Integral Witnesses

Renee Hudson reviews Eliana Hernández-Pachón’s “The Brush” and Selva Almada’s “Not a River.”

By Renee HudsonJuly 25, 2024

• Poetry

• Fiction

IN HER BOOK Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence (trans. William McCuaig, 2009), Adriana Cavarero describes “saved” Monowitz-Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi’s feeling that “he cannot be one of the true witnesses of the reality of the [concentration camp], because he did not touch its depths. The only real witness, whom Levi calls the integral witness, is he who has gone to the heart of the horror.” And yet, those witnesses, in Levi’s words, “have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute.” In their new books The Brush (transl. Robin Myers) and Not a River (trans. Annie McDermott), respectively, Eliana Hernández-Pachón and Selva Almada consider what it means to go to the heart of horror and what it means to bear witness in the process. Both authors turn to the environment as the ultimate witness: in The Brush, the Colombian landscape gives a sense of the temporal scale of the Massacre of El Salado inflicted by the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), while in Not a River, the environment manifests in the ghosts of two teenage girls, Mariela and Lucy, who died tragically in an accident.

The afterword to The Brush renders explicit the question of how writers should ethically represent horror. The first two sections follow a specific couple, Pablo and Ester. The Pablo section details the night before the massacre (and his own death) and the Ester section describes how she fled to the forest during the massacre. In his afterword, Héctor Abad writes about the third section, which oscillates between testimonios from the Witnesses, the Investigators, and the Brush. Abad observes: “The Witnesses have more poetry in their account than the Investigators do. It’s best to speak obliquely of horror, especially for those who have suffered it firsthand.” Whereas the author’s concluding note relates how “paramilitary forces tortured, slashed, decapitated, and sexually assaulted the defenseless population, forcing their relatives and neighbors to watch the executions,” the collection itself is concerned with what we owe the dead: that is, to resist fetishizing or sensationalizing their torture and deaths, while actively bearing witness to such horror through seemingly everyday details.

For example, in the final lines of the Ester section, we read the following exchange: “Where did you find that shirt? / I wrung it out yesterday, the little girl responds, / I pulled it from the river with a stick.” In these lines, we learn of a shirt that lost a body, a body that was no doubt a victim of the massacre. Not knowing what she’s doing, the little girl rescues the shirt in a way that reminds us that after people are gone, their things remain. Or, as the Brush relates:

When the bodies collapse in the town square,
picked out at random,
the houses are left behind with their yards,
their kitchens, their sheets pressed smooth,
receiving, still,
the sun’s warm touch.

Here, the houses become the stewards of what is left behind: the yards, the kitchens, the sheets pressed smooth. The houses stand as monuments to their dead and are perhaps the only monuments that will exist at all to commemorate the massacre’s victims. As Hernández-Pachón makes clear, the paramilitary assault was state-sanctioned—the day before it began, “the Colombian Marine Corps battalion that was responsible for protecting the area had withdrawn.”

Thus, when we read the sections that focus on the investigatons of the massacre, we are faced with a conundrum. The Investigators want to know: “What did they do to them? Did they kill the ones they killed because they were on the list, or because they tried to defend themselves? What else did that do that day? Was there any warning? How did they get here?” The Investigators’ questions suggest that there has to be a reason for the massacre, that somehow the massacre happened because the people deserved it. As this brief sample of the questions suggests, the Investigators mainly focus on the perpetrators, not the victims.

The verbs that accompany the testimonios in the final section illuminate the complicated nature of testimonio, particularly when those who are tasked with investigating the massacre represent the very entities that made the massacre possible. The Brush’s account “returns,” “continues,” “says,” “clarifies,” “remarks,” and “adds” while the Witnesses’ testimonios “say,” “correct,” “add,” and “resume.” Meanwhile, the Investigators’ reports “explain,” “ask,” “announce,” “point out,” “continue,” and “detail.” The Witnesses and the Brush offer accounts that are aligned with one another as both clarify and correct, in contrast to the Investigators’ testimonio, which strives for a clear, authoritative account for questions that have no answer: Why did the AUC target this community? Why did the state abandon them?

In contrast to the Investigators’ focus on the perpetrators, the Brush bears witness to the victims. For example, the Brush observes, “The limbs crisscrossing deep inside the woods / are numberless. They have a vital purpose, / like stout fingers passed down by blood.” The Brush offers a refuge from the massacre, and it also provides a burial ground:

Their bones,
their last palpable forms,
distill into erasure what
they used to be:
masses, birthmarks,
then soil and humus, simple tissue
that the weight of passing days
slowly compacts into
a coat of gauzy earth.

While the bodies may be erased in the process of decomposition, the masses and birthmarks return to nature, return to the Brush, who lovingly witnesses the process by which the bodies become one with itself. While we might not have an account from Levi’s integral witness, we do have a more-than-human witness who relates the all-too-human tragedy of the massacre.

