carolyn forche what you have heard is true

These experiences lead Forché to become an activist with Amnesty International. Released in 2019, her memoir, What You Have Heard is True, tells the story of her experiences there and those specific moments that influenced her poems. Her travels produced two of her books The Country Between Us and Gathering the Tribes. I would later learn that Forché is an American poet who was invited down to El Salvador by a revolutionary to witness and write about the human rights atrocities in the country. Forché’s image was so striking I called back many of the memories I had of a neighbouring country that also still bore the marks of the civil war that had impacted it only a few years before. I had asked our hosts about them because some of the broken bottles still wore Fanta and Pepsi logos. Immediately, I remembered my “mission” trips to Nicaragua where I had seen walls like this in Corinto. “Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man’s legs or cut his hands to lace.” I devoted a whole paragraph in an essay to “the moon swung bare on its black cord over the house,” outlining how it revealed certain claustrophobia on behalf of the speaker, but it was the following line that stuck with me:

The poem unraveled before me a picture of an evening at a colonel’s house in El Salvador during the civil war. I was twenty-one when I first read Carolyn Forché’s “The Colonel” in my first year at Carolyn Forché, 1950-present The moon swung bare on its back cord over the house. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar.

Carolyn forche what you have heard is true