Carolyn Forché’s Education in Looking - The New Yorker

Forché, in California, in 1977. Her poems ask what we can do with what we see.Photograph by Marsha Boston / Courtesy Carolyn Forché

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In a 1961 interview, the great modernist poet Marianne Moore expressed ambivalence about her popular 1943 antiwar verse, “In Distrust of Merits.” “As form, what has it?” Moore said. “It is just a protest—disjointed, exclamatory. . . . First this thought and then that.” Moore was not the first author to question what you might call her reactive voice. W. H. Auden famously turned his back on his poem “September 1, 1939,” written on the occasion of Germany’s invasion of Poland—“All I have is a voice / To undo the folded lie . . . / We must love one another or die”—because he considered the work fundamentally dishonest. “After it had been published,” he said, “I came to the line ‘We must love one another or die’ and said to myself: ‘That’s a damned lie! We must die anyway!’ ” Implicit in Auden’s and Moore’s self-criticism is their aversion not only to the declarative but to the general—to the poet’s “I” taking on the mantle of “we.” And yet the English-language reader is particularly attuned to that kind of broad rhetoric, which can be found in poems ranging from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” to Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise,” because, despite Auden’s claim that “poetry makes nothing happen,” we equate political poetry with momentum and a kind of galvanizing sound—a cry of victory in a world hellbent on oppression and darkness.

It’s precisely the absence of those easy markers—the triumph of good over evil, truth lighting the way—that makes the poet and activist Carolyn Forché’s work chilling and unique. For a large part of her career, Forché, who is now sixty-nine, has been characterized as a political poet. Which she is, though she prefers the term “poetry of witness.” Her poems ask again and again, What can we do with what we see and live through? They help us to consider our memories of Auschwitz or an image of immigrants drowned in the Rio Grande. In our deeply bifurcated world, Forché’s best writing engages in a kind of dialectic, one in which the truth of experience burns as brightly as the author’s intuition and imagination. Her poetry and her fascinating 2019 memoir, “What You Have Heard Is True,” which describes her time in El Salvador shortly before and during the civil war there, are filled with refugees, the dispossessed, and survivors, acutely observed in public places, near bodies of water, in garbage dumps. These are people Forché is desperate not to forget. Nor can she forget the young woman she once was, a woman who, as she told Jonathan Cott, for his 1987 book, “Visions and Voices,” “wasn’t equipped to see or analyze the world.” Of her travels in El Salvador, she said to Cott:

My perceptions were very distorted—and I’m even talking about visual perception. I would notice things in very general terms, but there were certain things I would fail to see.

I would always marvel at the wealthy women in the suburbs of San Salvador—women playing canasta all day—and I spent many hours talking to them. They did not see poverty, it didn’t exist for them. First of all, they never went outside the capital city, but even in the city they could go through a street in a car and not see the mother who had made a nest in rubber tires for her babies. . . .

Now, as to what I didn’t see: I was once driving past rows of cotton fields—all I could see on either side of the highway for miles was cotton fields, and it was dusty and hot, and I was rolling along thinking about something in my usual way, which is the way that has been nurtured in this country. But I didn’t see between the rows, where there were women and children, emaciated, in a stupor, because pesticide planes had swept over and dropped chemicals all over them, and they were coughing and lethargic from those poisonous clouds . . . There they were, and I hadn’t seen them. I had only seen cotton and soil between cotton plants, and a hot sky—I saw the thing endlessly and aesthetically, I saw it in a certain spatial way. So I had to be taught to look and to remember and to think about what I was seeing. . . .

[W]e Americans . . . tend to register perceptions without codifying them in any political, historical, or social way. There’s no sense of what creates or contributes to or who benefits from a situation. And I’m not talking about a prescriptive political ideology now . . . [but] a process of understanding.

