Poetry and Politics

Poetry & Politics: Forché and Rich
Introduction
Carolyn Forché and Adrienne Rich are two female American poets whose work integrated the personal and the political into the poetry. Forché, for example, was responsible for coining the phrase “poetry of witness,” as she felt her poems were testimonies to the political events that were oppressing people around the world (Poetry Foundation, 2018). Rich likewise made her poetry into a type of testimony, though her aim was different. Whereas Forché focused on issues like the civil war in El Salvador, Rich focused on the political situation at home and the rise of the Feminist Movement (Martin, 1984). This paper will show how Rich and Forché used their own personal experiences and observations to give voice to marginalized people, those oppressed both abroad and at home, and those in need of testimony.
The Poetry of Forché
One of Forché’s best known poems is “The Colonel” written in 1978 and published in The Country Between Us in 1981. The poem is about the violence that consumed El Salvador under the dictatorial government by the U.S-supported military government, which was fighting the country’s National Liberation Front. “The Colonel” describes a scene that Forché witnessed personally. It is a prose poem written in block form and at first does not look like a traditional poem at all—but this is appropriate because the point of the poem is to give testimony to a gruesome reality in El Salvador that newspapers back home in the U.S. would not be giving. The poem tells the story of a Colonel who treats the poet and her friend to dinner—lamb, mangoes, wine, etc.—before bringing out a sack of human ears that have apparently been collected from the local rebels. He empties the sack on the table and tells the American that her people have no rights, that they can go “fuck themselves,” before sweeping the ears to the table and announcing, “Something for your poetry, no?” (Forché, 1978). This poem generated a great deal of attention for Forché, as it touched upon a nerve of Americans back home. What was the American government doing in El Salvador? What was happening in the country? Forché helped awaken the national consciousness to the cruelties of proxy war, of the barbarism of American-backed dictators. Her poem “The Colonel” was what she called a documentary poem—a poem meant to bear witness to political and social oppression abroad.
Her poem “The Visitor” written in 1979 was another example. In this poem, she was visitor a rebel who had been arrested by the government and imprisoned. Her view in the poem is that of an outsider—literally—as she is not inside the prison cell but rather viewing the experience from the outside. As in the “The Colonel,” Forché describes the scene in El Salvador from the perspective of the person who is a native there, the person who is actually experiencing the horrors of the country first hand. Whereas “The Colonel” deals with a person in a position of power, “The Visitor” deals with a person who is politically oppressed. In both, however, Forché is an observer who is describing the experiences of others rather than her own. In “The Visitor” she describes Francisco whose time is literally running out, which Forché symbolizes with the scythe cutting into the wheat as Francisco tells his wife in Spanish from behind the prison walls “there is no time left.” The image is evocative and heart-breaking, and the sense of injustice is strongly felt in the last two lines of the short poem: “It is a small country. There is nothing one man will not do to another” (Forché, 1979).
The Poetry of Rich
Rich’s focus was not so much on others as it was on her own personal experiences. Likewise, her focus was not on political happenings abroad but rather on socio-political movements at home in the U.S.—namely the Women’s Movement and Women’s Liberation. Adrienne Rich wrote in the American Feminist tradition that emerged in the first half of the 20th century with works like The Awakening and “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin, “A Room of One’s Own” by Virginia Woolf, and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which arrived at mid-century to take the literary themes circulating among 20th century American women writers and distill them into the ideological expression that became known as Feminism. Other women like Gloria Steinem, founder of Ms. Magazine and Feminist activist kicked off the Women’s Liberation movement in the U.S., and Rich emerged from within this movement as its poetic voice. In “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers,” Rich explored many of the themes discussed in feminist literature and shared similar tropes with other stories of oppressed women who found the weight of their wedding ring (a symbol used in “Tigers”) to weigh heavily on their hands—whether they were the kitchen-confined woman described by Friedan or the woman who killed her husband after years of mental abuse in Susan Glaspell’s Trifles. The Feminist tradition flowed through Rich’s works, were served as emblems of Feminist and Lesbian activism.
One of the recurring themes of feminist literature is the concept of the woman who is oppressed by her matrimonial life and feels crushed by her husband’s presence, which serves as a kind of patriarchal shadow hovering constantly over her and blocking out the sun and light of life. The Feminist Movement became aligned with lesbian activism and took up issues such as “reproductive rights,” even pushing Old World institutions to recognize their positions (Ruether). Judith Butler would also strive to define “gender identity” in the midst of a new revolution in terms of how women viewed themselves as opposed to how they traditional culture defined them as male counterparts.
Rich herself aligned with these issues and ideas. Born to a Jewish father and a Protestant mother, Rich was encouraged by parents to pursue self-expression through the poetic form. She attended a girls’ academy which introduced her to “fine role models of single women who were intellectually impassioned” (Martin, 1984, p. 174). Rich honed her poetry writing skills in college and her first book of poems, A Change of World, was picked by poet W. H. Auden as winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award (Flood, 2012). Rich was then awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship at Oxford but chose instead to travel Europe and seeing the Continent.
“Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” was written by Rich in 1951 and marked the beginning of Rich’s career as a poet. It also foreshadowed many of the themes that she would explore in her feminist writing and later in her activism as a feminist and lesbian. The poem’s power was in its use of symbolism and the tropes of the traditional feminist genre, as already established by Chopin and Woolf. Byars (1990) noted, for instance, that “Rich’s own remarks on this poem are an important starting place; she discusses how even in a formal and consciously distanced poem of her early period, she can discover clear (if latent) feminist concerns” (p. 37). These latent feminist concerns were apparent in the plight of “Aunt Jennifer” who felt stifled in her loveless marriage, similar to the way Rich felt stifled in her own. Rich would eventually leave her husband and take up a lesbian relationship while leading an activist lifestyle for equal rights for women and other marginalized groups. This activist spirit is seen in the tigers that Jennifer stitches: they sit up in the trees above the men on the ground, unafraid of the threats of violence below.
