I broom the edges of the room, tracing the perimeter for dust and cobwebs, lost hairs, crumbs, decayed and dried plant stems fallen from their pots, bits of dirt and bark tracked in after meandering the forest, harvesting mullein and wild leeks under the cool damp canopy of spring. From out to in, the bristles carry what appears to be a tiny universe, a seemingly trivial detritus, the shed skin of the year’s longest, coldest months. From the edges to the center of the room, scratching the hardwood’s long winter itch. Out to in, out to in, out to in.
This is how I sweep, in the coastal cities I’ve called home, what I drag in on the sole of my shoes, the ruckus and roil of the day’s and night’s commutes: a wayward hair from the library carpet; ice sludge of winter storms griming their way into the subway floor; dried mud from moonlit park rambles; the crisp fractures of ginkgo leaves crumbling in sidewalk cracks; croissant flakes having tumbled from some man’s mustache, escaping his too-easy justifications of a crass ethics; heartbreaks over a broken world; residuum of romances; the dregs and dross of overstayed wounds; nightmare scraps and the shreds of perpetual sadness. This is how I sweep, after toeing the small head of a skunk cabbage in the waking wetlands of the Midwest. A passage of fibers tied as wing, congregating a little pile of hairs shed in illness, incense ash set afloat near the open window, the debris of viral griefs. Out to in, out to in. Such habits the body weaves, a quiet geometric footwork, domestic choreography of gathering.
This is how my mother has swept what desert winds blew past our windows in the Southwest; what the ocean breeze ferried through from the Pacific. Saguaro spines and other dust storm remnants. Abalone shells and silver dollars, skeletons ground to sand. The spats of children, the anxieties of dollars. Out to in, out to in, out to in.
And how her mother. In the mountains of Colombia. The brick powder and industrial soot of a burgeoning city. Uneaten chicken feed. The hallway evidence of nine children running about, the soil of their after-school adventures trailing in at their heels. The gendered suffocations of the church’s heavy hand. Out to in, out to in.
And her mother; and her mother before her. Higher up in these same mountains. Horse manure-covered straw and mud. The occasional moth or beetle wing. Husk wisps of felled corn. The eyelashes of trespassing enemies amidst devastations of war. Out to in.
Generations gathering dust. A matrilineal craft of keeping: house, memory, spirit, future. A reverence. Out to in, out to in, winter, spring, summer, fall. Hand over stick, hips and arms swaying, prayer in motion.
*
In the “Old World” of Europe’s Christian ways, to sweep a house by corralling the collective leavings of a week or a season from the bowels of a room and out the mouth of its door, was considered a proper way to cleanse the home and the soul, both striving to house Godliness. Sweep the devil out the door: a clean house was even, at times, a necessary precaution to unholy possession. From within and out the door, in to out—so were kept the gates of heaven, the church, the Christian home; in to out, the Christian soul, confessing its “unclean” thoughts in order to purify.
For Sephardic Jews, the house was swept out to in, a sacred act of protection of the home by keeping the doorway clear, not passing dirt across the jamb where the mezuzah maintained the presence of Holy Mystery through the blessed encasement of tiny scroll and scripture, a command to love. The joy of congregating in the sweetness of knowledge called up by the incantations of devotion, the besom’s twig fingers waving to the stranger, come in, come in! From out to in. Out to in.
