Tag: Colombia

After the night, day breaks: The Brush by Eliana Hernández-Pachón

Pablo and Ester live in the hills. Their children are grown. Their lives are simple, bound to the land, but lately there have been signs, omens. Pablo is concerned:

For some time now
he’s felt a heavy change pressing the air,
and can’t explain it.
Like when
he walks through town at night,
and when he hears the animals
can’t sleep.

Sensing danger, he gathers some papers and items in a box and goes out to bury it while Ester sleeps. And then they come.

Between the 16th and the 21st of February, 2000, members of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia descended upon the Montes de Maria region and attacked the people:

During this incident, known as the Massacre of El Salado, paramilitary forces tortured, slashed, decapitated, and sexually assaulted the defenseless population, forcing their relatives and neighbors to watch the executions. Throughout, the militiamen played drums they found in the village cultural center and blasted music on speakers they took from people’s homes.

Sixty people were killed. The Colombian Marine Corps battalion charged with protecting the area was nowhere in sight—they had withdrawn the day before the massacre began. With The Brush, a taut work of narrative poetry, Colombian poet and educator Eliana Hernández-Pachón draws on the official 2009 report on the massacre to bring the story of this brutal event into focus in an unusual and affecting manner.

The tragedy of this horror exists on many levels—the unimaginable terror of the attack itself which was not an isolated event, the lingering trauma of the survivors, and the years of fighting for a formal apology and reparations from the government. As a story well-known within Colombia, the poet says in an interview that “if I was going to tell it anew, then I would need a new form.” Her approach is to pass the account on to several distinct characters or voices and allow these diverse perspectives to carry the varied layers of this tragedy.

The first of three sections belongs to Pablo who has reason to be worried about the growing tensions. He will not survive the attack. The second part belongs to the thoughts of Ester, his wife, in the days that follow. She wonders where Pablo is, what might have happened, heading out into the brush to try to find him. And then…

Crossing the glade, she sees
a shadow vanish
in a glimmer of undergrowth.
Hey! she shouts.
And the woman approaches warily
leading a little girl by the hand.
A whisper first, and now her clearer voice:
They did it to me with a knife, the woman says
and points to a mark on her arm.
They also did things
I can’t talk about.

Knowing it is unsafe to return, the two women and child are now forced to keep moving through the brush.

In the third section, the Brush—the dense, living forest vegetation—is granted it own direct, poetic voice. It is The Brush that stands as witness, to sights, sounds and sensations, from the crushing footfalls of the approaching militants and falling bodies in the town square, to the careful movement through the forest of survivors, and, finally, to the blossoms and blooms that will welcome those who eventually return.

In conversation with The Brush’s testimony, Hernández-Pachón engages input from The Investigators and The Witnesses. These perspectives, drawn from official sources, define and correct one another, while the Brush adds its own comments and clarifications. The human choruses are presented in prose, but even if the Witnesses’ offerings are more poetic in tone, both stand in sharp tonal contrast with the lyrical, omniscient voice of the Brush. The Brush, it turns out, can tell a tale of horror and grief that people, especially those who have been victimized, are often unable to fully articulate.

The questions still survive:
what does it think about, the brush, somnambulist,
after it’s seen it all?
The day that follows night returns
its artifice, the well-known
interlocking of the hours:
how is it that time didn’t stop,
why do the grain’s unopened eyes
keep growing?

A disconcerting calmness rests over this book-length sequence of poems that, in a mere 57 pages, manages to capture the contradictions and harmonies that arise in response to acts of extreme violence. That calmness serves to unsettle the reader and honour the survivors, while placing this event within a wider ecosystem and granting a voice to nature, the one force, perhaps, that can truly offer both understanding and healing.

The Brush by Eliana Hernández-Pachón with an Afterword by Héctor Abad is translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers and published by Archipelago Books.

Imagining a life lost: In the Beginning was the Sea by Tomás González

For aspiring novelists, the greatest inspiration sometimes lies very close to home – at the heart of their own families. And most often, it is not a happy circumstance they are seeking to reconcile when setting pen to paper.

seaIn the late 1970s Colombian author Tomás González was struggling to build a career for himself as a writer. The murder of his brother Juan, on a farm where he had retreated to find a refuge, would provide the central focus of his debut novel In the Beginning was the Sea, first published in 1983, but not released in English until 2014.

There is a distinctly sober, calculated tone to this tale of J. and his girlfriend Elena, two faded hippies who seek to escape a life of drugs, alcohol, and partying in Medellín by purchasing and moving to a remote tropical farm. J. dreams of a simpler life, a new beginning. It soon becomes clear that he has absolutely no business sense at all. He repeatedly allows himself to be swindled and makes a series of reckless investments. As his debts mount, he demonstrates an uncanny ability to dig himself in deeper, disregarding the warnings of those around him. To add insult to injury, Elena and J. have a volatile relationship at best – one that the isolation of their new home does nothing to mediate. She tends to be caustic and unpleasant, especially to the native blacks who work for her or live in the area. The dislike is instantly reciprocated. J. is much more affable with the locals, a nature lubricated by increasingly copious quantities of cheap alcohol. But as time goes on, his world continues to spiral downward. In the end, as we are repeatedly warned, it will cost him his life.

