Bridge of Courage (1994) and Searching for Everardo (1997),
and Francisco Goldman’s The Long Night of White Chickens (1992). Goldman and
Harbury are US-based authors with strong emotional ties and affective connections
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to Guatemala: Goldman’s mother is Guatemalan and he spent much of his life in

this country, and Harbury is a Human Rights activist and wife of the guerrilla
commander Efraı́n Bámaca, aka Everardo. The three texts were published within
four years of each other and cover a time period from approximately the early
1980s to the mid-1990s. In what follows I will engage with them through close
readings and by treating them as partners in a reflection and conversation on
articulations and imaginaries that enquire into the possibilities of disrupting the
logic of conquest in intercultural encounters and relationships, and that draw
instead on “decolonial love,” one of the key components of what Chela Sandoval
has called, in a book of that title, “the methodology of the oppressed” (2000).
The term “decolonial love” resonates negatively with the concept of “coloniality,”
introduced by Anı́bal Quijano in his article “Colonialidad y modernidad –
racionalidad” (1991), translated as “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” and
developed by Quijano himself to include the “coloniality of power” (2000), and by
Walter Mignolo (2000), and others. The coloniality of power, in turn, is a result of
colonialism. It refers to a logic of domination and subjugation that orders four wide
domains of human experience: (1) the economic: appropriation of land, exploitation
of labour, and control of finance; (2) the political: control of authority; (3) the civic:
control of gender and sexuality; and (4) the epistemic and the subjective/personal:
control of knowledge and subjectivity (Mignolo 2005, 11). The coloniality of power
is sustained by, and produces, “the coloniality of being” (Maldonado-Torres 2007)
and “the coloniality of gender” (2007). In her article “The Coloniality of Gender,”
Marı́a Lugones traces how processes of coloniality narrowed down the meaning of
the concept of gender “to the control of sex, its resources, and products” (2008, 12).
She bases her argument on the intersections between race and gender for women of
colour. Here, I will focus on how the coloniality of gender manifests itself in
encounters between inhabitants of the Global North and the Global South and with
reference to men as well as women. Maldonado-Torres outlines the far-reaching
cultural implications of coloniality for society as a whole, not just for women of
colour:
Coloniality [ . . . ] refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a
result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and
knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations.
 Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 53

Thus, coloniality survives colonialism. It is maintained alive in books, in the criteria

for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image
of peoples, in aspirations of self, and so many other aspects of our modern
experience. In a way, as modern subjects we breathe coloniality all the time and
everyday. (2007, 243)
The coloniality of being produces emotional attachments and personal and social
relationships which I will understand through Todorov’s notion of “dreadful
concatenation.” Todorov shows how the logic of conquest turns love into a weapon
of destruction, through the sequence “understanding, taking possession, and
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destroying.” He writes: “There is a dreadful concatenation here, whereby grasping

leads to taking and taking to destruction, a concatenation whose unavoidable
character we want to question” (1984, 127). The sequence “understanding-
possession-destruction” produces the “understanding-that-kills.” In the cases he
describes, namely the love that Las Casas displays for “the Indians,” Cortés’
admiration for the Aztecs and the relationship between Cortés and Malintzı́n, or La
Malinche, love is only possible after conquest and it is a direct result of possession:
one loves what one owns. Love is predicated on a notion of “equality” that denies
the difference of the other and, consequently, there is no trust between the lover
and the beloved. Conversely, to be loved means to be accepted by another as their
possession; furthermore, the willingness to turn oneself into such a possession and
accept the other person as a gift, is considered an expression of love.
Standing as an alternative to this is Sandoval’s concept of decolonial love, a
methodology which draws on the theories of decoloniality articulated by thinkers
like Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Eldridge Cleaver, Gloria Anzaldúa and others,
and by their European and North American counterparts – for example, Roland
Barthes, Hayden White, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault.
She brings their theories into a dialogue with the experience of de-colonial
liberation movements most centrally and, in her case, the feminist movements of
women of colour in the USA. The aforementioned methodology of the oppressed
works transnationally and through what Sandoval refers to as “coalitional
approach,” which connects those who commit to decolonization as a shared
project and do so no matter where they are from. The methodology of the
oppressed draws on five central “technologies” (Sandoval). The first is semiology,
the second is deconstruction as a challenging of dominant ideologies, the third is
the appropriation of dominant ideological forms, the fourth consists of “not simply
survival or justice [ . . . ] but egalitarian social relations,” or “democratics,” and
the fifth is the recognition of difference through a “differential movement of
consciousness” (Sandoval 2000, 82). Decolonial love is thus not so much an
individual feeling as “a hermeneutic, [ . . . ] a set of practices and procedures that
can transit all citizen-subjects, regardless of social class, towards a differential
mode of consciousness and its accompanying technologies of method and social
movement” (139).
 54 C. Gräbner

Maldonado-Torres, in the article quoted previously, partially builds on

Sandoval’s analysis – as well as Emmanuel Lévinas and Fanon – and focuses on
what he terms “the logic of the gift.” A world marked by coloniality produces the
damné:
Émile Benveniste has shown that the term damné is etymologically related to the
concept of donner, which means, to give. The damné is literally the subject who
cannot give because what he or she has has been taken from him or her. This means
that the damné is a subject from whom the capacity to have and to give has been
taken away from her and him. The coloniality of Being is thus fundamentally an
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ontological dynamic that aims to obliterate – in its literal sense of doing away
completely so as to leave no trace – gift-giving and generous reception as a
fundamental character of being-in-the-world. (Maldonado-Torres 2007, 258)
Conversely, and this is an addition of mine to Maldonado-Torres’ analysis based
on my readings below, those of us who are in the position of the former colonizers
are unable to receive a gift that is given in equality from an “other”; we can only
receive in equality from those who are like us, and this encloses us within the
confines of the colonial logic. Moreover, we have unlearned the ability to give
freely to an “other” – “freely” in the sense of not expecting anything in return, not
even a clean conscience; and our Being is therefore once again enclosed within a
logic that always expects something in return.
This paper practises close reading to identify the ways in which we “breathe
coloniality” (Maldonado-Torres) through stories and personal interactions, and to
unravel the ways in which storytelling is imbricated with, and perpetuates, the
coloniality of gender relations. For the sake of a more varied view I have chosen
texts from different genres. Bridge of Courage (BoC) brings together testimonies
that US lawyer Jennifer Harbury collected during a series of visits she undertook to
Guatemala and Mexico between 1985 and 1990. Harbury initially travelled to
Guatemala to collect information that supported asylum applications of
Guatemalan refugees. The brutal repression and the dignified and constructive
resistance struggles she encountered during her trip soon turned her fact-finding
mission into an experience that affected her deeply on a personal level. She
eventually returned to Guatemala to collect testimonies of those who were involved
in armed struggle, and spent years interviewing supporters of the guerrilla in secret
health clinics, safehouses and, finally, combatants of the Organización
Revolucionaria del Pueblo en Armas (ORPA) at the Luis Ixmata front.1
Harbury’s second book, Searching for Everardo (SfE), draws on both
autobiography and testimonio. The book is written as an ongoing conversation
with her husband Everardo, or Efraı́n Bámaca. During her stay with the guerrilla,
Harbury and Everardo, one of the ORPA commanders, fell in love. The book starts
with a demonstration at a clandestine cemetery, in the hope of recovering
Everardo’s physical remains after Harbury had been told of his death.
The narrative then jumps backwards to Harbury’s first visit to Guatemala, in
 Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 55

