[In the essay below, Greer examines Forché's poetry "as a phenomenon that is, in its very constitution and production, social, historical, and political."]

In the four years since their publication, the poems of Carolyn Forché's The Country Between Us have been identified with a renewed debate concerning the claims, the merits, and the possibilities for "political poetry" in contemporary America. They have been taken as an occasion for critical pronouncements on the question of "mixing art and politics" and have been widely praised as well as strenuously criticized. The apparent plurality of critical opinion surrounding The Country Between Us would seem to suggest that the question of poetry's relationship to politics is once again productively open, but in fact it masks a more disturbing consensus: whatever their merit, these poems belong to a specialized genre—"political poetry." They are to be evaluated for their ability to "reconcile" or "balance" impulses generally regarded as contradictory: the personal or lyrical on the one hand, the political or engaged on the other. I see several problems with such a notion of political poetry. First, it implies that certain poems are political while others (the majority) are not, and it thus functions to marginalize those poems regarded as political without yet having explored the social and political constitution of all literary discourse. More importantly, such a notion of political poetry adopts unquestioningly an already reified conception of the social; it is incapable of helping us to think of relationships between individuals and society in terms other than those of opposition. As a result, it replicates the split in contemporary ideology between private and public. That subjects may be socially constituted is a question usually not asked. Finally, this taken-for-granted definition of political poetry is not a historical definition: it fails to consider the ways in which lyric poetry, since the Romantics at least, has been constituted in opposition or reaction to dominant modes of social and political discourse. Severed from history, the lyric poet becomes an isolated voice crying out in the empty wasteland of modernist despair: politics becomes mere psychologism and the struggle to wrest freedom from necessity is rewritten as a purely individual quest. The compulsion to read Forché's poetry as political in this narrower sense, then, has resulted in readings that distort and diminish the real accomplishments of the poems while undermining any claim they, or any contemporary poems, have to be political in any deeper sense.

In the autobiographical "El Salvador: An Aide-Memoire," Forché herself has provided us with a text that asks to be read as both a preface to and a theoretical defense of the project undertaken in The Country Between Us. "Aide-Memoire" is pervaded by an uneasiness regarding the critical terms in which the poems have been received and discussed. In response to critics' classification of the poems as "political poetry," Forché writes: "I suspect that underlying this … is a naive assumption: that to locate a poem in an area associated with political trouble automatically renders it political." The essay, in fact, concludes with an enumeration of several of the more problematic questions concerning the theoretical status of poetry as political—suggestions, perhaps, of ways in which the political constitution of all poetry might more productively be explored. What emerges is the notion that there are really two different senses of the term "political." The first, more limited sense sees "politics" as the largely institutionalized, two-dimensional discourse of political programs and "ideologies" in the official sense; the second, invoked in response to the confinement of the first, defines politics far more broadly and flexibly as any action or discourse carried out in a social world. These two competing definitions are made dramatically clear in the juxtaposition, on the final pages of "Aide-Memoire," of the following two statements. First, Forché's own allegation that "there is no such thing as nonpolitical poetry"; second, a statement from Hans Magnus Enzensberger's "Poetry and Politics": "The poem expresses in an exemplary way the fact that it is not at the disposal of politics: this is its political content" [The Consciousness Industry, 1974]. Where most American readers of Forché seek to reduce the political to the more limited of these two senses, Forché and Enzensberger attempt to open up the notion, to make "the political" again the site of an ongoing, daily contestation.

Enzensberger's "Poetry and Politics" effectively defines the theoretical impasse at which American practical criticism finds itself when it attempts to discuss poetry like Forché's.

As sociology, literary criticism cannot see that language constitutes the social character of poetry, and not its entanglement in the political battle. Bourgeois literary esthetics is blind to, or else conceals, the fact that poetry is essentially social. The answers offered by the two doctrines to the question of the relationship of the poetic to the political process are correspondingly clumsy and useless: complete dependence in one case, complete independence in the other…. The real question remains unexamined and indeed unasked.

This essay seeks, if not to answer, at least to ask that real question: how can we, in contemporary America, begin to think poetry as an immanently social and political act? How can poetry like Forché's help us to read other poetry in a way that avoids reproducing the bourgeois ideological separation of "the private" from "the public"? By moving between Forché's Salvadoran poems and the critical languages constructed around them, this essay seeks to begin sketching out more productive ways of thinking and talking about poetry as a phenomenon that is, in its very constitution and production, social, historical, and political.

