She sees unsanitary hospitals, dead bodies hacked to pieces, she is chased by death squads, meets priests and nuns who are willing to give their lives for justice, she meets friends and enemies, and all the while she’s still trying to figure out what she’s doing in El Salvador and what her role is in bringing justice. Leonel insists that Forché has a part to play and convinces her to come to El Salvador to see for herself the injustices running rampant through the country.įorché finds herself agreeing (though she doesn’t know why), and this agreement sends her into a reeling and unpredictable journey through a country she will come to love. When Leonel shows up at her door with his two daughters, he wastes no time in sharing the history of oppression in El Salvador and its roots in European invasion.
It’s the late 1970s, and Forché is teaching poetry at a university she is recently unmarried, living with a roommate, and trying to figure out what to do with a fellowship she’s unexpectedly earned. Told through a mixed media lens, the book includes narrative, poetry, and photographs to help build the image, scene, and emotion of El Salvador at the time of Forché’s visits there.įorché is twenty-seven when she gets a mysterious knock on her door and a request from someone named Leonel (the uncle of a friend) to enlighten her about the plight of El Salvador.
Written by poet Carolyn Forché, the memoir is an account of her time in, and relationship with, El Salvador and the man who helps her form that relationship: Leonel. What You Have Heard is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance is a moving piece of non-fiction that gets at the heart of what it means to be human and what it means to be a human who acts.
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