Pick-Up Line: 'It is a small country.'

Welcome to Pick-Up Line! My newest feature to this blog, in addition to my other features Interesting or Stupid?, Meta Moment, and Quick Chat, which you should catch up on *wink wink* In Pick-Up Line, I will discuss in-depth one line, or several, of a poem, or a sentence(s) of prose. I have found that when I read something, a line or two from it echoes in my mind after I've finished reading it for one reason or another. And I've named this feature Pick-Up Line to intrigue you, reader, to read the poem or book or collection. This feature will most likely feature poetry, because I think we all need more poetry in our lives, and it can be hard to get into poetry, I admit. So I'm hoping my focus on a line or two is enticing enough to have you read more poetry. Hence, my cheeky title.

Let us begin our first installment! I posted yesterday about The Country Between Us by Carolyn Forché. This book is seriously beautiful, and if you can, read the whole thing. The line I will discuss from The Country Between Us is from the poem 'The Visitor,' which you can find here.

'It is a small country' (line 8)

As you might be able to tell from the title, the idea of a country is central to the text. The title implies distance, and over the course of the collection we see what physical and emotional distance can mean between people. We also see a country being made and unmade, as this book is partly about the Salvadoran Civil War. In the poem, 'The Visitor,' a country is the hand of a lover, the imagining of a hand of a lover, or the wind imagined as the breath of a lover. The wind against the walls of the prison is

                                      ...his wife's breath
slipping into his cell each night while he
imagines his hand to be hers. It is a small country (lines 6-8).

There are two definitions of a country here:

1. It is a physical place, but it is the physical body and breath of his wife.
2. It is an imagined place, as Francisco is imagining the body and breath of his wife with him.

These ideas of a country are interesting because they imply that our 'citizenship' is tied with those we love. It reminds me of something Roberto Bolaño said - one of my absolute favorite authors of all-time. Bolaño was from Chile, and he grew up in various countries in Latin America. He supported the socialist regime in Chile, which was eventually overthrown by dictator Augusto Pinochet. Subsequently, he left Chile, fearing for his life, and because he was dissatisfied and antagonistic towards the prominent literary figures of Chile. Bolaño essentially put himself in exile. In his last interview ever, Bolaño said, 'My only country is my two children and perhaps, though in second place, some moments, streets, faces or books that are in me.'

In Bolaño's quote, and in Forché's poem, what we're seeing is that when you are stripped of the 'country' you were born, maybe even imprisoned by that country, it calls into question your citizenship and allegiance, not in a legal sense, but an existential one: what exactly does the borders and land of a country do for you when they are seemingly against you? When to be on one side of a wall or another means imprisonment or exile? And if we take into account the idea of a country being imagined - as it is implied through Francisco imagining the wind as his wife's breath, and imagining her hand - then that problem is only exacerbated. These delineations are illusory, but in our respective societies, we all commit and agree: yes, this a country. But it is also because of those agreements that a 'small country' can be made out of relationships.

Can I also say how beautiful it is that Forché specifies a small country. The inclusion of the word provides the perfect beat to slow the line and provide space for the gravity of the word 'country' and all that it implies for the poem. Including the word 'small' also shows a tenderness to the relationship, that it is concerned with the small things of feeling someone's breath, of holding someone's hand.

Let me know your thoughts, and if you've read anything by Carolyn Forché, or Roberto Bolaño, who I ALWAYS want to talk about. 

On Whose Authority?

Recently, I decided I wanted to re-read Carolyn Forché's book of poetry The Country Between Us. I first read it a few years ago for a Creative Writing class, and wanted to revisit it because I didn't remember much about it, and I just generally need to punctuate my typically fiction-centric reading with poetry, whether it's just going back to my favorite collections and reading a few poems or (re)reading a full collection.

The Country Between Us is partly about Forché's time working as a journalist in El Salvador as it was on the cusp of a civil war in the 70s. Poems about unrest in El Salvador between its people and leaders are told along with poems about the unrest and distance between two lovers. With this book, Forché is renowned for her weaving of the 'personal' and the 'political,' which is a popular topic in literary criticism. When we talk about the personal and the political in a text, we are acknowledging that there is not as a neat a distinction as we'd like between our personal lives, even our subjectivity, and the larger world - we are saying that maybe the sensibilities or function of the two are not so different. And in the case of Forché's book, we can say that the way the personal and political function are as metaphors of each other: the political situation in El Salvador can be a metaphor for the relationship between the lovers, and vice versa. It is also good to note that Forché is known for coining the term 'poetry of witness,' meaning that poetry is necessary in dealing with things such as war and conflict, and that it is a tool for social justice.

This book is beautiful. Because it is pretty short - just 59 pages - I decided to read it out loud to myself over the course of a few days, to really savor the language and imagery. I loved reading this book, and think it definitely warrants your attention. But one thing preoccupied my reading: Forché is a white woman writing about El Salvador, and she may be one of the most known voices on the Salvadoran Civil War. Even on the back of book, there is a blurb that says,

'Latin America needs a poet to replace the man who represented in his writings the beauty, sufferings, fears and dreams of this continent: Pablo Neruda. Carolyn Forché is that voice.' -Jacobo Timerman

This praise is ridiculous. It is ridiculous to say that Latin America needs a voice that is not their own, that Latin America needs the voice of a white person from the U.S. Latin America has plenty of voices, it is up to us whether or not we listen to those voices, whether we support them and give them a platform to be heard. This is not to say that Forché is not allowed to write about El Salvador because she is not from there, or that these poems are not good because she is not from El Salvador. It is that Forché should not be considered an authority, which is what the above blurb suggests. No one author should ever be looked at as an authority on a subject - people and events are too complicated to look to one person or one perspective. Each of us has a certain amount of privilege and gaps in our understandings, which is why it is so crucial read widely and diversely. In this blurb, we can see Forché's privilege of being considered an authority on something she does not actually have authority over. And while this book is certainly beautiful and important, it does not make it the authoritative poetic text on El Salvador, or Latin America.

Read widely, read diversely, read critically, read skeptically. Some may think that reading in these ways reduces the experience of reading, but I think it enhances it, and it pushes me to read new books to love.