What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance by Carolyn Forché

What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance by Carolyn Forché
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

5.0/5.0 stars - This is a book that I'd likely never had picked up if it hadn't been a book club selection. First, she is a poet and second, it is a memoir. It would have been a great loss to me, though. I was moved by this book in ways I can't begin to describe - both by the beauty of her prose, her mastery of language, and the horrors of the events that she witnessed. The setting is El Salvador in the late seventies, the time leading up to a 12 year civil war. Carolyn is a young, but established poet, teaching at a university in California when Leonel Gomez Vide shows up at her door and changes her life. He invites her to come down to El Salvador and over the weeks she is there, lifts the veil of innocence and naivete from her eyes. Look, see, observe and write he tells her. Read this book, it may well change your life.
I was gifted a copy by a friend, purchased the Audible version, as well. During my library work career, I had the privilege of working with a great collection of interviews with great writers that had been filmed over a 50 year at Brockport. I wrote grants to digitize several dozen of the interviews, including a young Carolyn Forche in 1982. It is freely available through our repository here: http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/w..., as well as the transcription of it here: https://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/....
Book 190 of 2020

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