On "The Colonel"

John Mann (1986)

Nothing could have prepared the winner of the Yale Series or Younger Poets prize (awarded for her first book, Gathering the Tribes, in 1976) for what she found when she journeyed to El Salvador in 1978. She describes herself in a recent interview in Rolling Stone as a midwesterner with working-class roots teaching and writing in San Diego when, in 1977, Leonel Gomez Vides appeared at her door. A translator of Claribel Alegria's poems, and a worker for Amnesty International, Forche was perhaps ready to accept Gomez's invitation to visit and learn about his small country (on maps, the size of a chestnut); but her recollection of agreeing to go now strikes her as absurdly naive: "I thought I would be the lady in white working in the orphanage for one year who pats the little bottoms! I pictured myself that way, rather heroically." Instead, what she found in several journeys to El Salvador between 1978 and 1980 was twentieth-century reality. The eight poems in Part l of The Country Between Us bear the title "In Salvador, 1978-1980." They represent an immersion (really a kind of baptism) for the poet—what quickly would become a political education, but more importantly a moral education as well. As she recalled later, "A young writer, politically unaffiliated, ideologically vague, I was to be blessed with the rarity of a moral and political education—what at times would seem an unbearable immersion, what eventually would become a focussed obsession. It would change my life and work, propel me toward engagement, test my endurance and find it wanting, and prevent me from ever viewing myself or my country again through precisely the same fog of unwitting connivance." This immersion ultimately issued in an outcry and a transformation.

Carolyn Forché (from an interview with Bill Moyers)

Moyers: . . . The Country Between Us. What is the country?

Forché: It's complicated because that book emerged while I was working as a human rights activist in Central America and in the United States and those poems turned out to be very different from the poems I had previously written. They were still first-person lyric narrative free-verse poems, but I didn't realize how much I'd been changed by my experiences in El Salvador until those poems reflected that change.

The country between us is perhaps the distance between one human being and another, how long it takes one human voice to reach another human voice. It's probably also a reference to El Salvador, which was the country that came into my heart when I was just becoming an adult, and the country which probably shaped my moral imagination. But perhaps it is the United States too, because for me the United States is very complex. It was the people of the United States who all through that war were very concerned and who cared about human rights and responded very favorably to all appeals while at the same time the United States was a government that didn't seem to know how to listen to any of that. So I have two countries in my mind: the country of my people and the country of the government that I knew as I was growing into adulthood.

Moyers: Your mention of El Salvador brings to mind "The Colonel." It's the poem of yours most quoted in anthologies and most used in classes. How did it come about?

Forché: I was in El Salvador. It was 1978. Very few Americans who didn't work for the embassy were there. There were a few Peace Corps people, but it was an unusual occurrence for an American to come into the country. I was being taken around and educated about conditions in Salvador by members of Claribel Alegría's family. My presence in the country came to the attention of the military, they were intrigued and wondered if I wasn't also working for the U.S. government because, in a way, everyone thinks that all North Americans there are doing that.

So officers began to want to talk to me. I realize today that they were hoping that the United States would desire their services and pay them for information and intelligence and so on, but I didn't know that then. it became clear to me, however, as I was having these meetings with military officers, that they were very upset about the human rights policy of President Carter. They believed that the United States was being hypocritical in its relation to them: they were still getting support, but they were embarrassed because they were being insulted internationally about their human rights behavior.

On this occasion I was taken to dinner at a very high-ranking officer's house and I don't think he realized that what I said about myself was true--I really was just a twenty-seven-year-old American poet. He got a little intoxicated and angry, and he wanted to send a message to the Carter administration. He wanted me to go back to Washington and tell President Carter, "We've had enough of this human rights policy," and his actions were his way of demonstrating his contempt.

Moyers: He literally poured ears on the floor?

