What You Have Heard Is True

In What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance (2019), poet Carolyn Forché recounts her time in El Salvador in the late 1970s; during this time, the country teetered on the edge of a devastating civil war. The war would last over a decade and kill untold tens of thousands. By one estimate, 65,000 people were either killed or disappeared by El Salvador's military junta during this period, in no small part due to the support it received from the U.S.'s Carter and Reagan administrations. Forché visited the country multiple times between 1978 and 1980 on a Guggenheim fellowship; this experience became the basis for her controversial poetry collection The Country Between Us (1981) – and, much later, What You Have Heard Is True.

Forché's memoir begins with an approach by Leonel Gómez Vides, who has traveled from El Salvador to meet Forché knowing that the poet has been translating the work of his aunt, Nicaraguan-Salvadoran writer Claribel Alegría. Vides hopes to enlist Forché as a witness, a means by which news of the coming war's atrocities can be funneled back to America. As Vides puts it to Forché, "You could see quite a bit of the country, I think, and you could learn about the situation, and then you could come back here, and when the war begins, you would be in a position to explain it to the Americans." Forché objects that a journalist might be better suited to document such a topic, given the low esteem America typically has for poets, but Vides insists he needs someone with a poet's sensibility.

Vides himself, as Forché describes him, is a bit of a conundrum. He is a revolutionary, an activist who works on behalf of the campesinos (the peasant farmers). He isn't, technically, on either side of the Salvadoran conflict; neither the US-backed military junta government nor the guerrilla fighters (he would eventually help settle peace between the sides in 1992). Intrigued by his offer – Forché would later describe Vides as “seeming like he was playing twelve-dimensional chess against the world, against evil” – and beset by a feeling of urgency she can't explain, Forché accepts his offer to travel to El Salvador to “learn about the situation.”

What Forché sees, she records. Her naivete is challenged early on, as she confronts poverty, destruction, and corruption on all sides. In long stretches of unpunctuated prose-poetry, she crafts descriptions, such as, “This is the village abandoned a pitted road stretches between burned shacks in the mud there is a saint’s picture decorated with foil stars there is no smoke rising from cook fires where women would have turned the family’s daily tortillas nor any from the fires that chewed through this village during a 'search-and-destroy' operation the people returned here briefly and held orange rinds wrapped in cloth over their mouths as they gathered the dead listing their names.” Forché's run-on sentences reflect the stream of her consciousness: astounded by what she sees, she lists it all in a breathless, never-ending torrent that engenders in her readers the same desire to rest and digest – even block out – what has just been taken in that she felt at the time.

Vides arranges for her to meet many people. Farmers, clergy members, militants, and military officers – many of them corrupt. Not all of her “interviews” are with men. She records her meetings with women variously involved in the conflict as well, and these are some of Forché’s most moving passages. There is a woman who consorts with assassins, a nun on the run, a doctor who has dedicated herself to helping the afflicted poor. Forché's interviews are not always safe – they usually are not – and they beg the question of Vides's motives. He needs Forché because he wants her to tell what she has seen, to uncover it. However, he also seems to deliberately place her in danger on several occasions – she escapes death squads, if only just, twice. Repeatedly, he asks her, “What do you see?” Pencil on paper, Forché responds as faithfully as she can.

It was out of her harrowing experience of war's eruption in El Salvador that Forché would come to develop her idea of “poetry of witness”: poetry that, avoiding polemicizing, documents the atrocity of war, as fully as it can. Poetry of witness is written in the hope that by truly rendering the pain of war, readers, whoever they might be, might finally learn to heed it. Poetry of witness, in other words, posits poetry as a valid means of social advocacy. In 1992, Forché published Against Forgetting, an anthology of war poems by various writers that Forché has described as “a symphony of utterance, a living memorial to those who had died and those who survived the horrors of the twentieth century.” What You Have Heard Is True provides Against Forgetting's essential context; besides standing on its own as a stark record of the outbreak of war, What You Have Heard Is True also gives its readers the experiences out of which Forché's later theorizations of poetry of witness, and its necessity, arose.