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Using Jean Allouch’s analysis of the novel The Ring Finger by Yoko Ogawa, this paper will question the term “naturalization,” arguing that its polysemous use in French symptomatically pairs colonial violence with mourning. I interpret this odd coupling using Éric Vuillard’s exploration of colonialism in his 2016 novel Sorrow of the Earth. Introducing the notion of archival violence, defined as violence by the archive and against the archive, allows us to differentiate between these two modalities of naturalization in the mourning process (or its impossibility) and to give an account of each. The first is what I call “naturalization-extortion.” It considers naturalization as constitutive of colonial violence, and links it to the distortion of the love object. It further shows that it is a consequence of the narrative that finally legitimizes the total transparency of the “wholly Other.” This persecutory radical Otherness deprives the mourner a priori of the very possibility of mourning. In the second account, “naturalization” is the name given to the mourning operation, as suggested by Allouch in his analysis of The Ring Finger, thus echoing the closing of Vuillard’s book. Picking up the various strands of these three texts (Ogawa’s, Allouch’s, and Vuillard’s) this paper attempts to open up a new avenue for interpretation of the work of some post-colonial authors in whose texts opacity becomes the site in which the violence of this transparent and persecutory narrative is thematized.