american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

68 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
“Return” (17–20) and the other poems in The Country Between Us,
which was the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1981, have been written
about by a number of critics. I depart from critics interested in the
poem’s content, politics, and insight into war’s effects on its observers.
I am concerned with the poem’s rhetorical strategy and embodied
agency. Some background is necessary, though, to introduce the poem.
As mentioned earlier, Forché worked for Amnesty International in El
Salvador during its civil war. The U.S. government provided aid, intelligence,
and funding to El Salvador and its paramilitary death squads,
who were responsible for tens of thousands of desaparecidos (disappeared
persons), most of whom were innocent peasant farmers sympathetic to
the leftist guerillas. The United States intervened in support of their
right-wing dictatorship in the fear that the populist, campesino rebels
were communists. The backdrop for “Return” 19 is the speaker-poet’s
re-entrance into life in the United States after her two years in
El Salvador.
These two disparate worlds give rise to the two disparate
experiences and voices that mark the poem, thereby calling into
question strict boundaries between time and space. The poem radically
disorders these two worlds, so that they vector into and out of utter
difference and utter sameness. Forché’s sophisticated figures of voice
and authority in the poem make this suspension possible. The poem
thus has two alternating first-person speakers—one the poet, the other
her friend, Josephine Crum, to whom the poem is dedicated. The
speakers directly address each other using the second person “you” so
that their conversation appears somewhat staged and exaggerated. This
strategy styles the dialogue as a quiet interchange between two old
friends rather than as a piece of moralizing public discourse. When
Josephine first speaks, in line thirteen, she says, “So you know / now,
you” (my emphasis). In the next four lines, she repeats “you” five
times, each phrased in order to repeat what the reader has not heard
the speaker-poet say. Phrases such as “you know,” “You’ve seen,” and
“You’ve heard” show Josephine speaking for the poet about her experiences
in El Salvador. This technique allows Forché to avoid demagoguery,
the arrogance of bragging about hardships survived, and the
sensationalization of violence. When the conversation is between
friends, readers overhear instead of being the subjects of preaching.
This dialogic strategy allows the poet to maintain authority without
proselytizing or presuming to speak for others. Forché is acutely
aware of the questionable ground of authority she trod in writing
about El Salvador. She has spoken at length about the creation of a
quasi-fictional, first-person voice. This voice, she says, stages a “self ”