“What are we looking for?”
Carolyn Forche´ asks this question in the
first 15 minutes of her new memoir.
About 20 minutes later, she is asked,
“What do you know about military
dictatorships?”
“Not much,” she answers.
“Good, I’m glad you know what you don’t
know.”
Why is this memoir, What You Have Heard
is True, describing her travels to El Salvador in the late 70s, so relevant
today?
Where do we begin our stories about
immigrants arriving at the US border with Mexico? With their arrival and
detention by ICE?
What if we started their stories with the
story of El Salvador in the late 70s, and the history that stretches from then
to now? What is the story of the parents of these parents?
Here in Tahoe we are lucky to have
frequent opportunities to meet Forche´ and hear her read and discuss her work,
as she has taught for the Sierra Nevada College Low-residency MFA in
Creative Writing.
The title of her memoir is the first line
of one of her arguably most well-known poems, “The Colonel”. Her writing, poems
and prose, challenges her reader to pose their own questions, to know what they
don’t know. She presents the physical
experience of her presence as she met this individual in his house:
“ears on the floor pressed to the ground”
“like pressed peach halves”
“there is no other
way to say this” (“The Colonel”)
The only way for her to say it is to help
us experience the visceral present through her use of language. She asks us to “read
for witness”.
The moment in her memoir that stands out
to me the most after finishing her book is from a surreptitious visit to a
prison. She walked into a dark room in which small boxes were lined up with
small wired windows. She could see hands
inside holding onto the wire. These were
prisoners who sometimes were held in the box for a complete year. When they
were released, they could no longer stand as their bodies had atrophied.
Here in 2014 she reads two poems from her
second book of poems, The Country Between Us. Her poem “The Visitor”
seems to recall this prison visit. The image of the hands repeats in this poem
and echoes the image of the hands I was so moved by in her memoir, written 20
years later.
“The
Visitor” by Carolyn Forche´
In
Spanish he whispers there is no time left.
It
is the sound of scythes arcing in the wheat,
the
ache of some field song in Salvador.
The
wind along the prison, cautious
as
Francisco’s hands on the inside, touching
the
walls as he walks, it is his wife’s breath
slipping
into his cell each night while he
imagines
his hand to be hers. It is a small country.
There
is nothing one man will not do to another.
1979.
References
Forche´, Carolyn. What You Have
Heard is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance. Penguin, 2019.
---. The Country Between Us.
Harper Perennial. 1982.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsOITnYFVfo