Way Far Away by Evelio Rosero: The Dream of Hope in the Ecosystem of Violence
Way Far Away by Evelio Rosero, Tr. Victor Meadowcroft and Anne McLean, New Directions 2024
A mysterious anonymous village centralized around a convent sitting on the side of a volcano which forth the cinematic image of the Himalayan convent of Black Narcissus (1947). A town where the streets are cold and souls are colder. It is infested with mouse carcasses and puddles of blood unknown to be animal or human. The townspeople are hostile to outsiders, so complicit in a mutually kept secret as to be faceless. This is the setting of the surrealist Colombian novella Way Far Away by Evelio Rosero, the final, inevitable location where an elderly man, who would introduce himself as Jeremías Andrade (if anyone were to ask), concludes his search for his missing granddaughter, beginning in a morgue of a hotel where he is the sole tenant. Its standoffish inhabitants not unlike the cast of characters of a Jodorowsky picture: the money-hungry hotel landlady with a side hustle as a raw chicken peddler, her promiscuous dwarf maid, a slimy albino man who “in this town they call” Bonifacio, a cart driver endlessly sweeping the streets of mouse carcasses in an act of futility, and the shop clerk and his blind mother who the landlady alleges unleashed the mice upon the town in a grab to sell mousetraps to the inhabitants. The novella can be read in two distinct parts–that which follows the protagonist’s exploration of the town’s psychogeography, and his subsequent descent through the walls of the town convent into the unraveling psyche clinging to the ledge of hope which must contend with the horrors of pervasive abductions and relentless violence, teetering on the edge to the abyss below.
Victor Meadowcroft and Anne McLean render Rosero’s Spanish into whirling description and biting dialogue which leaves ample room for ambiguity and the questioning of reality. As pointed out by Spanish language critics of the original text Frida Conn and Alejandro Salgado Baldovino, to the Latin American reader the text reads as an obvious allegory for the psychological experience of having to process the abductions and violence which outfall from right wing para-military groups, left wing guerilla factions, narco-traffickers, and the futility of trying to do something about it. However, much of the political significance has the potential to be lost among an English language audience who, by and large, are not exposed to such constant violence at the same degree of proximity. While I hesitate to endorse hand-holding in grappling with literature, particularly for unintended and privileged audiences, the English edition could benefit from a forward which contextualizes the text in Rosero’s oeuvre of more explicitly political writings and the country in which the longest-standing armed conflict in the Americas rages on (what small progress was made as a result of a 2016 peace deal which appears to have been largely backtracked during the pandemic), on a continent repeatedly destabilized by the US government’s staging of coups and its shady participation in proliferating cartels.
from Michael Powell’s Black Narcissus (1947)
The difference in encountering the text with and without its context is the difference between a Bretonian understanding of surrealism as a political tool to incite toward liberation and a Daliesque perspective which eschews political statements for a paradoxical egoism of the id. Stripped of its political context–the knowledge of hostility of rural communities toward outsiders where governmental protections fail to extend, where livelihoods are dependent on narcotics crops such as coca and the narco-trafficking industry, and where murder and kidnappings must be impossibly accepted as reality–the surrealism in the text becomes ungrounded, a feverish nightmare suspended in air when read against an individuated psyche rather than a portrait of a collective psychological load no one should have to bear, but the people of Colombia and Latin America at large have to anyway. Rosero does not explicitly depict acts of violence, but paints a landscape of an environment inoculated with its outfall: mundane brutalities of agrarian livelihoods (like the plucking of a chicken or butchering of a cow) held alongside, and so compared to, tacit participation and permissions granted in the name of survival for brutalities committed against fellow humans, reducing an entire population into livestock lacking agency. Properly situated as an Andean gothic, Rosero’s rendering of surrealism, which magnifies and renders symbolic the commonplace images and experiences of rural Colombian life, conveys the idea that reality lived under an atmosphere of violence is itself surreal.
Rosero’s characters read as archetypes of responses to an ecosystem of violence: those whose humanity is lost to the ghoulish transformation undergone by those who seek to exploit the ecosystem of violence for personal gain, those who maintain the infrastructure of entrapment, those who hope for the recovery of that which has been lost to violence is their motivation to go on, those whose futile acts of resistance are as much a part of the violent ecosystem as the participants who exploit it, those who reckon with all the lives and souls lost to violence and utter powerlessness to do anything about it, those who drink and fuck and laugh amidst the crunching of bones because what else is there. There is no innocence in the ecosystem of violence, its children baptized into unshakeable sin, stripped of any possibility of redemption. Rosero plays a lot with images of corrupted childhood–the slutty dwarf maid who is initially perceived to be a young girl, the town’s children playing soccer with a severed head, townspeople thought to be old men but upon closer inspection discovered to be adolescents, the protagonist’s missing granddaughter Rosaura made from a girl into a mother by rape.
Pablo Picasso, Mandolin and Guitar (1924), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Perhaps the most haunting creature in the ecosystem is the anonymous chorus of those who choose not to acknowledge anything is going on. They look away from each other and so grant permission to each other to carry on, to survive ostensibly but to never be anyone beyond a body who exists in a place. The characters in the book are unnamed, excepting three, two of whom are primarily named indirectly, by how others refer to them. Our protagonist refers to himself by name, only in imagining that he will introduce himself as “Jeremias Andrade”. The primary antagonist, who may be read as paramilitary organizations, US interventionism, cartels, or really any entity which considers itself the paternalistic benefactor of that which it exploits, tells Andrade that “in this town they call me” Bonifacio. The only character who is always named directly, who can be considered to retain her humanity, is only briefly glimpsed in the novella: Rosaura–a name which, due to its proximity to “Rosero” seems to be where the author situates himself, or rather, his humanity, his potential for the possibility of a redemption which will recovery the purity forcibly taken by violent, exploitative systems none of us have opted into and which no one can truly escape from participating in, even those who are most exploited by them.
Yet, the novella is ultimately not a tragedy but a comedy, ending on an optimistic beat, albeit an optimism carrying a dreamlike impossibility, flowing from the political to the existential in a kind of liberation theology. The evildoer sees justice and plummets into the abyss below. Power is restored to the townspeople. Rosaura is found, and so too is the possibility of redemption, although that’s not really the point. This culmination is ultimately reached after the protagonist descends through the convent’s walls, through a labyrinth of innocent souls being farmed as they slumber, past the humanity within us which we keep alive, which we must keep alive, confronting himself, his soul, presumably dead, past torment, treading the cusp of abyss, into that which is inevitable, the recovery of one’s humanity. Even if this world does not permit an innocent life, we go on in our pursuit to rediscover what we have lost: a world where survival does not depend upon exploitation and violence, because the very pursuit is the only way to claim back our humanity.
K. Beaman
2025