Forché: He poured them on the table. I learned later there were a number of officers who had a practice of keeping bounty of various kinds. Some Vietnam veterans also told me that had happened in Vietnam, so what I saw was not as uncommon as I thought when I first saw it. I remember feeling sick and dizzy, but nothing happened to me. Everything was fine. His wife brought us out into the living room for coffee and tried to make everything better because she felt the dinner party was ruined. But he was not the worst man I met, not even the worst officer. In fact, this officer tried to warn priests when they were in danger.

Moyers: "Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground." Are they listening to something?

Forché: I'm happy you know that about the image, because sometimes people are puzzled, they don't understand why I describe in this way. But there's an expression, "ear to the ground," you know the way you can hear a train coming if you put your ear to the ground? I think that when we're writing a poem, sometimes our associational memory magically makes these connections. There were many such moments writing "The Colonel."

I thought the moon in the poem was just the moon until someone pointed out that it seems to be a white lamp shining in a box in an interrogation room. People have interpreted many features of this poem, but when I wrote it, I was just trying to capture details so that I would remember. I didn't even think it was a poem. I thought it was a piece of a memoir that got mixed up with my poetry book. So when a scholar read the manuscript and said, "This is the best one. This is the best poem," I said, "Oh, no. That's a mistake. That's not a poem." It took me years to accept it as a poem and not just a block of memory.

Moyers: The Colonel, what happened to him?

Forché: He's dead.

Moyers: The victims?

Forché: Dead.

Moyers: But the poem survived, so for whatever consolation it is, memory has a chance.

Forché: Yes. That's the hope.

Moyers: Had I reported that incident as a journalist, I would have been quite literal: who, what, when, where, and why. What's the relationship between these facts as a journalist would report them and the truth that you're trying to reveal?

Forché: Some writers whom I admire very much say that facts often have little to do with the truth. What I was trying to do with this piece, as I finally allowed it to be in The Country Between Us, was to acknowledge that something important had actually occurred. But the poem also contains a truth about the brutality of that situation which seems to reach deeply into people. When I came back to the United States and began reading the poem, I noticed that some people were very moved by it and others were very angered by it. And some people simply didn't believe it, they said it could not have happened.

There was a fierce denial and yet several years later a reporter for The Washington Post interviewed soldiers in El Salvador and they apparently talked about the practice of taking ears and all of that. In fact, one of these soldiers read the news story about his practice of taking ears and was so proud of the story that he actually clipped it out and laminated it and carried it in his wallet. Because now he was famous, you know, for this.

Moyers: That's what can happen to a journalist's account. But the poem is a condemnation.

Forché: It is a condemnation. As a journalist, maybe you wouldn't have been able to use the obscenity, and perhaps you wouldn't have been able to quote him directly. But more than that, I don't think it would've happened to you because I don't think the message was intended for the press. It was intended for a quiet communication back to Washington, and unfortunately they told the wrong person. They told a poet.

Moyers: Lesson for politicians and military leaders: Never talk to poets.

Forché: Never.

From The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets. Ed. James Haba. New York: Doubleday, 1995. Copyright © 1995 by Public Affairs Television, Inc., and David Grubin Productions, Inc.

Sharon Doubiago

"The Colonel," the most oft-quoted and reprinted poem of the book is, interestingly, set in prose and the witness breaks down midpoint when the Colonel spills a sack of human ears onto the dinner table: "There is no other way to say this." Who is it that is breaking down here? Not the witness, but the poet with the burden of her U.S. aesthetics. Who is she apologizing to? First and foremost, to us, her fellow poets (or is it to her teachers and critics who will disapprove?). The opening lines of the piece are also addressed to us, I think. "What you have heard is true. I was in his house," as if a poet should not have been, as if to

answer her poet friends who warned her about this. The ears :are like dried peach halves," the poet's only simile here and one I think that undeniably authenticates her experience. We need this simile, for how many of us have had the experience? It brings the ears alive for us, just as the one dropped in the glass of water by the Colonel "came alive." And even he addresses the poet's "problem" as he performs his heinous act. "Something for your poetry, no?"