As the story unfolds, González maintains an emotional distance from his subjects, but he excels at bringing the tropical farm to life. His language is highly evocative.

“Smells. The murky smell of the mangrove swamps carried sometimes on the breeze. The musky, resinous smell of crabs, dead and still raw. The smell of paddocks pounded by the immovable hammer of the noonday sun. The smell of mingled smoke and coffee from the kitchen. The lunchtime smell of fried fish, fried plantains, the heavy scent of
coconut rice. The smell of the suntan lotions and the moisturizers that made Elena’s skin more perfect.”

If there is a weakness here, it is the lack of a solid reference for the hostile and unpleasant behaviour Elena demonstrates throughout this novel. From the opening scenes where her precious sewing machine is damaged, we see a woman who refuses to tolerate any perceived incompetence in others. One is left to wonder what is behind this and what she ever saw in J. A history of divorce and depression is hinted at. His weaknesses are examined a little more closely and we know that he is torn between attraction and frustration with Elena, and that he harbours a deep personal sense of despair and failure. But again, the why’s are never fully explored.

Though some factors or circumstances may, in truth, defy full explanation; In the Beginning was the Sea does draw to a close with an imaginative and heartbreaking elegy, perhaps the one of the finest moments in the entire book.

Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2015: Pushkin Press deserves to be praised for bringing long ignored works and authors to an English speaking audience. Frank Wynne’s translation is clear and vivid. I hope we will see some of González’s more mature work available in the future.

Literary prescription: The Sound of Things Falling

I am now a few weeks beyond the significant manic episode that has ground my life and work to a halt and precipitated a sudden crash into depression, anger and frustration. The crisis did not happen overnight and the healing will take time but I feel some measure of relief that my ability to lose myself in a book has been returning. Some additional anti-anxiety meds are helping too but I am trying to remain open to literary whims – reviews, suggestions from readers I respect, stray quotes that catch my attention. It seems to be critical medicine for me.

Fortunately there is also that wellspring of rewarding fictional riches, The International Impac Dublin Literary Award. Each year nominations are commissioned from public libraries around the world to create an extensive longlist from which a shortlist of 10 titles is ultimately drawn. It is inevitable that works in translation tend to feature prominently both  in the shortlist and among the archive of winners. Purists can argue over the Booker all they want, this is the award I watch.

winner_slide_2014This year’s winner, just announced in June, is The Sounds of Things Falling by Colombian author Juan Gabriel Vasquez, translated by Canadian Anne McLean. This book had been waiting on my ereader for some time, but in light of its recent honour, I thought it might be time for a closer look. A few pages in and I was hooked. Billed as a literary thriller I was expecting a perhaps an entertaining diversion from my own troubles but in truth I soon found myself  deep in a remarkably intimate account of the impact that traumatic experiences have on those directly effected and those around them in ways we often are powerless to predict or prevent. Whether the trauma results from actions chosen or events over which an individual has little or no control the fallout over days, month and years can lead to fateful decisions, ruptured relationships and deep wounds. At the core of this novel are two strangers, brought together through an act of violence who find temporary refuge in a sharing their own experiences of coming of age in Bogota at the height of the drug fueled wars of the 1970 and 80s.

Personally, as I struggle to make sense of the pressures, stresses and events that collaborated to make such a mess of my recent months, it is difficult not to vacillate between anger and regret. Although I know that mood disorders play havoc from the inside out and that the person who is suffering knows something is wrong, they may be slow or even unable to define the nature of the condition, and most certainly incapable of stopping it on a dime. Playing the “if only” card serves no significant benefit. As Vasquez’s narrator Antonio muses as he sets to record the experiences he wishes to share:

“There is no more disastrous mania, no more dangerous whim than the speculation over roads not taken.”

I was able to lose myself in this novel but it did not serve as quite the distraction I expected from a “literary thriller”. There was a disturbing real world resonance that I could not have anticipated. The Sounds of Things Falling is more than simply a title, it is an experience repeated and echoed throughout the novel. From a airshow stunt gone terribly wrong, to a fatal drive by shooting, to the devastating crash of a jetliner. Because a key character was a pilot, de Saint-Exupéry‘s The Little Prince also features as a beloved childhood tale. It was disturbing to imagine the little prince asking the pilot if he also fell out of the sky when bodies were literally falling out of the sky as Malaysia Airlines MH17 exploded over a disputed region of the Ukraine.

Trauma, small and personal or wide-reaching and global and all shades in between have always marked human existence. It divides and unites us in large and small ways. the complexity of that experience is, for me, one of the primary themes explored in this worthy literary award winner.