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

by Carolyn Forché

Hope also nourishes us. Not the hope of fools. The other kind. Hope, when everything is clear. Awareness. —Manlio Argueta

For the strangest people in the world are those people recognized, beneath one’s senses, by one’s soul—the people utterly indispensable for one’s journey. —James Baldwin

No te conoce nadie. No. Pero yo te canto. Nobody knows you. No. But I sing to you...

“Okay. How is your knowledge of history?” And then without pausing for my answer, he said, “Look. There is soon going to be a war in El Salvador. It will begin in three years, maybe five at the most. It might cost tens of thousands of lives, maybe hundreds of thousands.”

“And then?” “And then, under orders of Colonel Chacón, Richardson was taken, along with a few political prisoners, for a short helicopter ride over the Pacific, and they were tossed alive into the sea.”

“What do you mean?” “What I just said. Are you going to write poetry about yourself for the rest of your life?” And then he sighed and acknowledged that this might not have been fair.

“I don’t think Americans are interested in getting involved in any more wars, Leonel. We just left Vietnam.” “Yes, you just left Vietnam. Did you, by the way, understand why your country was at war there?”

He appeared surprised. “Well, you’ll have to change that. In my country, and in the rest of Latin America, poets are taken seriously. They’re appointed to diplomatic posts, or they’re assassinated, or put into prison but, one way or the other, taken seriously.”

You don’t know this man, my friends will say. This isn’t a good idea. You’re going to get malaria or even worse. So what if he’s a relative of Claribel Alegría’s? According to you, even she claims not to know who he really is.

There is an extraordinary document that surfaced two months ago in Miami, apparently leaked by the CIA, which links right-wing terrorism and pseudo-left-wing terrorism to Col. José Francisco René Chacón, former counter-intelligence chief. Chacón, in turn, is linked to Guatemalan gangsters of Lebanese origins . . . if one can believe any of this! Chacón, at any rate, is a well-known psychopath who was responsible for the murder in prison of the black North American soldier of fortune and petty thief James Ronald Richardson. I am sure you know of this incident. This is by no means Chacón’s only murder. He is out of government, but there are plenty left of his stripe.

The ticket arrived in the mail some weeks later, booked for January 4, 1978. As Leonel had suggested, I went to a tropical disease specialist for a gamma globulin shot and quinine pills, but they didn’t think I needed a vaccination against yellow fever. Later that day, an older woman friend, who had enrolled in one of my writing classes at the university, and who had lived in Latin America for fourteen years, asked me if I knew what I was doing. “We’ll talk when you get back,” she said. “You’re going to need to talk then.”

Qué te he dado, lo sé. Qué has recibido, no lo sé. I know what I have given you. I do not know what you have received. —Antonio Porchia

“At this moment,” he said, taking up where I left off, “eighty percent of the country lives that way, without a decent place to take a shit. The small amount of land they might once have had has been carved up over generations. They don’t have enough to feed themselves. They are forced into illiteracy by lack of education. Their life expectancy is about forty-seven years for the men, slightly more for the women. I told you that one in five children dies before the age of five, mostly of dehydration caused by dysentery and also by diseases like measles. These kids don’t get vaccinated for anything. Their drinking water is polluted. Average household income is about four hundred dollars a year. A year. And one more thing: Most of them work from dawn to dusk.” I might have been looking around the pupusería because he added: “You won’t see many campesinos in here. They can’t afford this. The people in here work in machine shops or some other goddamn thing. These are urban people, the luckier ones. Barrio people.”

but I had known since childhood that human suffering demanded a response, everywhere and always, and I wondered: What would I do?

“this is Coffea arabica, so it is susceptible to rust blight. I wish the Peace Corps would send someone here who knows something about rust blight. Instead they send us anthropology majors.”

“This is how coffee was traditionally grown, under the protection of forest shade.” He stood up, brushing his palms on his thighs. “If you’re going to grow coffee in full sun, without this canopy, you have to use fertilizer, which is not only expensive but also damaging to the soil and the water table.”

People were disappearing now every day, taken from the streets, from their vehicles and houses, at night and in the middle of the day. Yes, I thought, he’s right, it’s dangerous, but nevertheless I wanted not to be left behind, and I stopped believing that protecting me was his sole reason.

“You have to be aware here, very aware, but more important, you have to be your own person. You have to think for yourself, do you understand? Leonel is very intelligent but he is working alone. He has his own—his own project. This is dangerous, Carolyn. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

Even without the repression, Leonel had said, El Salvador is a violent country, with the highest murder rate in the world. I didn’t know if that was true, but I was thinking of this as I sat in the dark waiting for him to come back.

There is no avoiding war; it can only be postponed to the advantage of others.

