you are there

What You Have Heard is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance by Carolyn Forché
Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)
Genre: memoir
Read 20 in 2020 category: memoir/biography
Review: What would you do if a man appeared on your doorstep one day and announced that he was Leonel, the mysterious cousin of a friend of yours who you'd heard so much speculation about?  What if he told you a tale of conquerors and corruption, of resistance and danger?  If you're Carolyn Forché, apparently you agree to join him in El Salvador for a month so that you can educate yourself about the actual situation there, rather than only seeing it only the was the US government wants you to.  And then, many years later, you would write a beautiful book about what you saw.  Forché is a poet, and it shows in every scene.  Even when describing the sight of people using a fetid ditch for a latrine, or the brutal mistreatment of prisoners, her images are exquisite.

Unfortunately, she herself doesn't come across nearly so well.  Not entirely ignorant when she arrives in El Salvador, thanks to Leonel's lessons, she knows she's not there for a vacation, but she's hardly knowledgeable enough or savvy enough to make her own way.  So she sticks pretty close to Leonel, who shows her around the country and introduces her to other members of the movement.  But sometimes Leonel has go do something vague, and he leaves her with someone else, sometimes in a nice house in San Salvador, and sometimes in a hut in the jungle.

It's the vagueness that became a real problem for me.  It's one of my pet peeves when reading if people aren't being straight with a character and that character doesn't demand straight answers and explanations.  And here we have Forché accepting lots of vague answers and allowing herself to be brought into a lot of potentially dangerous situations with little or no information, including meeting with high level Salvadoran government officials who were known to rule through extreme violence.  And this is real life!  I felt that it was very irresponsible of her to not demand more answers and explanations when walking into situations where her life was literally in danger.

For those who are not bothered by such things, this is absolutely one of the best books to read to get a sense of El Salvador in the late 1970s and the US government's role in it.  Forché learns a lot as she spends more time there, and her readers learn along with her.  The effect is that the reader becomes the witness of the book's subtitle, just as Forché and Leonel hoped.