19 pages • 38 minutes read
Carolyn ForchéThe Colonel
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1981A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context
Forché wrote “The Colonel” during her time in the Republic of El Salvador in the 1970s, even coining the term “documentary poem” to describe the hybrid nature of the text. The reported events really happened; Forché did visit a military official’s home where he did pour a bag of human ears onto the table. In order to understand whose ears these were and why such atrocities were being committed, it is important to briefly survey the shape of El Salvadoran political history.
The Republic of El Salvador had existed as an independent, sovereign nation for less than a century when Forché toured the country in the 1970s. Its brief existence had thus far been largely characterized by both severe economic inequality and corrupt politics. The country’s political and socioeconomic power was monopolized by a tiny portion of the population, landowners who controlled El Salvador’s primary industry of coffee farming. El Salvador’s 20th-century history is a history of attempted uprisings by the oppressed peasantry and indigenous citizenry, followed by violent retaliation from the aristocracy who dominated the official government.
At the time of “The Colonel,” El Salvador was on the brink of a violent civil war. Only a few years before Forché arrived as a journalistic poet, the country’s presidential elections were rigged multiple times in an organized electoral fraud ensuring military officials won the office. The combination of deep inequality, political unrest, and enmity between the elite ruling class and the disenfranchised populace led to escalating violence.
While the El Salvadoran Civil War—fought for over a decade between the official government and a coalition of left-wing organizations—wouldn’t officially erupt until after Forché wrote the poem and left the country, the official government was already massacring the populace, mutilating and torturing its victims, and even shooting priests while they preached sermons. The sack of ears in the poem is not an exaggeration but instead typical of the human rights violations that characterized El Salvadoran political practices at the time.
Biographical Context
When Forché was 27 years old, she had already published one book of poetry (to some acclaim) and secured a teaching job at a university in California. Forché’s first book, Gathering the Tribes (1976), followed the vogue in American poetry at the time by focusing on the poet’s personal experiences. Although Confessionalism—the American poetry movement that championed the intimately personal as a literary subject in the 1950s and 1960s—had ended over a decade before, its powerful influence remained in the literary scene. Forché’s first book was selected for the Yale Younger Poet’s prize by Stanley Kunitz, who himself championed Robert Lowell’s Confessional work.
However, an El Salvadoran named Leonel Gómez Vides with loose connection to Forché (the two had not met, but he was a relative of a poet whom Forché had planned on translating) drove from his country all the way to her doorstep. Gómez attempted to convince Forché to go to El Salvador to document the atrocities underway—not as a journalist but as a poet. As Forché wrote in her memoir about the experience, Gómez challenged her, “What are you going to do? […] Write poetry about yourself for the rest of your life?” (Forché, Carolyn. “What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance.” The New York Times, 2019).
With the substantial help of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Forché met Gómez’s challenge, and her poetry career altered irrevocably. Instead of writing about the personal in the tradition of Confessionalism, Forché turned to political themes and married journalism to poetics with her new work. Gómez took Forché all through the Republic of El Salvador, bringing her to farmers, politicians, priests, and generals. The dinner described in “The Colonel” really happened, as did the infamous outburst with the bag of ears. The friend mentioned in the poem is Gómez himself, serving as Forché’s guide.