“Many intelligence reports in war are contradictory; even more are false, and most are uncertain.” Also this: “All action takes place, so to speak, in a kind of twilight, which, like a fog or moonlight, often tends to make things seem grotesque and larger than they really are.”

“We have no Sierra Madre here,” he said, in the voice of a father about to tell a story to a child. “We have no jungle. There is no place to hide. If the people take up arms, those arms must come from somewhere, and the ammunition from somewhere, and the fighters must be fed, and have continual access to potable water. Equipment and supplies must be moved from place to place without interruption and without detection. Fighters who are killed must be replaced. They must also be transported back to their homes or buried. Wounded fighters must receive medical attention. Doctors and nurses are needed, as well as surgical and medical supplies, and all of this must also be transported, again, continually, again without detection. Do you see how challenging this is, Papu?”

“Remember that the USSR lost twenty million people during the Second World War. Twenty million. Leningrad was under siege for nearly nine hundred days. They were pulling wallpaper from the walls to eat the wheat paste. And, remember, they won that war in Europe for you. Without the Soviets, Hitler would have been victorious. What? You look surprised.”

A poet had once cautioned me not to live a life that was more vibrant and intense than my inner life, that inner and outer must at least be kept in balance, but if one was to gather strength over the other, let it be the life within.

Later I would understand that here the dead and the living were together, and those who stood alive before him, he was blessing in advance.

The Mayans don’t distinguish between past, present, and future, he’d said. They have one word to describe all instances of time, meaning something like “It comes to pass.”

Lesson number four: If someone promises to do great things, ask them first for something small, like a bridge or a cow.”

“Papu, listen to 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.”

Writing for your own people. I promise you that it is going to be difficult to get Americans to believe what is happening here. For one thing, 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.”

quote from Albert Camus: It was in Spain that men learned that one can be right and still be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own reward.

Bertolt Brecht, folded into his wallet, and later, he passed this slip of paper to me: Sink down in the slime, embrace the butcher,/If you could change this world, what would you not be willing to do?

“You want to know what is revolutionary, Papu? To tell the truth. That is what you will do when you return to your country. That is all I’m asking of you. From the beginning this has been your journey, your coming to consciousness. All along I have only been responding to you. When you ask me a question, I try to place you in a situation in which you might find your answer. I do not have your answers, Papu. I am just a man.”

I would be on my way home and would not return for another twelve years, the years of the civil war that could not be prevented and would claim almost one hundred thousand lives, with eight thousand people disappeared, five hundred thousand internally displaced, and another five hundred thousand taking refuge in other countries. Leonel would remind me that history counts its casualties in round numbers. I would not return until “the signing of the peace” in 1992. Within a week of my departure, Monseñor Romero would be assassinated in the chapel of Divine Providence while celebrating Mass for the repose of a woman’s soul.

We must hope without hoping. We must hope when we have no hope.

“People think that what happens to someone else has nothing to do with them. They think that what happens in one place doesn’t matter anyplace else.” This reminded me of something I had read years earlier—a single sentence from The Captive Mind by the poet Czesław Miłosz, written when he was also young: If a thing exists in one place, it will exist everywhere.

“You can’t quit,” he said. “If they think you are even slightly pulling away or having doubts, they do something to you. And they know. You can’t hide doubts from them. They give an order and if you hesitate, that’s it. For a while I knew I had to get out but I also had to wait for my chance, because I would have only one chance, and if I didn’t make it that would be it. You can’t tell anyone. You can’t confide in anyone. You have to have a plan. My plan was to take a bus to Mexico City and find some group, human rights or Green Cross, and tell them everything and ask for protection.”

Someone said to me—Allan said—why don’t you tell the Americans this and why don’t you tell the Americans that? Tell them where their money is going. But the man who is suggesting that I talk doesn’t know what it’s like to come out of a military—concentration camp. I’ve been making these declarations in the offices on Capitol Hill, and I have realized something. The Americans already know what’s going on, and have known for a long time.

It isn’t the risk of death and fear of danger that prevent people from rising up,” Leonel once said, “it is numbness, acquiescence, and the defeat of the mind. Resistance to oppression begins when people realize deeply within themselves that something better is possible.” He also said that what destroys a society, a state, a government, is corruption—that,

I once asked him what it would take to make the United States a good country. Well for one thing, you could green the hemisphere, he said.

You believe yourselves to be apart from others and therefore have little awareness of your interdependencies and the needs of the whole.

Cuando me hiciste otro, te dejé conmigo. When you made me into another, I left you with me. —Antonio Porchia

It was as if he had stood me squarely before the world, removed the blindfold, and ordered me to open my eyes.