[An American poet, Levis won the International Poetry Forum United States Award in 1971, the Lamont Poetry Prize in 1976, and a National Poetry Series Award in 1981. In the excerpt below, originally given as a speech in July 1981 at the Aspen Writers' Conference in Aspen, Colorado, he discusses the problems associated with attempting to convey the atrocities of war through literature and Forché's poetic treatment of the subject of violence.]

What is it like to write about or to photograph a war that is going on now, that was going on last week, last year? In the post-Vietnam era, I believe that one of the most difficult problems is to convey, simply, information, facts which sound, to those who are comfortable, like "improbable tales." For any advance which might be called humane and positive, there are advances in warfare which might be called cynical and retrograde. Anyone writing about war now must bear witness to two phenomena common to any war but ostensibly more intentional and widespread now: torture and mutilation.

Item: June 20, 1981. I am staring at a photograph by Susan Meiselas which depicts a dead Nicaraguan, apparently a man and, in all probability, one who rebelled against the deposed dictator, Anastasio Samoza Debayle. I assume this because the location of the photograph, "Cuesta del Plomo," is a hillside near Managua where the National Guard carried out its assassinations. Actually, the photograph shows only half a man—the legs, clad in jeans, and, above them, a spine with all of the ribs snapped off or hacked off by some sort of macheté or tool. Some of the stubs of the stronger ribs still show in the picture. The spine resembles a delimbed tree trunk at first but soon it resembles nothing but a spine. Other bones litter the foreground. The background looks, except for a few patchy areas, as if it could be a tropical postcard with a bay, trees, and mountains in the distance. But what one notices is a spine. The rebel is not only dead, but mutilated beyond any purpose one might have who thinks of burial. There is no suggestion that his limbs were cut off and strewn in this field out of rage; it looks too much like a calculated design, a design which is, at the same time, casual. After a few moments I realize the intention of this: mutilation, too, has become a kind of art. Perverse? Nihilistic? Maybe. But art: the corpse is on display; it is meant to be seen, although it could hardly be identified by anyone looking here, for a loved one, for someone lost. The photograph by Meiselas was taken in Nicaragua, but it could just as easily have been take in Argentina, El Salvador, or Guatemala.

Item: From "Letter from El Salvador," by Tom Buckley, The New Yorker, June 22, 1981.

On April 29th, the House Foreign Affairs Committee voted, 26-7, to require President Reagan to certify, as a condition for further military aid, that "indiscriminate torture and murder" by Salvadoran security forces were being brought under control. On May 11th, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which is controlled by Republicans, passed a similar measure … It acted over the protest of Secretary Haig, who said in a letter to the committee that such a bill "would encourage left-wing insurgents and other extremists."

Item: Buckley, above.

El Salvador is receiving a hundred and forty-four million dollars in economic aid and thirty-five and a half million dollars in military aid in the fiscal year that ends on September 30th. The sums that Congress is considering for the 1982 fiscal year are ninety-one million dollars and twenty-six million dollars, respectively. No one doubts, however, that large supplemental appropriations will be sought.

And finally:

Even that sum became small change when the Reagan Administration announced on June 3rd that it had approved in principle a comprehensive program of economic and military aid for the nations of the Caribbean and Central America. Its purpose, like the old Alliance for Progress, would be to counter Communist, particularly Cuban, influence by improving the standard of living under capitalism.

Buckley ends his article with an account, published in the Times, of two hundred peasants who were massacred on the Honduran border as they tried to cross the Lempa River to safe territory. Witnesses said many were machine-gunned, from the air, by a helicopter, "probably one of those supplied by the United States."

