The Brush by Eliana Hernández-Pachón
Archipelago Books (2024)
A Review

In the opening section of Eliana Hernández-Pachón’s The Brush, a man, Pablo, buries a wooden box that he and his wife, Ester, keep in their bedside table drawer. The contents, “a chain, a medallion, some envelopes,” are of negligible value—yet, like the “dead creatures” their cat leaves as morning presents on the doorstep, “a hummingbird heavy as an orange…then a snake, a mouse,” they feel imbued with foreboding. Indeed, “for some time now,” Pablo’s attunement to the non-human—peeling tobacco leaves, collecting rocks, picking flowers—has hinted toward catastrophe:

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.

Still, he carries on with mundanity—eats a silent dinner, grows angry at the news, places a concerned phone call to his son—until this persistent unease is visited upon his own body:

The night before they come
Pablo can’t sleep:
he knows that something’s going to happen,
just not what.

So, with ceremonial precision, counting thirteen steps, repeating the number, he walks into the night, shovel in hand, as “Ester snores in her fifth dream.” Then, box buried, night dark, Ester dreaming— Pablo vanishes.

On February 16, 2000, more than 300 members of the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, a far-right paramilitary organization, entered the town square of El Salado, a rural village in Bolívar, Colombia. In the days that followed, AUC militiamen forced residents to watch as they tortured and executed over 60 townspeople. They set up speakers and broke into restaurants for alcohol, accompanying the executions with round-the-clock drinking, singing, and dancing. In the aftermath, government reports characterized El Salado as a battle between guerilla fighters and paramilitary forces—and in the months that followed, multiple survivors who testified or gave media interviews about the massacre were assassinated.

Upon the AUC’s arrival, many residents of El Salado fled their homes into the surrounding forest—the “brush” or, in the Spanish of the poem’s original title, La Mata. Ester, Pablo’s wife, and the subject of the poem’s second section is one such resident:

Standing in the doorway, she tries to think clearly
and looks out to where the woods begin,
…
She pulls out the machete and cuts
                                       her slashing
path: the brush.

Dark but not still, the brush is a tangle of multisensory experience: “the towering trees…the insects’ swarming zeal…the murmur of the river.” As she forges into its cacophonous unknown, Ester encounters a woman and child, hand in hand, emerging from the undergrowth. The three of them walk together, mostly in silence. “They…did things I can’t talk about,” the woman says. “The little girl doesn’t like talking much,” the poem says. “There’s no time for sadness,” Ester thinks. When the body stops, the mind reels with the unanswerable—“should I have waited for him there?” “was it a bad sign that the cat never came back?”—while the brush offers the best protection it can: “the rain falls harder, swallowing the questions.”

Eventually, however, unable to bear this impossible holding-in, the woman turns to Ester for connection, unfolding the still-fresh trauma from which no one in El Salado can escape: “I want to tell you, the woman says one night, what happened that day.” Ester listens, knowing that this “want” of communication is also a “need” for survival, an imperative as much as a desire. As ants swarm over fallen guava, she silently agrees to carry this weight along with her own. At night, “the forest throbs”—and Ester “hears the woman screaming in her sleep.”

The poem’s third and final section gives direct voice to the brush itself. As in previous sections, “this brush, which breathes” remains vibrantly anthropomorphized and jarringly loud—it struggles, snags, snaps, snarls, tears, creaks, interrupts, and furrows as the alternation of sprawling lyric and botanical list create a lush, almost gothic, canvas that radiates omniscient presence and distance alike. This landscape, both embodied and symbolic, frames the culmination of the collection’s most pressing questions. How does one put language to the unsayable? How can words convey their meanings without marginalizing or aestheticizing experiences of pain? How can the land—the forest that speaks and sees—remain beautiful while witnessing such atrocity? “What does it think about, the brush, somnambulist, after it’s seen it all?”

This section is also interspersed with narrative blocks from “the investigators” and “the witnesses.” Speaking in the evidentiary prose of bureaucracy, its lifeless governmentality in stark contrast to the organic rhythms of the forest, the investigators search for resolution, if not answers, in the legalistic pursuit of clarification. Here, Pablo makes a brief reappearance as one of the executed, acknowledged by official records as “leader of the Community Action Council”—while the parabolic paths of bullets are traced by accounting for air resistance in calculating their speed. The witnesses, meanwhile, for all the testimony they provide, also stand in defense of themselves. In their statements, they fight battles with self-inflicted guilts, their own irresolvable consciences, the fear prompted by the Pandora’s box of survival. “If we open our mouths,” they inquire, “will we be able to forget?”

Echoing the documentary poetics of Carolyn Forché and Layli Long Soldier, The Brush compels renewed attention to Colombia’s historical traumas while forging connection to the countless global El Saladaos—in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Syria, in Sudan, in Yemen— that overwhelm our contemporary news cycles to the point of exhaustion and the risk of indifference. Yet to read Hernández- Pachón’s work in the mouth of the current U.S. regime is also to confront the reality that, in the words of Adrienne Rich, “this is not somewhere else but here.” As corrupt sycophants and complicit bureaucrats make macabre mockeries of human dignity and human life under the guise of security or economy or greatness— all while dancing the YMCA—The Brush demands we turn its interrogations inward as well. What boxes will we bury? Whose hands will we hold—and whose screams will we hear in the night? Who will testify to our traumas—and to our small resistances? Where are the forests that will shelter our bodies and bear our burdens? Who will investigate the horrors we perpetrate—and the horrors perpetrated upon us? How will we go on—if, indeed, we will at all?