Forché and Rich: Poetry, Politics, and Marginalized Voices

Introduction

Carolyn Forché and Adrienne Rich are two female American poets whose work integrated the personal and the political into poetry. Forché, for example, is credited with 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 form 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 shows 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 addresses the violence that consumed El Salvador under the dictatorial, 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 does not look like a traditional poem at all — but this is appropriate, because its purpose is to give testimony to a grisly reality in El Salvador that newspapers back home in the United States were not reporting. The poem tells the story of a colonel who treats the poet and her friend to dinner — lamb, mangoes, wine — before producing a sack of human ears apparently collected from 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 off the table and announcing, "Something for your poetry, no?" (Forché, 1978).

This poem generated a great deal of attention for Forché, as it touched a nerve among Americans at 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 and the barbarism of American-backed dictators. "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 it, she visits a rebel who has been arrested by the government and imprisoned. Her perspective in the poem is that of an outsider — literally — as she is not inside the prison cell but viewing the experience from without. As in "The Colonel," Forché describes the scene in El Salvador from the perspective of someone who is actually experiencing the country's horrors firsthand. Whereas "The Colonel" deals with a person in a position of power, "The Visitor" deals with a person who is politically oppressed. In both poems, however, Forché is an observer describing the experiences of others rather than her own. In "The Visitor" she describes Francisco, whose time is literally running out — a reality Forché symbolizes with a 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 heartbreaking, and the sense of injustice is powerfully felt in the poem's final two lines: "It is a small country. There is nothing one man will not do to another" (Forché, 1979).

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 from 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.