order to cover chronologically a period of three years before the demonstration

and then the two years that followed. We learn that Harbury and Everardo spent
extended periods of time together in Mexico City and Texas, and eventually got
married. In March 1992, Everardo was allegedly killed in combat. Several months
later an escaped prisoner alerted the guerrilla command to his being alive and in a
clandestine prison. Harbury started a race against time to have her husband turned
over to civilian courts or released before he got killed. She eventually engaged
in two hunger strikes, one in Guatemala City and one in Washington, DC.
The second of these hunger strikes was unlimited and pitched her life against
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information on her husband’s whereabouts. After 32 days, US State Department

official Richard Nuccio revealed to the Democrat Representative Robert Torricelli
that the CIA and the US embassy had known all along that Everardo had been
captured alive, tortured by a CIA asset and executed in late 1993 or early 1994.
Torricelli conveyed this information to Harbury and to the US public. The book
ends with Nuccio’s revelation, though Harbury’s struggle continues to this day in a
different form.2
Francisco Goldman’s The Long Night of White Chickens is a novel: a piece of
fiction that stages the power of storytelling. The I-narrator Rogerio Graetz is the
son of a US American Jew and a Guatemalan upper class woman, living in the
United States and spending extended periods of time in Guatemala. He is confused
about his identity to a degree that encourages him to live vicariously through the
stories of others. The novel begins with Rogerio’s return to Guatemala, where he
wants to find out the truth behind the murder of his adopted sister and nanny, Flor
de Mayo Puac. The narrative then develops without chronology: Rogerio jumps
forward and backwards in time, thus making it impossible for the reader to locate
themselves chronologically in relation to the events, presenting all events as if they
were equally important, and replicating the structure of a meandering, late-night
conversation. The Central American setting of the novel is reinforced through the
insertion of Spanish expressions and, in the direct speech of the Spanish-speaking
characters, the inflection of syntax through Spanish. The chronologically earliest
point of the narrative is Flor’s arrival at the home of the Graetz family at the
official age of 16 to take care of six-year-old Rogerio, who is recovering from
tuberculosis. Rogerio’s father Ira, son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants and
a benevolent patriarch, is shocked at the prospect of having a teenager as a servant
and nanny. He insists on Flor receiving an education and treats her as a daughter.
Flor becomes a high achiever, receives a degree from Wellesley College, and
returns to Guatemala as an aid worker in charge of an internationally funded
orphanage. Her work includes the rescue of orphans from areas of Guatemala
which are ravaged by civil war, as well as the organization of international
adoptions. When she is found with her throat slit, Guatemalan tabloid newspapers
mount a slander campaign against her, accusing her of arranging illegal adoptions.
Rogerio returns to Guatemala when his childhood friend and Flor’s former
secret lover Luis Moya proposes to find out the truth about Flor’s assassination.
 56 C. Gräbner

Moya is considered one of Guatemala’s most courageous journalists who, under

the pretence of writing editorial columns, publicizes coded information and
commentary on acts of repression. The pair set out to uncover why Flor was killed
and to identify her killers. This search provides Rogerio with an opportunity for a
digressive and labyrinthine narrative which works through his childhood
memories of life with Flor, and which pieces together information on her adult
life in Guatemala. In the end, Rogerio comes up with three possible explanations
for Flor’s murder, which I will not reveal in this article.
The question of “[h]ow to speak of such things?” will recur throughout the
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following three sections. The first section, on storytelling, engages with the ways
in which gendered forms of storytelling sustain or sabotage decolonial projects
and affirm neocolonial ones. The second section, on the coloniality of gender and
on the ways in which masculinities and femininities perpetuate it, zooms in on this
particular aspect of the stories told here. The third section, on “the dreadful
concatenation,” focuses on colonial and decolonial love, and on femininities and
masculinities within these frameworks.

Storytelling: stories as weapons of seduction, or as gifts

Stories – especially those that do not put forward meta-narratives – are often and
enthusiastically regarded as crucial to intercultural communication in the service
of social and political change. Eric Selbin argues that stories can bridge
differences: “by ‘denationalizing’ [ . . . ] stories we can also internationalize them
and find common themes which suggest that while matters revolutionary are
profoundly local, they also reflect broader and deeper rules we write across time
and space and culture about who we are, how we behave, and what is possible in
our world” (2010, 29). Selbin approaches storytelling as truth-telling, as evidential
of how we behave and what we believe. In what follows I will argue that stories,
when considered a communication of the truth, form part of a transactionary
logic in the sense of an exchange of truth for support. However, in cataclysmic
situations the truth cannot always be told in order to protect someone’s safety; and
sometimes the subject position of the speaker is such that there is no language to
tell their story. As we will see in The Long Night, this leads to a situation where
stories can only become tools for seduction. With reference to Harbury’s books,
I will argue that she treats stories as a gift, and that, mainly through her structuring
of BoC, she carries out an act of solidarity that inextricably replaces the logic of
“truth-for-support” with the notion of gift-giving in equality.
The stories told in The Long Night suggest that as a listener one might have to
bear in mind that “truth” can mean different things to different people, especially
during intercultural encounters in cataclysmic situations. Luis Moya’s and Flor de
Mayo Puac’s narratives of Self are examples of this. Both Flor and Moya cross
boundaries from a young age. Flor, when she is made to leave the orphanage in
Guatemala where she had been taken after her father’s violent death, enters the
 Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 57

culturally and religiously hybrid world of the Graetz family, in which a lower-
class US American Jew of Eastern European descent and an upper-class Catholic
Guatemalan woman got married, had a child, and ended up in a state of permanent
emotional warfare on the verge of divorce. Moya crosses borders and boundaries
when he, the son of a seamstress and a mostly absent seaman, hence from a very
poor lower-class background, gets a scholarship to the upper class élite school run
by Anne Hunt, his mother’s boss. Both Moya and Flor overperform, and both are
exposed to the series of humiliations and struggles that, respectively, a poor ladino
lower-class boy and a Mayan teenage domestic servant have to go through in a rich
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ladino upper-class environment in Guatemala and the upper middle-class white