In order to understand what Forché is doing on the page, you have to look between the rows of type, and see what she leaves in the white space of your imagination. You have to rejigger, if not jettison entirely, your ideas or preconceptions about political writing and about what makes a poem. Forché’s stately stanzas—her writing is never hurried—are the work of a literary reporter, Gloria Emerson as filtered through the eyes of Elizabeth Bishop or Grace Paley. Free of jingoism but not of moral gravity, Forché’s work questions—when it does question—how to be or to become a thinking, caring, communicating adult. Taken together, Forché’s five books of verse—the most recent, “In the Lateness of the World” (Penguin Press), was published in March—are about action: memory as action, vision and writing as action. She asks us to consider the sometimes unrecognized, though always felt, ways in which power inserts itself into our lives and to think about how we can move forward with what we know. History—with its construction and its destruction—is at the heart of “In the Lateness of the World.” In “Museum of Stones,” the first poem in the book, Forché’s delicate but hawklike observations show us the broken dreams and false idols that are left in the wake of violence, folly, and time. She also shows how to pick our way through that detritus to search for clues as to who we were or might have been:

These are your stones, assembled in matchbox and tin,
collected from roadside, culvert, and viaduct,
battlefield, threshing floor, basilica, abattoir—
stones, loosened by tanks in the streets,
from a city whose earliest map was drawn in ink on linen,
schoolyard stones in the hand of a corpse,
pebble from Baudelaire’s oui,
stone of the mind within us
carried from one silence to another . . .
stone from the tunnel lined with bones,
lava of a city’s entombment, stones
chipped from lighthouse, cell wall, scriptorium,
paving stones from the hands of those who rose against the army,
stones where the bells had fallen, where the bridges were blown . . .
all earth a quarry, all life a labor, stone faced, stone-drunk
with hope that this assemblage of rubble, taken together, would become
a shrine or holy place, an ossuary, immovable and sacred
like the stone that marked the path of the sun as it entered the human dawn.

Faith has been part of Forché’s story from the beginning. Born in 1950, she is the oldest of seven children. Her working-class religious Catholic parents, Louise and Michael, a tool-and-die maker, raised their brood in Farmington, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. When Forché was about nine, her mother, whom she has described as a feminist, suggested that her bright, bookish daughter entertain herself by composing a poem. To show her how, Louise dusted off an old textbook—she had attended college for two years before marrying—and explained to Carolyn what meter was and taught her the importance of stresses. Forché was instantly taken by the poetic form. “I began to work in iambic pentameter because I didn’t know there was anything else,” she told Cott. “Writing was simply the reverie that I recorded.”

While the surreal horror of the Vietnam War was still a daily reality, Forché completed a bachelor’s degree in international relations at Michigan State University in 1972, and a master’s of fine arts at Bowling Green State University three years later. In an essay for her essential 2014 anthology, “Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500-2001,” co-edited with the scholar Duncan Wu, Forché relates how, in her early twenties, she read excerpts from the transcript of the 1964 trial, in Leningrad, of the Russian-born poet Joseph Brodsky—Soviet officials weren’t thrilled by his assertion, among other things, that it was God who gave him the authority to be a poet—and sent him some poems. Brodsky, who was then teaching in Ann Arbor, Michigan, near where Forché grew up, wrote back to the burgeoning writer, suggesting, first, that she include more of her own philosophy in her writing, and, second, that she read Anna Akhmatova. This was another turning point for Forché. She was moved not only by Akhmatova’s spare, dissident “Requiem” but by how, under Stalinist rule, Akhmatova had largely composed the poem in her mind and, with help from some friends, memorized it to avoid committing anything to paper—an act that, according to Akhmatova’s biographer Amanda Haight, was possible only “if one was convinced of the absolute importance and necessity of poetry.” All of this—Brodsky’s sense that his vocation was a gift from God, the fleeting smile of a woman who’d asked Akhmatova if she could describe the horror of the Yezhov terror (Akhmatova’s answer: “I can”)—began to change Forché. In her essay for “Poetry of Witness,” she writes:

 As I was still in my early twenties and educated in the United States, I hadn’t thought of poetry in these terms. I had not yet encountered evil in anything resembling this form, and had not yet, therefore, imagined the impress of extremity upon the poetic imagination, nor conceived of our relation to others as one of infinite obligation: to stand with them in the hour of need, even abject and destitute, in supplication and without need of response. If it were so—if description were possible, of the world and its sufferings, then the response would be that smile, or rather something resembling it.

