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

by Carolyn Forché

Ruben Blades

received the news that Olivier had died of a massive hemorrhage. I had lied to him, telling him he was going to make it. I felt ashamed to have survived.”

saw his El Salvador through his photographs. He saw mine through my poems.

“How did you do it?” I asked, pretending that I didn’t know, that I had not seen the bodies such teams as his threw onto the roads or left at the so-called body dumps, stripped

and hacked apart, eyes gouged or pecked by vultures, that I hadn’t seen the machete marks, the open mouths stuffed with genitals, swollen bodies in putrefaction, that I hadn’t taken the smell of corpses into myself so deeply that for the rest of my life I would know that smell and not mistake it for anything

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he was at least in small measure a child himself,

The Captive Mind by the poet Czesław Miłosz,

Resistance to oppression begins when people realize deeply within themselves that something better is possible.”

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

You’re a goddamn poet, Papu. You must write.