“Today we believe in the possibility of love” (Reference FanonFanon 2008, 24). So writes Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks, a work well known for exposing the pathologizing effects of colonialism on both the colonizer and the colonized, but not often remembered for its concern with this particular emotion. Indeed, it may be surprising to encounter Fanon as part of a discussion of feminist love studies, especially considering that within certain feminist circles it has become nearly impossible to engage the Martinican physician and theorist of black lived experience given his notoriety as an alleged misogynist.Footnote 1 Yet love is essential for Fanon—he devotes two chapters to analyzing the challenges to interracial love occasioned by colonialism. Tellingly, he refers more than once to his obsession with “love and understanding” (xii), and his efforts to examine and diagnose the various spheres within which the rejection and alienation of the colonial subject take place are important for understanding what I will refer to as “colonial love.” In what follows, I foreground the foundational work of decolonial feminist Chela Sandoval, who builds on Fanon's as well as on Roland Barthes's writings on love to develop another concept, that of “decolonial love,” an idea grounded in a view of decolonization as both an ongoing political and ethical act, and which offers feminist love studies a perspective on love that poses a direct challenge to systems of power that perpetuate coloniality. Decolonial love serves as an important form of ethical interrelation that is premised on imagining a “third way” of engaging otherness that is beyond that of traditional Western and colonial binary thinking. I argue that this form of anti‐hegemonic love is central to the process of decolonial healing.
I will explore the implications of adopting decolonial love as a theoretical and practical model for healing the wounds of coloniality by contrasting its revolutionary potential to the damaging effects of its opposite, colonial love. The latter, based in an imperialist, dualist logic, dangerously fetishizes the beloved object and participates in the oppression and subjugation of difference. Decolonial love, by contrast, originates “from below” and operates between those rendered other by hegemonic forces. In its acceptance of fluid identities and a redefined but shared humanity, decolonial love promotes loving as an active, intersubjective process, and in so doing articulates an anti‐hegemonic, anti‐imperialist affect and attitude that can guide the actions that work to dismantle oppressive regimes.Footnote 2
Literature that makes central the lived experiences of female subaltern figures works to theorize new ways of being and offers feminist philosophy a different way to understand intersubjective relation that challenges hegemonic thinking. As such, love's role in ethical interrelation as well as its potential to heal beyond the confines of a feminized economy of care is of interest to those concerned with the political potential of affect. To this end, I offer a close reading of Gabriel García Márquez's underexplored Of Love and Other Demons, a novel in which the subversive power of decolonial love challenges Christian, imperialist love to foreground black lived experience and knowledge over and against the Eurocentric. By shedding light on the danger and power of colonial and decolonial love, respectively, the novel provides readers with both a context for and examples of radical forms of ethical interrelation, thereby tapping into debates within feminist love studies that seek to empower marginalized communities to challenge the terms upon which their humanity has been insufficiently recognized by the dominant worldview.
Love in Fanon
As a condition that describes the “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,” coloniality remains co‐constitutive of modernity, even into the present postcolonial era (Reference Maldonado‐TorresMaldonado-Torres 2007, 243). Thus, the eradication of coloniality forms the backbone of decolonial theory, a mode of analysis that explores this underside of modernity.Footnote 3 A significant and ongoing effect of coloniality has been the persistence of the colonial wound, which is recognized as the epistemic rupture enacted by the European encounter in the Americas, and which resulted in the devaluing of non‐Western forms of embodied knowledge.Footnote 4 As both a literal and metaphorical concept, the colonial wound highlights the pain and suffering of those oppressed by the legacy of coloniality, while also emphasizing the valuable knowledge these subjects produce by virtue and in spite of their very woundedness.Footnote 5
In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon's focus is “the set of barriers that inhibit interhuman contact in a colonial world”; therefore, “[i]t is not strange that the first three chapters of the book deal with language and love” (Reference Maldonado‐TorresMaldonado-Torres 2008, 137). Indeed, as Nelson Maldonado‐Torres argues, “love leads Fanon to articulate a position that subverts at various levels the logics of imperial recognition. It is in the ‘gift,’ beyond imperial recognition, that we will find the possibility for love” (123). What is more, love not only “appears as a response to war … but love is … a de‐colonizing activity … . Both de‐colonial love and justice commence in the attention paid to the ‘cries’ of ethical revolt that emerge at the very limits of Being” (251–52). My interest in Fanon stems from the lack of critical attention paid to how his clinical training and practice influence his theories on ethical interrelation.Footnote 6 His refusal to accept the amputated existence offered to him by anti‐black racism proves essential to understanding coloniality, for these kinds of oppressive systems inflict not only visible, physical violence upon their subjects, but invisible, affective wounds as well.Footnote 7 With this in mind, I argue that Fanon's concern with love is also a concern with healing, and that Sandoval's theorization of decolonial love harnesses this healing impulse.
