INTERVIEW CONDUCTED BY JANET Uchendu and Annika Warrick
TRANSCRIBED BY ANNIKA WARRICK
In October of 2023, members of Arkana had the opportunity to interview Carolyn Forché, internationally acclaimed author of “The Colonel” and books such as The Country Between Us and In the Lateness of the World, about her process of craft and the intersection of the political and personal.
Arkana: How do you feel “poetry of witness” connects to the idea of processing personal trauma in writing?
Carolyn Forché: I use the term poetry of witness in a particular way, and witness is variously interpreted. As a word, it derives from the term for martyr. It has a biblical route, but also a legal route. I needed to open a space between the personal, the intimacy of the hearth and the home, personal life of the individual, and politics in the sense of collective entities visiting terror upon individuals. For example, people who suffered because of what were essentially apartheid laws in the United States suffered at the hands of a collective body supported by the state.
I was studying trauma that was experienced collectively because of the depredations or failures of the state, or other entities within the state. I was studying such experiences as warfare combat, military occupation, forced censorship, forced exile, and restrictive political laws that bear upon a certain group in a society. I thought to open a social space between the intimacies of the heart and the institutions of the state, or similar entities. This social space was actually conceptualized at the founding of the country. I know that a lot of those documents are deeply flawed, written by deeply flawed men, however they did conceive of a space where debate would take place, and the public would have a voice and there would be collective deliberations. All of literature belongs in that space, all of poetry belongs in that space, and it’s the space for publishing. The space all of this derives from is the public.
I felt that, at the time my second book of poetry was published, a lot of people felt that poetry should not concern itself with what they called the political. There was a real aversion to it. Well, what do they mean in the United States by politics? In Central America, for instance, if you are political you’re very active, you are part of an organization, and you follow their belief system. In the US I finally had to realize that if you were called political it meant you said something that the other person didn’t agree with. You were only political if you were perceived as adversarial in terms of the norms of your society. Politics was kind of a meaningless term in the US.
I wanted to create a space for people who had suffered through such things as, Black people in the United States, Native American people in the United States, those who saw combat during the Second World War, Holocaust survivors , prisoners of Soviet gulags. There had to be a way that those experiences, which marked those people deeply, could become present in poetry. That presence I think is legible in poems written in the aftermath of extremity.
In terms of what one passes through and is marked by, the soul is marked, the mind is marked, the consciousness is marked, the heart, the whole of the human being, including their language is marked. That mark becomes legible in everything they do or say in the aftermath, or in the midst of that suffering. To exclude certain areas of human experience from poetry seemed a very suspect proposition to me. It was something that was flexible in the hands of those who wielded it, because it was only wielded at their pleasure and for their reasons. I was hoping to move literary art a little bit in a different direction, and that’s why I gathered these poems [in Poetry of Witness]. I could only publish 145 of the poets’ writings. I had 4 times as much. That was all that Norton was willing to publish in that volume.
I learned that poets in most parts of the world in the 20th century suffered through a pretty narrow list of experiences that included what I just mentioned. One of the chapters in Against Forgetting that was queried was on the civil rights movement in the United States. But Norton said that “Well, but that isn’t like the Second World War, or the Spanish Civil War,” and I said “We’re talking about collective suffering, imposed, sanctioned, or supported by the state. Would you please explain to me how oppression wasn’t sanctioned or supported by the state?” It stayed.
The other thing they didn’t want me to do was begin with the Armenian genocide, the poets who went through that. They wanted me to start with the First World War. “No one really knows anything about Armenia, you should start with the poems of the First World War.” Hitler said that very thing in conference with his colleagues, when they were talking about their final solution. “We will get away with it because who today speaks of the Armenians.” I won that one, too. I got to start with the Armenians by telling [Norton] they now had something in common with Adolf Hitler.
This was a very funny process for me. It turned out very well in the end, but it was fraught. Today, everything is different. I am so happy about this. In fact, it’s so different that young poets worry if they don’t have a political subject. If they don’t have some issue that’s contemporary and important, they feel that their poetry book won’t be perceived as very good or strong enough, or whatever. It’s gone the other way, but it would be a wonderful world where your poetry could be about anything at all, and it would be judged on its merits in terms of musicality, and not about subject matter. Yeah.
Arkana: What drew you to creative writing as a form of expression?
