Carolyn Forché is an award-winning poet, editor, translator, and activist. She has written a courageous and crucial new book: What You Have Heard is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance. In it, the master poet who coined the phrase “poetry of witness,” documents the war in El Salvador during some of its bloodiest days in the dark Reagan 1980s.
At nearly 400 pages, Forché’s highly personal accounting chronicles the beginnings of the war, the abject poverty in the countryside, and the violent activities of the death squads—supported, trained, and coordinated by the U.S. government. It includes a dramatic recounting of the poet’s meeting with Archbishop Oscar Romero, who urged her to leave El Salvador for her own safety. A week after Forché flew home to Los Angeles, Romero was assassinated while saying mass.
I spoke with Forché recently for my syndicated news program on Pacifica/KPFA in Berkeley, California. What follows is an edited excerpt.
Q: On one level, your book is a tour through a level of poverty most Americans could never understand. Could you talk about how this began to transform you, witnessing this kind of life on the ground?
Carolyn Forché: This memoir is really the story of an education. I wrote it so that the reader would never know more than I knew at the time. I was hoping I could bring the reader along with me. If I could write it that way—including the moments of terror that I would not need to find another language for—then perhaps it would help people today. And this includes the students from El Salvador who have come to my office over the years.
It was really a journey and [a man named] Leonel was my guide. He would bring me to a very wealthy house one night and then the next morning we would be in a little village where no one had anything. There were seven trips altogether between 1978 and 1980. I was profoundly changed during this period of time.
Q: One transformational moment was when you went to visit a prison and saw how political prisoners were being kept. When I was reading this, I kept thinking about the poet Muriel Rukeyser, who referred to prison gates as “the gates of perception.” At first, I thought that was a metaphor, but I can see that your visit to this prison changed everything for you.
Forché: Yes, it did. It was very dramatic. I was talking all the time about the disappeared and people who were in clandestine detention. Leonel had had a childhood friend who was a prison warden. There were a number of political prisoners there and he had arranged for me to visit someone inside that prison because he wanted me to make a mental map of the prison and especially those places where he believed brutal things were happening.
When I emerged from that, I had hives and was sick to my stomach.
When I emerged from that, I had hives and was sick to my stomach. I was supposed to meet with some poets and I wanted to cancel. That night I had another experience in the barrio which led me to realize that I could not afford to be tired anymore or to cancel appointments. I had a profound change of mind and realized what this meant and what this was going to cost. I don’t think I ever went back to how I was before that.
Q: The death squads were expanding their activities and at one point you saw someone taken off the street.
Forché: Everyone lived in fear at that time. Death squads were in the cities as well as the countryside. Many of them were military out of uniform. At one point, they were killing up to a thousand people a month in the capital. They would mostly apprehend people at night, but one day I was walking with a friend of Monsignor Romero and right in front of us a van screeched to a halt and men jumped out and grabbed a young man with a rucksack and threw him into the van.
There was nothing that anyone could do.
Everyone lived in fear at that time. Death squads were in the cities as well as the countryside. Many of them were military out of uniform. At one point, they were killing up to a thousand people a month in the capital.
Q: You yourself were pursued several times by death squads. How did you sustain yourself in the face of this fear?
Forché: As I became a part of that community, we developed strong commitments to each other. The Salvadoran people knew what they were up against and recognized what was happening. Many of them risked their lives for each other and I felt that I was with people who would do that for me. It makes you strong when you witness that kind of courage. It doesn’t mean that you are not afraid. It is a kind of courage that means rising to the moment on behalf of others. So, in addition to all the fear, there was the strongest human solidarity I have ever experienced.
Q: Just before you left El Salvador you had an extended visit with Archbishop Oscar Romero. Could you describe that?
Forché: He granted an interview to a Venezuelan journalist and [others]. They arranged for me to be there as well, and I recorded the conversation. After the journalist left, we went into the convent kitchen for dinner. That is when I was told in no uncertain terms that I had to leave the country the next day. I begged them to let me stay a little longer, because I still had work to do. I also tried to persuade the archbishop to leave. At that time, he was the prime target of the death squads and we knew that an attempt on his life was close. He said no, his place was with his people.
And now my place was with my people. I had to take back what I knew to the United States. During the interview I could see that this man was calm and radiant. He was tapping his fingers on this little Bible he carried around, and I thought, “I’m sitting next to a saint.” A week later, he was assassinated. I was back in the United States when it happened.
I felt an obligation. I had promised them that I would speak about it and I had promised Leonel that I would write about it. I wrote poems but it took me twenty years to be able to start this book and fifteen years to write it. It was like being in a tunnel underground for fifteen years. Finally, I finished it, so it can be in the world now.
Q: Well, it is an important book. In it, you write these little paragraphs in pencil and without punctuation that document the most horrific parts of what you witnessed. Can you say something about why you chose that format?
Forché: I kept notebooks with me in El Salvador, as I have all my life. I always write in pencil because if feel it is less of a commitment. I came across some of these notebooks from El Salvador and I actually used some of them verbatim. Then I thought this is the state of mind I was in at the time and which I have to replicate for these most horrific moments. The mind experiences the world differently under extremity. There could not be a calm narrator. I wanted the reader to feel what I was feeling. That notebook form occurred to me as the voice of the trauma, when you are not fully processing what is happening to you.
There is something fortifying about the human spirit when it dedicates itself to the protection of others.
Q: It is an extraordinary read. It is also incredibly important given that one of the key players in instituting this death squad policy in El Salvador, a guy by the name of Elliot Abrams, is back in the news as Trump’s special envoy to Venezuela.
Forché: The other thing happening right now is the refugees coming from Central America. They are running away from something much more terrifying to them than anything that could happen to them in the desert or once they reach the United States. People don’t leave their countries for nothing, with just their children in their arms, unless what they are leaving behind is horrifying to them. The situation they are in right now was created years ago and I hope I was able to tell some of the story of that creation. They are normal people running away from something that we helped create. We owe them asylum and protection and care.
Q: And what they get is the back of our hand and the disappearance of thousands of children.
Forché: Many of them are in secret detention centers. We have to keep working on their behalf. We can’t be a country that abducts children from their parents and sequesters them in freezing cells, depriving them of school, depriving them of childhood.
There is hope because, just as the anti-intervention movement, and the sanctuary movement, and the witness-for-peace movement blossomed in the early eighties, it can happen again. There are good people in this country who are working to protect people being pursued by ICE. That is the hope of our country, in helping and saving others. There is something fortifying about the human spirit when it dedicates itself to the protection of others.