The text in question here is "In Salvador, 1978–80," a sequence of eight poems that forms the first section of Carolyn Forché's The Country Between Us. It is primarily these poems that have been responsible for the association of Forché with political poetry, and more often than not they are characterized as "explicitly political" at the outset, only to be reclaimed later as successful personal lyric. [In his "War as Parable and War as Fact," American Poetry Review 12, No. 1 (1983)] Larry Levis, for example, begins by praising the poems for their ability to engage the political realities of Central American violence and struggle, but ends by translating the sequence into the romanticized terms of an internal struggle, "the process of a human psyche learning and becoming more openly human and vulnerable." This gesture is a common one in the criticism of American poetry: to translate external landscapes and journeys into predominantly psychological terms—but in the case of these Salvador poems this project would appear to be subverted at every turn by a poetic voice which repeatedly displaces or decenters its own subject position. The last lines of "The Island," for instance, pose a question which undoes any sense we might have of a unified speaking subject, bringing vividly before us [Emile] Benveniste's fundamentally important fracturing of the subject of the enunciation from the subject of the enounced: "Carolina [Carolyn?] do you know how long it takes / any one voice to reach another?"

The epigraph to "In Salvador" is from Antonio Machado (his epitaph, in fact) and introduces one of the important structural motifs of the sequence: "Caminante, no hay camino / se hace camino al andar." (In English, roughly, "Walker, there is no road; the road is made by walking.") While the eight poem sequence does not explicitly comprise a coherent narrative journey, it does imply such a narrative progression, and it relies on our sense of the grouping as a whole and roughly chronological sequence. The trip is problematically framed, but remains circular and complete, the poem "Return" (the sixth) explicitly ending the travels and replacing the speaker in America.

The outline of this journey is as follows: "San Onofre, California" opens the sequence with the speaker physically—and perhaps ideologically—"at home" in the States; "The Island" initiates the journey to Salvador, but indirectly, through the intermediary figure of the Salvadoran poet Claribel Alegria, herself in voluntary exile on a Mallorquin island; "The Memory of Elena" and, especially, "The Visitor" and "The Colonel" speak from the darkest recesses of Salvador itself, the three poems together forming the sequence's literal and metaphorical center; "Return," as its title suggests, expresses its speaker's moral and communicative dislocation upon her return to North America. The final two poems, "Message" and "Because One Is Always Forgotten," complete the sequence by turning once again to the south, to face, from a now more educated—but also more unstable—North American position, those who remain in Salvador, those who will fight "for the most hopeless of revolutions."

Given this sense of a general narrative construct, it becomes important to consider how each poem undercuts or problematizes the sequence's implied linear progression: the haunting ambivalence of the first poem ("San Onofre") for instance, depends on its speaker's knowing what it is she will see further south—on her having, in effect, already undertaken the journey toward which the poem gazes. A similar confusion of narrative time and tense informs "The Island" and "The Colonel," in which the speaker's rhetorical strategies are based on a knowledge of the problem of poetic communication in a North American context, itself not explicitly encountered until later, in "Return." These more subtle ambivalences, of course, depend on the stability of the narrative framework from which they depart—a fact emphasized by Forché's own determination, both in public readings and in the prefatorial "Aide-Memoire," to explicate and clarify the major episodes and turning points of her actual journey to Salvador.

The primary subject matter—to speak in thematic terms—of "In Salvador," that which, more than simply its setting, makes the sequence in some broad sense "political," is what Forché has called, in a provocative but largely unexamined phrase in "Aide-Memoire," "the politics of cultural immersion." "It was thought important that a few North Americans, particularly writers, be sensitized to Salvador prior to any military conflict," she writes; "the lessons were simple and critical, the methods somewhat more difficult to detect." Forché herself was recruited by a group of Salvadorans to travel in and observe the Salvadoran situation as a poet (a fact which surprised her—"mere poetry" she says, not having in Salvador the pejorative connotations it has in an American context). Carolyn Forché, of course, is by no means the first North American writer to find herself in the role of witness and reporter: a decade earlier, for instance (in 1968) Susan Sontag undertook a similar journey into North Vietnam and chronicled her experience in her well known "Trip to Hanoi" [collected in her 1969 Styles of Radical Will]. And a year or so after Forché the American essayist and novelist Joan Didion traveled to El Salvador and wrote about it in her popular Salvador. An examination of the structural and thematic similarities among "Aide-Memoire," Salvador, and "Trip to Hanoi" will help to define some of the key issues and problematics implied by Forché's notion of a "politics of cultural immersion."

