In 2018, a series of coincidental events led to the cross paths of a “Rolo” from Chapinero and a Pacific Afro. Juan Nicolás Donoso (Bogotá, 1977) received a call from a friend who had been visiting a person in a chronic care clinic. He was curious to see a man in the front room, deftly moving his head and manipulating a tablet with a pen held in his mouth. She asked him what he was doing: he replied that he was writing a book.
Jhon Anderson Hurtado (Buenaventura, 1992) was shot multiple times in 2013 while paying his bills amid the seedy environment in which he moved while working as a bike painter in Bogotá’s 7 de Agosto neighborhood. A shot in the air, another in the arm and a third in the neck, hitting his spinal cord, caused cervical trauma and left his body immobilized below the neck. Ten years and five clinics have passed since then.
“You who are a writer, why don’t you go and give her some advice and look at her to see how she is doing,” suggested Carlos Castro, a visual artist, to Juan Nicolás about the novel, den John wrote . He gave her the information and hung up. Although he didn’t quite understand what he was getting himself into, Nicolás – as people around him call him – made an appointment and visited him. He found him in a room, hidden among boxes and other things, behind a makeshift desk that the nurses had set up for him over the stretcher. “I saw that he had a tablet in front of him and that he was a functioning human being. Well, I wrote a novel with my mouth!” he says. “He sent me a preview on WhatsApp and I immediately said: This man is a writer. This must be published.”
“If you read the first paragraphs, it’s a novel that throws you at you,” says Nicolás, a visual artist with a master’s degree in philosophy and literary creation, a teacher, and the author of the novels Siberia (Extinct Animal, 2019) and Coprófago Paradise (Caín Press, 2016). He began commenting on the progress he sent him, recommending reading, and visiting him once a month to finish proofreading the text. Not only did he help him, but he also realized that it was he who was transformed by Jhon: because of his life story, because of the avidity with which he read, because of his ability to absorb knowledge, the wildness of his stories and his surprises at spelling a young man who had left school in the seventh grade and graduated from high school practically years later. Jhon left him without any excuses.
After three years and in the context of a pandemic, Tunda was born, the first novel by Jhon Anderson Hurtado, published by Caín Press in October 2022 and one of the best-received independent books at the last Bogotá Book Fair. In Tunda, the environment that shaped his life is described: the arrival of the paramilitaries in Buenaventura, witchcraft – everyone there does, has been done, or knows about it; it’s normal, Nicolás explains—; There’s also the jungle, the imposing geography, the toxic waste, and the neglect. Its originality lies in the fact that the author does not speak from what he has read or what he was told, but from a hostility that absorbed him and finally led him to this bullet. “Circumstances would lead me to it sooner or later,” he says.
Jhon grew up amidst the squeaking of the ‘Pique Houses’, places where he is tortured, murdered and dismembered, which serve as the backdrop for his literary endeavor. “Yes, I was a witness and in one way or another I wanted to do this kind of violence too and you end up doing it without being part of a group but with outbursts of anger. Moments out there in a disco, drugged.
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Jhon uses his tablet at Engativá Hospital. NATHALIA ANGARITA
In the text, Buenaventura is “a tropical paradise, but also the notorious swamp of poverty cruelly lashed by all kinds of primary evils.” John’s golden age was there. “When I was a kid,” he says, “I would go out to play little dresses, I would play hide and seek, in my days and on my escapades into the jungle, exploring the mangrove swamp, visiting the shipyard, the High tide for swimming and that was the best part.”
He was always “a person open to fun, adventure, curious and also a bit rebellious” until he finally “got into trouble” that led him into exile in Bogotá to switch from poking around in the mechanical workshops of August 7th life . Now, in the rearview mirror of time, with his experience and the catharsis he creates through writing, he has come to terms with his past and sees no point in so much violence: “What shocks me a lot is that it’s people that you grow up with.” and later they become paramilitaries themselves and hurt the same people.”
Mythology and the Street
La Tunda, a central figure in the mythology of the Colombian South Pacific and Ecuadorian North Pacific, is described in the book as “a terror that appears to the people of the mountains, children who are misjudged, drunkards, unfaithful people, or the like.” are sons of bitches and victims”. Within the novel, too, there is a spectrum made up of “voices and grief moving in the dark,” an exploration of the paranormal in the midst of a mangrove swamp, and the “smell of the bazuco mingled with the black smoke of…” the Exostos “…
Jhon’s language consists of street and life. Donoso believes he is seen as a new benchmark for Afro-Colombian literature. It reminds him of Arnoldo Palacios, a Chocoano writer who also had mobility issues due to polio. In his novel Las estrellas son negras, “He’s in the Choco Jungle listening to the other kids play outside and he can’t move. This is how he begins to become a writer by imagining how others play.”
Nicolás describes Jhon’s literature as a mixture of palacios, Pedro Páramo – the flagship of Juan Rulfo’s Mexican literature – and a lot of rap. What he likes best, however, is: “I wasn’t thinking about enrolling in a place with black, Afro-Colombian pronunciation when I was writing it, but: I’m going down a path with a machete.” That’s what his prose does so alive It is not tainted by a speech that ends up mummifying you after repeating it over and over again.”
Pedro Páramo was undoubtedly one of the books that had the greatest impact on the author and helped him build a spooky aura. Another work that served as a reference was “In Cold Blood” by Truman Capote. “The descriptions that Tunda starts with are from the jungle, I don’t know why they remind me of Capote’s descriptions from Kansas,” comments Nicolás. “One is a desert and the other is a jungle. They’re two completely different regions, but I told him: read this and go as far as you can. And it turns out he loved it because he was those characters in his past life, he knows what cold blood is and he writes in cold blood too.
Jhon continues to navigate his familiar geography: the mangrove swamp, the shipyard road, and the 7th of August that stuck in his mind. “But it already flies on its own,” says its editor. Now she’s working on a new picture book that virtually connects her with her psychology studies. He is in his sixth semester and applies techniques to himself based on what he has learned. “It was all very difficult to bear and a direct consequence of this situation is obviously the development of psychological and emotional problems,” he says. It torments him “to end up being sentenced to live in clinics and hospitals.” So he writes any time of the day and turns to psychology, which he says has helped him a lot: “I’ve been trying to meditate, self-assess and develop resilience, but it’s been very difficult.” It consumes me.”
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