However, the poem also reveals that there is more work to be done by Feminists: as Byars (1990) put it, “Perhaps most interesting, however, is the fact that the needlework tigers, like Rich’s poem itself, are ineffectual as rebellion, because the very means of their rebellion are inscribed in the oppressor's language, and thus reveal an unhealed split in the psyche of the oppressed” (p. 37). By eventually getting away from the language of the oppressor and ceasing to internalize the commands of the oppressor, Rich would go on to display in her poetry a spirit of independence. In “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers,” however, she was laying the groundwork for liberation. Rich describes the hands of Aunt Jennifer as “terrified” and “ringed with ordeals she was mastered by”—a suggestion that marriage is more of an act of subjugation and oppression than of love and commitment. The tigers that Aunt Jennifer weaves into the fabric that she sews resemble the desire of the emerging feminist—the desire to be free above “the men beneath the tree,” free to “go on prancing, proud and unafraid” (Rich). The tigers represent the fierce freedom that sits in the oppressed woman’s breast. The woman is shackled by the wedding band, just like a slave is shackled by chains. And just like the woman in Glaspell’s Trifles spends her time knitting and sewing in a discrete and separate act of escaping from her husband’s presence, Aunt Jennifer takes up the needle to weave for herself a pattern that represents her inner desires: she is one with the tigers who prance in the trees, unafraid of the men below who seek to capture them. Aunt Jennifer’s tigers are thus a symbol of the feminist spirit that was about to break free in the mainstream American consciousness in the years following the publication of Rich’s early poem.
With her poem “Diving into the Wreck,” Rich would describe her transition from traditional marriage as a woman into a new sense of gender and sexual identity: “This is the place. / And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair / streams black, the merman in his armored body. / We circle silently / about the wreck / we dive into the hold. / I am she: I am he” (Rich, 1973). Rich used this poem to announce her transition and to support the voices of women who were also likewise committed to liberating themselves from old world patriarchal definitions of gender and sexuality. Rich wanted to focus on the socio-political sexual and gender identity of women in a patriarchal society and how that had to change.
The Problem of a World without Heart
Forché wanted to write about the socio-political problems that America itself was perpetuating by funding the government in El Salvador that was using death squads to silence critics like José Rudolfo Viera, who was Salvador's Deputy of Agrarian Reform, and to whom Forché dedicated her 1981 poem “Because One is Always Forgotten.” In that poem, Forché used the image of the human heart to express the backwardness of a country that locked away its citizens for having heart and that brutally murdered those who wanted reform. The poem is full of irony, as the heart is used as an image that one does not need because it cannot be eaten, and this irony reflects the hypocrisy of the U.S., which advocates for freedom and liberty and yet supports oppressors like the government of El Salvador that used death squads as a form of “justice.”
This sense of a world gone amuck without love is also displayed in Rich’s poem “Love Poem X” published in 1978. In it she wrote “without tenderness, we are in Hell.” This was essentially the sentiment of Forché, who provided evidence of this fact by digging into the background of what was happening in El Salvador and exposing the brutality of the regime in place. Rich associated the Hell of a world without tenderness to the lesbian movement and Women’s Liberation movement, both of which she saw as channels for women to free themselves from patriarchal systems of oppression in the U.S. Forché saw the Hell of a world without tenderness as being associated with the awful rule of an oppressive regime denying the right of the human heart to live and exist. As Mann (1986) pointed out, Forché wrote poems about dismemberment—spiritual and physical—the separation of the people from the political power structure and the separation of the soul from the body through a brutal death. Whether it was an ear being cut off a political prisoner as in “The Colonel,” a prisoner being executed at dusk as in “Because One is Always Forgotten,” or a husband being separated from as in “The Visitor,” Forché used imagistic material to bring to life the world that America was helping to bring into existence abroad.
Conclusion
Both Forché and Rich challenged the status quo of their times by using poetry to bring attention to voices of marginalized groups. Forché focused on the oppressed in countries like El Salvador, where a brutal regime was crushing dissent in a grisly manner. Rich focused on giving voice to the Women’s Liberation movement by depicting her own evolution as a woman and transition to a lesbian lifestyle. Individually, they united politics and poetry, though in different ways and for different ends.
References
Byars, T. (1990). World, Self, Poem: Essays on Contemporary Poetry from the
“Jubilation of Poets.” Kent State University Press.
Flood, A. (2012). Adrienne Rich, award-winning poet and essayist, dies aged 82.
Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/mar/29/adrienne-rich-poet-essayist-dies
Forché, C. (1978). The colonel. Retrieved from
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49862/the-colonel
Forché, C. (1979). The visitor. Retrieved from
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53172/the-visitor-56d2323b389c3
Martin, W. (1984). An American triptych: Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne
Rich. The University of North Carolina Press.
Poetry Foundation. (2018). Carolyn Forché. Retrieved from
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/carolyn-forche
Rich, A. (1973). Diving into the wreck. Retrieved fromm
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/diving-wreck
Ruether, R. R. (2008). Women, Reproductive Rights and the Catholic Church.
Feminist Theology 16(2), 184-193.