From 1610 until 1811, the Spanish Inquisition in the colonized city of Cartagena, Colombia, operated under orders to “purify” the nation in the name of Christianity. Exiled to the Latin American “New World” and faced with the choice of forced conversion or death by the inquisition’s hand, many of these Jews became conversos, crypto-Jews, bnei anusim (Hebrew for “the forced”), publicly performing Christian rites while secretly keeping close their ancestral rituals of element and creed. Mezuzahs were hidden inside statues of the Virgin Mother standing just outside doorways, receiving their kiss by way of Mary’s feet—a covert intimacy. Challah became simply a bread for springtime. A fair substitute for Matzoh, arepas, unleavened bread from corn. Olive oil for cooking, instead of pig lard. Candles lit for Chanukah, masked as Christmas spirit. Two pots of food cooked for a Sabbath dinner: one for show, chock full of meats forbidden in the Jewish faith; another for the family’s consumption. The house swept, religiously, from the edges inward, out to in. Gestures of tradition, of deep memory, rendered insurrectionary. The inquisition, posting lists of domestic habits to eye for, made spies of the public. To sweep wrong, to eat wrong, to speak the wrong prayer, made crime. People were imprisoned, tortured, publicly executed for such things, the vestiges of an old life made treasonous, a forced letting go.
In order to live, we let go. We let go and let go for two hundred years.
Over time, across many generations, the persistent force of Catholic Dominance in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, later become post-colonies, led to a collective forgetting, the once-sacred rituals made as quiet resistance to anti-Semitic violence stripped of their sacred meaning.
My grandmother, as is common with anusim and their descendants, as her mother and grandmother had done, stayed in bed for forty days after each birth-giving. As her ancestors, my ancestors, had done, mirrors were covered when a death occurred, the men of the family tying black ribbons around their upper arms. Women tending to the shrouded dead, preparing the body for its last. And, come spring, or before the family gathers, sweeping the house, from the plaster wall perimeter and sturdy wood-beam corners to the center of a room, out to in. Out to in, out to in.
We often do these things without knowing exactly why we do them in the way we do. We do them because our beloveds before us did them. In order to remember, we hold on to what we can. We pass on bodily memory, gestures, rituals, cellular residue, hiding the knowledge somewhere deep so that we cannot betray our own lives. The symbolism of sacred practices is hidden, dispatched into the secret recesses of our bones. Made innocuous. Styles of sweeping become, perhaps, a quirk of character, a barely noticeable idiosyncracy of domestic life. But, the house, when swept, follows the patterns of concealed prayer of the old ways, from the perimeter to the center, out to in, out to in, out to in. A spirographic dance.
This is how we broom. How we gather dust. A modified ritual of palimpsestic movement. Ceremony in cipher. How we move in the old ways that remain beyond a centuries-long violence.
*
St. Bernadette Soubirous of France, patron saint of the ill, garnered attention as a young peasant woman from the Catholic Church and the French government when in 1858 she claimed to have multiple visions in which she spoke with the Virgin Mary, la Virgen Maria. The woman beyond the sun. Luminous woman. Lady of light. She could not promise Bernadette happiness in this world.
In order to escape the attention, she became a nun with the Sisters of Charity, serving as an assistant in the infirmary there. Upon being asked about her visions, she said, “the Virgin used me as a broom to remove the dust. When the work is done, the broom is put behind the door again.”
A bout of cholera in her childhood left her with chronic asthma, resulting later in life in tuberculosis in the lungs and bones, that ultimately killed her. Several decades after her death, upon being exhumed, her body was found to be preserved from usual human decomposition. A strange miracle.
*
In 1907 in several urban centers across Argentina, a movement of mostly women carried out a tenants’ strike after landlords transferred the costs of city-raised taxes to renters. The movement came to be otherwise known as the Rebellion of the Brooms. For over three months, more than 140,000 participants refused to pay rent in protest of abusive landlords, inordinate rent increases, and unlivable conditions in the housing tenements. The strike committee also sought salary increases and an eight-hour workday. In response to the tenant strikes, landlords attempted to evict the protestors with the help of police forces. Refusing to comply, women and children came out to block the entrances to targeted homes, resisting the evictions while holding brooms as a sign of their domestic power. One of the first public demonstrations of the strike was the March of the Broomsticks in the area of La Boca in Buenos Aires, in which strikers carried brooms from their homes, with the aim of “sweeping away the landlords.”