CF: I am a child writer. Some writers are not child writers, they didn’t start until adulthood, but child writers usually are influenced by a parent or a librarian or a teacher. They produce something for school, and they discover that they really love doing it, and they get positive feedback for what they’ve done. That happened to me. I had my mother. I’m the oldest of seven children, we grew up in a house that was fairly crowded in Michigan. It snowed, and when it snowed enough, the schools were closed, and my mother would go insane having all seven children at home all at once. She gave us each something to do, and she knew that I liked to read, so she assigned me to write a poem, and she showed me a lot of poetry. I started fooling around with it. I wrote a poem about the snow. I fell in love with doing this, and my mother said, “After you help me with the housework, you can do another one.” I kept doing it. I had a couple of teachers. At first they thought I was copying my work from somewhere, but they couldn’t find the source. They didn’t have the internet, but I wasn’t copying. I finally said, “I’ll write one of these pieces in front of you. I’ll sit down, and you just tell me what to write about and I will write for you and you can see what I do.” After they got over the fact that I wasn’t plagiarizing, they became very encouraging of my work, and I just stayed in love with it.
In those days, there weren’t many creative writing programs, and certainly no way to major in creative writing as an undergrad, so my big problem was finding something to major in that was compatible with my obsession with writing. If we nudge an artist towards making art early in life, it often sticks. I think that’s true of anything you nudge the child to do. Anything that they do before they find out it’s work, that it’s still something wonderful.
Arkana: How do you differentiate between the modes of expression that you utilize to speak of your experiences? What draws you to sometimes tell your stories in articles versus poems, and how does one form speak in a way that the other cannot?
CF: You’re talking about why this genre rather than another genre. I wrote seven poems about El Salvador. That’s all, and they were about moments in El Salvador. They illuminate a particular single experience, or a relationship with a specific person—for example the dinner with the Colonel. That was a couple of hours one night. After, I promised myself, “I will talk about this later, I will one day write about this,” and by “this” I meant the whole two years prior to the beginning of the war. I knew that those seven poems did not illuminate that whole story. I always knew that. I liked writing prose, unlike a lot of poets, who don’t like writing prose. I knew that I needed the space of a long prose narrative because it really was a story that I wanted to tell, and I don’t think poems are capacious enough to tell stories. It took me a long time to begin writing What You Have Heard is True, but finally I did. I told as much of the story as I could, and I learned that you can’t tell the whole story no matter what. I still had to leave things out of that volume.
Sometimes you write a poem and it’s based on something you lived through, but it doesn’t tell the story of living through it. It might be very moving, but it does the work a poem can do. Poems don’t really build a world on paper. They refer to something that happened off the page. In the prose narrative, you really do have to build the world on paper.
In terms of articles, in the urgency of the moment I wrote articles for The Nation and the other places that simply reported on what was happening there. That had very little to do with literary art. It was really journalistic, not my favorite form of writing nor the one I’m best at. Yet I was the only one there some of the time, and I had to write because no one else was there. That’s when I realized how much disappears in this world because no one ever writes it.
Interestingly, wherever I’ve gone in the world, including anywhere in this country, if people find out I’m a writer, like on a bus or a plane, they will begin to tell me things. They’ll say, “If you write this, I’m going to tell you something that happened.” Everyone wants these stories to be told. But they’re not writers, and when they meet a writer, the first thing they want to do is make sure that something gets told.
Arkana: I know you’ve spoken about “The Colonel” already. I really love the way you marry form and feeling within that poem. How did you come to formatting that poem the way you did? It’s a prose poem, and you’ve got shorter sentences, and there are all these observations that provide a sort of dissociative sense to the reader. I’m really curious about how that poem looked when you first drafted it.
CF: Well, firstly, I didn’t write it as a poem; it was never meant to be a poem. I wrote it fairly soon after the events happened, because I wanted to get all of the details before I forgot. I never forgot, but I thought I might. I was thinking that someday I would write a prose book, so this would be maybe a piece I could use. I wrote it as a piece of prose to keep track of some details that happened on a particular night. It got mixed up in my poetry manuscript in a folder. I gave Daniel Albright my folder of poems to read and to ask his opinion and advice. He chose “The Colonel”as the most important poem in the folder, and I said, “Oh well that was a mistake, that’s not supposed to be there,” and he said, “oh you’re very wrong! You must leave it in the book, it’s a prose poem!” Or what they later started to call flash. But it wasn’t fiction, it was flash nonfiction I guess you would call it.
I never made a decision about the form. I wrote it in one night, and it didn’t get revised, ever. I’ve only had two or three poems like that in my entire life, and “The Colonel” was one of them. I remember the window, I remember the snow falling, I remember what the desk looked like, I can go right back to the moment of writing “The Colonel.” It was like being in some sort of weird space.
Arkana: I am so intrigued by that because the second part of that question is- did you write it immediately after?
CF: Not immediately, but pretty soon. Within six months or so.
Arkana: What do you think your future as a poet looks like? Are there projects you’re currently working on, or work you are specifically seeking to pursue?
CF: Well, I’m 73 and I am almost finished with a second memoir. I am writing new poems slowly, as I always have, very slowly. That’s what I’m doing and I’m hoping for one more book of poems and this memoir. I’ll be just really lucky. If I can do that, I’ll be happy.