From "Towards an American Criticism: A Reading of Carolyn Forché's The Country Between Us." American Poetry Review, January-February, 1983.

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Terence Diggory

About "The Colonel," in which the title figure dumps a sack of human ears onto the table from which he and Forché have just dined, Forché says that, "I had only to pare down the memory and render it whole, unlined and as precise as recollection would have it. I did not wish to endanger myself by the act of poeticizing such a necessary reportage" (American Poetry Review, July-August 1981). If to "poeticize" means to prettify, Forché's statement is unobjectionable; if however, she means that "The Colonel" is a "reportage" rather than poetry, Forché is disavowing her own very significant role in giving her experience the shape of art. That "The Colonel" has such shape can be demonstrated by quoting its last two sentences, which provide perfect closure to a text in which each word is placed with artful precision: "Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground," Even if we follow Forché's instructions to read "The Colonel" as "unlined," that is, as prose, the repetition in these sentences produces very formal prose indeed. And if, despite Forché's temporary banishment of lineation to the composing room, we read each sentence as a line of poetry, we discover that each is almost perfectly anapestic, thus lending special significance to the crucial disyllabic substitution that compresses the rhythm at the very moment that the ears are seen to be pressed to the ground. In the context of the volume as a whole, the image of ears has a special resonance, for Forché is continually aware of how difficult it is for one person's voice to reach the ears of another, spanning the distance of "the country between us." That her voice reaches us so distinctly is a tribute to her art as well as a measure of the horror to which her art bears witness.

From "Witnesses and Seers," in Salmagundi, Fall 1983, pp. 112-24.

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Jonathan Holden

Why is this poem so good? Because the speaker/author's ideological predispositions do not preempt authentic poetic discovery--the discovery of connections between the feel of her individual life and, in this case, objective, historical and economic facts, discovery which is directly carried over into the poem's language and structure, a structure which, by matter-of-factly in a catalogue format juxtaposing such items as "daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion . . . gratings as there are in liquor stores," not only links oppression inevitably with bourgeois life but also reveals the profound banality of such evil, a banality epitomized finally by the ears "like dried peach halves" in what might be the Salvadoran equivalent to a brown paper Safeway shopping bag. The poem is "analytic" in precisely the sense that the Simpson poem is. Instead of delivering us a conclusion, it renders the process of analysis itself. Indeed, Forché herself seems to sense how much it is authorial discovery after "pen" has been taken to "paper" which lends this poem its power. Introducing it, she characterizes it as "almost a poeme trouvé." Of course, "The Colonel" is nothing like a "found" poem. The "found" poem simply rearranges some nonpoetic discourse as verse, whereas this poem not only lacks verse, but it is in Forché's own words. It is "trouvé" in a more profound sense, in the sense that all excellent poetry is. In its genuine wonderment and curiosity at the details of the colonel's household, at the way in which bourgeois banalities are stored so casually side by side with the trappings of oppression (as if those furnishings naturally belonged together), it discovers and renders these connections more forcibly than any ideological statement could.

From Style and Authenticity in Postmodern Poetry. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986. Copyright © 1986 by the Curators of the University of Missouri.

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Carolyn Forché

Fifteen years ago, while working as a human rights activist in El Salvador, I had the occasion to dine with a high-ranking officer in General Humberto Romero's military regime. The following aide-memoir was among the seven poems included in The Country Between Us that had to do with human rights in El Salvador.

[Forché quotes "The Colonel"]

In a book celebrated and maligned for extraliterary reasons, this was the most widely discussed and most controversial poem. North American audiences were curious to know whether the events narrated were "true." One critic theorized that I had stolen the central image from an Ernest Hemingway novel, in which bulls' ears were severed after a bullfight. The colonel's gross display of human bounty seemed unimaginably inappropriate in the context of a suburban dinner party, and yet I was credited with having invented this and other details out of whole cloth. An early essay which I wrote on the formation of the death squads in El Salvador piqued serious interest at the New York Review of Books, until its fact-checker learned from the U.S. Department of State that the death squads were a figment of this poet-fantast's unrestrained imagination. I had been beyond the borders of hegemonic reality long enough to have developed a serious delusional condition. In choosing to present truth in a literary form, I had transgressed literature and forfeited the credibility accorded to "objective" and institutionally constrained journalists.