patriarchy in Massachusetts.
Flor and Moya become accomplished storytellers who exploit their privileged
audience’s need for subaltern success stories, and they manage to hide this from
almost everyone but Rogerio, who knows them from childhood on and was there
for the events that they turn into stories. Moya’s persona, the “Public Moya,”
utilizes his Northern interlocutors’ perception of the political situation in
Guatemala. He gets himself invited to the parties of the US ambassador and
of NGOs, where he mixes with socially conscious international visitors to
Guatemala. They think of him as a courageous journalist who uses his newspaper
columns to expose acts of repression in a coded way. This has earned him a certain
international reputation:
For in great American and European cities, at solidarity and university conferences
and in editorial meetings, and even once, it had been inferred in Moya’s presence, in
the actual halls of Congress, Washington, DC, women (and men too, though fewer,
and not quite in the same way) who cared for Guatemala and had been there or were
planning trips there, spoke of Moya, and apparently said things like “Well, you must
look up this Luis Moya Martı́nez. It’s amazing, the things he gets away with in his
newspaper, even despite the State of Siege! True, his paper is little read compared
with others there. But he’s very brave, and quite brilliant; I imagine that much of
what he writes probably goes right over the heads of the secret police, if you know
what I mean. Still, it’s amazing he’s alive. When you think of how many journalists
have already been killed or disappeared there [ . . . ]. So young too! Quite handsome
in a funny way! Though his hair is turning white.” (Goldman 1992, 145)
Part of Moya’s performance of the Public Moya takes place in the intimacy of the
bedroom. There, he performs the role of the promiscuous and slightly callous Latin
American macho lover. His sexual prowess adds an intriguing and alluring
element to the figure of the courageous journalist and flatters his clientele of
Northern women with the impression of having gained a genuine insight into
progressive Guatemalan urban culture during the state of siege. Rogerio suggests
that this dynamic indulges Moya’s vanity, but he also acknowledges that the
Public Moya is Luis Moya’s life insurance: he can continue his work because
getting rid of him would attract the type of international attention that the
 58 C. Gräbner

Guatemalan government wants to avoid. Moya and his Northern women are linked
to each other in a relationship of mutual subjugation and exploitation, though
neither of them admits this to themselves.
Flor, like Moya, tells a repertoire of stories to build the “Public Flor” (my term).
Rogerio never makes up his mind as to whether these stories performatively
construct her identity, or whether they hide her true identity:
It was one of her best advantages almost right from the start, another tool, something
almost exterior to herself, to be wielded deftly: her own life story! So what’s left if
you take away these stories? The truth? Why so skeptical now? (That’s what I ask
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myself.) Yet it was amazing to see sometimes how quickly she could be provoked
into a curled-up, almost crustacean silence. But there was no reason to do that to her.
What did it accomplish? I’d always thought she had her own ways of letting you
know. (Goldman 1992, 140)
The sceptical question “[t]he truth?” implies that there might not be a true identity
or essence behind the one performed in the story; that Flor remakes herself every
time she tells her life story according to the needs of her listener. Yet, if this is the
case, then what does Flor’s “crustacean silence” hide or protect, and what sense of
Self supports her silence? Goldman never reveals the answer to this question – if
there is one. With regards to Moya, Rogerio and the reader do find out that the
Public Moya does hide another Moya, one who is full of personal faults and
contradictions but also capable of great effort, sacrifice and commitment. Moya’s
US and European interlocutors believe that stories, especially when told by
someone they associate with the Left, reach out to them by offering them “the
truth” which, for them, means the facts. For this reason they do not realize that
Moya strategically uses storytelling and performance to keep his audiences
mentally occupied. They are made to believe that they know who he is and what he
does, and therefore they do not ask any questions, do not think about what he
means with his maxim “secrecy is a Church,” or even notice his elusive character
and the crustacean secrecy he too maintains about the past and present
circumstances of his life.
Flor and Moya meet their match during the central event of the novel, the long
night of white chickens, when they first get together and work out each other’s use
of story. Rogerio recounts this through the eyes of Moya, from whom he receives
all his information. According to this version, each of them sets out on their usual
conquest-by-storytelling. But Flor disrupts Moya’s script by switching off his tape
recorder and threatens to leave if he does not stop giving her his ardent venga-acá-
stare which works so well on foreign women. Moya, in turn, does not immediately
respond to one of Flor’s favourite stories about herself and when he does so, quotes
the opening lines of an arguably much more accomplished story, the novel El
señor presidente (1946) by Guatemalan Nobel laureate Miguel Ángel Asturias.
Both remain stunned and, for once, speechless. Moya’s rendition of this night ends
on a pensive note:
 Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 59

But it really did have something to do with his sense that Flor had been speaking
highly polished words [ . . . ] that she’d spoken a thousand times in her life already,
an impression confirmed when he got to know her better, however brief, and of
course tragically ended, that relationship was. Then what was different about the
Chicken Light of White Night? wonders Moya. [ . . . ] Why, on this night, did telling
her life story leave her feeling so vulnerable to love and if not love to what?
(Goldman 1992, 142)
Their speechlessness signifies a pause in their respective performances and a
moment of mutual recognition, the “‘zero degree’ of all meaning,” as Sandoval
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calls it with reference to Barthes: “the place from which the obtuse, third meaning
emerges to haunt all we think we know” (Sandoval 2000, 140). However, Moya and
Flor do not explore their “zero degree” moment. Moya translates the incipient
potential for intimacy and decolonial love into the desire to grasp and to possess,
physically and emotionally. Flor initially resists but only, as we find out later,
because she already “belongs” to someone else. Eventually, as a compromise,
they express their connection through sex and the intimacy that comes with it, but
this reduces emotional texture because they do not explore other elements of their
connection. The silence of the “zero degree” moment is drowned out by a
cacophony of multiple stories which prevent everyone involved from listening to
the – often much more meaningful – silences. Why does this happen? Because
there is no language for who Moya and Flor are. Their identities, characterized by
constant crossings and by secrecy, could possibly be articulated in a language
similar to the one used by Gloria Anzaldúa in Borderlands/La Frontera (1987). Flor
and Moya, and also Rogerio, would have to speak and to listen as poets if they truly
wanted to speak their Self in an encounter with the Other. Moreover, they would
have to de-link the dreadful cancatenation: only if understanding did not lead to
destruction, could the two crustaceans Flor and Moya make themselves knowable.3
None of this is possible during The Long Night. Moya and Rogerio are unaware
of their own gendered identity as participants in the making of truth-producing
stories. Rogerio tells us the story on the basis of information provided by Moya
and mixes it with his own desire to find out who Flor really was. However, this is
impossible because Flor never reveals herself to anyone. If she did, she would
make herself knowable and, as we have learnt from Todorov, this would lead to
possession and, eventually, destruction. Moya and Rogerio are both obsessed with
knowing Flor and, in so doing, possessing her. The complicity between Moya’s
romantic imagination and Rogerio’s storytelling techniques produces a narrative
that acts out the anxious desire of two men who wish to understand and to possess.
Flor makes herself unavailable to this and, consequently, Rogerio and Moya tell
stories that “talk over” hers.
Whereas Goldman stages what cannot be said, and why some things cannot be
said, Harbury in BoC and SfE tells non-fictional stories of individuals who share
into the collective effort of armed struggle. These stories have been eclipsed by
hegemonic discourses and by sheer brute force in a cover-up of the social and
 60 C. Gräbner