"In the end, of course," writes Susan Sontag at the conclusion of "Trip to Hanoi," "an American has no way of incorporating Vietnam into [her] consciousness." For Sontag, a journey into North Vietnam which began as "a somewhat passive experience of historical education" became, "as it had to, an active confrontation with the limits of [her] own thinking." To immerse oneself in a revolutionary Third World culture, Sontag discovers, is to confront the profoundly ideological character of one's own vision and perception; it is to experience a dislocating alienation in which all that is real about a foreign culture seems most "unreal," and in which one's own perception is, in Russian formalist or Brechtian fashion, radically defamiliarized. As Sontag recognized early in her travels, "I had only my own culture-bound, disoriented sensibility for an instrument" with which to interpret Hanoi. Didion's Salvador records a similar experience of cultural dislocation: "to land at this airport [El Salvador International, outside San Salvador] … is to plunge directly into a state in which no ground is solid, no depth of field reliable, no perception so definite that it might not dissolve into its reverse."

If a single overriding concern unites these three writers' approaches to Salvador or Vietnam, it is a concern to respect the primacy and inescapability of cultural difference—the sense that an American writer is inhabited by America as she inhabits it, that to leave the States is far more than to simply cross a geopolitical boundary. Theirs is a project of solidarity with a foreign culture born of mutual difference, characterized by a self-conscious attention to the limits of their own perspectives, and it contrasts instructively with the anthropologist's or the ethnographer's faith in his ability to write his way into a culture. Sontag most explicitly addresses the contradictions of this felt difference when she writes: "My sense of solidarity with the Vietnamese, however genuine and felt, is a moral abstraction developed (and meant to be lived out) at a great distance from them. Since my arrival in Hanoi, I must maintain that sense of solidarity alongside new unexpected feelings which indicate that, unhappily, it will always remain a moral abstraction." Throughout these writers' descriptions of their experiences of dislocation and cultural difference, it seems, their attention to their own perceptions and interpretations, while apparently directed "inward," is also profoundly political—they seem in their own ways to have arrived at a working definition of ideology not unlike Louis Althusser's [in his 1971 Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays]: "a representation of the imaginary relationships of individuals to their real conditions of existence."

If these experiences of cultural dislocation and defamiliarization form a kind of first moment in what might be called a "dynamic" of cultural immersion, a second, perhaps more unsettling moment occurs when these writers witness the economic colonization of the Third World by America firsthand and in so doing implicate themselves in the economic and political exchange systems that have, in a very real sense, produced the violence that pervades a Vietnam or a Salvador. Didion, in San Salvador's Metrocenter shopping mall, becomes fascinated with the consumer exports from the States—the Muzak and the pâté de foie gras, "the young matrons in tight Sergio Valente jeans, trailing maids and babies behind them and buying towels, big beach towels printed with maps of Manhattan that featured Bloomingdale's … the number of things that seemed to suggest a fashion for 'smart drinking,' to evoke modish cocktail hours." "This was a shopping center that embodied the future for which El Salvador was presumably being saved," she writes, with more than a touch of her characteristic irony. But a moment later the irony gives way to a painful moment of self-recognition and self-implication: "As I waited to cross back over the Boulevard de los Heroes to the Camino Real I noticed soldiers herding a young civilian into a van, their guns at the boy's back, and I walked straight ahead, not wanting to see anything at all." In this moment, Didion realizes that she, like the towels or the blue jeans, is herself an export from the capitol of consumption, is herself not only a consumer but a commodity as well. And in that moment, Didion catches herself looking the other way and confronts herself for the first time as a norteamericana.

