What You Have Heard Is True
A Memoir of Witness and Resistance
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
Carolyn Forché is 27 when a mysterious stranger calling himself Leonel appears on her doorstep, having driven direct from El Salvador. A friend has heard rumours about who he might be - a communist, a CIA operative, a sharpshooter, a revolutionary, a small coffee farmer - but nobody seems to know for certain.
Captivated for reasons she doesn't fully understand, she accepts his invitation to visit and learn about his country, and becomes enmeshed in the early stages of a civil war which will see a state turn death squads on its own people and over 100,000 dead.
Told across peasant shanties, retired generals' grand homes, protest marches and safe houses on the run, this is the powerful true story of a woman's radical act of empathy and her fateful encounter with an intriguing man who will change the course of her life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet Forch (Blue Hour) writes intensely about her visits to El Salvador as the country edged toward civil war in the late 1970s. A poetry professor in Southern California, Forch knew little of El Salvador and its "silence of misery endured," until Leonel G mez Vides a friend's cousin, coffee farmer, and rumored CIA operative "too mysterious for most people" appeared on her doorstep in 1977 and, inspired by her writing, invited her to visit and learn about his homeland. Arriving in El Salvador four months later, she and Leonel met with political and military figures saying she was a poet, journalist, and professor on a fellowship to the country to create an illusion of influence, which he explained "might save your life" as the nation slid into chaos. Working alongside an overtaxed rural doctor with few medical supplies, farmers barely subsisting off the land, and a wealthy socialite involved in the resistance, she documented the growing brutality, hoping to translate it into poetry, spurred by Leonel's insistence that "This place is a symphony of illusion... and an orchestra needs a conductor." These notes became the basis of The Country Between Us, her 1981 poetry collection that addressed the atrocities in El Salvador. Forch 's astute, lyrical memoir offer glimpses into life in a war-torn country and contextualizes her early works of poetry.
