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The Books of Carolyn Forché
Carolyn Forché’s debut collection, Gathering the Tribes (1976) won the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets prize and demonstrated her skill at mingling the autobiographical and the political. More lyric than her later work, the collection’s offerings range from the intensely erotic “Kalaloch” to the longest piece in the book: “Burning the Tomato Worms.” Here Forché explores the landscapes of history and memory that come to dominate her later work, but she does so through recollections of her grandmother, Anna, who emigrated from Eastern Europe. The poetic evocation of Anna’s voice combines with a vivid sense of the personal danger and political urgency of fleeing the pogroms devastating her Slovak homeland during World War II:
When time come
We go quick
I think
What to take
On her back ground wheat and straw dolls
In the sack white cheese, duck blood
This ability to juxtapose political urgency against the power of mundane (yet carefully chosen) details would also serve Forché well in her second collection, the more fully realized and politically powerful The Country Between Us. The book is bracingly frank as it evokes and bears witness to the violence of the 1970s and 1980s in El Salvador. Forche’s most anthologized piece, “The Colonel,” relays an evening’s terror, laid out over the dinner table, in a muted, journalistic tone that some take for Forché’s trademark. However, as powerful as the poem might be, it is not the most stunning poem in the collection. Instead, the collections final, lengthy poem, “Ourselves or Nothing,” and “The Return” show her intricate, complex vision of how a poet might transport herself into the difficult role of witnessing between cultures using the tools of poetry. “The Return” constructs a conversation between the poet and a friend upon her return from Central America:
Your problem is not your life as it is
in America, not that your hands, as you
tell me, are tied to do something. It is
that you were born to an island of greed
and grace where you have this sense
of yourself as apart from others. It is
not your right to feel powerless
The lines embody the kind of “moral dialogue with the world” Forché sees as the mark of her Catholic upbringing and education. It’s a conversation for which she has been lauded and criticized. Some critics have, in fact, accused her of a kind of politically correct tourism, an uncomplicated leftist critique of American ideology and a misuse of poetry for the purposes of argument.
Of course Forché herself has addressed such criticisms in essays and interviews, but has, I think, worked to counter them most fully in her 1993 anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, and in her most deliberately complex book, The Angel of History (1994). Both books offer a response to what she sees as the artificial separation of politics and poetry. Against Forgetting does so by collecting an enormous (though, as all anthologies must, a limited) range of voices, styles, political settings, showing through sheer enormity the vast uses to which poetry might be put in situations of extremity.
The Angel of History attempts something still more difficult -- writing a postmodern Wasteland, by decentering the “I” and replacing it with the collected voices of a century’s suffering. In poem after poem the voices of victims, other poets, even theorists appear together, woven into a litany and lament over the twentieth century’s “charred field.” An overwhelming book in many ways, the book’s very textual difficulties and diffused voices make it difficult to enter into the intense dialogue that Forché presents as an “encounter with the events of this century . . . polyphonic, broken, haunted, and in ruins, with no possibility of restoration.”
Where the book succeeds most, in my judgment, is where a single voice converses with one the poem’s speaker, a voice like that of a Hiroshima survivor in “The Garden of Shukkei-en”: “If you want, I’ll tell you, but nothing I way will be enough. / We tried to dress our burns with vegetable oil.”Moments such as this are capable, at last, of taking the reader back into the more intertextual and difficult sections of The Angel of History, inviting readers to question, along with the survivor and poet, where indeed does God live in such a century, in “this garden the garden. / And in the silence surrounding what happened to us / it is the bell to awaken God that we've heard ringing.” -- David Wright
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