A related moment of self-implication forms the climax of Forché's "Aide-Memoire": "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. My friend looked at me. Just another dead man, he said. And by then it had become true for me as well: the unthinkable, the sense of death within life before death." It is this sense of "death within life" that will pervade the central poems of "In Salvador" and lend to them their haunting, macabre quality, but it has more to do with than simply aesthetic tone. In this moment, Forché acknowledges and foregrounds difference at the same time that difference gives way and opens upon a larger network of political and economic exchange in which Forché, like Didion, is forced to recognize her own complicity. This dual stance—I am other and outside, but at the same time implicated—informs many of the best lines of "In Salvador" itself. It seems to reveal an interesting paradox which places Forché in the context, oddly enough perhaps, of high modernism: for her, the kind of fracturing and defamiliarizing of perception which is such a central strategy to the modernists takes on a distinctly political purpose and direction. To write about Salvador to an American audience, Forché discovers, requires one to self-consciously attend to the ideological and semiotic boundaries of one's own vision. It is in this context, too, that we may begin to see what Forché means when she describes her own poetic as a confrontation of "the impulse to witness" with the "prevailing poetic." Her own project is not to develop a political program in verse, but rather to take the American inheritance from Romanticism and modernism, which she sees as encouraging a "self-regarding, inward-looking poetry" and rewrite them in broadly political and ideological (in Althusser's sense) terms. Her project is to make a type of modernism once again historically aware of its own motivations and ideological biases. With this notion of Forché's poetics in mind, we may at last turn to some of the Salvadoran poems themselves, to follow through the implications of this confrontation of modernism and the political.

In "San Onofre, California," first of the eight Salvador poems, the poet stands poised on the southern border of the United States. She lingers at the boundary, not only of a political state, but of knowledge and experience, and can conceive of Salvador only in stereotypical tourist's images. That nation before her, further south, is known to her only as images of rural poverty—and the frightening possibility of "being disappeared."

         We have come far south.
         Beyond here, the oldest women
         shelling limas into black shawls.
         Portillo scratching his name
         on the walls, the slender ribbons
         of piss, children patting the mud.
         If we go on, we might stop
         in the street in the very place
         where someone disappeared
         and the words Come with us! we might
         hear them.

The alternatives presented by the situation are not, however, as simple as they at first appear to be and the momentary acceptance of separation is not entirely motivated by selfish fear. The speaker also expresses a discretion that knows rushing south to be killed or kidnapped would stifle any hopes of extending what, from the point of view of the rest of the poems in the sequence, must be the only gesture that can help, an effort of the hands—like scratching your name into the wall. Her cultural isolation from the Central American destination of this sequence of poems is thus a knowing acceptance of distance and temporary inefficacy. The fact that is then confronted in the last lines, the knowledge that "the cries of those who vanish / might take years to get here," is not simply a signal of a refusal to accept the responsibility to act for those who have been disappeared. In a public reading, Forché has explained that this poem is in fact addressed to the people of San Onofre—some of whom were her students—and that she wanted it to make them feel their nearness to Salvador as well as their distance from it. These last lines undercut any simple geographical sense of the present, of the "here," by radically blurring the boundaries between the "here" and the "beyond here." While we are moving further south, the "birds and warmer weather / are forever moving north."

To explain what makes these last lines so haunting and successful, one needs to move to more literary and formal considerations: the poet's use of this inclusive, plural "we." When Forché writes "We feel / it is enough to listen" (rather than to act, to continue the movement southward) she does so in a voice which allows her to speak for two groups of people at once: those who know that, further south in Central America, people are vanishing every day, and those who have chosen not to accept such knowledge. She avoids a tone that would place her apart from the Californians addressed by and included in the "we," opening her voice and her poetry to the expressions of the American that she has always been and known. She speaks to the complacent residents of San Onofre, but at the same time she is able to speak for them. In the sense that we are all like the residents of San Onofre, it becomes us—the readers of the poem—who are incorporated into this poem's rationalizing logic. We become part of the poem's ambivalent collective voice; we are the ones who continue to listen placidly, knowing that as long as we may listen, the "cries of those who vanish" may never reach us. Not "here" anyway. If Salvador itself and the experience of oppression cannot be brought out of nothingness in a North American language, perhaps we can at least be made to feel our own role in the ongoing reproduction of that language. "San Onofre" is an effective political poem because it implicates us as readers in the production of a language for which El Salvador is little more than a distant little country "about the size of Massachusetts." We are no longer given a simple image or spatial representation of Salvador, as we are in the poem's opening lines, but are instead placed in the position of having to view our own inaction and complacency as itself part of an ongoing production of an imaginary relationship of spatial, not to mention ethical, distanciation.

