A review by ms_castalian
The Country Between Us by Carolyn Forche
5.0
I tried not to write about Carolyn Forche this week, but on account of not being able to finish another book, I find myself here, having to write about Forche.
One of the reasons a critic might reasonably avoid writing about Forche is that her poems take time to develop – not just on the page, but in the mind. Their center of gravity is always beyond the instant, and as a result, the reader is left with the impression that any talk of the poems themselves must reach beyond the words from which the poems are made. Take, for example, the ostensible prose poem “The Colonel,” which details the speaker’s encounter with a military official whose collusion in El Salvador’s violent regime slowly becomes more evident. The poem proceeds by mollifying the reader with detail: “His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar… There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the / cushion beside him” (16). The addition of the word “cushion” here suggests: perhaps the pistol is normal, can be forgiven, can be seen as an everyday object. Later, domestic words are used to describe the house’s barriers: “Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to / scoop the kneecaps from a man’s legs or cut his hands to lace.” Scooping, lace, later detached human ears described as “dried peach halves,” these are all artifacts of Forche’s gift for describing the ultra-violent using the language of the everyday. Violence, she seems to argue, is neither visible nor invisible; it is readily apparent only in the mundane details of our lives, woven seamlessly into the objects we use to signal our innocence.
It is for this reason that writing about Forche is difficult. The poem itself, for all of its understated, factual qualities (there are no exclamations or wheeling rhapsodies here) seems to present itself as both factually exhaustive and emotionally incomplete. Yes, we recognize that in the midst of “the wind jostling lemons… dogs ticking across the terraces… the cries of those who vanish / might take years to get here” (9, “San Onofre, California”). What we don’t understand is how we could possibly feel both at once: the everyday bliss of a Southern vacation and the haunting thereof. Forche refuses to trade one reality for the other; she also refuses to resolve the contradiction, rather asking that we choose:
“There is a cyclone fence between
ourselves and the slaughter and behind it
we hover in a calm protected world like
netted fish, exactly like netted fish.
It is either the beginning or the end
of the world, and the choice is ourselves
or nothing.” (59, “Ourselves or Nothing”)
So, again, while the poems themselves seem chiefly concerned with the past in different ways (the first section is even dated 1978 – 1980; a later poem addresses “Prague, 1968 – 1978” or “Winter 1969”), the poems take their power from the involvement of the reader, which is precisely what takes time. In this sense, Forche achieves a kind of Brechtian self-reckoning by using the objects of our daily life to put into question our own experiences; unlike Brecht, she is interested in the vehicle not of artificial theatricality, but of uncanny naturalness. The uncanniness is this: the poems indicate no moral line in the world; they cover murder with the same matter-of-factness as they would a passing bird. As a result, we are forced to reckon with our own discomfort, which arises from the lines we have drawn inside ourselves.
One of the reasons a critic might reasonably avoid writing about Forche is that her poems take time to develop – not just on the page, but in the mind. Their center of gravity is always beyond the instant, and as a result, the reader is left with the impression that any talk of the poems themselves must reach beyond the words from which the poems are made. Take, for example, the ostensible prose poem “The Colonel,” which details the speaker’s encounter with a military official whose collusion in El Salvador’s violent regime slowly becomes more evident. The poem proceeds by mollifying the reader with detail: “His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar… There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the / cushion beside him” (16). The addition of the word “cushion” here suggests: perhaps the pistol is normal, can be forgiven, can be seen as an everyday object. Later, domestic words are used to describe the house’s barriers: “Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to / scoop the kneecaps from a man’s legs or cut his hands to lace.” Scooping, lace, later detached human ears described as “dried peach halves,” these are all artifacts of Forche’s gift for describing the ultra-violent using the language of the everyday. Violence, she seems to argue, is neither visible nor invisible; it is readily apparent only in the mundane details of our lives, woven seamlessly into the objects we use to signal our innocence.
It is for this reason that writing about Forche is difficult. The poem itself, for all of its understated, factual qualities (there are no exclamations or wheeling rhapsodies here) seems to present itself as both factually exhaustive and emotionally incomplete. Yes, we recognize that in the midst of “the wind jostling lemons… dogs ticking across the terraces… the cries of those who vanish / might take years to get here” (9, “San Onofre, California”). What we don’t understand is how we could possibly feel both at once: the everyday bliss of a Southern vacation and the haunting thereof. Forche refuses to trade one reality for the other; she also refuses to resolve the contradiction, rather asking that we choose:
“There is a cyclone fence between
ourselves and the slaughter and behind it
we hover in a calm protected world like
netted fish, exactly like netted fish.
It is either the beginning or the end
of the world, and the choice is ourselves
or nothing.” (59, “Ourselves or Nothing”)
So, again, while the poems themselves seem chiefly concerned with the past in different ways (the first section is even dated 1978 – 1980; a later poem addresses “Prague, 1968 – 1978” or “Winter 1969”), the poems take their power from the involvement of the reader, which is precisely what takes time. In this sense, Forche achieves a kind of Brechtian self-reckoning by using the objects of our daily life to put into question our own experiences; unlike Brecht, she is interested in the vehicle not of artificial theatricality, but of uncanny naturalness. The uncanniness is this: the poems indicate no moral line in the world; they cover murder with the same matter-of-factness as they would a passing bird. As a result, we are forced to reckon with our own discomfort, which arises from the lines we have drawn inside ourselves.