Honoring the Particulars

Carolyn Forche's clear, evocative poetry has brought to life diverse, and sometimes brutal, realities of the 20th century. Her first book of poetry, Gathering the Tribes, was the Yale Series of Younger Poets selection for 1976. From 1978 to 1980, Forche worked as a journalist and human rights observer in El Salvador, and many of the poems in her 1981 volume The Country Between Us (which won the prestigious Lamont Prize) reflect this experience. The poems helped raise public awareness of repression in that country and stirred up controversy in the literary world over the relationship between poetry and "politics."

Forche is now working on a book-length poem, "The Angel of History," which she calls "a meditation on the 20th century." She is also editing the forthcoming Against Forgetting: 20th Century Poetry of Witness, an anthology of work by poets who have experienced repression. She is one of six writers -- and the only woman -- who recently received fellowship grants from the Lannan Foundation.

Carolyn Forche lived in Washington, DC with her husband, photographer Harry Mattison, and her son, Sean, and taught creative writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, when this article appeared. Forche was interviewed for Sojourners at her home by Naomi Thiers, a free-lance writer in Washington, DC, who had studied poetry with Carolyn Forche

-- The Editors

An Interview With Carolyn Forche

Sojourners: Tell us about your background and why you started writing poetry.

Carolyn Forche: I started writing poetry, as far as I know, when I was about 9 years old. I was the oldest of seven children, and we lived in Michigan where the winters are quite extreme. Periodically we were snowed in.

One morning in particular my mother was despairing because we were going to be shut up in the house all day with the snowdrifts against the door, and we were already bored by 9 a.m. She suggested that I write a poem.

She took her old college text books down from the shelf and read me poems. I wrote my first poem that day. I think it was about the snow, very unimaginatively. And I became one of those children who does something obsessively. I wrote stories, poems, notes to my friends, letters, and I kept a very melodramatic diary. I wrote all through my childhood.

I went to a Catholic school for 12 years. I was taught by Dominicans, and they emphasized writing as well, and forensic studies. I was also trained to deliver literary material interpretively. This enabled me later to give my poetry readings with some degree of comfort before an audience.

I come from a working-class family, and my mother was a poet before she got married. She is a very creative woman. All of the children in the neighborhood played at our house. My mother would mix up huge vats of papier-mache in the summer and get us all out on the picnic tables making things. And my father was a woodworker with a garage always filled with sawdust and lumber.

Sojourners: So creativity was definitely a value.

Forche: Yes. But I think an idea exists in this country that creativity comes from the middle and upper classes. There is vast creativity in the working class that I grew up in. Clothing, quilts, household objects and furniture -- everything was for the most part made by hand; you would go to the store and see the thing and go home and copy it. This took no small amount of dexterity and talent. I was encouraged to write.

Sojourners: A desire for social justice seems to pervade your writing. What do you think is the source of that desire?

Forche: When I was in Eastern Europe this May I read a lot of [Czechoslovakian President] Vaclav Havel's works and derived from that a certain caution about what we call the desire for social justice. It can be a dangerous desire. All sorts of things have been done to human beings in the name of justice that was falsely interpreted as retribution -- justice according to a certain ideology or design. I'm very skeptical of that now. We are advised in Havel's writings to focus on concrete actual work -- actual issues and concerns -- rather than on the formulation of larger programs and ideals.

Sojourners: Where does your desire for concrete, liberating justice come from?

Forche: It comes from growing up among the more affluent. From spending my childhood surrounded by both privilege and poverty.

Sojourners: Yet your family was not affluent at all.

Forche: No, and there were people poorer than we were. There was a series of things affecting me. The civil rights movement was born in my late childhood, and I was deeply affected by it and by Martin Luther King Jr. Later by John Hersey's book Hiroshima. Also by my Catholicism.

The principles of the early Christians, if I understand them correctly, were that they worked collectively and communally, lived in voluntary poverty, and believed that Christ was in anyone that they met. They believed that everyone is to be taken care of and treated as if they were Christ.

Sojourners: And you took that to heart when you were young?

Forche: Absolutely. I took it literally. I believed them. And I thought, if they didn't mean what they said, what was this all about anyway?

I took my earliest religious training literally. I wanted to be with God. So when I was 5 and 6 and 7 years old I prayed all the time. Quite naturally it seemed to be what one did. I didn't know that the church functioned in my community as an opportunity for public piety and displays of fashion on Sundays.

When I was a child I had severe, recurring nightmares. This will sound very odd, but I feel I saw in my nightmares what I later saw in El Salvador and South Africa. I would wake up screaming, "The people! The people!" And my mother would hold me and say, "What's happening? What people?"

