• The Brush
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Archipelago Books

The Brush

The Brush

by Eliana Hernández-Pachón, translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers

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Available as E-Book Latin American Literature
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Pablo Rodríguez steps thirteen paces out into the night and buries a wooden box. Its contents: a chain, a medallion, a few overexposed photographs, and finally, a deed. He burrows into the ground without knowing quite why, but with the certainty of a heavy change pressing through the air, of fear settling “like a cat in his throat.” Meanwhile, his wife Ester a sharpshooter and keeper of all village secrets slips into her fifth dream of the night. As Ester tosses and Pablo pats his fresh mound of earth, another character emerges in Eliana Hernández Pachón’s vivid and prophetic triptych.

The Brush is a tangled grove, a thicket of vines, an orchid pummeled with rain. Told from the voices Pablo, Ester, and the Brush itself, Hernández Pachón’s poem is an astounding response to a traumatic event in recent Colombian history: the massacre in the village of El Salado between February 16 and 21, 2000. Paramilitary forces tortured and killed sixty people, interspersing their devastating violence with music in the town square. The Brush is an incantatory, fearless exploration of collective trauma and its horrific relevance in today’s Colombia, where mass killings continue. It is also an extraordinary depiction of ecological resistance, of the natural world that both endures human cruelty and lives on in spite of it.

Additional Book Information

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9781953861863
Pages: 72
Publication Date:

Praise

The Brush is a single narrative in three sections of poetry, each with a different point of view: Pablo, Ester, and The Brush. As a whole, the triptych creates a realm that simultaneously feels like fairy tale and current events—in the sense that horror abides in each. That the forest speaks adds wonder and fever. The quiet tone makes the Colombian massacre even more terrifying.
— Kimiko Hahn, World Literature Today

The narrative unfolds at a slant via three acts . . . in a tone that is at once factual and filled with palpable dread . . . 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.'
—Janani Ambikapathi, Harriet Books

Flowers, bleeding bodies, and all that blooms from itself—we need poetry that sends us directly into this blossoming in all its agony, horror, and beauty. Eliana Hernández-Pachón has given us this with The Brush, a book I want everyone I know to know about.
—CAConrad

A poetic, polyphonic work that explores what the El Salado massacre might have been like... As the story progresses, so does the Brush, which gains ground—including the ground of literature. It has no limits... Hernández’s work, her fragmented narration, takes an oblique approach to horror—or, in the words of artist Juan Manuel Echeverría, it observes via reflection, to keep from being paralyzed by horror. For the author, this kind of gaze avoids two possible risks: narrating violence as a spectacle and looking away.
—Beatriz Valdéz Correa

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