[An American educator and critic, Diggory is the author of Yeats and American Poetry: The Tradition of the Self (1983). In the following excerpt, he provides a thematic analysis of The Country between Us, discussing its relationship to Gathering the Tribes and its focus on political concerns.]

The honors showered upon Carolyn Forché during her brief career so far do not compensate for the misunderstanding that has accompanied them. Following her debut in the Yale Series of Younger Poets with Gathering the Tribes (1976), her second volume, The Country Between Us, was written under NEA and Guggenheim sponsorship, judged by the Poetry Society of America to be the best manuscript in progress, and awarded the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1981. A dust jacket blurb by Jacobo Timerman has Forché "replacing" Pablo Neruda as the poetic voice of South America.

Here the misunderstanding clearly surfaces. True, eight of the poems in Forché's volume deal with South America, specifically El Salvador—although, significantly, Forché takes her title from a poem about a friend from her Michigan girlhood ("Joseph") in another, longer section of the volume. That section serves as a confirmation of what should be apparent even in the El Salvador poems if they are read attentively. As the Cuban writer Mario Benedetti warned Forché prior to her involvement in El Salvador, her perspective on South American experience must inevitably remain North American. Further, poems written from that perspective must reflect an Anglo-American literary tradition. One of the great strengths of The Country Between Us is that, unlike so many of her reviewers, Forché does not allow herself the illusion that a cultural perspective or a literary tradition can be, or should be, simply wished away.

The ease with which Jacobo Timerman equates Forché and Neruda is made possible only by judging the work of each writer as "political poetry," according, that is, to its subject matter rather than to those features of style through which an author creates a distinctive voice. The functioning of Carolyn Forché's voice in The Country Between Us has been seriously misjudged because the term "political poetry" has seemed so appropriate to that volume. Even those critics who have not been merely distracted by the content, who have directly addressed themselves to the question of voice, have been misled by the spectre of "political poetry," because for them that genre was naturally associated with certain qualities of voice that they proceeded to discover, or find lacking, in Forché. Such preconceptions account for the confusing contradictions in the critical depiction of Forché's voice, with Joyce Carol Oates, in the [4 April 1982 issue of] New York Times Book Review, worrying about the "impersonal and at times rhetorical poetry" produced by Forché's "self-effacing technique," while Katha Pollitt, in [the 8 May 1982 issue of] The Nation, laments Forché's dependence on "the misty 'poetic' language of the isolated, private self." Although appearing to differ about Forché, these critics are in fact differing about "political poetry," and are so distracted by that issue that they have neglected to read Forché.

In an attempt to read Forché on her own terms, it is useful to step back for a minute to her first volume to perceive the continuities between its poetry, political or otherwise, and the somehow specially "political" poetry of the second volume. Stanley Kunitz's Foreword to Gathering the Tribe defines Forché's questions—"Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going?"—in the language of the private self that Katha Pollitt finds inhibiting in The Country Between Us. If Forché is inhibited in the latter volume, however, it is not merely a result of her language but of her intention, for she is still asking the same questions. Pollitt is embarrassed by "The Island," for example, because she wants, but is unable, to read it as an homage to the Salvadoran poet Claribel Alegria, but Forché says explicitly, "I look for myself in her." Like the Pueblo Indians of Gathering the Tribes and the Slavic relatives who appear in both volumes, the Salvadorans of The Country Between Us serve as mirrors in which Forché seeks to define herself, a major occupation of Anglo-American poets since the Romantics. Incidentally, the "Carolina" addressed at the end of "The Island" is not, as Joyce Carol Oates interprets it, an example of the obscurity that "political poetry" invites through its topical allusions, but rather the poet's own first name Hispanicized. Using Claribel Alegria as her speaker, Forché quite literally is talking to herself.

With regard to image as well as voice, Forché's earlier work offers a useful corrective to the distortions required to fit her recent poems into the category of "political poetry." In "The Memory of Elena," the poet and another woman, presumably the Elena of the title, lunch together in an atmosphere that, though geographically Spanish, is transformed by their awareness of South American atrocities:

       The paella comes, a bed of rice
       and camarones, fingers and shells,
       the lips of those whose lips
       have been removed, mussels
       the soft blue of a leg socket.

Katha Pollitt's comment on this passage, that "It trivializes torture to present it in terms of lunch," derives from her assumption of a conflict between Forché's political intentions, to record torture, and her poetic technique, which places an undue emphasis, in Pollitt's view, on the sensibility that does the recording. What do we get, however, if we assume that intention and technique are at odds, that the poet's self enters here not as an unwanted intruder but as an intended part of the poem's subject?

We get something very much like Forché's earlier use of the image in "Kalaloch," the dramatic and sexual climax of Gathering the Tribes:

       We went down to piles to get
       mussels, I made my shirt
       a bowl of mussel stones, carted
       them to our grate where they smoked apart.
       I pulled the mussel lip bodies out,
       chewed their squeak.