I'll give you an example. In one nightmare there were hundreds of dark-skinned, dark-haired people dressed in rags, with soot on their faces and the palms of their hands. They were reaching out to grab me in the dream. I was supposed to go and help them, but there was a barrier between myself and them.

In El Salvador one day I was in a truck that passed by a barrio where a couple of blocks had been burned down. The streets were strewn with people who had this ash on their faces and on the palms of their hands. They were crawling over the wreckage trying to find personal belongings. My friend who was driving the truck told me to roll up the windows. The people surrounded the truck and held out their hands toward the windows. I couldn't believe it.

That eventually sort of explained things because when I was little I used to have the feeling that I shouldn't ask questions, especially of God, and that I shouldn't ask questions about what I was doing. I was left with the understanding that I would go though many years of experience that would prepare me to do what I was supposed to do. Later I had all kinds of arguments with God and am in fact angry to this day.

Sojourners: At God?

Forche: Yes. But my anger is really at us. We are responsible for evil and good, and we are responsible for the future. All of the injustice on the earth is rectifiable and able to be traced to a source that made a conscious decision.

Sojourners: You seem to be talking about the importance of interconnectedness between all people. That is something that comes through very strongly for me in your book The Country Between Us, particularly in the last poem of that book, "Ourselves or Nothing."

But I've sometimes been confused about how to read the poem's concluding line: "It is either the beginning or the end/of the world and the choice is ourselves/or nothing." It could almost be read individualistically. Can you talk about what you mean by the choice between ourselves or nothing?

Forche: In other words, whatever hope there is resides in a collective concern. I like the Hindu idea that we are all caught in a humming, interconnected web. Anything anyone does sends a hum through the web that might be barely discernible but always affects every part of the web. Everything you do for good in the world affects the web, regardless of whether you can trace the effects or not. It is not ours to measure our effectiveness, or the results of our actions.

I believe now as an artist in focusing my attention intensively and acutely on phenomena, on things and conditions themselves. I worry about totalization -- the idea of an absolute reality. A homogenizing, leveling, standardizing, organizing, systematizing, ordering, elimination of difference. From the elimination of vegetable varieties in the European Common Market because of a decision about which are going to be marketed and which are not, to the elimination of differences in culture, to the standardization of humanity.

It's all dangerous, and it's all part of the same human impulse and must be opposed. We must honor differences in ourselves and others and respect multiplicity and plurality.

Sojourners: Poetry seems to be one thing that opposes that impulse.

Forche: Yes, because it focuses on the particulars of the world. It is a vision that is composed of those things which cannot be standardized without dying. These are things that we should most honor, and that are most under attack if you want to notice.

Sojourners: How are these concerns dealt with in your new long poem, "The Angel of History"? Is the poem different from your previous work?

Forche: You have to return to the work in El Salvador to answer that. I wrote poems out of my experience there, and that book received attention. I was very committed at the time to Monsignor Oscar Romero's directive to bear witness in the United States to what I had seen in El Salvador, in order that American audiences would be morally and ethically moved if I were blessed with the proper language. This was based on the assumption that there was a direct relationship -- or that there was some sort of relationship -- between North American popular opinion and foreign policy decision making.

Based on this assumption, which I have doubts about now, I began to speak and read poems and talk about El Salvador all over the United States. The Country Between Us was a controversial book because it was viewed as political, and the literary community often uses the word "political" as a pejorative term.

In 1982 and 1983, I was never at home. I was on the road. I lived in airports, motels, and as a guest in people's homes. I spoke almost every night at synagogues, churches, Kiwanis Clubs, Lions Clubs, Chambers of Commerce, libraries, and museums.

I had no personal life, but I didn't care. It didn't matter. I felt integrated as a person. I felt no contradiction between my working life, my spiritual life, and my ethical life.

I didn't anticipate the physical toll, which was exhaustion and illness. But that's so much less than the people in El Salvador have to worry about. I mean, it's nothing. The artistic toll came later. I felt somehow that I had become so very conscious of my language, my analysis, that I had no time for solitude, tranquility, and reflection -- the contemplation which is part of praxis in liberation theology. I was all action and very little reflection.

And so I depleted myself. When I went to write again it was impossible. There was nothing there. I was empty.

I went to Lebanon in 1984. My husband and I lived in West Beirut and were under very heavy bombardment. We were under sniper fire a number of times. I was evacuated from Beirut, and within days I was a guest poet at Vassar, living in a small cottage in the center of campus. These contrasts were very severe for my psyche.

In 1985 I went to South Africa with my husband. Harry and I conceived of an idea of working on a documentary there, much as we had done in El Salvador. I was five months pregnant. We had to leave South Africa abruptly, and we landed in Paris where I had my son. Our consciousness underwent many transformations during a short period of time. And at the end of all of this, there was no more work in me.