Parables, like [Zbigniew] Herbert's, come into existence because they abstract their designs from experience that is already complete, and which can, therefore, become a subject of contemplation. It is experience which has ended, which has entered into, if not chronological history, at least the maker's psychic history. But how can one make a parable out of last week's massacre and preserve his or her sense of artistic integrity? Or even sanity? One might also ask whether the experience of contemporary warfare is fit for parable. When a situation is immense, such as Hitler's occupation of Europe, then perhaps Herbert's parables or Camus' allegory of that war, The Plague, can, through miniaturization, make it visible. For what Hitler did was common experience, it was known. The difficulty for anyone writing about El Salvador is to make known what, in fact, is happening there, to reveal a brutal, and otherwise wholly ignorable "small" war—yet one that has claimed, since January 1980, over 22,000 lives.

Lowell's lines, in such a context, begin to sound ominously prophetic: "peace to our children when they fall / in small war on the heels of small war—until the end of time." But Lowell's perspective is long. Susan Meiselas's camera is only about eight feet from that spine. And how can anyone, poet or journalist, write about torture, massacre, and mutilation without sounding hyperbolic? It is a difficult art, but one which can be done. Here is Carolyn Forché's poem, "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 imbedded 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 as there are in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell 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 as is 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 themselves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and raised 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.

                        El Salvador, May 1978

There are moments when life imitates art, when what appears to be on the surface a slightly surrealistic prose poem—a poem wholly imagined—is, in fact, a realistic, reportorial account of a dinner party. Had the poem been written without reference to El Salvador, its effect would be altered, changed by the fact of its being imagined. This is, unfortunately, not the case here. Children often ask: "Is this a real story?" So do adults. Carolyn Forché, who over a two-year period made several visits to El Salvador as a journalist and an observer for Amnesty International, writes the following account of the poem [in her "El Salvador: An Aide Memoire"]:

I was taken to the homes of landowners, with their pools set like aquamarines in the clipped grass, to the afternoon games of canasta over quaint local pupusas and tea, where parrots hung by their feet among the bougainvillia and nearly everything was imported, if only form Miami or New Orleans. One evening I dined with a military officer who toasted America, private enterprize, 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 poème trouvé. 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. It became, when I wrote it, the second insistence of El Salvador to infiltrate what I so ridiculously preserved as my work's allegiance to Art. No more than in any earlier poems did I choose my subject.

What is that "allegiance to Art"? And what, given the circumstances, is sensationalism? I think, in the case of Carolyn Forché's second book, The Country Between Us, the poet undergoes and records a journey which reconciles the political with the artistic rather than severs that vital connection—for, finally, there is nothing sensationalistic about setting down the facts of a dinner party. If one argues that such facts remain sensationalistic in the context of poetry, it may be because readers no longer expect facts from poems, and think that all details are imagined. And if this is so, isn't one really arguing for that "inward" aesthetic which Hans Magnus Enzensberger criticizes? And isn't the result of such an aesthetic designed to limit poetry in its subjects? Therefore, isn't it, really and finally, another kind of censorship?

Unlike Herbert, Forché's position in the poems about El Salvador is admittedly partisan. She is, as are many of the people in El Salvador, against the military, against the government, the landowners, the mockery of "land-reform," and against U.S. aid, especially military aid. But such partisanship seems, under the conditions now apparent in that country, not Leftist so much as simply decent, and human, and discernible in many ways as a concern for the poet's friends in El Salvador. Some of them appear in "Return":

