2023-12-14 18:34:31
Kiepja doesn’t even try to grab the teacup, nor does she look comfortable in the long, baggy dress. Kiepja, don’t you want to belong to that nation that was built on your dead? How can you not love that bloody country with your loved ones? The camera films and observes you and, from symbolic power, it violates you in another way: it tries to make you something that you do not, cannot and do not want to be.
It is the night of December 8 when I look at you, but sitting a little cold as I see The Colonists (Chile, 2023), at the Chaplin cinema, in the 44th edition of the International Latin American Film Festival. The film (directed by Felipe Gálvez) takes place in a half-empty room – there was no silence, however, because parts of the audience break that pact of sealing their lips – and narrates the journey of Segundo, a mestizo Chilean, a former English captain and a American mercenary who surrounded the lands granted to the Spanish landowner José Menéndez (played by Alfredo Castro) under his orders and without the slightest respect for the native communities that lived in Tierra del Fuego.
On the way they will find you, Kiepja, and your defiant image synthesizes the spirit of the film, of a visual and sound portrait of colonization, of the denunciation made from beauty.
Your look carries more power than the bullet that killed the Selk’nam (ona) people. Where there could have been infinite pain there was defiance. The Ona people suffered the violence of the genocide, of death and displacement, but also of all the cultural devices that the settlers deploy to justify the massacre. “They are not people, they are beasts,” they will say and present themselves as your saviors. You, on the other hand, close the film with the most beautiful eyes that exist, those that challenge and resist colonial power.
I go out to 23rd Street and the night is a succession of people talking in front of the movie Strawberry and Chocolate. I stay with your defiant face in my memory and between your eyes, the magnificent performance of Mishell Guaña, the horrendous dress they made you wear and the street lights, I remember the essayist and thinker, Aníbal Quijano.
In the film, human relationships are established on racist categories and power is a colonial mechanism to appropriate land and kill.
I had, long before, a marked quote from his book The coloniality of power: “The formation of the colonial power of capitalism gave rise to a power structure whose crucial elements were, especially in their combination, a historical novelty. On the one hand, the articulation of various relations of exploitation and work—slavery, servitude, reciprocity, wages, small commercial production—around capital and its market. On the other hand, the new production of historical identities ‘Indian’, ‘black’, ‘white’, ‘mestizo’, imposed as basic categories of relations of domination and as the foundation of a culture of racism and ethnicism.”
From the beginning, the film explores those master-servant relationships that are marked by power and violence. The first scene can be shocking: “a man with one less arm is one less man”, thus explaining the fate of the men who in Patagonia are exposed to enslaved work and death, not even being a problem for the masters. .
From the first scenes, the hierarchy is also clear, between men and women (white wives who take care of the home or Indian women who kill, exploit or rape), and also between white people, the Ona people and people who are racialized as mestizo. . Suspicion falls on the latter during the trip and is expressed from the beginning of the feature film: who will he shoot if necessary? Human relations here are established on racist categories, power is a colonial mechanism to appropriate land, fence, fence, fence… it is routine, killing too.
And the best thing is that in the midst of such a complex issue, which takes a genocide as its essential point, there is room for humor, a reflective humor about the colonists, the white Europeans who in Latin America held a power that they did not have. in their countries of origin. It is a film that laughs at Eurocentric thinking, it ridicules it.
Colonialism, as a political system, gave way to types of social relations and subjectivities marked by racism. This explains the character of Josefina Menéndez, who presents herself as the savior of one’s childhood, while justifying her genocide (any similarity with the Palestinian people is not coincidental: the genocidaires always find the most convoluted excuses to act like the victims).
Before the official who comes to report from the capital, Josefina Menéndez displays all her racism and classism; acts as if the differences between indigenous communities and people like them were based on biological inequalities, on the superiority of whiteness, and not on concrete social inequalities, on a process of colonization and extermination that at that time did not exist. completed and has not yet been repaired. For this character and her father, José Menéndez, the murder of the Ona was more than justified and they based their defense on the most profound dehumanization. Turning them into beasts and “non-humans” justified the crimes.
The story told by Felipe Gálvez describes unjust social relations and denounces the cloak of silence of colonialism.
“The peculiar combination of ‘racism’ and ‘ethnicism’ developed since then to become a central element of power throughout the world, especially between the European and the non-European,” says Aníbal Quijano, and again it is not fortuitous. the permanent distinction between people based on their skin color. Second (played by Camilo Arancibia) will be seen as the other, an intermediate and incomplete being; This will not prevent abuse or being forced to commit violence, be an accomplice, or die.
Nor is it the result of chance that the figure of the priest who is a friend of the colonial power appears, of the priest who accompanies the owner in his crusade for capital, whiteness and against what is non-European. Religion on our continent extended its mantle over genocide for a long time, being part of the process that was said to be civilizing but resulted in the appropriation and assimilation of cultures and peoples.
The fact that Europe was already the hegemonic center justifies the power burden of characters like the Scottish soldier, MacLenan (played by Mark Stanley), who lies and defines himself as an English captain. From the care of the script, the acting rigor, the sound and the open shots – the landscapes are, according to the director, another character and the immensity and beauty of the scene contrasts with the loneliness of the three men – the story describes unjust social relations and denounces the great lie of colonialism and the silence that covered it.
Kiepja, that official who neither restores nor repairs calls you Rosa. You don’t listen to him, it’s obvious. That nation is not yours, although your bones are the seed.
Taken from The Bearded Caiman
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