In 'What You Have Heard Is True,' A Poet Bears Witness To Devastating Civil War
Though it took poet Carolyn Forché half a lifetime to fully share in a memoir what she saw during her time in El Salvador in the 1970s and the lessons learned, now is precisely when we need to see it.
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.
"There is soon going to be a war," the man says.
This is how begins. It is Forché's extraordinary memoir of the late 1970s, the years after shethe 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.