         for Josephine Crum
 
         Upon my return to America, Josephine:
         the iced drinks and paper umbrellas, clean
         toilets and Los Angeles palm trees moving
         like lean women, I was afraid more than
         I had been, so much so and even of motels
         that for months every tire blow-out
         was final, every strange car near the house
         kept watch and I strained even to remember
         things impossible to forget. You took
         my stories apart for hours, sitting
         on your sofa with your legs under you
         and fifty years in your face.
                                       So you know
         now, you said, what kind of money
         is involved and that campesinos knife
         one another and you know you should
         not trust anyone and so you find a few
         people you will trust. You know the mix
         of machetés with whiskey, the slip of the
         tongue
         and that it costs hundreds of deaths.
         You've seen the pits where men and women
         are kept the few days it takes without
         food and water. You've heard the cocktail
         conversation on which depends their release.
         So you've come to understand when
         men and women of goodwill read
         torture reports with fascination.
         And such things as water pumps
         and co-op gardens are of little importance
         and takes years.
         It is not Che Guevara, this struggle.
         Camillo Torres is dead. Victor Jara
         was rounded up with the others, and Jose
         Marti is a landing strip for planes
         from Miami to Cuba. Go try on
         Americans your long, dull story
         of corruption, but better to give
         them what they want: Lil Milagro Ramirez,
         who after years of confinement did not
         know what year it was, how she walked
         with help and was forced to shit in public.
         Tell them about the razor, the live wire,
         dry ice and concrete, grey rats and above all
         who fucked her, how many times and when.
         Tell them about retaliation: Jose lying
         on the flatbed truck, waving his stumps
         in your face, his hands cut off by his
         captors and thrown to the many acres
         of cotton, lost, still and holding
         the last few lumps of leeched earth.
         Tell them Jose in his last few hours
         and later how, many months later,
         a labor leader was cut to pieces and buried.
         Tell them how his friends found
         the soldiers and made them dig him up
         and ask forgiveness of the corpse, once
         it was assembled again on the ground
         like a man. As for the cars, of course
         they watch you and for this don't flatter
         yourself. We are all watched. We are
         all assembled.
                           Josephine, I tell you
         I have not slept, not since I drove
         those streets with a gun in my lap,
         not since all manner of speaking has
         failed and the remnant of my life
         continues onward. I go mad, for example,
         in the Safeway, at the many heads
         of lettuce, papayas and sugar, pineapples
         and coffee, especially the coffee.
         And when I speak with American men,
         there is some absence of recognition:
         their constant Scotch and fine white
         hands, many hours of business, penises
         hardened to motor inns and a faint
         resemblance to their wives. I cannot
         keep going. I remember the ambassador
         from America to that country: his tanks
         of fish, his clicking pen, his rapt
         devotion to reports. His wife wrote
         his reports. She said as much as she
         gathered him each day from the embassy
         compound, that she was tired of covering
         up, sick of his drink and the failure
         of his last promotion. She was a woman
         who flew her own plane, stalling out
         after four martinis to taxi on an empty
         field in the campo and to those men
         and women announce she was there to help.
         She flew where she pleased in that country
         with her drunken kindness, while Marines
         in white gloves were assigned to protect
         her husband. It was difficult work, what
         with the suspicion on the rise in smaller
         countries that gringos die like other men.
         I cannot, Josephine, talk to them.
 
         And so you say, you've learned a little
         about starvation: a child like a supper scrap
         filling with worms, many children strung
         together, as if they were cut from paper
         and all in a delicate chain. And that people
         who rescue physicists, lawyers and poets
         lie in their beds at night with reports
         of mice introduced into women, of men
         whose testicles are crushed like eggs.
         That they cup their own parts
         with their bedsheets and move themselves
         slowly, imagining bracelets affixing
         their wrists to a wall where the naked
         are pinned, where the naked are tied open
         and left to the hands of those who erase
         what they touch. We are all erased
         by them, and no longer resemble decent
         men. We no longer have the hearts,
         the strength, the lives of women.
         We do not hold this struggle in our hands
         in the darkness but ourselves and what little
         comes to the surface between our legs.
         Your problem is not your life as it is
         in America, not that your hands, as you
         tell me, are tied to do something. It is
         that you were born to an island of greed
         and grace where you have this sense
         of yourself as apart from others. It is
         not your right to feel powerless. Better
         people than you were powerless.
         You have not returned to your country,
         but to a life you never left.
                                     1980

