Poetic injustice
A poet remembers her impulsive trip into a civil war, writes Jennifer Szalai
“WHO is Gomez? Nobody knows.” The person who issued this cryptic statement was none other than Gomez himself — Leonel Gomez Vides, a coffee farmer from El Salvador who showed up in Southern California on the doorstep of the poet Carolyn Forché in 1977, with a bundle of papers under his arm and his two young daughters in tow. Within a few days he persuaded Forché to make her first trip to El Salvador, just as the country was on the verge of civil war.
In What You Have Heard Is True, Forché traces how this initial encounter with a stranger irrevocably changed the course of her art and her life.
Forché was 27 at the time, a Midwesterner living in San Diego, with a budding reputation for her work. She had heard Gomez’s name before, when she travelled to Spain to translate the poems of his cousin Claribel AlegrÌa, though nobody could say for sure whether Claribel’s cousin was working with the Salvadoran guerrillas or with the CIA.
Until the publication of this memoir, Forché’s experiences in El Salvador — seven “extended stays” between 1978 and 1980 — have mostly stayed distilled in her poetry. The Colonel, collected in The
Country Between Us (1981), begins with an elegant dinner at a colonel’s home (rack of lamb, green mangoes) and ends with him emptying a grocery sack full of human ears onto the table — ghastly trophies from a dirty war.
Taking its title from the first line of that poem, Forché’s memoir starts off slowly, as she describes in minute detail how she made the fateful and seemingly inexplicable decision to follow a mysterious stranger’s directive to take such a perilous trip. But once Forché’s story gathers momentum, it’s hard to let the narrative go. What You Have Heard Is True is billed, per its subtitle, as “a memoir of witness and resistance.” That’s fair enough, but it does this riveting book a mild disservice; the memoir I read was more intricate and surprising than such an earnest descriptor lets on.
GRISLY DISQUISITIONS
For a while, it isn’t at all clear how much Gomez can be trusted. When he first shows up, he draws Forché pictures of Spanish galleons, explains how the conquistadors brutalised the Indians, and uses a toothpick holder and a saltshaker to dramatise the infighting among Salvadoran officers after nearly 50 years of a military dictatorship.
He offers grisly disquisitions on the death squads, on the disappeared, on body parts washing up on the beach. Forché tells him that he would be better off enlisting a journalist to document what is happening in his country. “I want a poet,” he insists. “Why do you think I came all this way?”
“Terror is the given of the place,” Joan Didion wrote in her 1983 book Salvador. Forché describes being chased by death squads — not once, but twice. The killings become so indiscriminate that she grows familiar with the “rotting, sweet, sickening” smell of dead bodies left by the side of the road. Forché returned to the United States to write what she called “a poetry of witness” (“born to an island of greed / and grace where you have this sense / of yourself as apart from others”), married a war photographer, had a child.
“You have to be able to see the world as it is, to see how it is put together, and you have to be able to say what you see,” Gomez said, but he left it up to Forché to figure out the rest for herself. “I do not have your answers,” he told her. “I am just a man.”
NYT