political conditions that leave individuals with no other alternative but armed
struggle, and in an attempt by those in power to prevent the construction of social
and political alternatives. Telling and conveying these stories also constitutes
Harbury’s Self as organizer of stories and as storyteller through the interaction
with her Guatemalan interlocutors. In BoC this is achieved through the swapping
of stories, an expression that Harbury herself uses in the Author’s Note when
she describes the process of researching and writing the book. She explains the
circumstances in which she carried out the interviews, why she has to take the
protective measure of giving false names to her interlocutors, and she vouches for
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the credibility of the speakers and the authenticity of their stories. By not changing
her own name she recognizes the difference of her situation and turns it into the
basis for solidarity: as a person who does not live a clandestine existence she can
display her solidarity publicly, and as a US citizen she has to do so in order to
highlight her opposition to US military assistance to the Guatemalan army.
BoC consists of four sections: “Heeding the Call to Action,” “Life in the
Revolution,” “The New Generation,” and “How You Can Make a Difference.”
The first three consist of testimonies by individuals who are known only by their
first names, the fourth introduces the reader to projects they can support or
participate in. The title of each testimony is a false name given to the storyteller,
with the exception of the last testimony in each section which is contributed by
“Jennifer.” Each testimony on its own would be a fragmentary and incomplete
account of the individual and personalized experience of someone who does not
share their full name and story, but, as a collective, the individual testimonies
present a coherent story on the theme of each of the sub-chapters. Harbury’s own
identity as “organizer of voices” – to borrow a term used by the Mexican writer
Elena Poniatowska – is constituted organically through her engagement with
those who share their stories with her, and with whom she shares her story.4
The “swapping of stories” in BoC is an act of reciprocal gift-giving. Harbury
frequently comments on the generosity of the compañer@s, who give to each
other and to her without asking anything in return. In SfE, she frequently notes
Everardo’s special relationship to gift-giving, for example his inability to
understand the ritualized and consumerist convention of gift-giving at Christmas
which strikes him as impersonal, or the fact that she eventually finds out that he
treated each note she ever left him as a gift. The compañer@s, in their personal and
social interactions with each other and with Jennifer, reclaim that act of free giving
and receiving that colonial power had taken away from them and that had turned
them into the damnés. The first gift that they give, however, is trust, not stories.
When the comandancia allows Jennifer to visit the combatants in the mountains,
and when the supporters in the city let her enter safe houses and secret clinics, they
trust her not to betray them. Conversely, when she goes to these spaces, she
entrusts herself to them on a dangerous journey in unknown terrain and without a
map, where her safety depends on those who guide her. This relationship of trust
forms the basis for the swapping of stories. In this relationship, the compañer@s,
 Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 61

i.e. the damnés, provide her with an opportunity to become again a human being
who can receive freely and, therefore, who can give freely and in equality, and
Harbury responds by giving what she has and what is needed: her time, her energy,
gender specific knowledge, her affection, her silence, her trust, the access she can
get to the US public.
Harbury has to stop being the Self she built in BoC, at least in public, when her
identity as a US citizen and a lawyer becomes her only chance of saving
Everardo’s life. One of the early turning points in SfE occurs when she, in
consultation with the leadership of the Unidad Nacional Revolucionaria
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Guatemalteca (UNRG), concludes that her marriage to Everardo is the only

lever they have to get him back alive. Previously, this marriage had been kept
secret. The decision to publicize the marriage entails Harbury cutting ties with the
environment that has previously supported her emotionally, and her stepping into a
public sphere characterized by deceit and lies, and where she has to speak to
institutions and individuals who do not understand the decolonial language of
collectivity used in BoC. SfE bears witness to her search, articulates her loss, and
contradicts the slanderous claims made against her, but it is also an attempt to
performatively evoke and preserve the energy of a relationship which enabled her
to give and receive freely. The narrative is a constant dialogue with her husband,
thus replicating the search for him on the narrative level in a search for his voice,
in an evocation of shared memories, in a tracing of shared intimacy, and in the
memories of their attempt to build an intimate and clandestine relationship on
decolonial terms. This ongoing dialogue with Everardo provides Harbury with a
space where she can explicate the development and nature of her relationship
whilst discreetly extracting it from a conservative and conventionalized discourse
of marriage by indicating how they struggled with, and broke through, patterns of
colonial love and the legal figures that were traditionally complicit with it. At the
same time, she can articulate the excruciating emotional pain that has been
inflicted on her. As we will see in the following section, official institutions and
most individuals perceive Harbury through the lens of the coloniality of gender,
and impose on her a way of acting and speaking from within coloniality. The
symbolic violence generated by this imposition ricochets throughout the book.

The coloniality of gender and the world gender order

After focusing on storytelling in the previous section, I will now focus on social
interaction and, specifically, conversations. The conceptual approach to these
relies on what Marı́a Lugones has creferred to as “the coloniality of gender,” and I
will contrast it with the “world gender order,” a term frequently employed by
Raewyn Connell in his work Masculinities (1995). Lugones argues that
colonialism did not impose precolonial, European gender arrangements on the
colonized. It imposed a new gender system that created very different arrangements
for colonized males and females than for white bourgeois colonizers. Thus, it
 62 C. Gräbner

introduced many genders and gender itself as a colonial concept and mode of
organization of relations of production, property relations, of cosmologies and ways
of knowing. (2007, 186)
Conquest introduced an understanding of gender that linked it to other elements of
coloniality, and it inextricably linked the concept of gender to a set of gender
arrangements as defined by coloniality. This had previously not been the case in
the Americas, and Lugones questions whether the concept of “gender” as we use it
today and from within coloniality could be easily applied to the study of
pre-Columbian cultures. Moreover, she invites us to keep in mind that the gender
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arrangements of coloniality are not the same for everyone, but are determined by
where different individuals are placed. This last point maps loosely on the
distinction I made in the previous paragraph between the damnés and those who
are in the position of the former colonizers.
Theorists of gender who do not accept that the conquest of the Americas and
coloniality are the starting point for modernity will necessarily have to develop other
models to understand global gender arrangements.5 One alternative model is what
R. W. Connell calls the “world gender order.” Connell argues that globalization has
brought the gender orders of different societies in contact with each other, and that the
resulting gender orders are local but do bear the impact of a global society which is in
turn characterized by patriarchal gender relations (Connell 1995, 260–1). Similarly,
Michael Kimmel points out that the expansion of capitalism, and the economic shifts
that come with it, have pushed egalitarian gender roles towards male domination
(2004, 56–7). At the same time, these approaches suggest that gender equality is
possible at least in theory within a capitalist world gender order if masculinities and
femininities are changed, and if social and political environments are adapted
accordingly. But theorists of coloniality claim that modernity is inextricably linked to
coloniality and, therefore, egalitarian social and gender relations will never be
possible under the world gender order.
Importantly, the coloniality of gender does not only subjugate women to men.
It also cross-culturally relates men and women to each other in a relationship of
mutual victimization which forces them into the coloniality of gender and, by
proxy, co-opts them into the coloniality of power. This co-option is all the more
effective because many of us who are in a position to be potentially successful
in the capitalist system often do not realize – much less accept – that we, too,
function within the coloniality of gender; we believe that societies around the
globe function according to the world gender order and, therefore, that resolving
gendered subjugation is a question of “development” and of a type of
“democracy” which has nothing to do with Sandoval’s democratics. Under such
circumstances, the world gender order obscures and de-recognizes or, in the worst
case, perpetuates the coloniality of gender, as we will see below.
An example of this are the relationships between Moya and the Harvard
academic Sylvia McCourt, and between Flor de Mayo and Celso Batres. Sylvia
 Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 63

