american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

72 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
that, rather than substantiating the self, threaten to demolish it” (96),
which is exactly what Josephine does here. She demolishes the
speaker-poet’s sense of an isolated self “apart from others”; she also
crushes the speaker-poet’s self-indulgent lamentations of her difficulties
after returning home. The speaker-poet’s earlier complaints pale
to Josephine’s incisive remarks about the poet’s “hands,” which
connect to Jose’s hands “cut off by his / captors and thrown to the
many acres / of cotton.” Unlike Jose and other Salvadorans, the poet
and other Americans still have hands with which to fight injustice. For
Josephine, people with “hands” have no “right to feel powerless”; this
right is reserved for those who are actually powerless.
Forché’s rhetorical strategy in “Return” is sophisticated and artful.
The poem’s experiential agency resonates with the credibility of
blood, agony, and hardship in El Salvador, but without romanticization.
She utilizes a clever conceit in her willingness to give authority and
control to Josephine, who admonishes the speaker-poet for her
arrogance and complacency. These techniques circumvent what
Charles Altieri suggests is the transparency of lyric poetry. For Altieri,
a poem can claim that its speaking “I’s” experience represents
human experience in general, but the speaking “I” is always on a
“constructed stage” that reveals its status as an imaginative creation.
Consequently, poetic authority is always provisional (Self 22). In
“Return,” Forché’s strategy implies that the poet does not have this
authority, but her friend does, and in abundance. Whereas
the speaker-poet’s agency is derived from her experiences of extremity,
the poem’s agency is largely derived from the authority embodied
in Josephine’s powerful recriminations and recontextualizations of the
poet’s experiences. Alicia Ostriker’s essay on postmodern poetry of
witness best sums up the crisis Forché deals with in “Return”:
“the simultaneous impossibility of objective witness and of subjective
wholeness” (“Beyond Confession” 39; original emphasis). Forché’s
rhetorical strategy makes this point resound as she needs Josephine’s
struggle for “objective witness” and a speaker-poet’s struggle for
“subjective wholeness.”
Summary and Conclusions
When I was defending my M.A. thesis many years ago on the political
poetry of Forché and Rich, one of my committee members asked me
how I would respond to the notion that poets such as Rich and
Forché often unintentionally subscribe to a romantic heroism that
makes the poet brave, unyielding, and risk-averse in her pursuit of