{"id":11112,"date":"2019-11-27T20:10:06","date_gmt":"2019-11-27T19:10:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11112"},"modified":"2019-11-27T20:13:46","modified_gmt":"2019-11-27T19:13:46","slug":"carolyn-forche-the-country-between-us-reviewed-by-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11112","title":{"rendered":"Carolyn Forch\u00e9 | The Country Between Us<\/em><\/strong> | reviewed by Ian Pople"},"content":{"rendered":"

Carolyn Forch\u00e9 | The Country Between Us<\/em> | Bloodaxe: \u00a39.95<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Forch\u00e9\u2019s The Country Between Us<\/em> is a reissue of a book which was originally published by Jonathan Cape shortly after its original publication in the US. It is a book of poems that documents Forch\u00e9\u2019s time in El Salvador as it was turning to civil war. It is reissued now to coincide with Forch\u00e9\u2019s memoir of those times, What You Have Heard Is True<\/em>, described by the New York Times as \u2018beautifully and powerfully\u2019 written, and a \u2018magnificent memoir\u2019. It would be a little glib to describe the poems in this book in the same way \u2013 end of review \u2013 but it\u2019s true. It\u2019s difficult to come up with a way of describing how these poems seem transparent of the experiences they convey, but their elegance and control do seem both \u2018beautiful and powerful\u2019. These poems are certainly poems of witness, but Forch\u00e9\u2019s skill in the book is not simply to record, but to interpose herself both inside and outside the poetry. That interposition is also one with the experience which these poems record. The result is a voice which seems absolutely at one with the content. There\u2019s very little sense of strain in these poems even in the moment when Forch\u00e9 is angriest, and when the content is at its most harrowing. <\/p>\n

Because Forch\u00e9 is not one to hang back. The reader is left with few illusions about the nature of the dirty war which was the bloody conflict in El Salvador in the late 1970s. In the poem, \u2018Return\u2019, written \u2018for Josephine Crum\u2019, Forch\u00e9 writes, <\/p>\n

And so, you say, you\u2019ve learned a little
\nabout starvation: a child like a supper scrap
\nfilling with worms, many children strung
\ntogether, as if they were cut from paper
\nand all in a delicate chain. And that people
\nwho rescue physicists, lawyers and poets
\nlie in their beds at night with reports
\nof mice introduced into women, of men
\nwhose testicles are crushed like eggs. <\/p>\n

The address here is mediated in a number ways. The poem is addressed to a second person, we presume Josephine Crum\u2019 who has, in theory, \u2018learned a little\u2019. But it is clear that that learning is ironized, by the \u2018you say\u2019 that precedes it, and also by the devastating litany which follows it. The tone suggests that \u2018you say[ing]\u2019 is simply that \u2013 a statement. And the litany which follows piles on the horror, which the \u2018saying\u2019 could not possibly testify to absorbing. In addition, we have the people who are the more local witnesses \u2013 those who \u2018lie in their beds at night with reports\u2019. These are the rescuers but also those who may testify to the outside world with the reports. And then, there is the reader of the poem, you and I. Forch\u00e9 dares us as readers to simply \u2018say\u2019 that we have \u2018learned a little\u2019. This final \u2018learning\u2019 also redounds, to some extent on Forch\u00e9 as the writer. A fierce reportage is contained and the cumulative address challenges us, the reader, to dare to ask Forch\u00e9 about, firstly, the authenticity of the witness and secondly, the authenticity of the feeling when it is mediated through the considerable technique and artifice of her poems. <\/p>\n

Such comments may be, of course, the result of too much post-modernism. But it is interesting that Forch\u00e9\u2019s current prose memoir is titled after the opening line of a prose poem in this collection. This is the poem, \u2018The Colonel\u2019 which describes a visit to the eponymous colonel, who, it is quite clear, is responsible for a considerable amount of the violence carried out in his country. <\/p>\n

The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves. <\/p>\n

The obvious elements in this are the short sentences, the deft and devastating simile of the \u2018dried peach halves\u2019 (will you ever look at one in the same way again?). And then the way the narrative is continued with the ear coming alive. Within this, the artist intervenes, declaring a kind of limitation which is not a limitation. By suggesting that \u2018there is no other way to say this,\u2019 Forch\u00e9 actually asks the reader to collude in accepting the simile as being the very best one. It is a technique which both leavens the load by breaking the flow but also acts as a way of pulling the reader further into the content. As I have suggested, will we ever be able to look at a dried peach in the same way again! <\/p>\n

And then we pull out to the braggadocio of the Colonel. Forch\u00e9, I would suggest, almost has her cake and eats it here. The poem contextualises his comments with reports on the domesticity of the colonel, his wife, their children, and servant. There is a sense, to me anyway, that the colonel has his own vulnerability. Part of the witness of the poem is to the life of that man and his family. <\/p>\n

Forch\u00e9\u2019s powerful book creates its own narrative trajectory. At the end in the book, Forch\u00e9 looks back on her time and the way unities were created, <\/p>\n

he had heard them before me moving among the palms.
\nWe were going to die there.
\nI remember the moon notching its way
\nthrough the palms and the calm sense that came
\nfor me at the end of my life. In that moment
\nthe woman beside me became my sister, <\/p>\n

Then later, the poem adduces conflicts in Spain, German and the Soviet Union, this being the 1970s before the fall of the Iron Curtain. The poem ends with the sense of how her and our distance from these conflicts constructs a \u2018false consciousness\u2019 in us,<\/p>\n

we hover in a calm protected world like
\nnetted fish, exactly like netted fish.
\nIt is either the beginning or the end
\nof the world, and the choice is ourselves
\nor nothing. <\/p>\n

This calm, unadorned language with its precise similes shows us that our choices are actually deeply complicit in those conflicts. Although Forch\u00e9 would, I would suggest, not hold us, the readers, responsible for those conflicts, the netted feeling is a kind of choice. We place ourselves in that protective netting. It is a choice for self-preservation, which Forch\u00e9 understands. But where the choice is a beginning or an ending, we appear to choose neither; we can neither renew nor complete. We appear all too often to choose nothing, and that is acquiescence. It is a little glib, perhaps, to suggest that although Forch\u00e9\u2019s poems are set some forty years distant, the choices she adumbrates are utterly contemporary. But the timely reissue of this book makes its relevance clear. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Carolyn Forch\u00e9 | The Country Between Us | Bloodaxe: \u00a39.95 Forch\u00e9\u2019s The Country Between Us is a reissue of a book which was originally published by Jonathan Cape shortly after its original publication in the US. It is a book of poems that documents Forch\u00e9\u2019s time in El Salvador as it was turning to civil […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nCarolyn Forch\u00e9 | The Country Between Us | reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11112\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Carolyn Forch\u00e9 | The Country Between Us | reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Carolyn Forch\u00e9 | The Country Between Us | Bloodaxe: \u00a39.95 Forch\u00e9\u2019s The Country Between Us is a reissue of a book which was originally published by Jonathan Cape shortly after its original publication in the US. 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