Here the image prepares for an act of oral sex between two women, described later in the poem. If we grant the author's presence its full weight in "The Memory of Elena," that poem, too, depicts the communication of two women, Forché and Elena. At the most immediate level, their communion is sacramental rather than sexual, a commemoration of the dead through the communal eating of their bodies. The extremity of atrocity that is Forché's subject is thus reflected in the extremity of the response, but that is what this meal is, a response to, not an image of torture, as Pollitt would read it. The meal symbolically enacts the more literal response of the friends of a Salvadoran labor leader who "was cut to pieces and buried." As Forché recounts in "Return":

      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.

A few lines later, Forché indicates the relevance of this image to the body politic: "We are / all assembled."

Being so much of the body, Forché's political vision is naturally sexual as well. Underlying the sacramental communion of Forché and her companion in "The Memory of Elena" is the companion's recollection of sexual communion with her dead husband, a victim of political oppression:

      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—

Because sexual union, which joins bodies, is Forché's answer to political conflict, which tears bodies apart, the section of El Salvador poems in The Country Between Us is followed by a section, appropriately entitled "Reunion," of even more personal poems, many of them explicitly sexual. One of these, "For the Stranger," about a brief romantic encounter on a train travelling across Europe, brings into the present the sexual invitation that is trapped in the past in "The Memory of Elena":

       Each time I find you
       again between the cars, holding out
       a scrap of bread for me, something
       hot to drink, until there are
       no more cities and you pull me
       toward you, sliding your hands
       into my coat, telling me
       your name over and over, hurrying
       your mouth into mine.

Here the vehicle of communion is seen in successive meta-morphoses as food (including the sacramental bread that was so important an image in Gathering the Tribes), as the body, and finally as language, an obsessive naming that gathers ritualistic force during the progress of this volume, which seeks to rescue the dead from oblivion by remembering their names. Similarly, Forché seeks to rescue the oppressed from silence by sharing her voice. When she adopts the persona of Claribel Alegria, whose poems Forché has translated, she is "hurrying your mouth into mine."

Clearly, Forché's purpose in entering into the lives of others is not merely selfish. She is concerned with the interaction of selves, or, to use the formulation applied by Stanley Kunitz to Gathering the Tribes, her theme is kinship. If her treatment of that theme in The Country Between Us seems more mature, this growth must be partly attributed to Forché's politicization, her greater awareness and acceptance of the conflict that exists among kin. We should not expect Forché's political poetry to constitute a gesture of "solidarity" any more than we should expect Robert Lowell's "dynastic poetry" to conclude in a gesture of filial piety. Nevertheless, such expectations have misled even Forché's most sympathetic interpreters. In an otherwise acute discussion of Forché published in the [January-February 1983 issue of] American Poetry Review, Larry Levis equates the title phrase of Forché's concluding poem, "Ourselves or Nothing," with the famous line from Auden's "September 1, 1939," "We must love one another or die," a line whose simplistic assumptions later embarrassed Auden himself. To study Forché's line in its context is to see the difference between political slogan and political poetry:

       There is a cyclone fence between
       ourselves and the slaughter and behind it
       we hover in a calm protected world like
       netted fish, exactly like netted fish.
       It is either the beginning or the end
       of the world, and the choice is ourselves
       or nothing.

How broad a scope is implied in the word "ourselves" here? Most immediately it includes two people, Forché and the person she is addressing, Terrence Des Pres, who wrote in The Survivor about atrocities similar to those Forché witnessed in El Salvador. More broadly, the first reference to "ourselves" excludes the slaughtered Salvadorans and embraces only those who share the North American perspective of "a calm protected world." Given such restrictions, is Levis justified in taking, as he seems to do, the second reference to "ourselves" as embracing all humanity? I think not; in fact, I think ultimately Forché would restrict "ourselves" to the individual self that separates each of us. Such separation is what we have in common, and what we must tackle first if we are to make adjustments to a world that includes others. We cannot simply leap over the cyclone fence, leaving the self behind—the gesture that proponents of "political poetry" seem to demand. It is "ourselves or nothing" because it is only through ourselves that we have access to others.

Despite Forché's refusal to let go of the self, there is in The Country Between Us an occasional hint of the self-effacement to which Joyce Carol Oates responded with a slight chill. Within "Ourselves or Nothing," Forché quotes a sentence from Des Pres' book that might stand as a statement of Forché's intention in her own: "They turned to face the worst straight on, without sentiment or hope, simply to keep watch over life." In the context of the Nazi death camps that Des Pres describes, such unflinching confrontation can appear as heroic self-assertion, but in the idea of simply keeping watch there is an invitation to passivity that can be heard not so much in Forché's poems as in her own and others' comments about them.

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….

Terence Diggory, "Witnesses and Seers," in Salmagundi, Vol. 61, Fall, 1983, pp. 112-24.