Tag: Robin Myers

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 The Colombian Marine Corps battalion charged with protecting the area was nowhere in sight—they had withdrawn the day before the massacre began.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.

Searching for the ever elusive “I”: The Book of Explanations by Tedi López Mills

Lately, when I imagine, I remember. Then I shift into a peaceful kind of forgetfulness. And I start to imagine again, remembering. Like a circle that’s no longer vicious because it erases its own trail, little by little, always resketching its outline for the first time.

How much of identity is memory? It would seem that the experience of being in the world is dependent on memory because each moment, as it passes, becomes part of an ever accumulating past—a past that gives coherency to the existential “I.” Yet, can what we think we know about ourselves help us live with our choices, idiosyncrasies, strengths and faults? In her inventive and intelligent collection of personal essays, The Book of Explanations, Mexican poet and writer Tedi López Mills begins with a look at a most basic question of identity, her “improper” (read: “unconventional”) name, followed by playfully distinctive explorations and dissections of the nature of memory. These opening pieces set the groundwork for a journey that will carry us through many of the experiences, influences, values and ideals that make her who she is and, by extension, any one of us who we are—or might be—because, after all, what can anyone ever really know for certain?

I don’t know the history of the fourteen essays—cleverly numbered from 0 through 13— that comprise The Book of Explanations. That is, I cannot tell if the original 2012 collection was assembled from previously published pieces or intended as a cohesive work from the outset, but it definitely succeeds as a whole. López Mills’ style is eclectic and fresh; her essays open up in unexpected directions, adopting different forms and approaches from piece to piece. She is always very much present, drawing on memories and personal experience, but even her more memoirish essays swing toward broader social, psychological and philosophical questions.

After her early forays into the nature of remembering, López Mills turns her attention to that strange period of often dark introspection otherwise known as adolescence and to reflections on the peculiarities of family dynamics. As a teenager, the author, or  her possible alter ego/alternate “I,” falls into to some classically heavy reading—Hesse, Nietzsche—in search of formulative role models. On her family’s frequently uprooted home front, her father, an eccentric, frustrated architect of dreams and schemes, is an unpredictable but memorable character while her mother is the stabilizing presence. She explores the lasting impact of her childhood in the essay “Father, Mother, Children,” where she posits: “Maybe there are no happy families, just happy days. I remember them because they’re always flanked by unhappy ones.” Her father, she says, was “erratic, original every day,” her mother “homogenous, predictable.” She is tempted to imagine who her mother might have been without children, although that necessarily imagines the imaginer out of existence. This leads into a fascinating observation about childlessness—her own situation which she insists is neither right or wrong—and its implications:

You belong to yourself, and in the end you may realize that your persona dims if you don’t put it at risk; you start melting away into a nervous, perfectionist mind. The influence of childlessness may even be more shocking, a deprivation so intense that it triggers hallucinations of a crowd as you rummage around, hearing no one’s noise. A fictitious identity, if forced and constant. While there’s no room for regret—you can’t undo what was never done—there’s an extravagant kind of nostalgia. You miss the future, not the past.

Either option, parenting or childlessness, simply puts you on one side of anguish or the other. And as a parent, I would add that you can experience an extravagant kind of nostalgia as well. In fact, I suspect that we all have some aspects of our lives in which it is the future we miss, not the past.

From one essay to the next, López Mills, examines those notions that intrigue or trouble her, or both. Her affection for cats, the pervasive and evasive nature of guilt (a regular evening visitor), what makes some people prone to jealousy (something she does not experience) and what makes others “good” (something she would like to be). She defends pessimism in what is essentially an essay about Cioran, makes some astute observations of the way we show or fail to show compassion for those in need and, finally, engages in a spirited Wittgensteinian-like investigation of wisdom by way of by Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus and the Bhagavad Gita with plenty of introspective musing unfolding over 54 short reflections.

Not only is López Mills an engaging companion with a philosopher’s tendency to question and a poet’s sensitive attention to language, she puts herself—as the typically uncertain “I”—into all of the subjects she explores in a way that is always thoughtful and recognizable. This is a book filled with so many intriguing thoughts and ideas, but it is never intimidating or alienating. At a time when “genre-bending” essays have become quite popular, I sensed something here that I have not found in other similarly described collections. I suspect it may have to do with age. Although I grew up in a different environment and my soul searching may have had some differing triggers along the way, I had a sense from early in this collection that the author had to be close to my own age. There were no particular pop culture references to cling to but rather a shared atmosphere of being a teenager in the seventies, and a certain accumulated, well, wisdom. I finally looked her bio up online and discovered that she was born in 1959 and is just one year older than I am. Even though this book, first published in Spanish in 2012, was probably compiled when she was in her early fifties, I felt I was reading a contemporary.

It’s so easy to believe we know it all when young, but the older you get the more you realize how naïve your younger self was and the more you appreciate how little you ever really understand about who you are. At fifty or sixty, you may care less what others think in explicit terms, but that doesn’t mean you stop trying to figure out what it all means at the end of the day. As with one of my heroes, Michel Leris, who differs greatly from López Mills in style but not in intent, there is this unending desire to catch oneself in the act of being and examine a subject—the elusive “I”—which can really only be observed in passing. Both writers know we can look back at what we remember, but in the moment we are fluid beings and what we remember is always being reimagined. There will always be more questions than answers.

And that’s okay.

The Book of Explanations by Tedi López Mills is translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers and published by Deep Vellum.