In 1992, I returned to El Salvador for the first time in twelve years. "Those who wanted you dead are dead, I was told. The colonel, too, is dead." While in the capital city, I met Doug Farrah, now of the Washington Post. "You're the poet who wrote the ears poem," he said. "Did you ever see my article in the New York Times?" I confessed that I hadn't. "It's about the ears, and the officer mentioned in the article was so proud of having his name in the New York Times that he had the article laminated for his wallet." In the library after my trip, I found the clipping from May 20, 1986:

SALVADORAN SOLDIERS TELL OF
CUTTING OFF EARS OF DEAD REBELS.

Cerro Guacamaya, El Salvador (UPI)

Some Salvadoran soldiers say they have been cutting off the ears of dead leftist rebels to prove casualty counts. "We need something to prove we killed the terrorists," one sergeant said.

The officers of these soldiers say they are trying to end the practice, which they blame on the excitement of the moment.

Reporters traveling with an army unit on a counter-insurgency sweep in the northeastern province of Morazan on May 11 saw a soldier hold up two ears to prove that a guerrilla had been killed during a firefight near Cerro Guacamaya.

Other soldiers said it was not uncommon to cut the ears off the corpses of rebels to verify enemy casualties to commanders. But officers said they frown on the practice.

"Sometimes in battle, my men get excited and cut the ears off the dead terrorists," the lieutenant commanding the army unit said. "It is not something we order, but sometimes the excitement of the moment overcomes them."

As I read, it occurred to me to preserve the clipping myself, as a tangible fragment of that broken world. Perhaps it would one day serve some evidentiary purpose. Later in the trip, I was approached by an emissary from the American embassy, who informed me that I should stick to my poetry. "After all," he assured himself aloud, "nobody reads poetry."

from "The Poetry of Witness" in The Writer in Politics. Ed. William H. Gass and Lorin Cuoco. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1996. Copyright © 1996 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University.

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Kenneth Lincoln

Her cursed prose poem, "The Colonel," stalks readers with dead, severed ears. "One evening," she relates in terrible witness, "I dined with a military officer who toasted America, private enterprise, Las Vegas, and the 'fatherland' until his wife excused herself and in a drape of cigar smoke the events of 'The Colonel' took place. Almost a poeme trouve, I had only to pare down the memory and render it whole, unlined and as precise as recollection would have it" (APR 1981). Such an unspeakable moment, selected from personal history, is a witnessing check poem. "Simply to keep watch over life," the political historian Terrence Des Pres wrote, as Forche records his search for the lost home in "Ourselves or Nothing."

The word "colonel," from the Latin for "little column," designates a midrank, upright officer (vertically at attention) in the field. It is suspiciously close, byway of the ear, to "colonial," which derives otherwise from the Latin for "farmer." Forche's little column of words, "The Colonel," carries the news as a kind of freelance prose poem from a Latin American colonial home—straight from the mouth of a military bureaucrat with a gun on the "cushion" beside him (the privilege of terrorism). Suburban order is the flag of the generic Colonel's family: "his wife" clearing the table, "his son" going out for the night, "his daughter" filing her nails. The "pet dogs" complete this domestic coven, all-in-the-family conventional, proper and expected, but for the gun on the pillow.

