POETRY

Poet's words witness world's human rights tragedies

By Brad Buchholz
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, April 02, 2009

Carolyn Forché has devoted her life to the intersection of poetry and human rights. She writes for those who cannot — acknowledging, for the sake of history and memory, those who have suffered in the name of peace and justice and humanity. She calls it "Poetry of Witness."

Forché's poetry is haunted, impressionistic, elegant, ghostly, delicate. It references Hiroshima and the Holocaust, a boy soldier in El Salvador and his horrible knife, the metaphor of the ruined field, "a burnt room strewn with toy tanks, a century passing though it."

"I don't believe guns will save anyone," says Forché, who visits Austin on Saturday for a "Poetry of Witness" reading, set to music, at the Huston-Tillotson University chapel. "The sack of beans that isn't saved with everyone will doom a person morally. The bulwark in these times is our dedication to each other — and our service to each other."

As a young poet, Forché (now 58) did not set out to be a poet-activist. But in the late 1970s she traveled to war-torn El Salvador on a Guggenheim Fellowship, motivated primarily by the work of poet Claribel Alegria. Once there, she became involved as a human rights advocate working with Amnesty International.

'a random life, caught in a net of purpose'

In El Salvador, Forché came to know the archbishop Oscar Romero — a champion of the poor and of war victims. Romero, who was assassinated in 1980, was one of many Salvadorans who implored her to do the poet's work in the name of social justice, no matter how hopeless the predicament of the moment.

"He gave me to understand that we should not focus so much on our objectives," says Forché, who left El Salvador under duress a week before Romero's assassination. "Rather, he said we had to live morally and ethically, to promote what we wish to have happen in the world. But: We would not live to see it. So we had to give that up.

"He said if you work toward a particular goal, you take the risk of disappointment and discouragement, that (consequently) you might stop working. And that would be tragic. So he kept me focused on the present. He didn't believe the fighting in El Salvador would turn out well. He didn't believe a new day would come, and everyone would be peaceful. He believed that this was a long work."

'come love, through burning'

Carolyn Forché's early work is taut, turbulent, exact. The poems in 1981's "The Country Between Us," drawn from her El Salvador experience, are like volatile brews contained in remarkably sturdy vessels. "The Colonel," a true story of Forché's chilling experience as a dinner guest in the home of a Salvadoran military leader, is a study in horror and restraint.

In her two latest books, Forché's poetic approach is fractured, informed by more experiences in war-torn Africa and the Middle East and a deeper examination of her family's past. Relatives of her grandmother's had been prisoners at the Theresienstadt concentration camp in what is now the Czech Republic. So the poems in "The Angel of History" and "Blue Hour" are no longer about the sturdy vessel, but the exquisite, fragile shards.

'do we interpret the words before we obey the orders?'

"I believe in protecting civilians at all costs, at all times," Forché says. "I don't believe military forces — whether they are regular army or militias — should be allowed to massacre civilians. Period. Ever. If there's any legitimate reason for standing armies, it would be to protect civilians. That's it.

"There was a man talking on NPR the other day, a military man, expressing his concern for the United States because we were 'losing our enthusiasm for war.' I was peeling potatoes, thinking, 'Am I really hearing this?' There's a certain level that you cannot look at warfare — and I've looked at quite a bit of it, up close and personal — without seeing it as diabolical and absurd. It makes no sense whatsoever."

'it is more ominous than any oblivion, to see the world as it is'

Forché, who grew up in Michigan, devoted a decade of her life to putting together the celebrated, 800-page poetry volume "Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness," published in 1993. Its premise: To assemble "a poetic memorial to those who suffered and resisted through poetry itself" at a time in which "monstrous acts have come to seem almost normal."

The volume includes the work of Federico García Lorca and W.H. Auden, Pablo Neruda and Mahmoud Darwish. The book isn't "about" the ravages of war as much as it acknowledges the poet's voice against repression, discrimination and tyranny in all forms. The Civil Rights struggle in America. Apartheid in South Africa. Genocide in Armenia.

'only the walls that did not face the blast remained white'

"I've been researching weaponry, ancient weaponry," says Forché, who is working on three books –— a memoir, a fifth volume of poetry and a collection of essays. "Humans have been artfully creating and embellishing and wielding weapons since the dawn of time. And my question now is 'Why?'

"It's an important question for us as a species. Unlike most other species, we kill each other. We have something within us — and if it's within us, it's all of us — that has to be attended to. We have to be vigilant."

'walking the streets, tented in bedclothes
war-eyed in the warehouse of history
war no longer declared but only continued
warning us of its nature and our own
washing its windows until they vanish'

Forché's poetic vision is heavily influenced by philosopher Walter Benjamin, who envisions "The Angel of History" forever facing the past as it drifts backward into the future, so that it faces an array of death and war and injustice that gathers like wreckage at its feet.

But know this: Forché is an optimistic woman, even as she's fighting cancer, even in an era of war in the Middle East and financial crises around the globe. The poet devoted to honoring the sacrifice and courage of the oppressed sees hope.

"Hope resides in the attentiveness of the people and the education we're receiving right now," says Forché, who lives in Maryland with her husband, photojournalist Harry Mattison, and teaches at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. "I think Americans are learning something very painfully and very quickly right now. The Bush presidency has educated many Americans about how quickly we could veer from our principles if we didn't take care.

"The economic collapse has wounded many people. But I think, as painful and as difficult as it is, our communities and our caring for each other will strengthen us. I'm heartened by the panic I see in the monied classes, a response to populist anger. We have to keep in mind that there's such a thing as a reasonable response that arises out of legitimate anger at injustice and inequity."

Lines of poetry excerpted from Forche's 'On Earth.'

bbuchholz@statesman.com. 912-2967

Carolyn Forché

With musical accompaniment by saxophonist Alex Coke and cellist Shawn Sanders

When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday, April 4

Where: King-Seabrook Chapel, Huston Tillotson University

Cost: $25-$30, $10 students. Advance tickets available through www.texasnafas.org or 709-9486