Carolyn Forché

10/10

BECAUSE ONE IS ALWAYS FORGOTTEN

In Memoriam, José Rudolfo Viera, 1939-1981: El Salvador

When Viera was buried we knew it had come to an end,
his coffin rocking into the ground like a boat or a cradle.

I could take my heart, he said, and give it to a campesino
and he would cut it up and give it back:

you can't eat heart in those four dark
chambers where a man can be kept for years.

A boy-soldier in the bone-hot sun works his knife
to peel the face from a dead man

and hang it from the branch of a show more tree
flowering with such faces.

The heart is the toughest part of the body.
Tenderness is in the hands. show less

OMG that was so good! This is a love story, not of romantic love but of the love one has for the person who made them see the world, that taught them to be consequential.

Briefly, Forche was a young poet, teaching at a small college and hiding from the world as she mourned the death by suicide of her Vietnam veteran husband when a Salvadoran resistance leader (this was pre-revolution) dropped on her doorstep through the most tenuous and unlikely of circumstances and convinced her to come to show more witness and then report on the oppression the campasinos were experiencing at the hands of a brutal US-backed regime. Eventually, Carolyn finds herself narrowly escaping death squads, but not escaping seeing their carnage. This is a terrifying painful and riveting story filled with that rarest of things, naked truth. The story is told without softness, there are no spoons filled with sugar to help things go down, but perhaps the one bit of sweetness is Forche's prose, some of the most perfect I have ever read.

I read this and listened to the audio in turn. The words are so beautiful they scream to be seen on the page, but Forche's smoky confiding voice brought an intimacy to this tale that feels like talking to the most interesting person in the world at a coffee shop at 4 am, and that is something I would not have wanted to miss. show less

Occasionally you can attend a reading that is path-altering. I had the chance to hear Ms. Forche read a couple of times in the 80s. Students were talking about and sharing poems from her collection The Country Between Us, and her anthology of Poetry of Witness - Against Forgetting was still to come.

Forche spoke of a necessary space between the personal and political where witness poetry emerged – a space made necessary because of the too-narrow definitions that existed. That, in a time show more when young writers tended toward labels - political or confessional or romantic maybe - helped break the illusion that lives could be so compartmentalized.

The poems in her latest collection ‘In the Lateness of the World’ emerge out of this social realm but not without taking a hard look at Western minds that still want to keep lives wracked by war, and our unsavory histories, out of our mind’s eye. The poet shines a light migrations and crossings, and the harm and illusion of insulating ones' self whether in Asia, Central America, Detroit or on the Greek Isles where an overwhelming number of refugees pass. Her work alludes to earliest depictions of war in Western literature, a feeling of intergenerational trauma that overcomes our best efforts to shut it off.

In her poem 'Charmolypi,' this grief descends across generations, an “ache in the cage of breath” or a “light sound of wings brushing the walls” (57), being something brought down from Parnassus by Clio the Muse of History, a feeling that catches us unaware as if all the collective loss across generations were still present. The poem exists both as an acknowledgment of public grief but perhaps also as a rebuke for trying to distance ourselves.

There seem to be at least two certainties about the desire to wall ourselves off – its futility and our repeated efforts to do it.

In ‘Transport,’ Forche provides the reader with a catalog of ways to travel through this ancient land from rickshaws, to oxcarts, to taxis and small trucks. The speaker relates a set of instructions, saying that if the driver ‘struck/a man on foot we should run away before the car / is torched by the crowd and the driver killed.’ The idea of being a bystander collapses and the visions of burning cars invades the speaker’s dreams. Her poem is an answer to the idea of viewing the world from a mythical place of safety – which doesn’t exist. Our likelihood of doing harm diminishes as we stop trying to insulate ourselves – when we ‘go on foot’ (68).

Insulating creates a world surrounded by treachery, an area outside the light’s radius that is cause for fear. This is not the world of the poet whose proper work is to illuminate. Work that demands living like ‘the lensmaker who died / with his lungs full of glass’ or the ‘yew in blossom when the bees swarm’ becoming ‘their amber cathedral.’ The cost of this, like the case of the lensmaker, may be fatal but perhaps the reward ‘Nothing/to be afraid’ is greater. (13).

Forche, who has introduced so many newer readers to poets of witness such as Lorca and Mandelstam, has devoted much of her poetic life to this idea of illumination and implied the danger of writing from behind barriers. The images here put us in the scenes of atrocity, seeing many of them emerging from history, with Forche acting as our guide saying 'I will get you there' (6). show less

What would you do if a man appeared on your doorstep one day and announced that he was Leonel, the mysterious cousin of a friend of yours who you'd heard so much speculation about? What if he told you a tale of conquerors and corruption, of resistance and danger? If you're Carolyn Forché, apparently you agree to join him in El Salvador for a month so that you can educate yourself about the actual situation there, rather than only seeing it only the was the US government wants you to. And show more then, many years later, you would write a beautiful book about what you saw. Forché is a poet, and it shows in every scene. Even when describing the sight of people using a fetid ditch for a latrine, or the brutal mistreatment of prisoners, her images are exquisite.

Unfortunately, she herself doesn't come across nearly so well. Not entirely ignorant when she arrives in El Salvador, thanks to Leonel's lessons, she knows she's not there for a vacation, but she's hardly knowledgeable enough or savvy enough to make her own way. So she sticks pretty close to Leonel, who shows her around the country and introduces her to other members of the movement. But sometimes Leonel has go do something vague, and he leaves her with someone else, sometimes in a nice house in San Salvador, and sometimes in a hut in the jungle.

It's the vagueness that became a real problem for me. It's one of my pet peeves when reading if people aren't being straight with a character and that character doesn't demand straight answers and explanations. And here we have Forché accepting lots of vague answers and allowing herself to be brought into a lot of potentially dangerous situations with little or no information, including meeting with high level Salvadoran government officials who were known to rule through extreme violence. And this is real life! I felt that it was very irresponsible of her to not demand more answers and explanations when walking into situations where her life was literally in danger.

For those who are not bothered by such things, this is absolutely one of the best books to read to get a sense of El Salvador in the late 1970s and the US government's role in it. Forché learns a lot as she spends more time there, and her readers learn along with her. The effect is that the reader becomes the witness of the book's subtitle, just as Forché and Leonel hoped. show less