Grounding Decolonial Love and Healing
Decoloniality is a project that takes seriously the task of healing the psychological, affective, and epistemic wounds occasioned by the hierarchical division of the world into colonizers and colonized, a split implicit in the concept of modernity/coloniality. The very concept of modernity/coloniality is itself a conduit for the creation and naturalization of multiple forms of domination across racial, gender, and economic lines, all of which are premised on binary thinking. Decoloniality thus entails identifying the structures that perpetuate oppression while also working to shed light on those perspectives that have been devalued by hegemonic systems of knowledge and power. As an affirmative project, then, decoloniality serves to promote the revaluation of unrecognized subjective and embodied knowledge.
Essential to overcoming modernity/coloniality is an epistemic decolonization process grounded in ethical forms of interrelation and centered on critically interrogating binary thinking across various fields. Decolonial love encourages a form of ethical intersubjectivity premised on imagining a “third way” of engaging otherness beyond Western binary thinking; thus, I argue, decolonial love serves to promote healing by rehabilitating the relation between self and other. Although this positive association between decolonial love and healing may initially appear overly optimistic, grounding these terms within a more cautious, twenty‐first century feminist framework attuned to the uses of love to promote slavery and colonialism can help to safeguard against this risk. Indeed, rather than imply a total erasure of past wounds the way that “transformation” or “cure” might, healing in the decolonial context relentlessly underscores the ethical dimension of this necessarily ongoing practice, a process that need not even be realized in order to remain a worthwhile venture.
Addressing the problematic relation between love and colonialism, feminist critic Dawn Rae Davis reminds us that “the revolutionary possibility of love requires identifying and deconstructing historical alliances between love and reason and between benevolence and imperialism; otherwise we collaborate with a violent legacy” (Reference DavisDavis 2002, 146). As she argues, “an ethics of love is viable only to the extent that the radical difference indicated by alterity forms its basis” (146). I suggest that Davis's description of what love should be is part and parcel of decolonial love; her discussion of the “ability of not knowing” the beloved as integral to a revolutionary ethics of love resonates with Sandoval's recruitment of Barthes in her decolonial theorization of love.
In Methodology of the Oppressed, Sandoval challenges what she calls academic apartheid by reclaiming Western theorists such as Barthes and Derrida in order to align them with the strategies and tactics of survival already implemented by US third world feminism. She aims to “[construct] an alternative and dissident globalization in place of the neocolonizing forces of postmodernism” (Reference SandovalSandoval 2000, 3). By drawing attention to the common goals of scholars who have “developed separate terminologies for a theory and method of oppositional consciousness,” Sandoval seeks to re‐envision an academy where socially conscious and politically motivated theory and practice can come together to enact global change (69). As Sandoval writes,
U.S. third world feminism provided access to a different way of conceptualizing not just feminist consciousness but oppositional activity in general: it comprised a formulation capable of aligning U.S. movements for social justice not only with each other, but with global movements toward decolonization. (42)
Following third world theorists like Che Guevara, Frantz Fanon, and Gloria Anzaldúa, Sandoval encourages us to “understand ‘love’ as a hermeneutic, as a set of practices and procedures that can transit all citizen‐subjects, regardless of social class, toward a differential mode of consciousness and its accompanying technologies of method and social movement” (140). Reinvented as a “political technology,” love becomes “a body of knowledges, arts, practices, and procedures for re‐forming the self and the world” (4). This love is “not the narrative of love as encoded in the West: it is another kind of love, a synchronic process that punctures through traditional, older narratives of love, that ruptures everyday being” (142). Her ultimate goal is to theorize how to mobilize “love in the postmodern world as a category of social analysis” (10), as a method for determining what kinds of political and social actions to take. Ultimately, the “‘methodology of the oppressed,’” she writes, “is a misnomer” for “this process is better described as a postmodern decolonizing activity, a methodology of renewal, of social reconstruction, of emancipation—or perhaps better—a methodology of love in the postmodern world” (10).