McCourt is an ambitious political scientist who is “married to her career” and is

keen to make a name for herself by finding “the most apt response to her own
government’s obsessed and often belligerent harangues on Central America,
something that, without sounding at all extremist, would create a stir on editorial
pages and in high-level foreign policy circles” (Goldman 1992, 273). She meets
Moya at a party at the US embassy when she passes through Guatemala on one of
her fact-finding journeys. They end up in an intense conversation about politics
which carries on through the whole night and upsets Sylvia considerably because,
as she says, “[y]ou’ve made me feel so artificial, somehow” (Goldman 1992, 276).
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To satisfy her need for comfort, Moya has to hug her for the entire night, and they
also kiss. She eventually misquotes him in a newspaper column in which she
argues for military aid for the Contras, which indicates that she has not truly
understood any of his political commentary, or, phrased differently, that she is
unable to receive the thoughts, views and passions that he offers freely. In keeping
with this logic, she gives nothing, least of all herself. The encounter with Moya
makes her sense for a night that something is amiss: her comment about feeling
artificial, and the degree of her sadness during that night, show that she is missing
something about herself, possibly the person she could be if she were able to give
and receive freely in an egalitarian interaction with Moya. However, once that
night is over she loses touch with what is missing and returns to her aspirational
position in the world gender order which, as we can see here, obfuscates and, in so
doing, perpetuates the presence of the coloniality of gender.
In relation to her lover, Flor finds herself in a position equivalent to Moya’s with
regards to Sylvia. Flor has been raised to achieve validation by compliance.
The Graetz household is dominated by the patriarchal figure of Ira Graetz.
He insists on Flor getting an education and, to the extent that his upper class
Guatemalan wife lets him, dotes on her successes; he treats her, as Rogerio
frequently says, “like a daughter,” at the expense of his son who underperforms in
terms of social and educational success, and who does badly in competition with
other men. Flor never disappoints Ira and makes his expectations her own.
She does not set her own goals, she does not form lasting friendships with men or
women, and even during her time at Wellesley she seems to compete with her
fellow students instead of forming part of a supportive network of young women.
In Guatemala she disconcerts people because they do not know whether to look at
her as a “gringafied” Guatemalan – the “Wellesley girl,” as they eventually put it
– or as an ethnic Mayan who overstepped her boundaries. Moya’s boss Celso
Batres is initially attracted by the seemingly conflicting elements of Flor’s
identity, but she becomes an obstacle to his political career because she refuses to
accept the status of secret mistress, the only one she can possibly be entitled to as
an ethnic Mayan. Celso’s father points this out to Celso, and because the latter is a
good son, he leaves Flor.
Moya and Flor are both considered exotic, hence, and only for this quality,
desirable. Both are inserted into patriarchal networks which alternately try to
 64 C. Gräbner

subjugate and co-opt them. Their lovers do not acknowledge their otherness in
equality. In ways appropriate to their gender, Moya and Flor end up as the safety
blankets of their lovers. Celso discards his when he no longer needs it; Sylvia
keeps hers around and makes sure that no harm is done to it. And yet, Flor and
Moya never mutually acknowledge their equality in subjugation and turn it into a
source of strength. Instead, encased in their secretiveness, they hide it from each
other. Their equality in subjugation is another one of these “things” that cannot be
spoken.
Jennifer Harbury, a real-life person and graduate from the US Ivy League
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university where the fictional Sylvia McCourt teaches, also experiences the
communicational difficulties between the world gender order and the coloniality
of gender. During her hunger strike and early in 1994, Harbury is invited to a
meeting with Minister of Defence General Enrı́quez to discuss a possible response
to her demands. The first meeting is also attended by Colonel Mérida from the
secret service G2. Enrı́quez acts as the friendly patriarch who seeks to reason with
Harbury. Mérida, on the other hand, gives the impression of a man who has
difficulty controlling his temper. In the conversation, Enrı́quez treats Harbury as a
woman who can function within and play the colonial gender order which, by
definition, subjugates her. Harbury addresses Enrı́quez as a representative of the
patriarchal world gender order, and this implies that there is a potential for equality
if she only does things right.
The clash between the world gender order and the coloniality of gender
manifests itself in different readings of the masculine-assigned quality of control.
Harbury assigns “control” to “control of the facts.” To her, knowledge is power.
She thinks that she is gaining the upper hand because she has evidence that
Everardo did not die when the military says he did, and which furthermore
strongly indicates that he must be in the hands of the army or the secret service.
Now that she has wrenched control over the facts away from the military, she
considers herself in a strong or even superior position. She even proposes to
Mérida “to give [Mérida] all of the evidence [ . . . ] so that we can converse on the
same footing and hopefully make some progress” (Harbury 1997, 222), a proposal
that Mérida accepts because it offers him access to information but the
underpinning of which – the same footing – is unthinkable from subject positions
that are located within the coloniality of gender. Enrı́quez, in contrast, assigns
“control” to self-control of behaviour and to control over institutions: he does not
care about the control of facts because he has Everardo and the institutional power
to keep him and kill him. As a result, Harbury battles over the facts and Enrı́quez
battles over the subtext: he inquires how she would feel about Everardo showing
up in Texas, and she tells him “not to be ridiculous, that the facts are the facts;
nobody at all is fooled anymore” (Harbury 1997, 225). She asks for Everardo to be
turned over to the civilian authorities so that he can have a fair trial. If this
happens, she says, she will recognize this as a milestone in Guatemalan politics
and drop all charges. Enrı́quez and Mérida respond with disconcerted silence.
 Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 65

Probably, as Harbury eventually realizes, because their masculinities cannot even