"WHAT YOU HAVE HEARD is true," the rectangular block of an alleged poem, among six other lineated texts about El Salvador, opens with hushed confirmation. Beginning with full capitals, the first four words could pass for a legal brief or diplomatic report manque (Forche was serving as cultural diplomat on a Guggenheim, The Country Between Us her report to the people). This report is different. It does not look like or sound like a poem, at first, more a newspaper column—flatly descriptive, factual, reportorial. All this changes. The whispers of unspeakable rumor, the conspiratorial fears of oppression, the underground gossip of the streets leak through her reportorial column like small gusts of breath. A factual, mid-level diction breaks with maximal stress the need to tell all, in plain style disbelief and passionately embedded inscription. Hers is an anti-art that is an art of timed witness and indirect revelation. In journalistic wraps of the daily news, justified between margins, the lines carry a tone of clinical horror, echoes of controlled terror: all in the name of decency and diplomatic taste, Pentecostal "rack of lamb, good wine," and hemispheric trade. "His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar."

The Colonel's violence is institutionalized with broken bottles cemented into the walls (to "scoop" a man's "kneecaps," the voice edges toward bloodshed, or "cut his hands to lace," nervously questioning terrorist art). More colloquially, the Colonel's windows are grated "like those in liquor stores." Martial law rules this neighborhood. A "gold bell" calls "the maid," and "The maid" (in repetitious servility) brings green mangoes, salt, bread—all uniform, all in order, all "his" orders, a man-made, emotionless, down-home horror under middle-class cushion. A TV cop-show in English imports American greed and violence, the commercial in Spanish capitalizes the local margin. What will happen? the reader wonders. How will this piece work out?

Metric line breaks are embedded in the syntax, curiously disguised not to look like poetry. The lines internally break into hymnal or ballad measure (five, times in tetrameter, "His wife took everything away"), blank verse (sixteen times in pentameter, "The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house"), and Homeric meter (seven times in hexameter, '"There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him"), only three lines in strictly "free" verse, three to seven beats. Sibilant hissing rhymes interlace the metric sentence endings ("house, English, house, lace, stores, Spanish, terrace, this, faces, themselves, voice") .Within the closing lines, the monosyllables "sack, ears, halves, hands, glass, rights, ears, last, ears, scrap, ears" and "pressed" siphon their vowels into a cluster of atrocities carried home as "groceries." Forche is much more of a poet, or anti-poet, than she lets on here. Her hidden rhymes and rhythms (both words from Greek rhythmus, as mentioned, meaning "flow") conceal the art of conspiratorial witness, the designs of a hushed poetics. "Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—" Dickinson cautioned, "Success in Circuit lies" (no.1129) .The off-poetic disguise is essential. How can she be an aesthete in witness of the horror? How can Forche appear to be ordering her lines, to be measuring her steps, to be decorating her images, in the face of the Colonel's controlled madness, his butchering orders? This paterfamilias finds it difficult "to govern" these days, to order his household, to keep the margins justified, to muzzle the press, to silence the cries of the disappeared. "Hello," the parrot parrots on the terrace, and the Colonel tells it to "shut up." The poet's co-witness, "my friend" (separate from household pawns), says "with his eyes: say nothing." Timing is all here, the slowly detailed opening, the building of tension with the pistol, glass, and grating, then more swiftly, the pressure of breaking open consciousness through undercurrent and sustained release of detail—all in the steadily mounting expectation of a narrative worthy of Chekhov. The poet goes subversive. "She dealt her pretty words like Blades—" Dickinson wrote, "How glittering they shone— / And every One unbared a Nerve / Or wantoned with a Bone—" (no.479).

So the Colonel brings out his grocery sack of ears, as casually as any collector might produce his stamps or chloroformed butterflies. "He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like / dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this." This cannot be said right, the subversive poet knows, no way except by way of a horribly failed speech, a terribly wrong image—"like dried peach halves"—the unspeakably excoriated simile. Language cannot bear this violence. The word "ear" disappears uncannily in the word "disappear." The disappeared bodies go earless, this wretched simile our evidence that they heard, but did not heed the Colonel's orders. Poetry is hopeless. Metaphor strains, words fail, the imagination shuns the truth, "—An Omen in the Bone / Of Death's tremendous nearness" (Dickinson, no.532).

