Though it took Forché half a lifetime to fully share what she saw - this time is also more cryptically recalled in her second book of poems, The Country Between Us (1982) - now is precisely when we need to see it. 'What do you see?' Gómez asks again and again. Gómez's goal is to show her the contradictory truths of his country, a model of corrupt rule and the careful, painful process by which it is overthrown, so that she can ultimately show us. Forché is transformed from a young poet with an unfocused 'urge to do something in the face of some wrongdoing or injustice inflicted against another' into the lifelong activist and a 'poet of witness' she has called herself since.īy Gómez's side, she meets campesinos, mixes with insurgents, endures anxious interviews with military personnel, and evades death squads. Much of the book unfolds in the passenger seat of Gómez's car, where his lessons continue. Gómez invites Forché to his country, drafting her as a kind of factotum, a witness and helper in his campaign: 'you could see quite a bit of the country, I think, and you could learn about the situation, and then you could come back here, and when the war begins, you would be in a position to explain it to the Americans,' he says. He worked on behalf of the campesinos (the peasant farmers), was neither on the side of the guerrilla fighters nor the U.S.-backed military dictatorship, and ultimately helped broker peace between the two sides, and the birth of El Salvador's democracy in 1992. He was a shadowy and contradictory figure - a revolutionary, an activist and organizer, a political chess player. Written with a thriller writer's knack for narrative tension and a poet's gorgeous sentences and empathy, it is also an intimate portrait of Leonel Gómez Vides, the stranger who drove up from El Salvador on a tip from a mutual friend and dramatically altered the course of Forché's life. It is Forché's extraordinary memoir of the late 1970s, the years after she published her first book of poetry, when she traveled to El Salvador in the lead up to that country's devastating 12 year civil war, in which tens of thousands were killed. This is how What You Have Heard Is True begins. 'There is soon going to be a war,' the man says.

The poet Carolyn Forché was 27 when a stranger showed up on her doorstep, unrolled a giant sheet of paper on her dining room table, and proceeded to give her a masterclass in Central American geopolitics and the crisis unfolding in El Salvador. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title What You Have Heard Is True Subtitle A Memoir of Witness and Resistance Author Carolyn Forché

What you have heard is true