hear such a suggestion from a woman who is married to a guerrillero:
I offered them a pardon if they would publicly present the prisoners to the courts, an
act that would force them to admit they did indeed have secret prisons and torture
specialists as a standard part of their official repertoire. They would have to humble
themselves, confess, and receive pardon – and later settle for some international
applause for their first steps towards reform. Frankly, they would rather die. I forgot
their pride, and worse yet, I forgot their masculinity. (Harbury 1997, 230)
Enrı́quez and Mérida’s masculinities can be read through the world gender order
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as machista, backward and patriarchal, but such a reading implies that they would
behave differently if they ceased to be “backward.” However, this linear notion
of progress and development does not work with reference to the coloniality of
gender. Egalitarian relations between men and women are simply not part of
Enrı́quez and Mérida’s repertoire. To them, Harbury inexplicably squandered her
social capital on a Mayan guerrillero who grew up in a plantation shack, and
Everardo never will be anyone but a Mayan guerrillero from a plantation shack:
his marriage to a gringa lawyer will, in the best of cases, turn him into her prized
possession which one might wish to return, if the gringa lawyer agrees to stop
throwing what Enrı́quez and Mérida can only see as a public tantrum. Eventually,
Harbury has another meeting with Enrı́quez:
I tell him I don’t know if it is logical or not, but that if it [Everardo “going looking”
for her] happens I will publicly correct my position and even write a letter to
Congress on the matter, thanking the army for their cooperation, and of course send
them a courtesy copy. I lean back in my chair now, for I have tossed out my best
offer. Will it be accepted? The man leans forward now and lifts the cheap coffeepot,
looking directly into my eyes.
“You are a most intelligent young woman,” he says in a precise, dead-level voice.
“Won’t you have another cup of coffee?” (Harbury 1997, 235)
Harbury finally recognizes what the coloniality of gender – though she does not
use that term – means for her in practical terms, and she plays along with it.
Enrı́quez acknowledges this when he calls her “a most intelligent young woman”
and offers her the triviality of another cup of coffee – a most cynical offer,
especially bearing in mind that he never returns Everardo.
Equality is what cannot be spoken in these interactions. Flor and Moya cannot
speak it because it would bring them to their “zero degree” moment, and they are both
too invested in the game of seduction and domination to question everything they
know about relationships between men and women. The figure of Sylvia McCourt
shows that the aspirational logic of the world gender order and the equality of
decolonial love are mutually exclusive. If she and Moya spoke of “equality,” then she,
too, would have to confront an emotional “zero degree” moment which would
destroy the substance of what emotionally defines her: her career. As for Jennifer
 66 C. Gräbner

Harbury, she has to leave all notions of equality behind in order to negotiate for her
husband’s life. All of these relationships illustrate that equality is elusive and that,
therefore, aspirationally-defined models of analysis such as “world gender order” are
less useful in these cases than theories which acknowledge the “dreadful
concatenation” inherent in relationships ever since colonial times.

From the dreadful concatenation to decolonial love

The Long Night is an exemplary story of how the “dreadful concatenation”
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produces societies, socialities and intimacies which are permeated by the logic of
coloniality. Not one romantic relationship in the novel seems to be emotionally
fulfilling for those who are involved in it, and there are no true friendships. Flor
does not have any friends, and the relationship between Rogerio and Moya is
informed by lack of trust, though Rogerio does not realize this. For the most part,
relationships in The Long Night are characterized by mistrust, lack of trust, lies,
betrayal, manipulation, competitiveness and lack of self-awareness, because they
are defined by coloniality and by the desire to possess. The only genuine
manifestations of affection are between Rogerio and Flor, whose relationship
(are they adoptive siblings or nanny and charge?) does not fit into any of the
available labels for socially sanctioned emotional attachments. They have an
unspoken pact to be there for each other when the other is in need and says so, and
they observe and respect this pact without failure but they never openly discuss it
and convert it into a commitment.
Trust is what cannot be spoken in these relationships which are the result of the
dreadful cancatenation; and trust – not blind trust, but critical trust – is so crucial
to relationships in cataclysmic situations. Here, I will look at the relationship
between Rogerio and Moya as an example of friendship. As I said, it is defined by
mistrust, though Rogerio does not realize this. Moya’s mistrust is justified, not
only because of past experiences but also because of Rogerio’s general behaviour:
his lack of self-awareness, hence of self-control; his drunkenness; his lack of
self-worth due to his inability to compete successfully with other men; his openly
confrontational behaviour towards the authorities which attracts a great deal
of attention; but mostly, because of Rogerio’s failure to understand the meaning of
trust. This is expressed in the following conversation in which he tries to get Moya
to speak what cannot be spoken:
“So are you a guerrilla?” Roger suddenly blurted. “Look, I know, not a gun-toting
one, obviously, but organized, you know, in propaganda or whatever?”
Moya peered at him for a moment over the can of Budweiser suspended in front of
his lips.
“I just thought I’d ask. It doesn’t make any difference to me, believe me. I just think I
should know.”
“Bueno. No, Rogerio.”
Roger’s face suddenly reddened.
 Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 67

“Rogerio,” said Moya. “One thing you must be very clear about. When you are in
Guatemala, you can never, ever ask anybody questions like that. No one would ever
tell you anyway. And you can only get yourself in trouble by asking.”
“Oh sure, I know that,” said Roger, “but we’re not in Guatemala now, are we?”
(Goldman 1992, 273)
What Rogerio asks to be spoken, could only be spoken in an environment of
shared commitment and trust. And yet, his combination of nonchalance and
political naiveté signals his failure to grasp that relationships based on trust are of
the same type, no matter whether one is sitting in Guatemala or in the USA.
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For Rogerio, “trust” implies truth-telling, which he confuses with the performance
of storytelling (as distinct to Sylvia McCourt, who confuses truth-telling with
“the facts”). The question he asks Moya, however, concerns Moya’s political
commitment and personal safety; and possibly, if Moya were organized, the safety
of his compañer@s. For Rogerio, trust is a passive sentiment and is connected to
exterior conditions, not to personal commitments and attachments.
When talking about “love,” the mindset of the dreadful cancatenation produces
a language of warfare. Rogerio deploys an entire arsenal of military terms to
derecognize the possibility of a language of decolonial love when he recounts
Moya and Flor approaching their “degree zero,” during the long night of white
chickens: “skirmish,” “gaining the upper hand,” “war of the softest kind.”
The possibility of decolonial love is turned into a battle of seduction, and the role
of the storyteller is that of an accomplished strategist. Moya eventually declares
Flor the victor of soft warfare when he “surrenders” to her demand to leave
Guatemala together and forever. Unfortunately, he does not get to experiment with
the consequences of his decision to give himself completely, because she gets
killed that same night through third-party intervention. One of the reasons why the
The Long Night so effectively conveys the feeling of living in a low-intensity
warzone – irrespective of the protagonists’ whereabouts – lies in the imbrication
of storytelling, gendered interactions and gendered relationships with the logic of
coloniality. The result is a narrow range of emotional attachments, and
relationality conceived of as warfare.6
In contrast, the testimonies collected in BoC refer to a rich variety of
relationships, some of which are romantic and some of which are not, and all of
which are based on trust and equality between all parties involved, and on an
acute awareness of what in this essay I have called the coloniality of gender. With
regards to the emotion of love, the compañer@s value the depth of attachment
over the type of attachment. Everardo, in his response to a question about the role
of women in combat, recounts two stories of love for people who were killed: his
close friend Luis Ixmata, and his (Everardo’s) lover Gabriela. He concludes:
“Of course the death of a woman strikes us very hard. But so does the death of a
compañero. The bonds forged among us up here are very strong, as is the love we
share for one another. Every loss is a very bad loss, be it a man or a woman.
 68 C. Gräbner