Several of the poems following "San Onofre" engage or address the reader in a more direct, explicit fashion. In "The Island," the poet, who has been describing what happens "in Deya when the mist / rises out of the rocks," responds to what she imagines would be an American reader's natural question: "Deya? A cluster of the teeth / the bones of the world, greener / than Corsica. In English / you have no word for this. I can't / help you." "The Memory of Elena" implies the presence of an imaginary listener, to whom the poem's speaker exhibits various meaningful objects: "These are the flowers we bought / this morning." And perhaps most vividly, the prose poem "The Colonel" begins by invoking the presence of a listener: "What you have heard is true." Only the sequence's centerpiece poem, "The Visitor," is without a strong sense of implied dialogue or direct address. (It takes place in la oscura, the dark recesses of a Salvadoran prison, where the intolerable isolation makes all dialogue impossible.) Unlike the discourses of journalism or formalized politics, these poems do not assume a fixed or stable speaker-listener, self-other relationship. The reader is repeatedly made to feel that his or her reading of the poem is inseparable from the poem's very production and existence. In this sense, Forché's poetry may be seen as working against the ongoing commodification of poetry and of literary discourse in general, by its reinsertion of the reader at the center of textual production—as opposed to an address to an absent or distant consumer.

Here we may begin to see how Forché's poetry is ideological in Althusser's sense of ideology as an imaginary resolution of real contradictions. In contemporary America, such a gap exists between the bourgeois consumer of books of poetry (meaning all of us) and the implied reader or listener of poems like "San Onofre" that the former has become completely unrecognizable to the latter. Contemporary poetry has never known an environment in which the oral presentation of poems was not made a superfluous gesture by the production and distribution of books of poems, never known the reading (aloud) of a poem to be anything but a performance or spectacle. A poem like "San Onofre" or "The Island" may thus be perceived as an ideological and symbolic gesture whose purpose is to destabilize the poet-audience relationship and place the listener again—at least in the imaginary—at the center of poetic production. With this observation, we have begun to historicize Forché's poems, begun to see the objective contradictions in our own culture which make her poems possible, and necessary. By making available to us these fundamental structural contradictions of our own moment, I would argue, Forché's poetry is political in Enzensberger's second, more flexible sense.

In "Return," the sixth poem of "In Salvador," the questions that have lurked behind the poet's self-consciousness about her own political role become an explicit theme. The poem is a dialogue in verse between the speaker and her friend and critic Josephine Crum, to whom the poem is dedicated, and in it the poet's doubts about her ability to communicate her experiences of immersion come to be fully expressed: "When I speak with American men / there is some absence of recognition…. I cannot, Josephine, talk to them." For this frustrated poet, the American attaché to Salvador is the perfect emblem of the audience she feels incapable of reaching: while his wife writes his reports and flies her plane around the country, he drinks, clicks his pen, and stares into his fish tanks, all the while surrounded by Marines in white gloves. But Josephine is a strenuous critic, and she is quick to point out that the poet's feelings of powerlessness are in themselves a retreat into self-pity and self-indulgence: "It is / not your right to feel powerless." In response to the poet's desires to retreat into a traditionally modernist stance of isolated repose and distance, the character of Josephine in this poetic drama urges the poet to assume a more collective role, to blend journalism and reportage with the "traditional" poetic mode, and thereby to reach her intended audience through a subversive infiltration of their own media discourse. Responding in her most powerful lines to the poet's sense that "I cannot keep going," Josephine challenges:

        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.

As a suggestion toward a possible source of rhetorical power and persuasiveness, Josephine challenges the poet to "give them what they want: Tell them about the razor, the live wire … tell them about retaliation." While this encouragement to adopt the strategies of sensationalism is, in the long run, not an effective characterization of Forché's poetics, it does point to the fact that torture reports, the tales of prisons told by their few survivors, and photographs of mutilated death squad victims' corpses have, since the early 1980s, become available and known by the potential readers of Forché's poems. In fact, such narratives and images have in some sense already been incorporated into the North American sociolect. Besides the popularity of books like Didion's Salvador here in the U.S., the popular media culture has as well begun to display its own images of Salvador. A Rolling Stones video, "Under Cover of the Night," for example, includes one scene in which a young woman searches through one of Salvador's infamous photo albums of the dead, hunting in desperation for clues about a brother, or a lover; in another scene, the character played by Mick Jagger witnesses a death squad style execution being carried out on a deserted bridge. A related confrontation with Latin American brutality is presented in the opening sequence of a September, 1985 season premiere episode of NBC's Miami Vice: Crockett and Tubbs, the protagonists, newly arrived in Bogata on a cocaine investigation, witness the torture and machine-gun murder of a drug trafficker. "Welcome to the Third World"—the Colombian agent tells them.