What does it mean, however, for love to be a hermeneutic? For Sandoval, decolonial love is linked to a “differential mode of consciousness in opposition [that] can be productively read across many different kinds of texts, and across disciplines, to identify the instructions they contain for its generation” (72). The philosophical import of Sandoval's conception of love lies in its challenge to the binaries at the center of Western hegemony by offering a “third meaning” that allows an escape from the dualism central to normative epistemologies. Cartesian dualism not only postulates the separation of the mind from the body, but also remains the basis for distinguishing the rational from the irrational. The result is a standard that continues to inform the way we practice and evaluate knowledge, while simultaneously forming the basis of gender inequality and racial injustice, among other forms of oppression. Within the broader context of coloniality, the mind/body split served to underwrite the colonial difference, in which European colonizers claimed a monopoly over rationalism and labeled the colonized irrational and in need of a guiding hand in order for them to attain humanity.Footnote 8
In her own theorization of love Sandoval notes that the Western narrative of falling in love presents itself as a binary choice: “you love someone, and ‘either you have hope, and then you act, or else you have none, in which case you renounce. This is the discourse of the so‐called “healthy subject”’ who lives in the dominant: ‘either/or’” (143). In this formulation, which Sandoval draws from Barthes, one loves when there is external justification to love, and one gives up on that love when external factors discourage it. However, there is “a third option, another approach to loving. This other course of action ensues when the loving subject instead tries to ‘slip between the two members’ of the either/or alternative by saying, ‘I have no hope, but all the same …’ or ‘I stubbornly choose not to choose; I choose drifting; I continue’” (143). This third option encourages us to call “for a new order that can defend against the binary oppositions that ground Western philosophy” and forms the heart of decolonial love (149).
Fanon's own conception of love is especially powerful in light of Sandoval's attention to this “third way.” Although his discussion of interracial love has been misunderstood as a total critique of such relationships, upon closer examination it becomes clear that Fanon is instead critiquing a system in which genuine, ethical, intersubjective relations are rendered pathological by racism. It is because he believes that love is not only possible but also an ultimate goal of transcendental consciousness that Fanon “[endeavors] to trace its imperfections and perversions” (Reference FanonFanon 2008, 24). Although Fanon's “heterosexism and latent homophobia” remain problematic in terms of claiming Fanon as a feminist, as T. Denean Sharpley‐Whiting argues, “Fanon's commitment to women's liberation as a radical humanist” nevertheless proves useful to “antiracist feminist liberation theory and practice” (Reference Sharpley‐WhitingSharpley-Whiting 1998, 6). It is in the spirit of this recuperation of Fanon that I home in on his understanding of the problems of colonial love.
Sandoval's purpose in reappropriating both Fanon and Barthes is to perform her recognition of “differential consciousness” across apparent institutional and theoretical divides. For Sandoval,
the recognition of … differential consciousness and social movement, is crucial for shaping effective and ongoing oppositional struggle … . It retroactively provides a structure, a theory, and a method for reading and constructing identity, aesthetics, and coalition politics that are vital to a decolonizing postmodern politics and aesthetics, and to hailing a “third‐wave,” twenty‐first century feminism. (Reference SandovalSandoval 2000, 45)
Decolonial love thus performs “as a social movement [that] is enacted by revolutionary, mobile, and global coalitions of citizen‐activists who are allied through the apparatus of emancipation” (184).
Of (De)colonial Love and Other Demons
I will now turn to Of Love and Other Demons, a novel that explodes the rational/irrational binary through the exploration of alternative configurations of love, and, when viewed through a decolonial lens, proves emblematic of the transgressive and border‐crossing activity necessary to oppose dualist thinking and being. If one of the goals of decolonial theory is to revalue knowledges that originate “from below,” then any effort to highlight the particular embodied and affective knowledges of those who have suffered the violence of coloniality serves to bring us one step closer to overcoming the colonial difference.
