The resulting eight poems, published in the collection The Country Between Us (1981), are brutal in their stark depictions of rape, mutilation, torture, and horror. Why doesn’t anyone do something? I think I asked.”įorché was in El Salvador on a Guggenheim fellowship, to work with Amnesty International. Forché opens her recent memoir, What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance, which reflects on those visits (she traveled there repeatedly between 19), with a description of finding the dismembered body of a man: “The parts are not quite touching, there is soil between them, especially the head and the rest. POET CAROLYN FORCHÉ first visited El Salvador in 1978 when, in the words of her self-ascribed mentor Leonel Gómez Vides, its peace was “the silence of misery endured.” The country was on the precipice of a deadly civil war during which more than 65,000 people were killed or “disappeared” by a regime supported by the United States.
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