The Week of Colors
Women, blue-collar workers, and Indigenous people in Mexico respond in hallucinatory ways to the violence of men and abusive authority figures in Elena Garro’s intricate short story collection The Week of Colors.
Incorporating fantastical elements, many of the vignettes are disorienting and despondent, told from untrustworthy perspectives. In one, an abused wife confides in her servant. The piecemeal and nonlinear reveal of her carnage-replete liaisons with an embattled Native American warrior from inexplicable ages past is eerie against her ominous refrain: “This is the end of man.” Elsewhere, violence descends upon vulnerable people, swift and merciless, as where a penniless cobbler and his grandson seek refuge with the debt-ridden but blithe mistress of a household, inducting themselves into its fears of an infuriated stalker. In another tale, a wealthy man’s theft of a gold ring leaves an impoverished mother’s daughter bedridden, vomiting up pieces of her heart, and speaking “the language of the cursed.”
These stories refuse comfort. Victimized characters, instead of finding solace in solidarity, often escalate into frenzied malice. An Indigenous woman in “The Tree” confesses to a rich acquaintance her husband’s beatings and her past crimes, but is met with shocking dehumanization and racism: “She was a savage unacquainted with modern advancements.” Even the innocence of childhood is corrupted: Several stories center on Eva and Leli, two privileged girls undergoing a brutal coming-of-age. They are forced to learn about religious abuse afflicted on local women, experience a psychological rift as they lend support to opposing sides in a story, and escalate their antagonism into murderous outcomes.
Feverish and surreal, the short story collection The Week of Colors unearths the viciousness that Mexican women, laborers, and Native Americans survive.
Reviewed by
Isabella Zhou
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