García Márquez's Of Love and Other Demons is the story of twelve‐year‐old Sierva María de Todos los Ángeles, the daughter of a criollo (New World‐born Spaniard) Marquis and his mestiza wife, who from a young age has been relegated to the slave quarters of the run‐down estate. Set in Spanish colonial eighteenth‐century Cartagena de Indias, the novel centers on the question of whether Sierva María has contracted rabies after being bitten by a rabid dog or is instead demonically possessed. García Márquez emphasizes the Africanness of Sierva María, who renames herself María Mandinga and sees the slaves as her true family, thereby making abundantly clear that it is her blackness—that is, her embrace of and self‐identification with African slave culture—that marks her as deviant and other. Here questions regarding the limits of identity, as well as the boundary between the spiritual and the physical worlds, are at the center of the narrative, offering a key text that looks to the supernatural to express the painful and difficult colonial past of a nation—in this case, Colombia, which historically has denied its Afro‐descendant heritage. The novel is as much about the hybridity of culture as it is about the persistence of memory, for on the one hand, Sierva María's corporeal death at the novel's end serves as an ultimate example of the colonial pathologization of blackness, and on the other, her continued life beyond the grave—represented by the abundant locks of copper hair that continue to sprout from her skull two hundred years after her death—symbolizes the perpetual presence of the African in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Two very different forms of love, both linked to conceptions of blackness, form the core of García Márquez's text. The first is the decolonial love between Sierva María and her African slave family, in particular with her adoptive mother Dominga de Adviento. Dominga's love rejects imperial designations of family and self and allows Sierva María to self‐identify as María Mandinga, an identity that proves deadly for the young girl caught in the colonial structure. The second form of love is troubling in its ties to coloniality, for although many critics have rendered Sierva María's relationship to her thirty‐six‐year‐old exorcist priest, Cayetano Delaura, as one of romantic love, there are several factors that render their relationship symbolic of a fetishization of blackness, and one that relies upon and reveals the hierarchical nature of colonialism. By exposing forms of decolonial and colonial love, García Márquez's narrative participates in epistemic decolonization by emphasizing the reversal of power structures and suggesting that new ways of loving are a necessary part of the process.
Decolonial Mothering
Dominga's decolonial love for Sierva María saves her from death at the very moment she enters this world. As the narrator acknowledges, the colonial world is divided in two, and as the black slave who combines faith in Catholicism and Santería with ease, Dominga is “the link between these two worlds” (Reference García MárquezGarcía Márquez 2008, 11). She effectively adopts Sierva María when her parents cavalierly take her for dead when she is born prematurely. Dominga consecrates Sierva María to her Yoruba saints, praying for the girl to live and promising not to cut her hair until her wedding night. At the very moment of that promise, the newborn begins to cry, and Dominga reads this as a sign of the girl's future sainthood, a sharp contrast to her father's prediction that she would grow up to be a whore (42). That the narrator emphasizes Dominga's superior foresight—Sierva María lives on in Caribbean folklore as described in the novel's preface—highlights the different knowledge she brings to the encounter. Not only does Dominga then provide Sierva María with mother's milk from her own breasts, she also inducts her into the same marginal world in which she lives, between Spanish colonial and African cosmologies: she “suckled her, baptized her in Christ, and consecrated her to Olokun, a Yoruban deity of indeterminate sex whose face is presumed to be so dreadful it is seen only in dreams, and always hidden by a mask” (42). In short, where the girl's parents presume death, Dominga sees the possibility for renewed life, a life worth living, a life worth fighting for.
Sierva María's own “indeterminacy” is embraced and encouraged by Dominga and “the jubilant court of black slave women, mestiza maids, and Indian errand girls” Dominga orders to tend and care for her (42–43). When among the slaves,
The girl displayed just who she was. She could dance with more grace and fire than the Africans, sing in voices different from her own in the various languages of Africa, agitate the birds and animals when she imitated their voices. By order of Dominga de Adviento, the younger slave girls would blacken her face with soot. They hung Santería necklaces over her baptism scapular and looked after her hair, which had never been cut and would have interfered with her walking if they had not braided it into loops every day. (12)
Through these ornaments, gestures, and acts of loving care, Dominga encourages Sierva María to embody the slave culture with which she identifies. This contrasts with the lack of care and love offered by the girl's biological parents, who admit they never loved the child, nor worried about her living with the slaves until she was bitten by a rabid dog. As the narrator intimates, the Marquis “always believed he loved his daughter, but … this was a lie for the sake of convenience,” while “Bernarda … did not even ask herself the question, for she knew very well she did not love the girl and the girl did not love her, and both things seemed fitting” (16). Any care Sierva María receives, then, is not by order of the supposed masters of the estate, but by Dominga's alone, and as such this love that comes from below serves to reinforce the girl's sense of herself as living between worlds. For although Sierva María labels herself as black, the fact remains that she is not acknowledged as such by the larger colonial structure.Footnote 9
