The Paroxysm That Makes Us Identical

This chapter examines one of the first stories to appear in English by Colombian writer Evelio Rosero, “Brides by Night,” and his first novel to reach an international audience, The Armies . Both works shift the focus from the political violence that has become the cliché with which Colombia tends to be identified to a more general violence against women. While “Brides by Night” appeared in a collection of stories of violence and war from Colombia, it makes no mention of the Colombian conflicts and could have been written anywhere. This chapter argues that it is the point of the collection at which the non-historical or noncontextualisable within Colombian violence, the universality of gender violence, erupts. In The Armies , Colombian violence is shot through with Rosero&s;s narrator Ismael&s;s desire for his beautiful neighbour Geraldina. Ismael&s;s erotic fantasy unfurls alongside our own, exotic Colombian one, as Rosero sets a scene replete with the imagery and tropes of magical realism before both idylls succumb to violence. This chapter draws the connection between Ismael&s;s voyeurism as objective violence against the female Other and the objective violence of Northern audiences constructing the Colombian Other caught between magical realism and violence.