...extraordinary ... her memoir gracefully traces her evolution from an ignorant but curious young American to a writer committed to documenting in her poetry the horrifying details of war ... Forché’s memoir is an attempt not only to illustrate those connections [between Americans and other peoples] but also to provide readers with a path to a similar kind of moral evolution ... Forché’s memoir is so meticulous and specific in her documentation of what war is—children staring in frightened fascination at corpses, a torture victim’s severed fingers flushed down the toilet—that her book becomes a necessary corrective to the cold, bureaucratic language of U.S. politicians ... A book like What You Have Heard Is True challenges us as Americans to see the people arriving at our border not only with empathy but also with the knowledge that their arrival is a manifestation of a shared history—of our shared fate.
Gripping ... recounts how and why its author began to write the kind of poetry she published in her 1981 book The Country Between Us, what she calls 'the poetry of witness' ... One might expect a poet’s prose to be florid, or at least highly metaphorical. But Forché honors her responsibility to the Salvadoran calamity by writing sparely and precisely. On occasion, recalling the verdant fields and starry nights of Central America, she can wax lyrical. More often, the poet’s voice is manifest in a luminous sentence ... Much of the book consists of extended conversations between Forché and the varied people she meets. And though it is highly improbable that she could remember everything that was said verbatim, what appears in the book seems plausible ... A portrait of the artist as political and poetic ingénue, What You Have Heard Is True is just such a response, a riveting account of how she made good on that conviction. It bears eloquent witness to injustice and atrocity and to how observing them shaped a fearless poet.
...extraordinary ... Written with a thriller writer's knack for narrative tension and a poet's gorgeous sentences and empathy ... Forché paints a beautiful and chilling portrait of pre-war El Salvador ... In Forché's stark rendering — she struggles at first to accept what she sees, and then her vision gains a camera's coldness — all of this is simply heart-stopping, and feels utterly present, utterly pressing.
What You Have Heard Is True is not just an account of a young woman’s encounter with horrific human suffering and resistance in a foreign country, and her resulting political awakening; even in the hands of a poet who writes prose as beautifully and powerfully as Forché does, that would be a familiar story. The memoir is also a portrait of Gómez, a singular dynamo, and of their complex relationship ... Anyone who reads this magnificent memoir will partake of that luminous transformation.
Forché’s memoir starts off slowly, as she describes in minute detail how she made the fateful and seemingly inexplicable decision to follow a mysterious stranger’s directive to take such a perilous trip. But once Forché’s story gathers momentum, it’s hard to let the narrative go ... [a] riveting book ... the memoir I read was more intricate and surprising than such an earnest descriptor lets on ... Forché alludes to the political context in the book, but the shape of her memoir hews closely to what she herself saw and heard — and how, out of the horror, she began to discern what she needed to do.
As Forché changes, so does her memoir’s language. Her writing becomes quicker, less inclined to linger. Perhaps to replace the poetic writing of the memoir’s early chapters, she begins including notes she took in El Salvador, which function as prose poetry ... [Forché] remembers as much as possible, and the resulting memoir, once read, is difficult to forget.
Forché presents truth as something personal and individual, verified by physical senses and therefore impossible to ignore ... This memoir suggests that those who truly take the time to walk in the shoes of others will themselves be changed, and that when they speak out against suffering, they do so with authority. What You Have Heard Is True is a beautiful and important book of one poet’s awakening to the suffering of others and to the power of words.
... shattering, indispensable ... Reading [this memoir] will change you, perhaps forever ... [Forché] offers not only her harrowing outer journey through a brutal and wounded country, but also her inner resolve to find words for the unspeakable ... Thanks to Forché’s monumental gifts, the excruciating struggle between brutality and dignity must be faced even now.
Renowned poet and human rights activist Forché’s new memoir...is a lyrical, potent book ... [Forché's mentor Leonel Gomez Vides] wants Forché to see, truly see his country. Of course, it’s not all dim violence; El Salvador is a geographically beautiful country, and there’s plentiful prose as Forché describes its famed volcanoes, black sand beaches, cane, cotton and coffee fields ... Throughout the necessary grisly recounting of what she witnessed, we hear Gomez constantly admonishing Forché ... The question remains: Why did she go? Even by the end of the story we are still not certain ... This remarkable book is the world she saw.
What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance documents how we see and engage with the world through one woman’s consciousness. [Forché's] experiences led her to the conclusion that only by bearing witness and remembering can we be fully participatory citizens ... The act of bearing witness alone is not enough, but tracing Forché’s journey in El Salvador allows us to reexamine how we interpret, process, and remember ... We still face questions of how this witnessing, and memory created through witness, can be channeled in a collective way, not only to denounce, account for, and resist, but also to reimagine something better.
...heart-stoppingly beautiful ... Forché uses the memoir to explore with exquisite sensitivity questions about artists’ roles in moments of holocaust and terror ... Enlisting the same linguistic strategy she deployed in The Colonel, Forché does not spare readers from the graphic details of brutal, political murder ... What to do with human remains? What to do with the memory of human remains? This has been at the center of Forché’s project for the better part of 35 years ... Showing rather than telling in What You Have Heard is True, Forché has created a 'living archive' for all who are lucky enough to read the book ... the words of this extraordinary poet conjure the senseless brutality of one of America’s dirty wars and also remind us that words matter.
In this galvanizing memoir, [Forché] recounts her political awakening under fire with a poet’s lyrical acuity and a storyteller’s drama ... Forché recounts her frightening and transformative encounters with scorching specificity and portrays her brilliant and courageous mentor and other resistance fighters with wonder and gratitude. This clarion work of remembrance, this indelible testimony to a horrific battle in the unending struggle for human rights, justice, and peace, stands with the dispatches of Isabel Allende, Eduardo Galeano, Pablo Neruda, and Elena Poniatowska.
Episode by episode, dodging death squads, Forché builds a story filled with violence and intrigue worthy of Graham Greene around which a river of blood flows—doing so, unstanched, with the avid support of America’s leaders ... A valuable firsthand report of a time of terror.