Calling up the lingering fuerza of this history, in February 1922, five sex workers in La Catalina brothel in the city of San Julián used brooms to hit and chase away soldiers who had been involved in a massacre of rural workers striking as a part of the two-years long movement for labor rights including better wages and working conditions, which came to be known as Patagonia Rebelde or Patagonia Trágica—Rebel Patagonia, Tragic Patagonia. During that time, the army executed about 1500 workers who were mostly Spanish and Chilean refugees who had fled anti-worker violence in Chile.
Later, during Argentina’s Dirty War (1976-1983), the broom, which had been a symbol of domestic power for politically organized women, was appropriated and resignified as an object conveying powerlessness and instilling fear in the shadow of right-wing repression. Under the dictatorship of Jorge Rafael Videla Redondo, Argentine military personnel disappeared, tortured, and killed thousands of people they deemed political dissidents, including trade unionists and labor leaders, with the Navy Mechanics School in Buenos Aires (ESMA) being the most infamous secret detention center from that period. Once detained and brought to ESMA, victims were electrocuted by the use of a tool that had been named “Caroline”—a thick broom handle with two long wires extending from the end. The feminization of the torture device projected a woman’s betrayal of fellow political organizers—the broom was now a woman who would bring them unbearable pain. Its use in this way by the military at ESMA also emphasized the punishment women would receive for stepping out of line from their prescribed role as properly domesticated wives and mothers. Further, broom handles were often used to rape those who were detained as a tactic of torture. The broom was no longer a domestic technology for women to wield against abusive powers, but was wielded against them as a militarized technology and disciplinary measure of the authoritarian regime.
Forcibly exiled from Argentina to Italy in 1975 for his anti-fascist activism, and called an “outlaw poet” by Eduardo Galeano, Juan Gelman writes:
Here in Europe, time is successive, nobody wears the suit he wore tomorrow, and nobody loves the girl he will love yesterday.
In my country, Carlos would use the straw of a broom to kill the dictator so that he’d last longer. Paco will give his life so that things won’t go on as they are, whatever future used to burn in our memories, the past was a continent that someday will be discovered. (Rome, May 25th, 1980)
Despite the disorienting ways that states of brutal repression and torture can collapse space and time through the traumatic violences enacted on body and life, what Gelman suggests is that inside of that suffocating atmosphere, that violence never has total control—there are always glimpses of possibility for resistance. That imagining change is just as vital as finding ways to enact it.
*
I’m driving with A., my then-partner, now-chosen-family, through the countryside of his homeland of Uruguay—which suffered its own dictatorial regime from 1973-1985. (The military juntas across the Southern Cone often coordinated their efforts at quelling subversion to their regimes.) We cross through a long expanse of grassy fields and meandering streams, mostly cattle pasture that supports the thriving beef industry which requires overfertilizing soil to push its productivity and thereby creates devastating imbalances in local aquatic ecosystems. In the miles upon miles of vast fields we pass through, we come across a small and unassuming square building, whitewashed and surrounded by a few scattered tools on the ground, fairly unnoticeable—a shack, even—part of a larger farm operating in the region. A’s uncle points it out as one of the hundreds of torture detention centers that operated across the Southern Cone during the years of the Dirty Wars, not unlike where he himself was disappeared to and escaped from. A. and I exchange a somber look and reach for each other’s hands, sharing the sinking feeling of historical grief. We drive by in silence as we look out the window reflecting on all the ways space holds memory as those who survive violence carry it in their sense of landscape and time, passing it down to future generations, into the archives in our bones. The collective of ghosts echoing around us, no más. A broom leaning up against the outer wall of the former detention center tips and falls to the ground. There is no wind that day.