In contrast, the location of Almada’s Not a River is less clear; the story unfolds on an island, and readers are given to understand that there is an existing tension between the mainlanders who arrive on the island to fish and the islanders they encounter. The mainlanders who arrive are El Negro, Enero, and their dead friend Eusebio’s son, Tilo. The only islander who offers his name is Aguirre, who is also the uncle of the girls. If El Negro, Enero, and Tilo are on the island to deal with the death of Eusebio, perhaps symbolized by the massive ray the men kill, then Aguirre is there to deal with the death of his nieces, who died in a car accident going from the mainland to the island. The ray, then, also symbolizes the girls.

Not a River explores toxic masculinity, but in solely focusing on this aspect of the text, one would miss the heartbreaking story of the girls. We learn that they love to party and dance and drink, and while their community certainly judges them for this, it’s hard not to see them as just two teenage girls doing what teenage girls do: chafing at the expectations put upon them and, ultimately, resisting them. While their mother, Siomara, no doubt tries to prevent them from making mistakes they’ll have to live with, the true tragedy of Not a River is that the girls will not live at all.

Aguirre tells us that Siomara refuses to believe her girls are dead and, while we can certainly read this as a form of denial, Almada, in portraying the ghosts of the girls, also suggests that perhaps Siomara cannot believe it, because the girls are still there. The night that the girls are supposed to meet Tilo at the party on the beach, they’re already dead. We see ghost Lucy crawling next to her sleeping mother, where Mariela finds her: “Her sister and their mami are asleep. Or so it seems but when she gets closer, Lucy half-opens her eyes and smiles, pats the bed and makes space for her. They’re both still kind of sleepy and doze off together, curled up in each other’s arms, by their mother’s side.” The ghostly presence of the girls is hinted at when Siomara wakes up, “feel[ing] rested, lighter, her chest open,” and “reaches out and strokes the smooth patch of sheet beside her,” the seemingly empty space where the girls have been sleeping.

While the events that transpire in Not a River are not the same as the massacre in The Brush, they speak to the smaller, everyday violences that divide people. If the Brush is a kind of witness in Hernández-Pachón’s collection—one that sees all but is not subject to the same kind of violence—then Mariela and Lucy are the integral witnesses of Not a River, the ones who have actually “gone to the heart of the horror.” They are also a manifestation of the woods. As we learn early in the collection, El Negro “isn’t from these woods and the woods are well aware. But they leave him be. He can come in, he can stay for as long as it takes to gather kindling. Then the woods themselves will spit him out, his arms full of branches, back to the shore.”

The woods’ awareness takes the form of the girls, as we learn when we first meet them: “No one knows where the girls appear from, but suddenly there they are. First comes the smell of green grass given off by their long, newly-washed hair, still dripping at the tips.” While it is unclear why Enero, El Negro, and Tilo can see the girls, perhaps it is because they returned the ray to the river, the very river that hosted the girls’ funeral procession, and from this offering, the girls returned.

The collection takes its name from Aguirre’s ruminations: “If he looks farther on, to where the road slopes down, he can just about see the river. A glint that makes his eyes water. And again: it’s not a river, it’s this river. He’s spent more time with it than with anyone.” Aguirre’s reflections note that site specificity of the river, the way that it shaped and shapes his life. We also learn from him that “it wasn’t a ray. It was that ray. A beautiful creature stretched out in the mud at the bottom, she’d have shone white like a bride in the lightless depths. Flat on the riverbed or gliding in her tulle.” Who’s to say that the dead bride Aguirre is thinking of isn’t Mariela? Isn’t Lucy? Isn’t a life senselessly cut short?

What emerges in The Brush and Not a River is instruction in the practice of bearing witness, of honoring the dead. Rather than the clinical language of the Investigators, the Brush-as-witness offers: “For those who came back: / a handful of totumo blossoms, piñuelas with their tender pulp, their starry white tomentum.” Meanwhile, the girls shepherd El Negro, Enero, and Tilo away from the violence of Aguirre and his friends. They return home, “like the princesses in the story their mami used to read them when they were little: they danced all night till their shoes were worn through and in the morning they fell sound asleep.” In imagining their aliveness, Almada offers an antidote to the toxic masculinity that suffuses every page of the novella. Rather than focus on the culture that led to the death of the girls, in which “women with sons are never ready for tragedy”—and the implication, that women with daughters are—we see the girls, as ghosts, sleeping next to their mother and navigating the mainlanders through the woods. Whereas Aguirre thinks that “the devil doesn’t live on the island” but “has to cross the river to get here,” Mariela and Lucy know that crossing the river goes both ways, that the small violences on the island can just as easily turn into a massacre. The woods, like the Brush, will stand as witness and, if Mariela and Lucy are to be believed, as guards.

¤

Featured image: Alfred Stieglitz. Rebecca Strand, 1922. The J. Paul Getty Museum (91.XM.63.2). CC0, getty.edu. Accessed July 23, 2024. Image has been cropped and rotated.