Forché can sympathize, but she refuses to falsely appropriate, for her own purposes, the consciousness of someone she is not. That is, she refuses to sentimentalize either her role or her life, and when there is an apparent impulse to do so, "I tell you / I have not slept," it is soon substantiated by the image of madness. The poem is both cunning and skeptical, even of its poet, since it is Josephine who catalogues the atrocities and tortures of El Salvador's war; just as it is Josephine who knows that distant readers are thrilled, not by political corruption, but by the facts of truly sensational tortures and massacres; and it is Josephine, sophisticated in the only worthy sense of that word, with "fifty years in her face," who knows that change might depend, unfortunately, on the possible "rescuers" hearing of such tortures, the details of such facts. For finally it is both the audience, the reader, and the poet who are admonished and taught by Josephine, and if the effect of torture is to disgrace the human body, and therefore the human being; in Forché's art, as in Goya's Disasters of War, the viewer, the reader, are made accomplices and are similarly disgraced. But art, in these poems or in Goya's etchings, is different from actual torture. In art, the effect of being disgraced is to make the viewer or the reader more conscious, more human, more capable of bearing pain and perceiving the beauty of bearing it—if only because in life, for those who are tortured, it is the opposite that happens. Such an effect is not sensationalism. Sensationalism, finally, is a lie: by overstatement, it elicits only a cheap thrill. But a poem such as "Return" penetrates to feelings beneath the ordinary—to a shame that makes one vulnerable and human.

The method of the poem is narrative and imagistic, and basically realistic in its presentation, its witnessing. But, as in Neruda's example, there are situations in life, in war, that defy Realism. Only the achieved image and metaphor will do: "And so you say, you've learned a little / about starvation: a child like a supper scrap / filling with worms, many children strung / together, as if they were cut from paper / and all in a delicate chain." A delicate chain. The metaphor which violates all realism returns itself to childhood, to the image of paper dolls, which in all memory make the children who have died in El Salvador more childlike, more vulnerable, and more real even as the image becomes, in its intention, more grotesque. For finally, the situation, the witnessing, is different from Neruda's account of watching blood flow onto the street. Forché's character, Josephine, in trying to conceive of and imagine the sheer number of children who have perished is driven to create an image, a metaphor, beyond Realism, and certainly beyond the impoverishment of statistics and body counts.

Forché, in discovering another country, discovers herself—discovers, too, how American she is ("a country you never left"). Part of that discovery is the discovery of limits. It is a mature and brilliant act when Forché relinquishes her poem and allows Josephine to speak, when the poet becomes a listener as well as a speaker. For one of the ironies about the poem is the learning process, a reciprocal or dialectical process which resembles, and actualizes the paradigm of Paolo Freire's in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a book which Forché acknowledges as an influence on her work and on her life. Moreover, the irony of learning in the poem is positive: just as the poet learns to be more human from Josephine, Josephine herself, in speaking of what most torments her, becomes a poet. The poem's relationships are unshakably egalitarian. And so it is proper that Forché listens, for the duty of a poem like this is to witness and record, to detail a particular misery, to try to rescue some of the dead from an almost certain oblivion through the memorial of an elegy. Different in methods, the purpose of such art is like [Zbigniew] Herbert's, and like so many poems of war. Whether in parable or narrative, such poems oppose the frail dignity of remembering to the world … a world that is more likely to sleep, and forget, and enlist again.

Forché's poems detail, mostly, the progress of a human psyche learning and becoming more openly human and vulnerable in what has become a largely sinister "Vale of Soul-Making." In so far as this progress takes place at all, even if it only occurs between Forché and Josephine, such learning and transformation, though it may not end or prevent any war, is prima facie evidence that individuals, by changing themselves, can effect, however tenuously, the world, and can begin to change it. What we do matters, and Forché's final insistence, on "ourselves or nothing," is, especially in the light of any possible nuclear warfare, a kind of political wisdom. In essence, it extends and grimly reaffirms Auden's conclusion that "We must love one another or die."…

Larry Levis, "War as Parable and War as Fact: Herbert and Forché," in The American Poetry Review, Vol. 12, No. 1, January-February, 1983, pp. 6-12.