Yet one ear "came alive" in the Colonel's water glass. It's his awful party trick, his bad parody—little titular column of a military god-man with life-and-death whims. He orders desaparecidos, proved by souvenir ears. "Some thing for your poetry, no? he said." That little Latin-Anglo hinge, "no?" is the dialectal trip wire of the whole poem. Such a small word to reverse field on the expectations of poetry, to trigger an obverse order. The negating disclaimer turns back in moaning o's, "Something for your poetry, no?" This is not so much poetry as anticolonial protest, not so much aesthetics as conspiratorial witness, or art beyond art. The failure of language goes deeper into human failures. Such is a poetry that breaks poetic illusion with the need to speak of the unspeakable, at whatever cost. "As for the rights of anyone, / tell your people they can go fuck themselves."

Foul words fit here. The Colonel comes clean in infamy, the truth no longer slant, but out in bad talk, self-condemned. A fallen, postmodernist diction, lower than any poet has gone before, is orally apt. The unspeakable is disgustingly cursed by his own words. Forche writes in postlyric, questionable witness of "the horror" with us, Conrad's Marlow in the New World, female, south of the border, bringing the news back home. "You, I, his, her, my friend, your people, they"—the disparate host of personal pronouns in "The Colonel" points to a complicity of crimes at our door. The poet's careful detailing of this petty CEO thug with a gun leads to our implicative connection, "the horror" at home today, not far south. "Blessed / are those who listen," Linda Hogan says, "when no one is left to speak."

Some of the ears on the floor still beg mercy from a "scrap" of the Colonel's voice. This news comes from the bottom of the text, the prone axis that intercepts the Colonel's upright column and justified margins. Horizontal to his vertical order then, some of the ears lie "pressed to the ground"—trampled, still listening underground in resistance, keen to hear, to know, to witness, and to rise up against the Colonel's orders. Latin America is an Hispanicized Native America, fusional Old and New Worlds, "children and exiles of the Americas," Forche writes of Whiteman's Oneida Star Quilt. The nativized ghosts of atrocity speak through intense silence, the quiet of the desaparecidos, the horror weighing the poem's shadows. "There is no other way to say this," the poet says, but this much must be said.

"In every war someone puts a cigarette in the corpse's mouth," the poet makes note, as hard truth haunts her. "I dug maggots from a child's open wound with a teaspoon" (APR 1981). What is too horrible to say reduces her to simile, sacked ears "like dried peach halves," a device that admits its own failure to name things directly. In so failing, the simile breaks a frustrated silence beyond itself. Forche remembers horror with stunned clarity, a poet's post-traumatic stress: "The bodies of friends have turned up disemboweled and decapitated, their teeth punched into broken points, their faces sliced off with machetes. On the final trip to the airport we swerved to avoid a corpse, a man spread-eagled, his stomach hacked open, his entrails stretched from one side of the road to the other. We drove over them like a garden hose." A writer's trope tilts away in pain. "The imagination is not enough," Forche writes of an African Anna, mothering sixteen adopted children, the "smallest one tied to her back by a rag" (The Angel of History). Witnesses must see beyond the darkness. The failures of metaphor to rise above the real, the knots of talk, the breaks in syntax, the slippages in language . . . teach something about the need to go beyond what we think we can say, know, or do, our hands not tied by art, but freed ill responsibility.

The disappeared spirits listen mutely in Salvador today, and Forche urges us to heed their brutalized cries. "There is nothing one man will not do to another," she reports of one-meter human cages, La Oscura, in "The Visitor." This is a truth some know, others fear to imagine, most want not to hear in our land of opulent opportunity (as privilege goes) above the poverty line. "To write out of such extremity is to incise, with language, that same wound, to open it again, and, with utterance, to inscribe the consciousness. This inscription restructures the consciousness of the poet" (APR 1988).

from Sing with the Heart of a Bear: Fusions of Native and American Poetry, 1890-1999. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Copyright © 2000 by the Board of Regents of the University of California.

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