What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance by Carolyn Forché (review)

"Poetry makes nothing happen." So wrote W. H. Auden. But in the spring of 1980, I heard a poetry reading that made things happen in my life. My writing group received a grant to host three nationally known poets. Two were already well established, but our third poet, Carolyn Forché, had only recently received a prestigious prize for a first book of poems.

None of us could have known what we would hear that evening. The most arresting poems were about El Salvador, from where she had just returned. The most famous, "The Colonel," provides the title of her memoir of her time in Central America, intermittently from January, 1977, to March, 1980. Archbishop Óscar Romero had been assassinated on March 24, just days after she had conducted his last interview. She had left El Salvador at his insistence, for her safety, even as she had insisted, to no avail, that he do the same. On parting, the future saint missioned Forché to return to the U.S.to witness to the horrendous repression then taking place, in the years leading up to the civil war that claimed at least 70,000 lives, the overwhelming majority at the hands of the U.S.-trained and -funded Salvadoran military.

In late 1976 Forché, then twenty-six years old, was teaching in Southern California when a man she had never seen before, with two young daughters in tow, knocked on her apartment door and announced, the chain lock not yet released, that his name was Leonel Gómez Vides and that they had work to do. She learned that he was a cousin of Claribel Alegria, a Salvadoran whose poems Forché had translated, whose daughter Maya was a close friend. She unlocked the door for this mystery man and was told that he had driven in his panel van all the way from El Salvador to see her.

He cleared the kitchen table and spread butcher paper on which he drew maps and symbols, tracing the history of El Salvador from pre-Columbian times to the present. As a coffee farmer, he was a member of the ruling class, but he saw his native country through the eyes of the campesinos whose lives were characterized by illiteracy, malnutrition, lack of sanitation and health care, and early death. We learn later that he made himself unpopular with his peers because he provided decent housing and good wages. It sets a bad precedent, they said.

After a few days of this uninvited tutorial, insisting that the increasing violence by paramilitary death squads was leading inevitably to war and massive loss of life, Leonel told Forché he would send her an airline ticket after the turn of the year. As with the Hebrew prophets who resisted their call, Forché protested. What could she, a young American poet with little Spanish and no political skills, possibly do that could make a difference? None of her friends thought it was anything but crazy. Except one: "'You're going to ask people whether to do this or not until someone tells you to go,' he said. 'It is what you seem to want to do, so let me be that person. Go.'" When the ticket arrived, she did, not knowing what she was getting herself into, not even clear why she was saying yes.

No theme is more prevalent in this searing memoir than Leonel's insistence that Carolyn pay attention to how the campesinos lived, even how they relieved themselves, not in a latrine but squatting on two boards over a pit. She learns by doing. Pay attention, Leonel says, not only for your own safety when in the company of soldiers and their colonel, but for the sake of understanding how most of humankind has lived, and many still do. Pay attention to what seems to be a hose stretched across the road, but turns out to be human...