What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance

by Carolyn Forché

There were no words to accompany the cartoons.

Through the iron fence and the rattling palms, the building was blinding white.

I realized that the one factor, the one difference, and maybe the only difference was this: The people felt secure.

“I can’t give it to them,” he said again, flatly. “They have to take it from me.”

You have to be able to see the world as it is, to see how it is put together, and you have to be able to say what you see. And get angry.”

“The man you met in Guatemala told me several years ago that there would soon be war, and that I would have a lot of work to do, but I would

not have to do it alone. Someone was coming who would help. A young person with a red horse. And I thought ‘horse’? Puchica, I have no need of a goddamn horse. The young person who is coming will have to leave the horse behind—which, as it happened, you did.”

That’s why we had been called, the American photographer and me: to prevent an attack if this could be done by our mere presence.

He removed a film cartridge and pressed another into place, then gave me a look that said what couldn’t be said.

If they are coming for us, it will be quick. We will die looking like bourgeois women. Hold my hand.”

this is outside the realm of their imaginations. For another, it isn’t in their interests to believe you. For a third, it is possible that we are not human beings to them.”

It was as if we had forgotten that people no longer did such things as talk all night.

“You don’t have to talk about it. Alfredo told me everything.” “I wasn’t planning to talk about it. Let’s go.”

Leonel would remind me that history counts its casualties in round numbers.

and a sound came vomiting out of my mouth, the word ¡Firme! Attention! given as a command to soldiers. It wasn’t me speaking. But the soldier immediately came to attention.

In my memory, these two events are connected: this hallucination that was, in fact, real, and this

language that was not my own. Perhaps that saved my life.”

He also needed to be with people who would understand his situation and wouldn’t look at him as if he were a monster. This more than anything. Not a monster.

Sometimes I went all the way down the stairs and sat beside him to see if he wanted to talk, but usually he said that he preferred to tell the machine everything, and then we could listen later.

“What am I trying to say with these declarations? What can be done with the truth of one person?” he said into the machine.