poetry and activisim in the life of carolyn forche

She was a young poet and translator teaching in California.  Sometimes, as she worked, she found it a challenge to distinguish between literal and figurative language in the Spanish language poems she translated. As her friend Claribel Algeria observed, she couldn't seem to understand the conditions from which the poems arose.

But all this changed when Leonel Gomez Vides, a human rights activist and cousin of Claribel, showed up on Carolyn's doorstep with his two young daughters.  He asked her if she was just going to keep writing poetry about herself for the rest of her life.

And so an education began, as laid out in Carolyn Forche's searing memoir What You Have Heard Is True. Leonel was to provide history lessons at her kitchen table, showing her what she had not seen before: Salvadoran history and the inconsistencies in American Foreign Policy,  including in the mysterious death of an American who had traveled to El Salvador under the name of Ronald Richardson. 

Several months later, Carolyn visited Leonel in El Salvador where he “removed the blindfold, and ordered me to open my eyes.”  

He took her to hospitals lacking rudimentary supplies,  dropped her off in remote mountain villages, while going on missions of his own.  Sometimes she wished she hadn't come.  But she wrote her impressions in notebooks, slept on pallets in the huts of the campesinos,  and washed with local women at a spigot of icy water.   She encountered a world where Bible study was enough to get you killed, your body dismembered and scattered to the dogs; where villages were decimated, their inhabitants brutalized in unthinkable ways.

Carolyn writes about a prison/sugar cane farm  that Leonel took her to - instructing her to visit an inmate there and write exactly what she saw.  And what she saw changed her forever.  “The woman who went into the prison in Ahuachapan left herself behind in a barrio called la fosa – the grave. ”

It was at this point in my reading that I had to put the book down - and text Carolyn directly.  But yet I didn't know what to say.  I was so deeply moved by what I'd read,  but the words that came to me seemed empty.  In the end, I sent a namaste. 

What You Have Heard Is True is the account of a young woman's journey from a poet who loved language to a human rights activist who used language to change people's hearts and minds.  The title of the memoir comes from Carolyn's frequently anthologized poem The Colonel. - written following one of her visits to the home of a high ranking military official with Leonel.  It traces her journey through the publication of her collection The Country Between Us and the assassination of Archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero, whose last interview Carolyn herself recorded.

Along the way, Carolyn was sometimes given scraps of poetry, written by young poets in El Salvador. They asked her to translate their work while protecting their identities.  "I never saw the young poets again," she writes. "I don't know what happened to them.  If they survived or are among the dead.  Shortly thereafter I wouldn't want to know who people really were or where they lived, where they were going or who their friends were.  After that night I kept poetry mostly to myself."

Except she didn't keep it to herself.  She went on to identify a new genre of poetry and to publish anthologies of this work:  Against Forgetting and Poetry of Witness - the work of poets who cry out from the soul in extremity, at times of persecution.

 I am grateful to have had the privilege of taking classes with Carolyn when I earned my MFA at George Mason University.  Prior to this,  I lived with my husband on the other side of her story -  on the side of the American government, not in El Salvador, but in Argentina.  My husband Ben joined the US Foreign Service in 1985.  We began our service with two years in Venezuela and three in Argentina. Naturally we also have friends in the diplomatic community who served in El Salvador - and let me just say here that they, like us, entered the Foreign Service with the desire to do good for the world but not always knowing how to go about it.

Having said that, I should also add that my husband ran a library in Buenos Aires and ran a program that brought American lawyers to demonstrate the oral tradition of American law and to conduct mock trials and find a way towards answering some important questions. 

In Argentina in the 1980s, I met people who had lost loved ones in the Argentine Dirty War. I taught students at a university there and on one particularly memorable occasion found myself in a difficult spot, when I asked if any of them had attended an Amnesty International  concert for Human Rights which I had gone to.  A rift opened up. My students fell on both sides of the issue - and I realized when I learned this, that in fact, I understood next to nothing about what their country had gone through.

What You Have Heard Is True is a powerful, painful and very brave book.  In writing it, Carolyn has honored those who lost their lives: forgotten ones, and notable ones  but always, always loved ones.   She will be speaking at Politics and Prose on March 20, and I will be honored to introduce her.