what you have heard is true...
[What would you say if you could?]
Athens, Greece
letter twelve
January 13, 2020
Dear friends,
I am writing to you from Athens, Greece. Apologies that it has been a long time since I last wrote –- you haven’t heard from me since the end of my Watson year, now more than a year ago (but feeling like much longer). The fear of trying to sum things up paralyzed me, the impossible task of writing conclusively about an experience so raw and amorphous, the knowledge that there was so much more work I still needed to do, stories I needed to make known, people whose stories I felt responsible for…
Though it was a year brimming with love and joy, and without doubt the most cherished year of my life, it is still difficult for me to write about it. But now, in Athens with a month of free time thanks to an NYU fellowship (I am now in my second year of an MFA poetry program), my body is suddenly reminded of the year’s particular dislocation and solitude. How the body feels as a constant stranger in the world, of being “seen” all the time as foreign, of trying to make temporary spaces home, which means slowing down and seeing everything with fresh eyes and being present with the rhythms of each day, opening my heart to the special kindness one receives when visibly foreign in another’s land.
View of Athens from Strefi Hill
Living in New York this past one and a half years has also been an experience of making home, but that city is a different beast. By then, I was hungry for routine and gnawing to settle down, but with that, also came a gradual weariness of the world around me. In a city known for its biting competition and relentless labor, even the world of poetry began to feel suffocating.
Despite the communal warmth of the poetry community—the kind of community I have been seeking my whole life—self-doubt inevitably followed. Why was I attempting to write when there are so many deserving writers toiling away at their craft? How audacious to think I deserve to be read, when content overwhelms in this digital age. It feels laughable to be competitive in poetry, of all things, and to place so much of one’s life and self-worth into it. In New York, even poetry and art can feel like a capitalist enterprise, within which I toil attempting to emulate the voices of the “successful” -- success measured by output and the gaze of the literary establishment, elbowing my words into recognition for the next prize or publication, until I find I am forgetting my own voice, why I am writing in the first place. I feel dirty baring myself on the page in an attempt to “move” the reader—readers who hold the reins of prestige. Perhaps all this is the byproduct of churning writers out of the MFA machinery (but more on that next time).
Most of all, there is the guilt that I have left the people I spoke to, cared deeply about—sisters I found everywhere during the Watson year—behind. As time passes, that year felt more and more distant, and I feared it slipping from my grasp yet felt powerless to stop it. I struggled with transcribing the voices gifted to me throughout the year, and to find shape for the project. What is my position as the writer? What is my role and responsibility in trying to make poetry out of their experiences, from my safe privileged perch in New York? With these doubts plaguing me, I had a hard time responding to messages from those sisters, who eagerly messaged me often asking me how the book was going. Everything felt urgent, and yet I felt frozen in my own guilt.
It was reading (actually, devouring) Carolyn Forché’s autobiography 15 years in the making— What You Have Heard is True—that re-awakened in me a fresh courage to confront the year again. When I first picked up the book early upon my return from the Watson, I put it down after the first chapter. I was afraid of the weight of all that happened, the weight to tell it all, now. I admit, I also felt envious of Caroly Forché, the young heroine of her own autobiography who was swept up into the Salvadoran Civil War at my age, who tells it all with such lucidity, as if my experience would not match up to hers.
But over the past two days, perched on my Airbnb balcony in the Athenian sun, I devoured the book and cried and couldn’t eat and felt understood. Yes, I kept thinking, this is how one bears witness, this is how a poet enters the trauma of a country not of her own and bears witness.
Carolyn Forché’s time in El Salvador was made famous by her poem “The Colonel”:
The Colonel WHAT YOU HAVE HEARD is true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English. 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. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck them- selves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. 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. May 1978
It has always been a mystery to many how she got swept into the bloody conflict. Now, this book takes the title from her famous poem. “What you have heard is true," she tells us. The line confronts the reader directly, positions us as someone aware of the conflict but unsure of the truth—perhaps due to misinformation, media suppression, the sheer absurdity of war and violence unimaginable to those living in times of peace. The act of hearing is positioned against the ears pressed to the ground, the ears who can no longer hear/ be heard.
Carolyn calls her writing a poetry of witness. The book traces her growth from a naïve young poet living in San Diego to being found one day by a mysterious Salvadoran man, Leonel Gómez Videz, who insists a poet needs to witness how a war begins—the beginning of another Vietnam, he calls it—and to tell her country about it once it begins. (And to bear the truth that her country is funding the war, to hold her own government and countrymen accountable.)
