Ourselves or Nothing

heads up: about 2k words (without quotes) about a writer I deeply admire and poetry as a way to keep your wits about you or going or something. a good idea to send out during the darkest nights, at 9 PM on a sunday when frankly it seemed about midnight at noon? well, vamos a ver.

The first time I read “The Colonel” by Carolyn Forche I was 16. I was likely too young but I remember the poem indelibly, something in it that vibrated against me. The last coup against Chavez in Venezuela would’ve been the year before, in 2002, resulting in a one day presidency and the Llaguno Overpass massacre. That fall my tio, tia, and primo would come to live with us in the Chicago suburbs. They would return to Caracas in the spring of 2004, and there two of them remain.

Someone gave me a copy of the book as a gift and I have carried it around since. In my senior year, where I continued my conscription in the forensics club as a means to cure my shy rage and introversion, I picked "Return” to do as a verse piece. Likely it WAS mystifying to my teachers, to the judges, but felt like the only thing I wanted to read, when given the choice.

The second time I read “The Colonel” I was in my first-year poetry class in college. It’s the premier example of a prose poem, probably. It starts with: What you have heard is true.

It ends:

 “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.”

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My copy of “The Country Between Us” is some early edition, out of print because it’s printed upside-down in paperback, which means I always know I have it with me. Unlike many, many other books, my copy remains mine, falling apart, my name in high school script printed on the inside cover. It has lost the last page with the last lines of “Ourselves or Nothing”, but I have memorized those.

Over the years I have read this book over and over again, the memorized lines like mantras appearing when I’ve flinched at the newsworthy and mundane atrocities unfolding.

“There is nothing one man will not do to another.” The last line of “The Visitor”.

“To my country I ship poetry instead
of bread, so I cut through nothing.
I give nothing, so you see I have
nothing, according to myself.” From “The Island”.

And all the time, especially as this year ends, especially as we went November, darkest December, and the bleak advent of January:

“Your problem is not your life as it is
in America, not that your hands, as you
tell me, are tied to 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.”

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Better people than you were powerless I think as I idly mail merge envelopes to raise money for people at my job supporting the careful policy flank of abolition, of dismantling this police state, of trying to find everyone a house to live in, its long slog. Better people than you were powerless I think as I ride the bus and imagine what streets look like in a hungrier world, in a desperate world, in this world now with the men in the Plaza, the women with children strapped to their backs. Better people than you were powerless I think when I am trying to write and wondering what the fuck is the point. Better people than you were powerless I think when I tally up what I could do and remind myself there will always be something to do, so long as I am alive and so long as I can look at what is.

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Forche published the memoir of her time in El Salvador in 2019 called "What You Have Heard is True” and again, someone gifted it to me. I would’ve had the opportunity to make her a focus in my college years, but I never did. When I continued to learn about the United State’s clandestine aggression in Latin American countries, I didn’t think to research her life in El Salvador. She had gotten a fellowship, she wrote poems about her time there, she published the book and The Colonel remained a poem to emulate in workshops and classrooms for decades, sans context.

Forche was 27 and had published a book, traveled to Spain to translate poets (including Mahmoud Darwish), and returned to California when approached by Leonel Vides and invited to El Salvador, specifically, she writes, because she is a poet. At their first meeting he reveals himself in turns as a man of many interests and opportunities: an expert in agriculture, an interest in guns, an interest in the death of an American, an interest in her grandmother, in her time in New Mexico staying with an elderly Pueblo couple. He asks what she would do with her fellowship, and invited her to the country. He’d driven 4000 kilometers from San Salvador to do so.

I read the book intently and rapidly, could see some of the horrific details around curves of the chapters from the poems in The Country Between Us. The drunk and ineffective American diplomats Forche ends up going between, the night she and a friend stop breathing on the floor as their hotel room is shot up, the endless travels between the campo and the city, the churches with priests destined to be assassinated, meeting the farmers, their brutal deaths on display described in careful detail.

I am not sure if there are many people not very far removed from imperialist violent delights to their violent ends who have not had the passing tales of death squads and people being disappeared and men sent by the government to kill (is there a point in naming the countries?). Even so, the expanse of the brutality in a country to control its people, to turn them on each other, and Forche’s ability to continue moving through it, to observe, to watch, to remember, to write in the short span of time she follows Leonel, is nothing short of astounding.