Those concerns—the desire to stand with others, and to describe who we are and what we suffer—come to the forefront in Forché’s accomplished first book of poems, “Gathering the Tribes,” which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize in 1975. The book’s emotional focus, as Stanley Kunitz, who judged the contest, observed in his foreword, is on kinship: “Love of people, love of place.” “Gathering the Tribes” is a book about traces—the ghostly matrilineal lines leading to and away from the poet—and her still developing womanhood; it is also about voices, and the dominant voice in the book is that of Forché’s Slovakian grandmother, Anna. Part of the exquisite tension of the collection comes from Forché’s effort to inhabit her grandmother as a young woman in Eastern Europe, moving from one unsettled world to the next. From “What It Cost”:

In the pink tintype earliest hours,
we were moved out of Kiev.
Grey pelts to our necks smelling
as cold as in Wakhan on the dunged straw.
Asleep with fog in our mouths.

We ate the chunks bobbing in soup,
someone thinking it excrement, and drank
bad vodka poured over black breads. . . .

We were young,
the children ate flesh
pulled from pyres.
Mothers wrapped dead babies
in blankets and carried them.

As we will never know what it means,
we will know what it cost.

While the voice in these often compact poems is solid, definite, Forché’s perspective can shift from line to line: these poems are about consciousness as an active experience. The most exciting investigations in “Gathering the Tribes” involve identity: Who was Anna? What was it like to be her? Or to be Carolyn? In “The Morning Baking,” Forché asks her grandmother to come back from death to answer those questions:

Grandma, come back, I forgot
How much lard for these rolls

Think you can put yourself in the ground
Like plain potatoes and grow in Ohio?
I am damn sick of getting fat like you

Think you can lie through your Slovak?

But the dead take their recipes—and their secrets—with them. That’s one thing we hold against them. Along with our grief. One hears a bit of Sylvia Plath’s brilliant and brittle accusatory tone here, though Plath would never have felt, let alone expressed, the anticipatory joy that Forché feels about the possibility of becoming her grandmother: “But I’m glad I’ll look when I’m old / Like a gypsy dusha hauling milk.”

Toward the end of the book, we find the poem “Mientras Dure Vida, Sobra el Tiempo”—“Memory becomes very deep, weighs more, moves less.” If that’s true (and it seems to be for Forché), is it possible that words, by contrast, weigh less, move more? That when people are gone we are free to make them up, out of longing, grief, or imagination? Forché writes:

Last night a woman not alive
came to my bedside, a black skirt, black
reboso. She touched
my blankets, sang like wind
in a crack, saw
that my eyes were open.
She went to the kitchen
without footsteps,
rattled pans, sang ma-he-yo

Ma-he-yo until morning.

In a recent interview with Chard deNiord, Forché recalls that after “Gathering the Tribes” came out she was teaching at San Diego State University. Her spirits were low. But then her life took a turn. Through a colleague, she met and became friends with Maya Flakoll, who was the daughter of the Nicaraguan-Salvadoran poet Claribel Alegría. In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, Alegría had belonged to a group of writers called la generación comprometida (“the committed generation”)—artists who agitated for political change. By the time Forché met her, in the summer of 1977, Alegría was living in exile in Mallorca, writing extraordinary poems, which Flakoll encouraged Forché, who had been studying French and Spanish, to translate. “Flowers from the Volcano” is one of the poems Forché subsequently translated:

Cartoon by John O’Brien

Fourteen volcanos rise
in my remembered country
in my mythical country.
Fourteen volcanos of foliage and stone
where strange clouds hold back
the screech of a homeless bird.
Who said that my country was green?
It is more red, more gray, more violent:
Izalco roars, taking more lives.
Eternal Chacmol collects blood,
the gray orphans
the volcano spitting bright lava
and the dead guerrillero
and the thousand betrayed faces,
the children who are watching
so they can tell of it.
Not one kingdom was left us.
One by one they fell
through all the Americas.

