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Authority and the colonization within

Finished Annihilation's sequel Authority, book 2 of the Southern Reach series, and it's very important to me that in a book about colonization that happens through you and inside you the most pivotal characters are mixed race, all 3(?) being half-white. Not just for representation samesies reasons, but because of how thematically relevant it is. A "purity" that wants to override— or overwrite— you, pushing you always to properly assimilate. From the first book, "Desolation tries to colonize you".

John Rodriguez, "Control", has a latino father and a white mother. One he loved dearly and lost to cancer, and another who he resents while relentlessly trying to make himself into. And failing.

I saw someone say that the reason there's so much reference to race and ethnicity in Control's narration (quite unlike the biologist's in Annihilation) is because he works as an anti-terrorism agent for the ambiguously named Central. But I saw the reason quite a bit differently, at least meta-textually. Control's anti-terrorism work was, at least of what we see in the text, always around right-wing white nationalist groups.

Rather, there are multiple times he recalls being discriminated against for being latino. Being called a slur, noting places that were dangerous to visit if you "couldn't pass as white", the contempt he faced from white peers and white strangers. He uses "the good old boys" as a term of derision. He isn't profiling people, at least not in the Special Agent way. John Rodriguez is constantly, ambiently noting power dynamics around race and gender.

He notes the former director and the assistant director are both women of color to acknowledge how much more difficult it would have been for them to have reached their positions. He enters Ghost Bird's room/cell and immediately realizes the power he holds over her, what a powerful man might do to a vulnerable woman. He helps a velvet ant off a woman's neck in response to her distress, and notes that she probably left so quickly because a strange man had touched her neck.

Control is a hispanic man constantly aware of how others might perceive him as a threat, a predator. He is the one who is constantly getting stuck on the semantics of calling the space where reality and Area X meet a "border".

His memories with his dad's side of the family are all of connection and vivid color, whereas those of his mom and grandfather are cold and disconnected. His maternal grandfather tried to lure him to a lingerie show(?) as an excuse to give his preteen grandson a gun(???) to bring him closer to the family career, whereas his abuelo and abuela are lovingly rendered as carved chess pieces that he keeps as bastions of comfort.

Area X colonizes you from the inside out. Area X is desolate, pure.

Area X infects not through language, but as if "the message were a knife and it created its meaning by cutting into meat and your head is the receiver and the tip of that knife is being shoved into your ear over and over again". Meaning created not from the words but what they contained inside of them, like the hate packed into a slur that on its own is "just a word". Like the advice of adults who claim to know more about the world, but lie to you about it "for your own good" so all you're left with is maxims you repeat by rote.

It is the dynamics of power that through the messages hidden in words shove you where they believe you should be. Power dynamics enforced and reinforced. Hierarchies maintained through obfuscation and reprimand. Control, through hypnosis.

John Rodriguez is renting a house in a town he used to visit with his friends on the weekends as a teenager. The town has been gentrified. What once was gravel is now paved roads. What once he knew like the back of his hand is now a stranger. The same town or one entirely new, depending on how you land with the Ship of Theseus.

Control is latino. The biologist is asian. The director is indigenous. All three are colonized by Area X, inside and through them. They are changed by a force that wishes to purify them by eradicating their history and subsuming their identity.

When John Rodriguez is in Whitby's crawlspace, turning away from the man hiding on a shelf, looking back at the mural where he is a hare with a leviathan behind him, the hand that reaches out to pet the back of his head is white. The Voice that has been controlling him without his knowledge is that of Lowry, a white man.

The dopplegangers spat out by Area X refer to it, longingly, as pristine. Untouched by humanity. The land Area X eradicated upon its creation is called the Lost Coast. It's no coincidence that the indigenous former director had lived there as a child, that she goes back on her own. It's no coincidence either when Rodriguez mentions that the town he lives in, the town he once knew, was built atop the remains of an indigenous settlement.

Desolation tries to colonize you.

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