Her fair complexion and red hair denote her non‐African ancestry, but her bodily comportment expresses the attributes of her adoptive slave culture, specifically through her grooming, her language abilities, and her dancing. Indeed, as her biological mother astutely notes, “The only thing white about that child is her color” (Reference García MárquezGarcía Márquez 2008, 45). Before learning to speak the colonial language, she learns to dance to African rhythms, thereby establishing an embodied connection to black identity before entering the colonial discourse. As such, the girl becomes “an ambiguous and liminal figure, who crosses the boundaries between child and woman, black and white, and renders problematic the distinctions between health and disease; madness, wickedness, and demonic possession, martyrdom, and sanctity” (Reference Vázquez‐MedinaVázquez‐Medina 2013, 170). What remains clear is that Sierva María is endowed with knowledge that she is not expected to have. Unfortunately, her inability to conform to the binaries imposed upon her renders her dangerous to the colonial structure. Her embodiment of African culture through her mastery of multiple African languages and dance remains permanently at odds with what Fanon would call her “epidermalization,” which is read as white and ultimately leads to her demise.Footnote 10
Once the girl is bitten by a rabid dog, the colonial authorities—whether in the form of her parents, the medical establishment or, ultimately, the Catholic Church—attempt to reconcile Sierva María's marginality by providing alternative readings for her bodily difference. Regardless of the fact that she displays no signs of illness or possession, she nevertheless becomes the object of a cruel medical and religious inquisition that ultimately kills her; thus, the girl's persecution is in fact emblematic of the persecution of cultural difference in general and Africanness in particular (Reference OlsenOlsen 2002, 1067). Declaring “‘[s]he has only one family, and that family is white’” (Reference García MárquezGarcía Márquez 2008, 25), the Marquis removes Sierva María from her slave family while simultaneously ordering another female slave to care for Sierva María “as if [she] were Dominga de Adviento” (27). Unfortunately, yet unsurprisingly, this move marks the beginning of Sierva María's decline.
After having several doctors attempt to cure her—through treatments that only inflame her injured ankle bite further, thereby aggravating the appearance of illness—the Marquis finds his family the subject of discussion by the local Catholic bishop. Where Western (colonial) medicine—that is, the rational, earthly, concrete realm—is unable to improve or even explain Sierva María's condition, the equally Western but spiritual body of the Church enters the discussion in order to provide its own diagnosis and cure. Although the Church does not understand itself as being irrational (indeed, it likely sees itself as beyond any question of terrestrial reason), it nevertheless attempts to rationalize Sierva María's condition by determining that she is possessed by a demon. Unable to stand up to the bishop's call, the Marquis gives in and takes his daughter to the Convent of Santa Clara to undergo treatment: exorcism.
Bad Faith Love in the Colonial Context
In titling his work Del amor y otros demonios, García Márquez positions a certain form of love as one of several demonic forces present in the text. Likewise, blackness figures as a kind of ghostly apparition, which in García Márquez's novel serves to shed light on Colombia's troubled relationship with its Afro‐descendant heritage. Whereas the novel's critics have tended to focus on the ambiguous racial identity of Sierva María, my analysis centers on the disturbing eroticized relationship between the girl and the thirty‐six‐year‐old Catholic priest tasked with her exorcism, Cayetano Delaura.Footnote 11 Delaura's obsession with Sierva María, I argue, can ultimately be understood as a form of bad faith love, which, when read in the context of Fanon's reflections on the impossibility of interracial love within the colonial context, illuminates how coloniality has the potential to infect all ethical relationships under the colonial matrix of power.
As the novel's figure of colonialism par excellence, the Catholic Church asserts its power to dominate and define the other by seeking to exorcise all that is “African” under the guise of religion. As the bishop's protégé, Delaura at first appears to be a pious and dutiful priest. García Márquez turns the Church against itself, however, by introducing a disturbing romance plot that highlights the fetishization of blackness that can result when a culture exoticizes a part of itself. It soon becomes clear that Delaura's fascination with Sierva María is one premised on his understanding of her as deviant and in need of forceful submission in order to recuperate her humanity. Delaura's relationship with Sierva María can be fruitfully read through an interracial lens insofar as he serves as a representative of colonial power and self‐identifies with his Spanish heritage, while the girl not only self‐identifies as María Mandinga, but Delaura himself asserts that what the Church perceives as demonic in her are in fact “‘the customs of the blacks, learned by the girl as a consequence of the neglected condition in which her parents kept her’” (Reference García MárquezGarcía Márquez 2008, 91). Although Delaura momentarily backs down when the bishop challenges this perceived defiance, Delaura holds onto this idea, thereby amplifying his understanding of Sierva María as black. As an extension of the religious violence perpetrated in the service of colonization, then, Delaura's love for the girl transforms from a seemingly genuine concern for her well‐being to a desperate need to fulfill his own desires to become deviant through contact with her blackness.