Despite her sensitivity to the work, Forché didn’t think that she could accomplish the task, in large part because she didn’t know enough about the world that Alegría’s poems grew out of. She knew nothing about Central America or about the forces that were pushing El Salvador toward civil war. Sitting with Alegría and her friends on the older poet’s terrace in Mallorca, Forché began to understand how personal the political could be. In her memoir, Forché writes:

 From childhood, I had experienced bouts of depression, and my mother had also suffered this during her child-raising years. I would find her in her room sometimes, crying and staring at nothing. She told me that I would understand when I was older . . . In my own life, this darkness descended always unexpectedly. . . .
Something could, at times, push against it. Work did, and also the urge to do something in the face of some wrongdoing or injustice inflicted against another, and this urge swelled during the conversations on the terrace in Mallorca that summer, as I sat on the edge of the circle taking things in, until, toward the end, I also worked at being invisible, because it seemed, from what I understood from these conversations, that injustices of a political nature were not historical accidents, and that most injustices in Latin America were supported or made possible by the United States, or that was my impression. One of the visiting writers had even responded to my plaintive question regarding ways I might get involved with something like: There is nothing you can do, my dear. Change your government. Enjoy your summer.

Of course, this condescending remark conveyed not only anti-“ugly American” sentiment but the marginalization that many women experience when it comes to activism: they are supposed to cook the meals and bear the children while the men do the “real” work. The examples of Akhmatova and Alegría had taught Forché to be alert to the chauvinism in that non-idea. Still, after returning to San Diego, Forché was at a loss as to how to become more actively involved in a situation she was just beginning to learn about. What did it mean for Alegría and others to live in exile? What did it mean not to have a home or be at home? One day, Forché was visited by Alegría’s nephew Leonel Gómez Vides, who invited her to join him in El Salvador—to bear witness, as an artist, to what was happening there. As Forché recounts in “What You Have Heard Is True,” the meeting with Vides and her decision to journey, alone, to El Salvador had a hallucinatory quality: at the invitation of a man she didn’t know, she was going to live, at least for a time, in a country she didn’t know. Indeed, what she didn’t know about El Salvador and its relationship to “the Americas” could have filled a book. And it did, along with all that Forché discovered there, as she worked in conjunction with Archbishop Óscar Romero, in his efforts to stop social injustice, torture, and other forms of brutality.

Forché’s 1981 collection, “The Country Between Us,” bears witness not only to what she saw in El Salvador but to the broader U.S.-backed oppression in Latin America. The book is a masterpiece of poetry and of resistance. Nevertheless, it was rejected by several publishers. What had happened to the young woman who could embody her grandmother and write about family? Why hadn’t she stayed in that territory of dreams and domesticity? In “The Country Between Us,” Forché was a different poet—one remade by knowledge and by a need to tell the truth about where she was from. And the place Forché was from now wasn’t just Michigan, or California, or the past, but corrupt El Salvador, a country where scenes such as the one she laid out with poetic care and reportorial clarity in her 1978 prose poem “The Colonel” could take place:

 What you have heard is true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English. 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. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves. He swept the ears to 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.

When “The Country Between Us” was rejected by the first publisher it was sent to, Margaret Atwood, another older writer Forché admired, insisted that she not give up on the book. Eventually, it was published by Harper & Row, and it wasn’t long before prominent journalists, following the escalating troubles in El Salvador, were mentioning Forché in their columns as a source on the situation. As she told deNiord, she found this confusing:

 I was surprised that my work was being read as political poetry. I wondered what was meant by that. I knew that “political” was a pejorative term, but I didn’t know what they meant, because in El Salvador if you’re political, you go to meetings every night, you’re in a political party, you follow orders, you are in a disciplined, structured, political group. In the United States, as far as I could tell, it meant something loosely oppositional to the status quo. “Political” was a label, affixed to people who variously brought to light anything that seemed to contend with dominant thinking.