Sojourners: You hadn't been writing during that period at all?

Forche: I had been working for National Public Radio. I had written reports for human rights groups. But I hadn't written any poetry. I didn't understand where my work had gone -- my real work, my poetry. People were saying, "Well, when are we going to see the poetry about Beirut? When are we going to see the poetry about South Africa?"

Then I was asked to be in residence at the Fine Arts Center in Provincetown. While I was there, a very dear poet friend of mine came to me and said, "I will take your baby for two hours every day if you write while I am gone. " So I began writing.

The work was rather odd -- unrecognizable and mysterious to me. I felt that it was always ahead of me in my hands, but it was not consciously made in any sense. The lines were very long, and there were many voices.

It became what I would call a kind of symphony of utterance. Voices intruded upon one another. I recognized them as the artistic embodiment of the voices I had heard for a decade all over the world. What they did was enrich and educate me in some way for this larger work.

Sojourners: What is "the angel of history"?

Forche: It's a figure from Walter Benjamin's Illuminations. The passage is:

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from paradise ... The storm is what we call progress.

That was the seed of the work, that passage and the meditation on it. There is a preoccupation in the work with an excavation of the past. The past is an excavation of ruins, and within the ruins there are fragments of what once had been whole. We're not able to perceive the past as it was, but we are able to perceive its fragments and piece them together.

Sojourners: The fragments in the poem are these voices that you've described?

Forche: Right. What I have done, which I don't feel I've had a great deal of choice about, is follow my obsessions. I've immersed myself in the study of the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the first and second World Wars, the Armenian massacre, the war in Indochina, and liberation struggles. I suppose I am experimenting with myself:

What happens to a human being who takes all of this in? What happens to their language, and what happens to their soul?

Sojourners: You are editing an anthology of the work of poets who wrote out of violent or physically extreme conditions. Can you talk about what you call "the poetry of witness"?

Forche: I wrote The Country Between Us not realizing that it would be viewed as a political work. The reason I didn't realize it is that I had written those poems the same way I had written the poems in Gathering the Tribes. I wasn't aware that I had written what was viewed in this country as a different kind of poem.

So I began to think long and hard about the relationship between poetry and politics. Not only about what people here seemed to mean by it, but what I felt about it. And then I started examining the poets that I felt most moved and affected by in my own time, and I realized that one writes out of one's deepest obsessions and out of the spirit that one has grown to be. It's against all artistic inclinations to impose self-censorship. That my life was no longer reflecting the sort of life expected of American poets was not to be helped.

I began to see that many poets of the 20th century had endured conditions of extremity -- of exile, imprisonment, torture, internment, censorship, banning, house arrest. And the work that they wrote after enduring conditions of extremity seemed to bear the imprint of that extremity upon their imaginations, regardless of the subject matter of the work.

Sojourners: Can a poet in the United States, from a privileged society, write poetry of witness, and how would it come about?

Forche: One has to understand that each person is born to his or her circumstances. We don't have a choice about that. I was born Caucasian, North American, a post-war child; and I had certain privileges in childhood and was deprived of certain privileges in childhood. I begin to work from that point.

It's not helpful to deny one's origins. It's not helpful to poor people for others to pretend to be poor.

Sojourners: You mentioned self-censorship. In the past you and other poets have expressed concern about a kind of isolation -- a lack of engagement of social realities -- in much American poetry.

Forche: I think it's in the poetry because it is in the poets' lives. There can be nothing on the page that isn't already in the life, and whatever is on the page reflects the inner condition of the poet.

So the censorship begins in the life. It begins in the vision itself. The poet who is censoring him or herself does not begin that process on the page.

Sojourners: What about external censorship? In an essay you wrote in 1984 on Reagan's re-election you mentioned literary censorship as one of the great dangers of the Reagan era.

Forche: The censorship I see in this country is often imposed on the local level by groups that desire to purge, for example, public school libraries of works they consider offensive to their beliefs. This has included getting rid of all Darwinian thought and most of the greatest properties of Western civilization. It also included The Diary of Anne Frank, which purportedly was censored because it was too depressing for children. To Kill a Mockingbird was also on a list.

It's that sort of censorship -- book burnings and the current attack on the NEA [National Endowment for the Arts] -- which isn't really censorship. To fail to provide funding is not the same as to refuse publication. However, what is at issue in the United States is that this matter should be decided by the courts and not by Congress.

I don't approve of paying for something that I find morally offensive, such as the abuse of children. But that is being extrapolated into a full-scale assault on freedom of expression, which I oppose vehemently. I don't think that the NEA issue can technically be called a censorship issue. It is the failure of a society to support its arts materially.

