“In the dark times. Will there be singing? Yes, there will be singing. About the dark times.” These words by Berthold Brecht have been on my mind a lot lately even from my privileged point of view in rural Vermont, where peace is mostly as abundant as the long sweep of hay and cornfields. Still my television set blares the discord and hate, a technological vomiting that gets harder to subdue.
The Brecht poem appears in one of my favorite poetry anthologies, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poets of Witness, edited by the esteemed poet Carolyn Forche, who has recently published a highly anticipated, lyrical memoir What You Have Heard is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance about her time in El Salvador in the 1970s bearing witness to the horrors of war and human rights abuses.
With the brutality and crimes against humanity happening along our southern border, in addition to bloodshed from white supremacist terrorist attacks in El Paso and Dayton, it is hard not to think we have firmly crossed the threshold into our own dark times. Language has consequences. It has been said, our lives are human documents. What is written in those documents is us. Philosopher/theologian Martin Buber once said,“Whoever speaks one of the basic words enters into the word and stands in it.”
Poetry is one way to enter into the words of witness. This autumn I will be using Forche’s 1993 anthology as part of my poetry workshop at Northern Vermont University, where we will learn all we can about the poetry of witness. I can’t stress this enough in my blogs this week: “It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there,” William Carlos Williams once said in his poem “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”. We are collectively staring into an abyss right now. It’s important to remember history. What is past is prologue. People are dying right here, right now.
I began reading Carolyn Forche’s seminal book of poems “A Country Between Us” when I was in college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the 1980s. In hindsight, I see how her writing and witness about El Salvador helped bring to light, along with other organizations for which she worked like Amnesty International, the brutality and horror of what was happening, bringing a palpable awareness of human rights onto campus. One of the most important poems to me from that collection has been “The Colonel”, a poem that recounts a harrowing experience when her friend and mentor Leonel Gomez Vides, an El Salvadoran revolutionary, brings her to a dinner party at the home of a Colonel, who confronts them in a terrifying manner on the eve of all out war:
“…He spilled many ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves….As for the rights of anyone, tell
your people they can go fuck themselves. He swept the ears on the floor with his arm and held the last of
his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap
of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.
(May 1978)”
I remember reading it as a young person, my eyes rushing back and forth over the page, the image, the meaning, the language, the form. I could sense those ears on the floor of the poem listening for help. Up until then I was unsure if poetry could make a difference, if I should just go with my original plan to go to law school to become a civil rights lawyer, stop my formal poetry study and training. But that poem lead me down a road to read other poets of witness like Celan and Akhmatova. I began to understand that poems were a different kind of law. I learned a poem was an argument. Reading “The Colonel” made me immediately understand Shelley’s dictum ”Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
Go read or re-read this poem, now. Share it with young people that you know. Reread or read The Country Between Us and then read What You Have Heard is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance. That’s your assignment. Then talk about the issues of brutality, torture and death, and human rights abuses with your friends and neighbors. Be an unacknowledged legislator. We co-create this world with our actions. In the words of my grandfather, notice whoever you meet, you never know how they will change your life (or vice versa).
Here is a case in point, an event from which we benefit. When Leonel Gomez Vides, a man of mystery, the El Salvadoran national who showed up on Forche’s door step with his two young daughters in the 1970s, implored her to come to El Salvador to witness and report back to the people of the United States what was happening. Back then, she was a young poet, teaching in California, having recently worked on translating the work of Salvadoran writer and poet Claribel Alegria, from the Spanish. This was how Gomez became aware of Forche. He was related to Alegria. He also understood that a poet’s eye could bring critical information back to the United States and urge people and politicians to take notice of the brutal violence and help. So begins the memoir, which is filled with vital information of the revolution and civil war in El Salvador and how Forche became a human rights activist. It is the story of a young woman’s education in poetry and in life.
Recently, I had the thrilling opportunity to see Forche speak and read for the first time at Bookstock, The Green Mountains Festival of Words, a literary festival held every July in Woodstock, Vermont. It was thrilling, inspirational, necessary.
Here's my interview with Carolyn Forche about her new memoir, What You Heard is True: of A Memoir of Witness and Resistance:
Reading your memoir and hearing you talk at Bookstock made me think about Shelley's dictum "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." It seems Gomez understood this, that having a poet's eye could help begin to bring peace and reconciliation to a place of deep violence. I am in awe of your bravery and witness. Where did your courage come from?
One never feels oneself courageous. It certainly does not mean lack of fear. I recognize courage everywhere and often in the daily lives of people who wouldn’t describe themselves in exceptional terms: the courage summoned for childbirth and for facing illness and death, the courage to sacrifice for the greater good, to admit one’s deficiencies, to endure hardship and speak the truth. These are things ordinary men and women (and we are all ordinary) experience every day. In our culture we have a tendency to romanticize, and hence falsify, certain kinds of danger, particularly having to do with violence and war. We don’t always realize the moment we are most in danger. It is something more clearly understood in the aftermath. In the moment, one does what one can. Or should. One does what is possible to do.
What was the hardest and also the most interesting part about writing about your younger self, especially in prose?
I have always loved writing sentences, so the change to prose wasn’t difficult. Writing about one’s younger self? Yes, that presents challenges. It isn’t possible simply to write the earlier life; it must be re-lived. It is necessary to go through all of it again, as in a waking dream. Sometimes that was harrowing for me. I also knew that I had to be clear about who I was then, and could not bestow upon that character any of the knowledge acquired later. She, the younger self I was recreating, no longer resembles me in many ways. She was somewhat idealistic, and also naive. She was also curious, stubborn, a bit argumentative and headed to the barricades. Well, perhaps I am still a bit like her. But in writing her, I had to be honest with myself. I couldn’t give her qualities she simply didn’t have.
I'm also interested in your relationship with Romero and what you have written about the spiritual/ religious aspects of peace and the ideas inherent in liberation theology. Sometimes I think poetry can be a kind of theology, for me a process theology whereby human actions co-create the world with God, a creative collaboration. I wonder if liberation theology has shaped your ars poetica or your relationship to the word (lowercase and uppercase W).
I share your interest in the co-creation of the world, and in regarding writing as something essentially spiritual. In those days, I was deeply influenced by Gustavo Gutierrez and other liberation theologians. For me, their idea of praxis concretized some of the more wildly visionary writings of such thinkers as Teilhard de Chardin, an earlier influence. In El Salvador, I felt the presence of a spiritual life held in common, and of deeply human origin. I am forever grateful to have been surrounded by such people, and to have known them—St. Oscar Romero, yes, and the community as a whole.
Which writers do you recommend turning to in these dark times of so much hatred at our borders? What is that feeling one has in a nation on the brink of violence that we must all watch for? Is there a critical juncture before there is no turning back?
You are right to recognize our time as one of grave peril, not only in the United States, but as this is where we find ourselves, in the richest and most militarily powerful nation, this is where we must act. It is later than many realize. I recommend a prose work, Milton Mayer’s They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45. For deep spiritual awareness, Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil. To augment our understanding of history, or rather to begin to understand who we are and have been as a nation, Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism,” where in he answers a question seldom asked: why is the United States the wealthiest nation on earth, and what is the origin of that wealth? This is a time to clear our minds of false histories and damaging myths. Clarity is of utmost importance. Clarity, and also courage, which we find within ourselves when most needed. And read as much poetry as you possibly can.
