Carolyn Forche

The book opens with a series of poems about El Salvador, where ForchÉ worked as a journalist and was closely involved with the political struggle in that tortured country in the late 1970's. ForchÉ's other poems also tend to be personal, immediate, and moving. Perhaps the final effect of her poetry is the image of a sensitive, brave, and engaged young woman who has made her life a journey. She has already traveled to many places, as these poems indicate, but beyond that is the sense of someone who is, in Ignazio Silone's words, coming from far and going far.

The Country Between Us

Andrew John Kinney

Occasionally, a poet is in the right place at the right time, and has the talent to express what needs to be said. In World War I, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon expressed in verse the outrage of a generation sent to the slaughterhouse by old men who never deigned to go close enough to the front lines to understand the hell their Olympian policies and plans of attack had created. For Central America in the late 1970’s and early ‘80’s, Carolyn Forche’ was a voice for those who suffered the tender mercies of the Salvadoran death squads; her clear-eyed reporting, in her poems, was the counterpoint to those who claimed communism in Latin America had to be defeated by any means necessary, at a time when Reagan was declaring the tyrants in El Salvador and Guatemala to be men “of great integrity”.

This book of poetry was written decades before Forche’s account of her years in Central America, What You Have Heard is True. My recommendation is to read What You Have Heard is True, and then read The Country Between Us; done this way, the poetry will have meaning the reader would not grasp as fully if the poetry is read first. Also, What You Have Heard is a stunning achievement of witness; it is the best non-fiction book I have read in at least a year, and it opened my eyes in a way that nothing else has to the perfidy of the American involvement in Central America. 

What Carolyn Forche’ is trying to achieve in her poetry is to rip away the blindfold that most of us wear regarding terrible events occurring in far off places; for the American people to see clearly what was being done to people in Central America who had done nothing to deserve the horrific treatment they received, financed by the American taxpayer. The military regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala were unquestionably evil; it would have required only the most cursory on-the-ground inspection of their tactics to see this, but the representatives of the U.S. Government in the State Department, the Army, and the CIA were willfully blind to that reality. If all that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing, the United States did less than nothing. Reagan’s government actively supported mass murderers in Central America. 

Forche’s most famous poem, The Colonel, is based on a real interview; she interviewed many senior officials in Salvador. In 1979 I met a similar colonel in Uruguay, when that country was under military dictatorship and the Uruguayan Army was brutally suppressing the Tupamaros, a group which had already been defeated but was still the anti-communist bogeyman; the oppression was in fact directed at anyone considered at all leftist or an opponent of the government in the least way. The colonel I met when I was a 19-year-old Cadet on an exchange program had the same killer’s dead eyes that that Forche’ describes in her book. As in Salvador, the “anti-communist” crackdown in Uruguay was simply a way to suppress all dissent. I remember driving by a checkpoint at night with an Uruguayan lieutenant, and seeing a young, bearded man slumped in a metal chair outside the guardhouse, hands manacled behind him. “Un Tupamaro”, the lieutenant replied to my question, “Quien es?”. As if that explained everything. 

Some critics, Eliot Weinberger in particular, initially took issue with Forche’s book, saying her poems reduced El Salvador to a story about herself, that she was a “tourist of revolution”. I do not agree at all; a poet writes about what she knows and has experienced personally, if she wants her poems to have any force. Did Wilfred Owen reduce WW1 to a story about himself? Clearly many of his poems were about what he saw, what he experienced as a lieutenant in the front lines, but that does not reduce the power of his words; it enhances them. I think Weinberger’s criticism of Forche’ in that regard is silly in the extreme, if for no other reason than Forche’ took grave chances with her life in even traveling to Salvador, and she was with the resistance in person; she finally left the country only at the insistence of Archbishop Oscar Romero, who recognized the danger she was in and wanted her to be a voice for the people of El Salvador in America and Europe. Romero was himself gunned down only one week after he urged Carolyn to leave. At that point in El Salvador, as he knew clearly, no one was safe who opposed the government’s reign of terror, and he wanted Carolyn Forche’ to live, and to speak.

That said, not all the poems in this book ring true. The first part, the poems about Salvador, are the best, sin duda. The poems about her time in Europe have not all aged as well; they are a reflection of her younger, less worldly self. But as Forche’ herself said in an interview, it was well that she was so young and naïve when she went to Salvador, because had she known more about conditions there, she probably would have been too afraid to go. And rightly so. Her poems about love and her ex-husband are uneven at first reading, though one or two are poignant. Like most books of poetry, I will come back to this and re-read; some poems grow and improve upon re-reading, and I may find that some of hers that failed to move me at first will speak to me later.

It is sad that the Cold War effort, which defeated the Soviet Union, freed Eastern Europe, and strengthened democracy in the world in general was such a disaster for Central and South America. I have written elsewhere on GR about how Carolyn Forche’s writing has caused me to think deeply about Latin America again, and to consider after thirty-plus years the role of the military of which I was a part. My time in Honduras and in Uruguay was innocuous on a personal level, thank god, but I was nonetheless a part of a wrong-headed effort in the region which supported dictators who were killing their people with U.S. support. The tyrants and their armies in these countries fought not to defeat communism, but to stay in charge and prevent the rise of democratic government. Her poems are not overtly political, nor were they meant to be, as she herself has stressed. They are meant only to say, “take off the blindfold, open your eyes, and see”.

The Country Between Us

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