The pain, the wound, comes not from the gender, but from love itself. Have
I answered your question?” (Harbury 1994, 188). The feeling of “love” is
expressed with the same intensity through friendship and through romantic
relationships. It is premised upon equality between individuals, and between
attachments and the relationships that emerge out of these attachments. Harbury
picks up on this point from her own experience. Throughout SfE she highlights the
significance of her friendships with other women: Clara in Mexico City, Debra in
the USA, Emma in the mountains and the clandestine spaces of Guatemala City,
Anna in Guatemala City. These relationships are deep, intimate, and giving.
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Trust and self-knowledge are their marrow – and they have to be, because much
depends on the protection of clandestine spaces. Such relationships would be
impossible in the emotional landscape produced by the dreadful cancatenation,
because possession rarely enters into the dynamics of friendship and, therefore,
makes friendship a second-rate relationship. Indeed, several compañer@s reflect
on the expansion of their range of emotions and attachments upon arriving in the
mountains.
Domingo comes from a university background in the city and, as he himself
says, saw the masculinity of the well-read guerrillero as a sexy one, not dissimilar
to Sylvia McCourt’s perception of Moya’s masculinity. Domingo says that
when he got to the mountains, the most difficult hurdles to jump were ideological
dogmatism, race and gender. For him, the most deeply ingrained aspects of
machista masculinity did not lie in the distribution of chores and practical aspects
of life, but in how he and his male friends (he did not have any female friends)
built and maintained relationships with those they thought of as the “weaker sex”:
We were so conscious of them being female, a different species really. We wanted to
hover over them, help them out, protect them. In other words, to treat them as a
weaker sex. The problem was, they didn’t need us. It was a sad day for us when we
found out that we couldn’t do as many sit ups as Annabella, or climb as fast as Marisa.
[ . . . ] And meanwhile, we flirted up a storm with every woman in sight. This was our
way of still feeling like real men. And the compañeras understood and amiably flirted
back, as if we were their favourite younger brothers. (Harbury 1994, 148– 9)
Flirting, for Domingo and his friends, was how women and men mutually
validated each other as objects of the other’s desire, and it provided an opportunity
for them to constitute themselves as that potential precious possession that the
compañeras might like to own. Only when Domingo and his friends realize that
the compañeras are not validated as possessions and that they do not want to
acquire dead weight, do their attitudes finally change and “real relationships”
become possible:
You can hang on to your male ego just as hard as you are able, but it’s not going to
last very long. And this is a good thing, not a bad thing. Because in the end, you
discover a new way of relating to women that you never had before. [ . . . ] Because
the woman is a real person, someone to share with, not just a pretty little flower to
 Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 69

carry around. I never had real relationships with women before. Infatuations, yes,
but real relations, understanding, friendships – no. And to think I never knew what
I was missing. (Harbury 1994, 151)
Domingo now takes validation and confidence from his ability to maintain
friendships with individuals of both genders, and his notion of his own masculinity
includes the ability to be attuned to people of either gender, without expecting
anything in return. He now understands that the gender of the people one is
attached to requires and challenges different types of sensitivities, but that it does
not influence the strength of the attachment.
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Lorena, of a similar background as Domingo, recounts that for her, the most
difficult obstacle to adjustment to life in the mountains “lay in my notions of what
a woman should or shouldn’t be, should or shouldn’t do, should or shouldn’t
think” (Harbury 1994, 152). Lorena falls in love with a compañero, Daniel, but is
“very afraid of having a true relationship with him” (153). Slowly and over the
course of many months and long conversations, she and Daniel work through her
fears and preconceptions about relationships and sex: “We women have to rid
ourselves of so many of the old ideas when we come into the movement. We have
to free not only our country, but ourselves as individuals, as well. And this is what
I was going through, for many months” (153). Gradually, Lorena familiarizes
herself with the idea that liberation and equality are the premises of love,
and of relationships. Only then do she and Daniel finally embark on a
relationship. The tensions caused by her experience of femininity being more
constraining than his masculinity keep resurfacing, though, especially when she
takes the difficult decision to abort a pregnancy (155).
Lorena is left feeling disempowered by her unwanted pregnancy and turns
inward. She translates her fear and pain into anger, and in her anger she cannot
receive Daniel’s feelings of love and giving at this time. Neither can she recognize
that the unwanted pregnancy might be emotionally trying for him too, albeit in
different ways. Lorena’s feelings of vulnerability, dejection, and anger are
exacerbated by the circumstances of the abortion in the city: “I was so ashamed,
sitting in that small dark waiting room, under false papers declaring me to be a
married woman. All the old ideas came back in a rush in that environment, all those
old notions of sin and shame and punishment” (Harbury 1994, 155). Her experience
of femininity – particularly in the spaces outside of the mountains – isolates her
from her own strength and from the emotional intimacy she values so much. While
her anger and self-hatred are still bearable in the mountains, they become
increasingly undermining when she goes to the spaces that she associates with the
“old ideas” about her gender. Daniel cannot accompany her to this space where
women go alone. If it had been possible for him to accompany her, they might have
been able to analyze and deconstruct the oppressiveness of this space. But the
society that is marked by the coloniality of gender and by political violence
separates them at this important juncture. It is only when Lorena returns to the
 70 C. Gräbner

mountains and leaves behind the environment where her identity as a woman is
defined by the “old ideas” that she slowly starts to heal and to rebuild her
relationship with Daniel.
Domingo’s masculinity is challenged by having meaningful relationships with
women, whether romantic or not, and Lorena’s femininity is challenged by
romantic and sexual intimacy. Both Domingo and Lorena can liberate themselves
from their constraints after they have become aware of, and have worked through,
the coloniality of gender, though this term is never used. Crucial to this process of
working through are two elements. The first is described as follows by Lorena:
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“Sexual relations are allowed, because we are all human beings, and deserve to
live as human beings. But we must be very responsible. We cannot trifle with one
another or hurt each other. We must have respect for one another” (Harbury 1994,
154). The second element is the de-linking of romantic love from possession.
Lorena, Jennifer and Everardo all mention at different points just how difficult
they find this. As regards the early days of her relationship with Everardo, Jennifer,
for example, repeatedly notes her anxiety before the notion of love without
possession: “He opens slowly now, blooming yet untouchable, and I can only
watch with love but with no hope of possession;” “[h]e gives me his affection
honestly enough, but he steadily refuses to make me his” (55).
Breaking the link of the dreadful cancatenation between understanding and
possession – as distinct from breaking the link between possession and
destruction – is challenging for everyone, but it does produce what I call the
“understanding that nurtures.” Daniel had been killed by the time Harbury
conducted the interviews, so we do not know how he experienced his masculinity
in his relationship with Lorena; but one point needs to be made here,
comparatively with the relationship between Jennifer and Everardo, and it
concerns knowledge. Lorena’s narration of Daniel’s masculinity emphasizes his
ability to share into her developments which includes him being with her even
when she is at her most angry, hurt and hurtful, to accompany her in her journey of
personal liberation and, something that she comes back to repeatedly, to respect
her space at all times. Lorena also goes to great length to emphasize that they knew
each other very well, and that they took the process of getting to know each other
very seriously. Her decision to have a relationship with Daniel was based on
knowledge of each other, and the trust that was the result of mutual knowledge.
Jennifer also mentions this a propos of her relationship with Everardo, though he
was apparently much less gentle than Daniel. When she asks him for his story,
[he] stares, evaluating this dangerous request, and I struggle to avert my gaze,
realizing that he needs to read me. Our eyes lock and for a long while I sense my
mind being turned inside out and gently ransacked without a word being spoken.
[ . . . ] At last he settles back against a stump and asks me if I will go first, tell my own
story to him. Fair enough, I think to myself, amused at this deft turn of the tables.
I will go first. (Harbury 1994, 43)
 Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 71