But there are clearly differences between these media representations of the Latin American Third World and Forché's imagings of Salvador. Crockett and Tubbs, for instance, never experience the sense of dislocation that characterizes Forché, Sontag and Didion as they are welcomed to the Third World—the drug agent's welcome is in fact a reassurance to the Miami pair that their position, at least, is secure, elsewhere. The shock their facial expressions is supposed to register in fact reconfirms their complacent superiority as Americans—they don't, as Didion does, find the need to complicate their own role in the murder. Theirs is a stable position from which to judge the Colombians, without any hint of their own implication. And the Rolling Stones video, because its narrative is controlled or recontained by the musical soundtrack, also reduces murder to a spectacle—a hollow image which assures a viewer of his own distance from the murder. (But there is one difference between these two media representations: the film technique employed in the Stones video gives the impression that the filmed murder is "real"—one is caught for a moment in a disconcerting voyeuristic position.) Raymond Williams, in his important discussion of dominant, residual, and emergent cultural forms [in his 1977 Marxism and Literature] describes the power of dominant cultural forms to incorporate potentially alternative or oppositional forms by rewriting them in its own terms. A project like Forché's, which wishes to produce a genuinely oppositional alternative to media and officially "political" representations of Salvador, is always susceptible to being rewritten in the terms of the dominant cultural mode. The production of oppositional forms is "usually made much more difficult," writes Williams, "by the fact that much incorporation looks like recognition, acknowledgment, and thus a form of acceptance." The television industry in the States repeatedly congratulates itself on its ability to "raise viewer consciousness" by "covering" such stories as the Ethiopian famine, or the murder of Jose Rudolfo Viera, but it is actually its frightening ability to incorporate into its own language a whole range of world events and practices—without considering its own role in their production—of which it speaks in such self-congratulatory moments. And television's own cultural dominant is, of course, the commodity, the conversion of history into a domestic spectacle.

Where television wishes to say that it "acknowledges" or "confronts" such problems as Salvadoran agrarian inequity, Williams, and, indirectly, Forché, would argue that it has instead effected its ownstyle of colonization: the representation of world as spectacle. This commodification of such images operates to effect its own kind of censorship—a censorship which it then becomes Forché's purpose to dismantle or deconstruct. Commodification, because it reinscribes these images of brutality within the familiar North American domestic context—the cop show, the music video, the evening newscast—erases all traces of those images' histories and transforms them into symbolic representations without any material referent. Cut off from their now repressed histories, these commodified images float freely among all the other "floating signifiers" produced by the technological media. In such a form, they pose no disconcerting threat to the American viewer—they are as easily absorbed as new brand names into the popular social repository.

In this context, a different strategy by which to politicize the dominant poetic comes into view. Forché's political task as a poet becomes one of reinterpreting these ungrounded images by restoring to them their repressed, obliviated histories. To politicize the modernist, or postmodernist, poetic lexicon, then, is not simply to introduce images of brutality and violence which will shock readers out of their complacency (television's self-proclaimed purpose); it becomes the far more difficult task of making the material traces visible again on the surface of an already commodified, Americanized El Salvador.

Where media discourse represents Salvador, "pictures" it in a way that liquidates any historical traces and relegates present images to a securely bounded, formalized, and easily forgotten past, Forché's poetry makes a historical past once again available in the present. While most of the poems in the Salvador sequence effect this kind of a recuperation, "The Memory of Elena" most distinctively takes this movement as its formal principle. At the heart of "The Memory of Elena" is a macabre transformation not unlike a version of the Thyestean feast. Sitting over her lunch, the poet realizes in terror, "This is not paella, this is what / has become of those who remained / in Buenos Aires. This is the ring / of a rifle report on the stones." The pleasant surfaces of a cafe luncheon open onto a more terrifying memory:

     In Buenos Aires only three
     years ago, it was the last time his hand
     slipped into her dress, with pearls
     cooling her throat and bells like
     these, chipping at the night—

In "The Memory of Elena" the silence evoked by a description of the sounds which intrude upon it is transformed from a potentially calm and regenerative leisure into a historicized terror—the memory of a husband's murder.

