Narrative Complicity in Evelio Rosero’s Stories of Violence from Colombia

From The Armies (2007/2008) to Toño the Infallible (2017/2022), work by the Colombian writer Evelio Rosero that has been translated into English has brought something that exceeds the popular (to the point of clichéd) story of Colombian violence. Specifically, Rosero’s writing reveals our narrative or readerly complicity in violence: not only that for which Colombia became notorious during the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries, but in a generalized violence against the Other. The narrator of The Armies, a retired schoolteacher called Ismael Pasos, affectionately known as profesor, and Toño the Infallible, a writer called Heriberto Salgado, who goes by Eri, are both so libidinally invested in the perpetrators of violence that the line between bearing witness to the suffering of the victims and bearing responsibility for it begins to blur. Despite themselves and their protestations to the contrary, they pursue violence, particularly against women and other vulnerable groups, and facilitate its spectacle in both excruciating and poetic detail. This article argues that in the context of world literature, Rosero’s narrators are redoubled by an audience in the Global North whose voracious appetite for exceptional Colombian violence blurs the line between curiosity, consumption, and complicity