Delaura's erotic obsession with Sierva María as a symbol of black deviance bursts through the narrative in several violent encounters he has with the girl. He reaps immeasurable pleasure from her defiant fury as he attempts to release Sierva María from the bonds that immobilize her in bed at the convent where she awaits exorcism. Sierva María resists, screaming “‘Leave me alone … . Don't touch me,’” and as if foreshadowing a subsequent sexualized encounter, Delaura
ignored her, and the girl loosed a sudden storm of spittle in his face. He persevered and offered the other cheek. Sierva María continued to spit at him. Again he turned his cheek, intoxicated by the gust of forbidden pleasure rising from his loins. He closed his eyes and prayed with all his soul while she continued to spit at him, her ferocity increasing with his pleasure, until she realized that her rage was useless. (117–18)
Delaura's desire is directly proportional to Sierva María's anger and resistance; her wild rage sends him into ecstasies linked to “forbidden pleasure” as he proverbially turns the other cheek. As the passage continues, the narrator at once appears to relay objective information while also clearly inhabiting Delaura's interpretation of this negative turn of events.
Then Delaura witnessed the fearful spectacle of one truly possessed. Sierva María's hair coiled with a life of its own, like the serpents of Medusa, and green spittle and a string of obscenities in idolatrous languages poured from her mouth. Delaura brandished his crucifix, put it up to her face, and shouted in terror.
“Get thee hence, infernal beast, whoever thou art.”
His shouts incited those of the girl, who was about to break the buckles on her straps. The frightened warder rushed in … . Delaura fled. (118)
Although the text suggests the possibility that the girl is indeed possessed, in my reading Sierva María is beginning to realize the limits of her agency. Her expressions of resistance and anger, embodied in her spitting at Delaura, are fruitless and she is left with no choice but to escalate her violent struggle. What appeared “the fearful spectacle of one truly possessed” in which the girl spoke “idolatrous languages” may very well have been the expression of María Mandinga, speaking the African languages in which she is fluent. Delaura's rebuking of the supposed demon within her colors the situation from his perspective. Her demonstrations of physical strength might appear to be signs of demonic possession; however, it is also possible the girl was simply struggling to break free. In any case, Delaura's forbidden lust is associated with expressions of Sierva María's deviance, whether we interpret that deviance to be a sign of possession or a sign of her Africanness.
In one particularly telling scene, Delaura finds himself secretly peering at Sierva María, who has by now become an infamous attraction in the province, as she poses for a formal portrait. “[C]overed in precious gems and with her hair spilling down to her feet,” Sierva María was “posing with the exquisite dignity of a black woman … . The intelligence with which she obeyed the artist was as admirable as her beauty. Cayetano fell into ecstasy. Sitting in the shadows and seeing her without being seen, he had more than enough time to erase any doubt from his heart” (105). As the object of a double gaze, Sierva María's eroticization is linked not only to her being seen by Delaura without being able to return his gaze, but also to her supposed blackness; readers cannot help but hear the echoes of the black Abyssinian slave prized for her beauty and displayed nude on the auction block, who was purchased for her weight in gold in the novel's first pages (8). In this scene, however, there is no implication that Sierva María is in blackface. Rather, Cayetano sees what he has come to desire in her: cultural otherness.
