She's So Heavy

In 1981 Carolyn Forché published a slim collection of verse, her second, titled The Country Between Us. The first section, "In Salvador: 1978-1980," contained eight poems about El Salvador, including a prose poem that described the poet's visit with a powerful colonel in the Salvadoran Army. The colonel served wine, lamb and green mangoes, and exchanged politenesses with his guests as an American cop show murmured on the TV; then he abruptly excused himself, returned and emptied a sack full of human ears onto the table. "Something for your poetry, no?" he said. "They were like dried peach halves," Forché wrote. "There is no other way to say this."

The Salvador poems made Carolyn Forché famous. The Country Between Us appeared just as America's complicity in El Salvador's civil war--during which the United States supported a regime that kidnapped or "disappeared" more than 65,000 people--seized the public imagination. As a groundswell of outrage at the Reagan Administration grew, the collection, with its vivid depictions of the ongoing torture, rape and imprisonment of civilians, sold some 70,000 copies--an astounding figure for a single book of poems by a relatively unknown poet. Inevitably, some critics saw Forché's attempt to fuse poetry and politics as damaging to the integrity of both. Others took issue with her bald shock tactics: "Go try on/Americans your long, dull story of corruption, but better to give/them what they want: Lil Milagro Ramirez...who fucked her, how many times and when." A few critics went so far as to suggest that Forché had fabricated her experiences in El Salvador.

But The Country Between Us is hardly a collection of agitprop. In a larger sense, the book is an account of a young poet's hunger to be changed, to become adult (and her distrust of this same hunger). Indeed, fourteen of the poems have nothing to do with El Salvador; but they, too, chart the self's compulsion to understand violence, and (in the case of erotic violence) to feel it. For every poem detailing "the slip of the tongue/that costs hundreds of deaths" there's one scrutinizing "How my breasts feel, years/later, the tongues swishing/in my dress, some yours, some/left by other men"; for every depiction of brutal imprisonment there's a poem about "how much tenderness we could/wedge between a stairwell/and a police lock."

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