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Nevertheless, the boundaries established through binarisms were broken down by decolonization processes and reappropriation of an identity ripped from the native at the moment of conquest and colonization. It was this process of “conquest, colonization, and destruction” of the native in the New World that created binary patterns of identification that separated not only the colonized from his roots but made difficult any understanding between the colonizer and the colonized subject (Walder 31). In identifying India as the precursor to the process of decolonization, scholar Dennis Walder states that independence in India signaled the deconstruction of colonial control and the attempt at reconstructing a future without a native past (39). This liberation signaled the beginning of a rehistoricizing of the self and an attempt at recreating the past, aiming its process of reappropriation and reconstruction toward developing a new identity.
The consequences of any colonialist process are clear; the colonizer controls the colonized by appropriating land, language, and identity. The colonizer sees the colonized as he would view the land and anything else native to the colony but foreign to the colonizer—it is the wilderness, nature, uncivilized, dirty, and unproductive. It is something that must be civilized, tamed, cleaned up, made productive, and put to work for his own well-being. This is where the conflict between the colonized and the colonizer arises and a conflict that Reinaldo Arenas presents in his writing: The values of the colonizer are considered superior to the values of the colonized. In Arenas’ case, the values imposed through a revolutionary collective consciousness had to be accepted as more valuable and important than those of the individual, which meant internalizing them, which made any postcolonial transition difficult.
The colonizer never accepts the colonized, regardless of how well he adapts the colonizer’s ways, and is forced to replace his