Not all of her “interviews” are with men. Farmers, clergy members, militants, and military officers – many of them corrupt. Vides arranges for her to meet many people. In long stretches of unpunctuated prose-poetry, she crafts descriptions, such as, “This is the village abandoned a pitted road stretches between burned shacks in the mud there is a saint’s picture decorated with foil stars there is no smoke rising from cook fires where women would have turned the family’s daily tortillas nor any from the fires that chewed through this village during a 'search-and-destroy' operation the people returned here briefly and held orange rinds wrapped in cloth over their mouths as they gathered the dead listing their names.” Forché's run-on sentences reflect the stream of her consciousness: astounded by what she sees, she lists it all in a breathless, never-ending torrent that engenders in her readers the same desire to rest and digest – even block out – what has just been taken in that she felt at the time.

Her naivete is challenged early on, as she confronts poverty, destruction, and corruption on all sides. As Vides puts it to Forché, '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.' Forché objects that a journalist might be better suited to document such a topic, given the low esteem America typically has for poets, but Vides insists he needs someone with a poet's sensibility. Vides hopes to enlist Forché as a witness, a means by which news of the coming war's atrocities can be funneled back to America. Forché visited the country multiple times between 19 on a Guggenheim fellowship this experience became the basis for her controversial poetry collection The Country Between Us (1981) – and, much later, What You Have Heard Is True.įorché's memoir begins with an approach by Leonel Gómez Vides, who has traveled from El Salvador to meet Forché knowing that the poet has been translating the work of his aunt, Nicaraguan-Salvadoran writer Claribel Alegría. By one estimate, 65,000 people were either killed or disappeared by El Salvador's military junta during this period, in no small part due to the support it received from the U.S.'s Carter and Reagan administrations. The war would last over a decade and kill untold tens of thousands. In What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance (2019), poet Carolyn Forché recounts her time in El Salvador in the late 1970s during this time, the country teetered on the edge of a devastating civil war.

What you have heard is true