She was just 27 when she left, 30 when she published the book of poems. I have returned and continue to return to the poetry, and I’ve returned to the memoir, now. I am trying to remember how proximate this country I was born to is to violence common elsewhere. Or of course not that we are close: that we are there, that there is nothing inherent to the United States that will protect it from the collapse and harm it has created elsewhere. There is nothing one man will not do to one another.

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When I was 25 I took a truly ill-fated and stupid trip with a terrible person to Guatemala, three of us who spoke Spanish, three of us white Americans. During the trip one of them, struck with an idiot’s American insight, marveled, But there are no homeless people here, and everyone is so happy, as though someone had created a jungle utopia out of thin air for him. This was of course not true. In Guatemala City as we passed in the cars, they marveled at military men with AK47s, did not see men moving along the street without limbs. One night they followed a mysterious American man into the jungle to buy drugs and I sat on the hotel balcony, cold with their arrogance and stupidity, every story I had ever heard from every relative, wondering what time I would need to bribe a policeman. But that trip I learned it could be nice to think there were good choices to make to stay alive but mostly that was a fantasy. They returned from the jungle full of drugs, and the terrible person would continue to choose to come very close to taking my life.

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I do not feel very wise or smart, disappointed or smug that whatever choices we have made in this country will mean misery for the selfsame people punching buttons to ensure our fate for the next four years. Longer, maybe, who can say. Chavez stayed in power until he died, and Maduro continues. Pinochet stuck around for 17 years. There are myriad others across the globe, I just know the ones closest to my own blood.

My pa has been alert to this since 2016, I suppose. Another man with an appetite for power promising glory to the desperate in a country, but fueled by the wealthy, the greedy who will suck all the resources out and inevitably escape. In a country like Venezuela it was the oil. There are many resources in this country. There are many angry and hungry and desperate people.

I am unsure of what to say or write about this, mostly. Probably I spend too much time online, listening to others’ short bursts watching what descends. Trying to be an oracle of the particulars isn’t for me. What will happen, what is happening, has happened and been generated by this country before. It does me no good to imagine it, although I often do. When Forche wrote “Return”, the last lines come from critic Josephine Crum, responding to Forche’s inability to step between the luxurious indifference and ignorance of the US to what it has sewn in El Salvador. But in this country is a life you never leave. The trail of the past we have left behind in other places, what continues now, is still here and I am wondering what it will look like.

I don’t think reading poetry from the cruel world deadens me, makes me harder, but it does sober me up, the beauty of it and the witnessing. Everywhere there are writers who captured and wrote while they were lucky enough to live, or continue to live. Certainly I do not count myself, in any estimation, to the writers of witness I admire. But this is a time I must be constantly re-calibrating how to live. To not be helpless.

I find this true. My depression will often buffer me from wild swings of hope or disappointment in this country, or wrap itself up in the despair of the times, and the idea that work and the need to do anything can keep it in check. There is nothing you can do. Change your government. A voice from fifty years ago that remains the chorus of the latest years of this life, where I expect nothing from this government, at least not now. The steady supply of bombs to a genocide, the criminalization of being poor, this city I live in that feeds the tick of the police with seemingly no second thought. I try not to think about what police have meant under fascist dictatorships. I try.

So I continue to believe I will not do nothing, and that includes reading and writing. I’m not delusional enough to think whatever comes out of me, of this, will remain or be of importance, but that doesn’t stop me from doing it. There are many poets of resistance in this world, and what I can say is to find some of them. Most poets, I think, will fall under this category, and it is something you can do to be informed by them, use them to prepare. It is something for your heart to read them, come as close as you can to living and seeing alongside another.

I’d been wanting to write this, about Forche and The Country Between Us and the memoir for some time, but this is perhaps not what I thought I would write. Forche finished the book with a poem written to Terrence des Pres (who wrote about poetry and survival). Here I am in 2024 writing about Forche, four decades later. It is something I can do, writing about the words to remember while living in this world I have never left. Here is the last lines of the last book in the poem, lines that echoed in my head when I made my way around the United Center with the hundreds of others, trying to watch, filled with some grim understanding that whatever was inevitable would still require eyes open, and hands to do something, where she ends this book.

“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.”

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There are so many poets out there to read, and they are worthy company in this dark that seems to proceed and yet drag us all into 2025, and whatever years may or may not come after. In any case, Victor Jara is mentioned in the first section, who was murdered in Chile when Agosto Pinochet took power. His music has given me much comfort throughout the strange years since 2020, and here you go. Be good to each other, and do what you can, where you can. xo