“Out of Place and Time”: The Queer Time and Space of Milton Hatoum’s the Brothers

Abstract

According to Juana María Rodríguez (2010) queer perspectives allow bodies and acts to be disentangled from preconditioned meanings regarding normative conceptualisations of the world that surrounds us (p. 338), while, to Stuart Hall (1996), the postcolonial allows deviating cultural movements to proliferate, thence contributing to the deconstruction and decentralisation of essentialist Eurocentric discourses (p. 248). Taking that into account, the context of this essay comprises Milton Hatoum’s novel The Brothers (2002), aiming at identifying how Milton Hatoum problematises the space and time of the Amazon as interpreted by hegemonic discourses. Therefore, promoting a profitable bridge between queer perspectives and the postcolonial subject, this study analyses how Hatoum’s narrator positioning on a postmodern margin, as articulated by Santiago Colás (1994), debunks the mainstream linearity of Western imaginary. The Amazon of The Brothers (2002) (re)presents a world significant in itself, rather than an empty stage of human development, wherein time and space are no longer so easily encapsulated as hegemony wishes. The conclusion, hence, demystifies a singular construction of history recurrently questioned by Eduardo Galeano (1997) since it poses that “there is no other way” (p. 4) for a space to develop. There are, actually, many.