Book Report: What You Have Heard Is True

34. Carolyn Forché, What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance (2019) (6/30/21)

In May 1978, Carolyn Forché wrote a prose poem titled "The Colonel":

WHAT YOU HAVE HEARD is true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.

This book is the story behind, not that poem itself exactly (it is never mentioned, except in the titular reference), but her writing of it—or rather, her coming to learn enough about the atrocities being committed in El Salvador, in the run-up to and during the civil war of 1979–1992, to be able to write it.

She was twenty-seven when, in 1977, a knock came on her door in southern California: a brilliant, energetic, enigmatic man, Leonel Gómez Vides, the cousin of a poet whom Forché had spent the summer with, translating her work; he wished her to come to El Salvador to bear witness to the lives lived there, and to the great unease and the mounting violence—the coming war. 

In the book, on what would become seven extended stays between January 1978 and March 1980, the two of them spend a lot of time driving around the country, where he takes her to visit campesinos or military officers or gatherings of poets and intellectuals or Catholic workers for peace (including Monseñor, now Saint, Óscar Romero)—all people who, he hoped, would give her insight into the situation there, and a story to tell back home. Finally, by March 1980, the situation had become far too dangerous, and she left/was sent away for good. 

There is much detail of situations she was in, friendships made, brushes with death squads, conversations with guerrillas, mutilated bodies witnessed—and always, her education by Leonel. I was throughout a bit frustrated by a lack of temporal grounding. The only two time anchors—and these I had to use google to really nail down—were the year of her first visit (she was born in 1950, and she was 27 when Leonel first met her, so I figured 1977, though it was actually January 1978) and the year she left (anchored by Romero's assassination, a week after her departure). Until she states those facts and the fact of seven visits in the acknowledgments at the end of the book, there is little real sense of time. Which, I imagine, was deliberate: the people in that country were living in constant terror, where time dissolves and life becomes a day-to-day battle of survival. But I, as a reader, still wanted better time markers. 

There is also little mention of the poet-activist and humanitarian she went on actively to become. Yes, the focus is on those two years, but those two years seemed to be seminal in Forché becoming who and what she did become. I was curious to know more. (Okay okay, I can always google to find out more.) 

The final hundred pages or so of the book were in a way the most satisfying: the rhythm picks up, with short chapters and insertions of journal entries ("written in pencil"); the danger is growing. She returns to the U.S. and meets a man whom she met briefly in a tense scene earlier, he a photographer she posing as a journalist to prevent an atrocity from occurring—and they marry. There are Senate hearings, where the U.S. is implicated in the government-mounted violence. A former death squad member presents his testimony. Leonel arrives in Washington, D.C., safe despite eight assassination attempts, and granted political asylum. Then goes on to broker the peace deal that ultimately follows. 

The epilogue sees Forché back in El Salvador in 2009 with family and friends of Leonel as they scatter his ashes.

The book is really about Leonel.

I flagged so much, but I'll just quote this paragraph from near the end:

Early in his exile in the United States, when asked about himself, Leonel answered that he was a coffee farmer, and later, when they took his coffee farm away, he would describe himself as a social critic and political exile and, finally, an investigator of crimes against humanity. He would not say that he had also been a champion marksman and motorcycle racer, a painter, an expert on Formula One cars, a historian of military strategy, a part-time inventor, a collector of miniature ship models, and an adviser to politicians, Catholic priests, Carmelite nuns, diplomats, labor leaders, and at least one guerrilla commander. He would never tell anyone that the handmade AK-47 awarded to him in competition, which he kept in a glass display case, was fully loaded and always had been. We were mistaken to think that the sign affixed to the case that read IN CASE OF EMERGENCY BREAK GLASS was a little joke.

I was very moved by this book. Less by Forché's own experience, perhaps, than by all that she describes. The humanity of the people she comes to know and bears witness of. 

Hope also nourishes us. Not the hope of fools. The other kind. Hope, when everything is clear. Awareness.
                                                                      —Manlio Arguetta

No te conoce nadie. No. Pero yo te canto.
Nobody knows you. No. But I sing to you.
                                                                     —Federico García Lorca

Here are a couple of articles, one about this memoir and the other about atrocity as the subject matter of poetry.