“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)

This chapter presents an analysis of works by Francisco Goldman and Jennifer Harbury, which deal with "cataclysmic moments" of Guatemalan history. It explores gender relations in these works with reference to three themes: storytelling, communication and affective relationships. The chapter focuses on the notions of decolonial love, the coloniality of gender, and the world gender order as categories of analysis. The coloniality of gender and decolonial love are explored through their interactions with masculinities and femininities across the different case studies. The possibility of decolonial love is turned into a battle of seduction, and the role of the storyteller is that of an accomplished strategist. 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.