Leonel was right to choose a poet, because only a poet as empathetic and brave as Forché could stand a chance of conveying what should be indescribable. Talk of murder and missing digits is replaced by a corporeal danger across a country-a place where dead bodies are found by school children and army officials keep human beings in literal coffin freezers to feed their hounds. When Forché and Leonel come across two bodies in the road, the memoir truly begins. They rend the foundations of their societies before losing all humanity supposedly holds dear. But a people on the verge of violence do not amass in straight lines, do not prescribe to a neat narrative decline, do not die in round numbers.
And to better understand El Salvador, which suffered for so long under a war whose American-aided brutality is difficult to comprehend, it helps to have a poet for a historian.Īs Forché notes, wars reported by historians list their victims in round numbers, a literal rounding off of the ragged edges, the remainders. To understand Forché, one must understand her time in El Salvador the experience was highly formative and is found throughout the rest of her humanitarian career and her politically engaged work. What You Have Heard Is True is Forché’s recounting of her travels, an eyewitness account of a country losing humanity and compassion like blood.
He invited her to journey to El Salvador on the brink of a civil war, so that she might one day return and bend America’s eyes and ears and hands. The El Salvadoran showed up at Carolyn Forché’s door outside San Diego to offer her, a poet a few years shy of 30, an irresistible mystery. In the end, Leonel Gómez Vides had been correct to choose a poet.
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