When Delaura's desire for Sierva María finally overtakes him, it is as if he is the one who is truly possessed.Footnote 12 Alone with the girl in her cell,
Cayetano, half in jest and half in earnest, dared to loosen the laces of Sierva María's bodice. She protected her bosom with both hands, and a bolt of fury appeared in her eyes and a flash of red burned on her forehead. Cayetano grasped her hands with his thumb and index finger, as if they were flames, and moved them away from her chest. She tried to resist, and he exerted a force that was tender but resolute. (126)
Sierva María's resistance here is not that of a coy lover, but rather that of a girl being forced to submit to another's will. Yet Delaura continues the seduction:
“Say it with me,” he told her. “Into your hand at last I have come vanquished.” She obeyed. “Where I know that I must die,” he continued, and opened her bodice with icy fingers. And she repeated the lines almost in a whisper, trembling with fear: “So that in myself alone it might be proven how deep the sword bites into conquered flesh.” Then he kissed her on the mouth for the first time. Sierva María's body shivered in a lament, emitted a tenuous ocean breeze, and abandoned itself to its fate. He passed his fingertips over her skin almost without touching her, and experienced for the first time the miracle of feeling himself in another body. (127)
Although critics have interpreted their relationship as one of mutual love, this disturbing encounter, rife with the imagery of violent conquest and death adds a heavy layer of doubt to Sierva María's ability to consent.Footnote 13
As with Delaura's ecstasy over Sierva María's furiously spitting at him, here again the girl's agency is ignored and she is pushed to succumb to Eurocentric patriarchal expectations. At the point of a would‐be climax to what is ultimately a failed attempt to consummate his relationship with her, “An inner voice told him how far he had been from the devil in his sleepless nights of Latin and Greek, his ecstasies of faith, the barren wastelands of his chastity, while she had lived with all the powers of untrammeled love in the hovels of the slaves” (127). Delaura thus solidifies his eroticized perception of Sierva María's deviant embodied knowledge, for in achieving physical contact with her, he imagines himself that much closer to what he envisions as the orgiastic, and thereby sinful, experience of love as viewed from the colonial perspective.
This troubling representation of colonial love—in this case, the love of Sierva María's perceived blackness—serves as a provocative illustration of Fanon's own diagnosis within the colonial setting, for as he writes, “an individual who loves Blacks is as ‘sick’ as someone who abhors them” (Reference FanonFanon 2008, 10). This is because, as Africana philosopher Lewis Gordon argues, the search for love is in part a search for “recognition that is also legitimation” by which “[t]he lover bestows a judgment on the world that the beloved should exist” (Reference GordonGordon 2015, 34). Although Sierva María gives no indication that she seeks Delaura's legitimizing love, the priest himself is motivated by his contradictory impulse to tame her otherness in order to legitimize her existence, even as he is drawn to her deviance. As a representative of the Catholic Church, Delaura is tasked with the eradication of sin, which here is racialized as black. Even after acknowledging that what the Church has deemed diabolical is actually the girl's cultural otherness, he nevertheless remains bent on her reeducation, as evidenced by his persistence in reciting Spanish love poetry to her whenever they meet. As such, he is unable to fully legitimate her existence, to fix her as legible within the colonial matrix of power, even as he acknowledges the necessity to do so in order to prevent her death, a goal at which he ultimately fails. Indeed, Sierva María's death by exorcism at the hands of the bishop confirms that living between worlds as the young girl does is a dangerous ambiguity that must be expelled.
Delaura's claims of loving Sierva María do not indicate his acceptance of her racial ambiguity; rather, his obsession with her as deviant illuminates his own desire to see her as a symbol of all that he is forbidden as a priest living under the colonial matrix of power. The only way he can relate to Sierva María is through his obsession with her blackness, as evidenced by his eroticization of her otherness—be it her speaking in “idolatrous languages,” her “black dignity,” or her supposed knowledge of the kind of love experienced by the slaves with whom she grew up. He wishes to live her deviance vicariously, to be one with her in order to experience it, but his recurring Catholic guilt keeps him from taking the plunge. In the end, Delaura is punished for his transgressions, first by being officially forbidden to see Sierva María again, as he is no longer her exorcist, and later, when he is cast out of the convent and into the leper hospital after he is caught during one of his illicit night visits to the girl. In the end, the only way he can relate to Sierva María is through his fetishization of her blackness, and in playing out this drama, García Márquez pushes his readers to consider whether other kinds of love are possible that may help overcome the denial of Colombia's black heritage.