*
On my wall hangs a “turkey wing” whisk broom handcrafted by queer Mestiza artisan, Betania Ridenour, the maker behind the label, Bristle and Stick. Made of broomcorn and tarred fishnet line, the broom is called a “turkey wing” broom for its wing-like shape. Before the mid-18th century, brooms in the US were typically made of birch twigs, which was fine for rough plank floors, but not very useful for tabletops or near woodstoves and fireplaces where ash and dust and crumbs might gather. Preserved bird wings—those of turkeys, hawks, roosters, served well for this purpose, and when broomcorn (a variety of Sorghum) was finally imported as a crop in the 1760s, these finer-toothed brooms were crafted to model the bird wing shape.
The broom on my wall carries an aura for me, speaks to me of sweeping as medicine, as ritual, a source of power, of ancestral connection, embodied histories of gesture, movement as prayer. Betania writes of sweeping as all these things, rooted in their Mexican lineage. Once pathologized for the impulse to sweep, as noted on their website, they write, “I learned that sweeping, letting go, and moving energy is deeply woven into our spiritual and healing practices and traditions. I understand now that it was my Ancestors that put the broom in my hand, their quiet whispers leading me towards healing all along.”
When my abuelo spoke of his childhood home in the mountains in Antióquia, he spoke of the dirt floors his mother swept daily beneath the thatched hut roof of their one-room abode. In my faded memory there is a photo somewhere, of her leaning against the door, a broom in hand, a simple knee-length dress, a chicken running free in the foreground. Beyond the frame lies el campo, the family farm, the small crops of potatoes and plantains that fed my great-grandmother’s young family. I don’t know if this image actually exists printed somewhere and lost like so much of our family archive, or if it was brought to me in dreams, or if it is a mental collage of so many images I’ve been drawn to as an amateur photographer over the years. A woman and her broom in the lingering sun of the late hours. All the stories she could tell. Of a countryside amidst bloody war and industrialization. Of what bananas taste like after massacre. Of who before her remembered how the end of colonial occupation became conquest by another name. Of what it takes to clean a house made of dirt floors. Of the dust of her dreams. Of the joy of dirt’s seasonal fruitions. How seeds unfurl after rains.
My grandfather was just a boy of twelve when his mother died of cirrhosis. Some days she lives in my liver, inciting my own search for medicine—in the cabinet, in the music of the tiple, in the broom. But in the photo in my mind, she stands strong, resolute, tired, alive.
What worlds objects carry.
When I look at the turkey wing broom on my wall, Betania’s crafted labor of queer and ancestral healing, I feel my great-grandmother close. I glimpse the hands of my befores. Hear the swishing of dried grasses gathered by twine. Know that I am many. This too, a kind of magic, a transference of memory.
*
I broom the edges of the room, tracing the perimeter for whispers of self-doubt, fallen nightmares, winter sadnesses and soundless memories of severed friendships mulling about in their ache, a ceramic chip broken off the glazed mug a love now dead had brought as a gift from Palestine, more white hairs than ever before, and pine needles from the edge of a pond mirroring the cerulean sky a whole season ago.
From out to in, the bristles carry the dust into the pan. There will be new dust tomorrow.
From the edges to the center of the room, singing the floor’s good praises.
Out to in, out to in, out to in.
heidi andrea restrepo rhodes (she/her) is a queer, sick/disabled, brown/Colombian, poet, scholar, educator, and cultural worker. Her poetry collection, The Inheritance of Haunting (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019) won the 2018 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. Her chapbook, Ephemeral, is the 2022 winner of the Lorca Latinx Poetry Prize and will be published by EcoTheo Collective in 2023. She is a VONA alum and has received poetry fellowships from Zoeglossia, CantoMundo, Radar, VONA, and Yale’s Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration. Her poetry has been published in Poetry, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Split This Rock’s Quarry, Nat.Brut, and Foglifter, among other places. Currently living and teaching in Gabrielino Tongva land in the San Gabriel Mountain foothills of southern California, she wants to swim with you in the raucous and joyful possibilities of crip poetics and abolition dreams.
Photo by Joshimer Biñas