The best memoir book I’ve read in the last few years is, What You Have Heard is True. That title is taken from the poem below. The memoir is Carolyn Forche’s telling of time she spent in El Salvador as a young poet and journalist. For anyone who wants a deeper understanding of the brutality inflicted on the peasants and working poor of Central and South American countries, much of it by forces trained by US military personnel at the infamous School of the Americas in Georgia, this is a must-read book. I shed tears several times in reading her gripping descriptions of the innocent poor that were tortured and murdered in an effort to maintain a rule of terror and stave off a popular revolution.
Which brings me to this week’s featured poem. 'The Colonel' was written in 1978. El Salvador was in disarray, in the middle of a civil war between the US-backed military and government, and the Foarabundo Martí National Liberation Front. The poem describes an incident in which Forche was invited to dinner at the house of a colonel who commanded military personnel whose job it was to thwart dissent and protest among the peasantry. Near the end of the poem there is a description of one of the shocking tactics that were used.
The casual but detailed description of how the food and wine were served is followed by the awful telling of the length to which the colonel went to inflict fear into his young guest. This brutal description is followed by the line, “something for your poetry, no”? spoken as as he holds his wine aloft in a toast.
If you can read this poem without shivering, you are a stronger person than I am.
The poem was published in the 1981 collection, The Country Between Us, published by Harper & Row. The book was the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1981.
Here is the poem. Brace yourselves.
The Colonel
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 them-
selves. 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.
--Carolyn Forche, May 1978
Until next week,
Ed