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

by Carolyn Forché

In the woolen bag woven with a pouncing jaguar, he kept, bound together, a worn copy of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Carl von Clausewitz’s On War, and Machiavelli’s The Prince, all of them falling apart and rubber banded, with marginalia in the tiniest script I had ever seen.

After dark, I read by flashlight, as I had under the blankets as a child, its light brushing across the poetry as if along a path leading into a forest at night or another unknown place.