What You Have Heard Is True -- a book review

2019 National Book Award Finalist

This is a pretty, damned hard book to read. Not because of big words and difficult ideas. Not because it is too academic or artistically obtuse. But because the truth it tells is hard to take. 

I cannot freely recommend it. But I do believe it is important for you to read. It's not just for Americans to read, but maybe especially Americans should read it.

Americans like me who live a quiet, safe life, have no idea. Even Americans who do not enjoy so-called white privilege or Christian privilege or wealth privilege -- they do have American privilege. And Americans, despite our current administration's poor-little-rich-kid view that the world is picking on us, do "have it" better than some of our neighbors. 

Those among us who are truly oppressed -- and there are Americans among us who are truly oppressed -- have an advantage over too many in the world. That advantage is that they are Americans. 

We Americans don't understand why the people of Venezuela or North Korea or the Rohingya of Southeast Asia and the Uighurs of China and so many others around the world allow themselves to be oppressed by their own governments. We ask, "If they don't like it, why don't they change it?" 

In What You Have Heard Is True by Carolyn Forché, we learn why. On the title page the book calls itself what it most truly is, "A Memoir of Witness and Resistance." 

The author writes, "Over the years, I have been asked why, as a twenty-seven-year-old American poet who spoke Spanish brokenly and knew nothing about the isthmus of the Americas, I would accept the invitation of a man I barely knew to spend time in a country on the verge of war. And why would this stranger, said to be a lone wolf, a Communist, a CIA operative, a world-class marksman, and a small-time coffee farmer, take any interest in a naive North American poet? as one man put it, what does poetry have to do with anything?"

That man she barely knew was Leonel Gómez Vides. He explained to her why he chose her: "Someday you will be talking to your own people. Writing for your own people. I promise you that it is going to be difficult to get Americans to believe what is happening here. For one thing, this is outside the realm of their imaginations. For another, it isn't in their interests to believe you. For a third, it is possible that we are not human beings to them."

Forché, because she is not a journalist or an historian, she does not deliver to us a detached report of what happened. She is not a storyteller sitting in front of a cozy fireplace recounting an exciting war story. She is a poet and as such, she involves us in her experiences. Experiences so close to the reader that the tension is palpable. You feel the fear in your gut. You remind yourself that she survives this memoir because you need to be reassured. But, because of her, you know there are those who don't and you feel their loss. 

Our questions: Why do people allow themselves to be oppressed by their government? And why don't they change their government?

"It isn't the risk of death and fear of danger that prevent people from rising up, it is numbness, acquiescence, and the defeat of the mind." --  Leonel Gómez Vides

and

"Resistance to oppression begins when people realize deeply within themselves that something better is possible." --  Leonel Gómez Vides

Like me, you may find yourself with your own crisis of conscience. Complete with the need to know if it is still the same in El Salvador today? And what I can do.