A Love That Will Not Die
After Delaura is exiled to Amor de Dios Hospital to serve his sentence as a nurse caring for lepers, the bishop takes over Sierva María's exorcism with a vengeance, and this, paired with the girl's unwillingness to eat for a week, ultimately kills her. This brutal end to the novel emblematizes the deadly nature of colonial love, for in the eyes of the Church the loss of Sierva María's body is nothing compared to that of her soul. Indeed, the narrator's cryptic description of the dead girl holds new meaning when read within the context of colonial and decolonial love: “The warder who came in to prepare her for the sixth session of exorcism found her dead of love in her bed, her eyes radiant and her skin like that of a newborn baby” (Reference García MárquezGarcía Márquez 2008, 147; emphasis added). Sierva María's culturally ambiguous status requires her total elimination by the overzealous colonial structure that demands her submission and sanctions her torture and death by exorcism in the name of Christian love. Her corporeal demise thus exemplifies the colonial pathologization of blackness.
Yet to understand this to be the final moral of the story would be to miss the larger import of the novel. For even as Sierva María is described as dying of what we can now recognize as colonial love, the final lines of the text remind readers of her ongoing spiritual life, which I argue must ultimately be understood as made possible by Dominga's decolonial love. In addition to her radiant eyes and baby‐like skin—images that harken back to the scene of Sierva María's birth—“[s]trands of hair gushed like bubbles as they grew back on her shaved head” (147), an inexplicable act that echoes both Dominga's life‐giving promise and the novel's opening.
In the preface, García Márquez‐as‐author narrates the occasion during which the young author‐as‐journalist attends the demolition of the Convent of Santa Clara, which was to be converted into a five‐star hotel. During the excavation the workers find the final resting place of a young “marquesita” named Sierva María de Todos los Ángeles, and as they open her tomb they are surprised to find that from the remains of the skull extend over twenty‐two meters of red hair. The foreman seems unimpressed, remarking matter‐of‐factly that human hair continues to grow after death, but García Márquez takes this discovery much more to heart:
The impassive foreman explained that human hair grew a centimeter a month after death, and twenty‐two meters seemed a good average for two hundred years. I, on the other hand, did not think it so trivial a matter, for when I was a boy my grandmother had told me the legend of a little twelve‐year‐old marquise with hair that trailed behind her like a bridal train, who had died of rabies caused by a dog bite and was venerated in the towns along the Caribbean coast for the many miracles she had performed. The idea that the tomb might be hers was my news item for the day, and the origin of this book. (4–5)
By highlighting his grandmother's transmission of the legend of Sierva María, which itself was told throughout the Caribbean and which the author learned as a child, García Márquez sheds doubt on the supposed scientific claims made by the foreman. That is, although the foreman attempts to rationalize the continued growth through mathematics (twenty‐two meters of post‐mortem growth equals two hundred years), García Márquez turns to the oral histories to which he had access as a child for a more likely explanation, thereby priming the reader to approach the text that follows with an open mind. In this way García Márquez suggests that oral testimony, originating from below and which contradicts imperialist rationalizations, may hold more truth than “factual” historical narratives, such as those that deny the African influence on the Caribbean. In short, Sierva María's unending life serves to emphasize oral culture, including but not limited to black culture, over and against written, Eurocentric narrative.Footnote 14
García Márquez's return to orality, paired with the life‐affirming role of Dominga de Adviento, a figure whose name is the feminized version of “advent Sunday,” a holy day that anticipates the birth of a savior, renders the novel a subversive testament to the power of decolonial love. For upon a closer reading, it is Sierva María's induction into the Caribbean world of syncretism that allows her story, oral and written, to persist into the present day. In this way the novel encourages readers to “think decolonially” by shifting the balance of power away from the Eurocentric perspective and toward that of the marginalized and oppressed, thereby exposing this underside by working to recover and revalue its epistemological claims, in particular with regard to questions of being. To love decolonially is to heal the wound that rejects the other within, to acknowledge the “third meaning” of love that embraces the ambiguity and unknowability of the other, and to unleash the transformative power of that love. That this conception of love makes the forces of coloniality extremely uncomfortable is reason enough to read these kinds of stories as sources of new ways of knowing, for as Sandoval reminds us, “[i]t is love that can access and guide our theoretical and political ‘movidas’—revolutionary maneuvers toward decolonized being” (Reference SandovalSandoval 2000, 141). In this way, Sandoval urges feminist love studies to explore notions of love that complicate our understanding of normative categories, suggesting that we go beyond the hegemonic binaries that perpetuate the colonial wound, thereby shedding light on that which is in most dire need of healing: intersubjective relation. Sandoval's decolonial love, then, aims to direct our attention toward decolonial healing, calling us to address the wounds of coloniality by attending to the experiences of those most marginalized in order to make ethical, loving, and human relation possible.