Everardo turns out to be a seducer by listening. Jennifer does not get to hear
his story that day. She eventually feels “as if he has seized me by the ankles
and shaken me upside down, my thoughts and memories bouncing like small gold
coins on the ground at his feet.” Everardo then thanks her “for the gift of this good
discussion, this good stimulus” (Harbury 1994, 44) and over the following days
and weeks, bit by bit and at his own pace, reciprocates.
Dispensing with the notion of possession does, however, hold its challenges.
Dora comments on this when she points out that “all of us flirt, and all of us are
jealous. Because we all know this, it doesn’t create any real problems. This is just
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how we are” (Harbury 1994, 241). Dora explains that there are two rules for
romantic relationships: “In the first place, people are not property. In the second
place, of course, a relationship should be built on trust. Also, we should trust our
fellow compañeros. And we do, really, it’s just that jealousy is not a rational thing.
It just sneaks up on you, no matter how you try to fight it” (239). Dora also
mentions that the comandante is notoriously jealous of his partner but that he has
to control his jealousy because he has to set a good example. The hegemonic
“good example” here consists of men and women controlling their jealousy not
because of good manners, but because the collective considers the possessive and
controlling sentiments expressed through jealousy to be incompatible with the
liberty and dignity of the human beings whom these feelings objectify as a
possession. By the same token, the collective acknowledges this self-control as an
achievement and, in so doing, acknowledges the baggage that coloniality has
placed on each individual.
In closing, I will move away from the space of the mountains into the
clandestine but urban domestic everyday life led by Jennifer and Everardo in
Mexico City. Several episodes of their shared clandestine domestic life in Mexico
City illustrate the cross-cultural effectiveness of the methodology of the
oppressed. After a series of seemingly unresolveable disagreements on whether to
eat out or in, Jennifer explains that it is not the practicalities of housework that
deter her from eating in, but the symbolic meaning and historical significance of
“kitchen” as the traditional place for women. Everardo appreciates this point but
suggests resignifying “kitchen” because he has never had a kitchen (as in, an
apparatus of installations and machinery that was probably very different to the
cooking arrangements in the shacks where he grew up, or in the guerrilla camps)
or a flat before and enjoys having one. Similarly Jennifer, upon coming home one
time, finds him on his knees scrubbing the floor. The posture and the chore conjure
up deeply upsetting images of slavery and exploitation in her mind, whereas
Everardo is happy with his task and initially does not understand what causes her
to be upset. In both cases, they find compromises that accommodate the differing
symbolic meanings of elements of domesticity, without deprecating the personal
and social experiences of either.7
In their resignification of domesticity, Jennifer and Everardo pass through the
different steps of the methodology of the oppressed: they read the space, challenge
 72 C. Gräbner

the dominant ideology through deconstruction, appropriate the dominant

ideological form – here, domestic space and household chores – through
practices of equality, and, finally, in a differential movement, find a practice that
recognizes their differences. Jennifer’s readings of domesticity draw on the
feminine experience of patriarchy and are informed by her localized experience of
the world gender order, whereas Everardo’s are informed by the lack and hardship
that defines the experience of the damnés. Each recognizes that the other has been
oppressed by a different manifestation of coloniality, each refuses to become part
of what oppresses the other, and each turns this refusal into a constructive act of
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liberation through what one might call, with reference to Sandoval, differential
movement: Everardo learns something about the baggage that has been loaded on
women, including middle-class women from the Global North, and Jennifer learns
something about the emptiness of hardship. When sharing differential movement,
each contributes to the other’s liberation. This is possible only because both
bring a high degree of self-awareness about gender roles and cultural identities to
their initial encounter. This degree of self-awareness is then heightened by the
dynamics of the intercultural encounter, and it is turned into a shared project
through the commitment to equality that necessarily engages all aspects of the
coloniality of gender: relations of production, property relations, cosmologies
and ways of knowing. The dreadful concatenation becomes meaningless in a
context where the very concept of love absorbs both romantic and non-romantic
relationships in which nurture and equality, not mutual destruction, are the
cohering phenomenon.
And yet, all three texts note that such relationships and such a concept of love
do not occur in the politically sanctioned, “legal” public spaces and environments,
which relegate the practice of democratics to intimate spaces and, in so doing,
exclude a social and political dimension of democratics. Decolonial love only
flourishes in the clandestine spaces of the guerriller@s. This in itself is a terrible
indictment of the hegemonic order. Moreover, the impossibility of love beyond
the dreadful cancatenation is one of those “things” that in our supposedly
democratic societies can only be spoken of with difficulty and that are often not
heard; and conversely, the possibilities of an alternative, as we have seen above,
are talked over, eclipsed, pushed aside, ridiculed, or silenced. For this reason
Goldman’s demonstration of how the dreadful cancatenation seeps into our
lives through stories, and Harbury’s courageous reminders that an alternative
can be made possible by human beings, are raw materials for the building of
critical hope.

Notes
1. For reasons of space I cannot engage in greater detail with the historical and political
circumstances of the Guatemalan guerrilla struggle, the UNRG and the ORPA. For further
information on them, see, among others, Kruijt (2008).
 Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 73

2. For a more detailed account of the events, see Harbury (2005), the website: www.casobamaca.
org (Accessed 26 September 2012), and Doyle (2012).
3. Quijano (1989) introduces the notion of “desprendimiento,” or delinking. Mignolo (2007)
discusses delinking. For Mignolo, only the damnés are able to delink.
4. BoC resembles Elena Poniatowska’s La noche de Tlatelolco (1971) and Nada, nadie: las voces
del temblor (1988). In both cases, women appropriate a profession which is usually organized
around patriarchal patterns, the legal profession (Harbury) and journalism (Poniatowska).
Lawyers and journalists are usually expected to speak for others, to fulfil the role of experts who
can interpret the individual within a hegemonic epistemological framework; here: public
discourse or the legal system. The licence to interpret constitutes the authority of journalists and
lawyers. Harbury and Poniatowska in different ways refuse to become professional interpreters.
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Instead, they become professionals of listening and remake their own Self in this process.
5. Theorists of coloniality draw on world-systems-theory and argue that the logic that sustains
capitalism can be traced back to the conquest of the Americas, as distinct from the Industrial
Revolution.
6. Maldonado-Torres suggests that coloniality “can be understood as a radicalization and
naturalization of the non-ethics of war” (2007, 247), a point which is forcefully illustrated
through The Long Night.
7. Eating out resolves the issue of the kitchen in terms of Jennifer’s personal liberation and the
hiring of a cleaner would ensure cleanliness of the floor without either Jennifer or Everardo
having to clean it, but this does not fundamentally address the gendered character of housework,
or issues such as underpayment of domestic workers and those employed in the gastronomy
sector.

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