Part of what keeps “The Country Between Us” powerful to this day is that we learn what “political” means to us as Forché discovers it for herself. Yet, despite the support of many other writers, including Joyce Carol Oates, who praised “The Country Between Us” in the Times—“One feels that the poet has earned her bleak and wintry vision”—the collection wasn’t greeted with open arms. Forché was accused of doing something—reporting—that was not part of her role as a poet. (The essayist Eliot Weinberger called it “revolutionary tourism.”) But what is the role of the poet? Are writers responsible to some degree for the world they inhabit? These were questions that Forché was undoubtedly, if indirectly, putting to other writers, as, along with other brilliant poets, including Adrienne Rich, June Jordan, and Audre Lorde, she was carving out a place for poetry that not only spoke of the self but connected to the world.

In the years after “The Country Between Us” came out, Forché connected to the world in a variety of ways, some deeply personal. In 1980, she met the photographer Harry Mattison, whom she married in the winter of 1984. Mattison worked for Time, in South Africa, where, eventually, the couple came under government scrutiny for violating the Group Areas Act; that is, for sharing a home with a person of color. (Their landlord reported them.) As the situation escalated, Forché became pregnant, and she and Mattison left South Africa so that she could deliver the baby in relative safety. Her son and only child, Sean Christophe Mattison, was born a few weeks after the couple arrived in Paris, where they stayed for almost a year. Being a mother and making a family are, of course, essential themes in Forché’s third collection, “The Angel of History” (1994), in which she writes about the resonance of disasters, such as Hiroshima and the Holocaust, but also about the ways in which the members of one generation can be affected by the gravity of what the preceding generation left behind to nourish them—or not. The extraordinary title poem begins:

There are times when the child seems delicate, as if he had not yet crossed into the world.
When French was the secret music of the street, the café, the train, my own
   receded and became intimacy and sleep.
In the world it was the language of propaganda, the agreed-upon lie, and it bound me to
   itself, demanding of my life an explanation.
When my son was born I became mortal.

Forché’s role as a mother—the moral barometer against which all children measure themselves—is important, though not overwhelming, in the collection “Blue Hour,” from 2003. With this book, the poet encountered the same criticism as with “The Country Between Us”: What was personal? What was political? And how could the reader reconcile the two? A Briefly Noted review in this magazine said:

 The uncertainty of an individual’s survival at any given point in history informs the first part of this volume, which mounts a quiet protest against the atrocities of the last century and insists that “even the most broken life can be restored to its moments.” In such lines, Forché’s persona—unflinching witness and eloquent mourner—prevails, but in the centerpiece of the collection, “On Earth,” her obsessive documentation of inhumanity overwhelms her best lyric instincts. . . . [A]nd . . . the poem’s collage of horrifying imagery feels gratuitous more often than it does inspired.

Forché’s strongest critics seem to agree on this: that she, with her various intensities, can be “too much.” But isn’t the world too much? Toni Morrison once observed that there is no such thing as bigger than life: life is big. Forché, in her profoundly ambitious work, aims to capture that bigness, line by line. In “In the Lateness of the World,” one feels the poet cresting a wave—a new wave that will crash onto new lands and unexplored territories. To read the book straight through is to see connections between her earlier work and her new poems because, by looking at the world, she has made a world, one in which her past is as present as her future.

In “The Boatman,” a poem about refugees in Italy, one hears echoes of “The Colonel”—“We were thirty-one souls, he said, in the gray-sick of sea / in a cold rubber boat, rising and falling in our filth.” But in the book’s final poem, “What Comes,” Forché takes apart the thought and thus the language that sent her to the page in the first place, a dialectical world littered with yeses and nos and her mother and Anna Akhmatova and Claribel Alegría and all the women and the mess and the beauty of identity in between, which are given shape by the care and discipline of poetry and the desire to speak. And yet, as much as life takes, it gives, including the poet’s voice and its myriad possibilities, among them how to render silence:

to speak is not yet to have spoken.
the not-yet of a white realm of nothing left
neither for itself nor another
a no-longer already there, along with the arrival of what has been
light and the reverse of light . . .
you have yourself within you
yourself, you have her, and there is nothing
that cannot be seen
open then to the coming of what comes  ♦

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