Gómez serves as Forché’s self-appointed guide and teacher, though his methods are unorthodox. She consistently emphasizes her myopia, reminding readers that “I was at the time quite young, with a romantic view of the world, and I was also an American, which made this worse.” Forché’s memoir traces her journey from political innocence to experience, and in doing so offers a model to others who might take the same journey. Forché never presents herself as an expert, an authority, or worst of all, a savior. Though she spoke Spanish well enough to translate, with assistance, Alegría’s work, she failed to grasp the poems’ “political and historical context, or, as would say, ‘the conditions from which the poems arose.’” In her memoir, Forché frames her decision to go to El Salvador with Gómez as a commitment to learning those conditions. Forché accepted his invitation in large part because she had struggled to understand Alegría’s poetry. Alegría’s activist cousin, Leonel Gómez Vides, having read Forché’s debut poetry collection, invited her to visit El Salvador.
The story begins with a summer Forché spent in Spain, translating the exiled Salvadoran poet Claribel Alegría. In her new memoir, What You Have Heard Is True, Forché explains how she arrived in El Salvador, and how she came to write The Country Between Us. In “ The Memory of Elena,” a meal transforms into “the lips of those whose lips / have been removed, mussels / the soft blue of a leg socket.” In “ The Colonel,” a colonel empties a bag of ears “like dried peach halves” on his dinner table as he derides the notion of human rights.
Her Salvadoran poems rang with clarity, and with horror. From 1978 to 1980, she traveled repeatedly to El Salvador, where she bore witness to the violent repression of Salvadoran citizens by that country’s military dictatorship.įorché later called her time in El Salvador a “moral and political education-what at times would seem an unbearable immersion, what eventually would become a focused obsession.” In The Country Between Us (1981), she offered a set of poems reflecting that immersion and obsession. She coined the term in her introduction to Against Forgetting, a 1993 anthology in which she collected works by 145 “poets who endured conditions of historical and social extremity during the twentieth century.” Forché herself had not endured such conditions, but she had seen them. The poet Carolyn Forché has devoted much of her career to writing what she calls the poetry of witness.
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