     These are the flowers we bought
     this morning, the dahlias tossed
     on his grave and bells
     waiting with their tongues cut out
     for this particular silence.

In this poem, "this particular silence," this empty, quiet moment in the present, undergoes a transformation from an inert, quotidian presence and becomes the emblem of a distinct past. Onto the moment of silence between the bells is superimposed the rifle report that sounded the death of Elena's husband; the silence of the present is made to contain a three years' absence. A present and a past are seen to coexist at the very moment that the poem itself begins to dissolve into silence.

The historicizing movement of "The Memory of Elena" may be more fully illuminated through a consideration of the notion of history developed by a writer whose vision of the past intersects with Forché's at many points: the German critic whose work is a dazzlingly contradictory combination of Marxism and apocalyptic gnosticism—Walter Benjamin. In his "Theses on the Philosophy of History," a text whose fragmentary, runic style has itself become an emblem of the struggle against fascism, Benjamin offers glimpses of a conception of history which sees revolution not as a struggle to liberate the future, but as a fight to redeem the past. Benjamin's Messianic version of historical materialism arises as a critique of bourgeois "universal history," or progressivism—that empirical notion of historical development which seeks to establish causal connections between successive moments, and which looks forward into a future of homogeneous, empty time. In contrast to this notion of history which "assigns to the working class the role of the redeemer of future generations," Benjamin turns his back on the future and warns: "Even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins" [Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, 1968].

To articulate the past historically, for Benjamin, "means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger." Radical history does not involve simply rewriting the past "the way it really was." It becomes a struggle to make available to the present images of the past which will allow "the sign of a Messianic cessation or happening … a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past." As I have been reading Forché here, her project seems to be just such an attempt to make these signs available to us, her North American audience. A poem like "The Memory of Elena" singles out and redeems a single moment of the past, makes that moment again "citable," to use Benjamin's phrase, in the very moment of the poem's reading. "Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably," writes Benjamin. In that moment of horror in which an everyday bowl of soup becomes the fingers and leg sockets of the murdered, a new relationship of present to past is established, the traces of a violent history are restored to the objects of a seemingly inert present. Forché does not allow the images of Elena's memory to disappear; she reinscribes them in our own present.

The culture of contemporary America is dominated by a discourse of forgetfulness which liquidates our history, transforming our past into a commodified image—palatable, certainly, because it no longer bears the marks of the violence and aggression that have produced our nation, our world. With our gaze turned forever forward, our faith placed in a technological progress which offers the empty hope of a utopian future, we willfully erase all records of our own history. A scant ten years later, the Vietnam war appears to have been made all but totally irretrievable; the more recent events in Salvador, the murders of Monsignor Oscar Romero, Jose Rudolfo Viera, and the thousands of other Salvadoran workers and campesinos have been recorded by the media and the press as if they were spectacles intended for our own momentary edification. Carolyn Forché's journey of cultural immersion in her Salvador sequence tries to combat this willful forgetfulness by politicizing our vision, making visible to us the all too immaterial traces on our own present world of America's ongoing colonization of Central America…. Three lines from "Ourselves or Nothing," the closing poem of The Country Between Us, summarize what I take to be her redemptive project: "Go after that which is lost / and all the mass graves of the century's dead / will open into your early waking hours."

A single image from Benjamin's "Theses," with which this essay will end, gives us a way to imagine what a transcendent perspective on our own history might be like, were such a vision ever to be available to Benjamin, to Forché, or to ourselves. In it is pictured a fully redeemed vision of the past—glimpses of which it is Forché's purpose to evoke in poems like "The Memory of Elena." Benjamin's "angel of history," itself taken from Paul Klee's painting Angelus Novus, compresses all of our own irretrievable past into a single instant and image:

His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread … His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Michael Greer, "Politicizing the Modern: Carolyn Forché in El Salvador and America," in The Centennial Review, Vol. XXX, No. 2, Spring, 1986, pp. 160-80.