People don't understand that unsupported, certain things cannot happen. Only the privileged will have the material well-being to afford the luxury of time to produce literary works. So literary works will reflect their sensibilities only.

The people who are attacking the arts have decided that the arts are dangerous. That's an important thing for all of us to recognize. If their political agenda is threatened by poetry, then by all means make more poetry.

It's interesting that we artists have finally become a formidable enemy. It means we're doing something important. Artists should be proud when they become a threat to authoritarianism.

Sojourners: I'd like to ask a personal question about being an artist and a mother. I've heard a quotation somewhere to the effect of, "Women artists always fail because they have children." But the poet Lucille Clifton has said that having six children was the best thing that happened to her writing.

You had a son four years ago. How has being a parent affected you as a writer?

Forche: A child brings on a complete transformation of one's entire life. It is not, "Now I am going to do all of this and have a child." It is, "Now I am going to do all of this with a child."

I feel very enriched by the presence of my son. I feel he has deflected me from a certain self-absorption which I might have engaged in had I not been forced to focus on the needs of another person.

It has also made scheduling very difficult and the procurement of time very difficult. I did not anticipate the fatigue that comes with growing older. I can no longer stay up until 2 and 3 in the morning and get up and do my day. Others who have reached their 40s as I have understand that.

Alice Walker made an appeal to women artists to have a child of one's own. She felt that any more than one child would be very difficult for women to bear in the present world.

Sojourners: Has it helped your writing?

Forche: Yes it has. But what I advise to mothers is, first of all, don't expect too much of yourself artistically in the first two years. After that, my advice is to carve out at least an hour a day that can be exclusively yours. Two hours is ideal. That's what Flannery O'Connor advised, but I don't know many women that can get two hours. Don't do anything else during that time, no matter how pressing. In other words, don't do the laundry, don't clean; sit down and write. The hour has to be sacred.

Margaret Atwood said to me once, "Look, do you want to be a writer or do you want to have a clean house?" She said writers can't have clean houses. Just forget about it. "You're a writer," she said, "so remember that."

Sojourners: You are of Czechoslovakian heritage, and you visited there in May. What is your impression of the changes there? Is there a feeling of hope among the people?

Forche: Yes, there's a feeling of hope, but I would say it's a dangerous sort of hope because there are unreasonably high expectations. They successfully and heroically threw off totalitarian rule, but it's very difficult for them to take matters into their own hands now. Local community action is inconceivable. Everyone wants the new government to tell them what to do.

At the national level, they are forming parties, they're doing brilliantly. But there's a kind of political and spiritual fatigue after several generations with no experience of anything but totalitarian communism and its repressive bureaucracy.

Here there seems to be an attempt to convey the impression that Eastern Europeans want to have the system we have. In other words that our system has triumphed. It's true they admire us. It's true they envy our standard of living and want it for themselves. It's also true that they can't conceive of living in a society where one pays for one's own health care, and where the elderly are not taken care of.

And the environmental problems there are not to be believed. It shows you very graphically and immediately what this country would have been like without unleaded gasoline, without environmental controls, without air quality controls -- to the degree that we have them at all.

Sojourners: What is it like to have a playwright as a president?

Forche: Vaclav Havel is an honest human being. He thinks for himself and he's very intelligent. He has massive support and rightfully so. And he is not power hungry. In fact, he expects to be there only as long as destiny ordains it and would have no problem at all going back to the nice quiet life of a playwright.

Sojourners: It was refreshing when Havel addressed the joint session of Congress in February. I think people were pretty amazed to hear that he wrote his own speech.

Forche: I have the whole speech on the wall here. I gave a reading of it in Prague to a packed theater and was very well received. It was so moving and wonderful for me. Now that's Eastern Europe.

Sojourners: What are your personal sources of hope?

Forche: Monsignor Romero told me not to need hope. He said if you need to feel hope you're courting despair, and if you court despair you'll stop working. So try to wean yourself from this need to have hope. Try to have faith instead, to do what you can, and stop worrying about whether or not you're effective or important. Worry about what is possible for you to do, which is always much greater than you imagine.

Every once in a while someone writes me a letter and says, "You know, I came to your reading in 1982 in Somewhere, Texas, and I was moved to make the decision to go to law school. Now I'm an immigration lawyer working in the border lands of Texas and Mexico." Or I get some letter from someone who gave the rest of their life to human rights work.

The other day I was at a gallery in Vermont that had shown our El Salvador exhibit. I was told that Brian Willson, who lost his legs on the railroad tracks in California, had come to that show in 1983 and decided to change his life.

I've never met Brian Willson, and I don't know if this is a true story or an apocryphal one, but I'm happy about it. I took one action, and he has multiplied it manyfold. This is the web again. You can't measure it.