Despite the subtitle on the cover, “a memoir of witness and resistance,” a probable publishing ploy, Carolyn writes in the acknowledgements:
I am not a historian or journalist but a poet, and although this might be called a memoir, it is not about myself but about others living and dead to whom I owe a debt of immense gratitude…
This is the central concern of the book. She asks the stranger at her door, “What does poetry have to do with anything?” This question boils beneath the currents as she goes to El Salvador and witnesses widespread poverty created by the opulence of the 16 ruling families and juntas, as her nose becomes used to the smell of street side corpses, as she watches illiterate workers organizing after dark and “death squads” haul away students in broad daylight, as she learns a human head weighs 2 ½ kilos.
She asks Leonel, the stranger at her door: “Leonel? I think you want someone else, a journalist maybe, someone with the credibility to do this—whatever it is you have in mind.”
“I’ve thought about that, and I don’t want a journalist. I want a poet. Why do you think I came all this way?”
“I don’t think you understand, Leonel. I’m a poet. Do you know how poets are viewed here? We’re seen as bohemian, or romantics, or crazy. Among the poets I admire, there is one who waved good-bye before jumping from a bridge, another who put on a fur coat and gassed herself in her garage. Great American poets die broke in bad hotels. We have no credibility. Although this isn’t true of every poet, and I’m giving you the dramatic examples, when poetry is mentioned in the American press, if it is mentioned, the story begins with ‘Poetry doesn’t matter,’ or ‘No one reads poetry.’ No matter what else is said. It doesn’t matter.” He appeared surprised. “Well, you’ll have to change that. In my country, and in the rest of Latin America, poets are taken seriously. They’re appointed to diplomatic posts, or they’re assassinated, or put into prison but, one way or the other, taken seriously.”
I have felt so alone wrestling with these questions: why is poetry the shape for documenting these stories? Why not journalism or some more straight forward way of documentation? I still feel uncomfortable calling myself “a poet.” Perhaps the role of the poet does hold different weight in other cultures. In Chinese, it holds so much weight and history that I think of a poet as someone who has the knowledge and foresight into the future, wisdom to speak for the people, a role almost at odds with modern society. It was weird coming to NYU and be surrounded by young, bright faces introducing ourselves as poets and writers. How dare we? I think. I am certainly not yet a writer—still, I can only say that I write, as a verb, something I’m still learning to do.
I have been working on some poems this semester with Terrance Hayes, and at the end of the term, he called my work poems of witness. I don’t know if he was referring to Carolyn Forché’s work, but I realize now that most things I write is trying to bear witness to the mundane, to try and speak the unspeakable, to form some sort of shape from the truths and untruths around us. Terrance noticed that I was obsessed with “the power of sight and seeing.” He wrote to me, “With closed eyes, the speakers conjure the ghosts of loved and lost ones; with open eyes the vision is complicated by the present.” I am realizing, yes, that is my work, to bear witness with eyes open, to give words to what cannot be unseen.
my first class I taught at NYU this fall, with a group that changed my life...more on that next time.
At the end of the book, Forché writes: “It was as if [Leonel] had stood me squarely before the world, removed the blindfold, and ordered me to open my eyes.” The poet’s role, then, is to see her position in the world with clarity, to try to find a way to express her own truth:
“I would learn to review my experiences for the missed details, and to keep in mind that while I was observing others, they are also observing me, and I would become less (how did he put it?) readable, and when necessary, I would attempt, in his words, to “manage the perceptions of others” so that, of the “five versions of the truth,” in any given situation, mine would prevail.”
How does truth become a responsibility of the poet? Leonel, who becomes Forché's mentor, a guiding light throughout her journey in El Salvador, tells her the reason he chose to bring her:
“You want to know what is revolutionary, Papu? To tell the truth. That is what you will do when you return to your country. That is all I’m asking of you. From the beginning this has been your journey, your coming to consciousness. All along I have only been responding to you. When you ask me a question, I try to place you in a situation in which you might find your answer. I do not have your answers, Papu. I am just a man.”
view from my Athens balcony
I don’t have a singular Leonel to thank for my journey-- I was lucky to have found so many guiding sisters in every country. The Watson year had been a journey towards my own consciousness. And I am still on that journey, and I am realizing it is okay to take the time to continue it my whole life. I am coming to terms with letting the year and its various truths sit in my body as I continue to look at and document the world with eyes open—maybe it will take 15 years or more like Carolyn to write her book, maybe that many years to realize what I have to say, and enough time to protect all those who were involved, and I am learning to understand that.
Thank you for reading and coming along with me & I love hearing from you - write me! lots of love, JinJin