![]() ![]() And she brings the full range of her first-rate skills into play. But the beauty of her language is of a sort seldom, if ever, found in such accounts. My stomach turns as she comes upon the dismembered corpses of the desaparecidos (the disappeared). In spite of knowing Forché is alive and well some forty years later, I hold my breath, as she describes her encounter with the escuadrones de la muerte (the death squads). Īll this makes for a memoir that, at times, feels like one is reading a novel or a thriller. ![]() … It’s a whole cast of characters and it’s a strange memoir in that I’m the narrator but I’m not the main character. I wanted to replicate what it was like … to go through that time with him (Leonel). What I decided to do with this book is to take the reader with me through the journey that I took and the reader never knows more than I did at any given time. She explained her somewhat unusual approach to memoir: Recently, I had the opportunity to meet Forché briefly at the Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor. It is this mysterious man, Leonel, whose spirit pervades her recently published memoir, What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance. Surprisingly, this complete stranger convinced her to accompany him on what he called a “reverse Peace Corps” mission. He showed up unannounced and unknown on her doorstep in Southern California. And Forché was brought there by Leonel Gómez Vides to document it all. Poet Carolyn Forché lived and worked in El Salvador from 1977 to 1980, where she witnessed the worst human rights abuses imaginable. ![]()
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