The Brush

Eliana Hernández-Pachón’s The Brush, translated by Robin Myers, tells the story of a massacre in the village of El Salado, in February 2000, when Colombian paramilitary forces tortured and killed over 60 people. The narrative unfolds at a slant via three acts that follow the central characters, including Pablo and Ester, and is related in a tone that is at once factual and filled with palpable dread:

Ester gets up early to make coffee,
strains it through a black stocking,
the sun’s still hidden.

Some mornings, Pablo finds
dead creatures by the door:
first a hummingbird heavy
as an orange in his hand,
then a snake, a mouse.

Hernández-Pachón’s third protagonist is “the brush,” a woodland or a forest that

follows the current of itself,
and is a substance that decays
and eats itself
and comes back into being:
breathing, furious.

The book follows the characters quite closely, their movements, and fates. The brush occupies a longer time span than either Ester’s or Pablo’s, and is as attentive to the slow transformation of the survivors as to the light that is cast over objects: “receiving, still, / the sun’s warm touch. / Things are left with their layers / creased into each other.” Hernández-Pachón fills the book with the dense voice of the brush, much like a village enclosed by a forest.

For a poet writing about a catastrophe, using artifice to generate pathos can be difficult, as the reader knows that the events in the book are true. Hernández-Pachón resolves this by animating the forest, who is a compassionate observer, with a distinct persona and all the eccentricities of being a speaking-forest. “During the concert, / rain is generality. / Every I and every mine / is open sky or moss.”