That was a wonderful introduction.
Thank you so much, and thank you for being here.
I'm thrilled to be back in Tucson and particularly,
in the year of the 60th anniversary of the Poetry
Center.
You have a lot to be proud of here for that.
[APPLAUSE]
Congratulations.
You've built one of the most important poetry centers
in the world.
You know that.
I'm really happy to be here.
And I'm actually going to begin with some prose.
I'm saving the poetry for the place of honor.
When I was 27 years old, teaching at San Diego State
University, I was living in Encinitas, California.
My roommate at that time is here with me tonight.
She was away for a few days.
And while she was away, I was grading papers
and writing letters on behalf of Amnesty International.
We belonged to an Urgent Action Network,
which meant that we had to write polite letters to dictators
asking them to please release and stop
torturing their prisoners.
So I was writing those and grading papers,
and the doorbell rang.
And I wasn't expecting anyone.
And I wasn't going to answer the door at first.
I'm the eldest of seven children,
and my mother trained us never to answer
the door when we were home alone if we didn't know who it was.
So I was going to do what she taught us to do,
which was to hide until they went away
and pretend we weren't home.
But then, my curiosity got to me,
and I had to answer the door.
So I answered it with the chain on.
And the man said, "You are Carolyn Forché,
and I am Leonel Gómez Vides, and these are my daughters."
There were two little girls with him.
I'd heard that name before.
I had spent the previous summer in Majorca Deia,
Spain with Claribel Alegría.
I was translating her poetry that summer
with my friend Maya, her daughter.
And this, Leonel Gómez Vides, was one of Claribel
Alegría's cousins.
But they used to say strange things about him.
Like, he's very strange.
He's very brilliant.
He's like Robinhood.
He sleeps on the ground with his motorcycle in his arms.
He gives his land away to the peasants.
He might be with the guerrillas.
But probably, he works for the CIA.
So he was on my front porch.
And I didn't know what to do.
So I had him identify some photographs
I'd taken that summer.
And then, when he did so, I took the chain off and let him in.
He spent three days and three nights with his daughters
with me.
And he covered my table with white butcher paper,
and he drew cartoons and drawings of everything
that he talked about.
He began with the conquistadors and the conquest
of the Americas.
And by three days later, he was drawing American helicopters
over the mountains of El Salvador,
and telling me that there was going
to be a war there in three to five years.
And what he needed, he said, "Was a poet."
Because he wanted the poet to learn all about the war
so that the poet could come back to the United States
when the war began and explain it all to the American people.
So I explained to him that a poet probably
wasn't what he wanted for that kind of explanation.
And he said, "No, I need a poet.
A poet will touch the heart.
And I need hearts to be touched because I
need the American people to oppose support for this war.
And so that will determine US policy.
And that's going to be very important."
So I explained to him, just how much influence poets
have over US foreign policy in matters of prosecution of war
overseas.
And I said-- then, I had to explain to him how--
at that time at least-- how most Americans viewed poets.
Well, so, no, I tried to be gentle about it, but I said,
we were kind of a fringe element.
And we were bohemians.
And we died in bad hotels and worse things happen to us,
but we weren't influential in the United States.
And so he said, "Well, you must change that."
You know?
So I'm going to read-- he brought--
I accepted his invitation.
It's all in the book.
You can read it there.
But I don't have time to do more introduction.
I'm going to read a few passages from the book
so that you have a sense of what it was like then.
I did accept his invitation.
I first went there on January 4, 1978.
It was not yet the war.
It was the time of the death squads,
so it was a murderous time.
And it was really frightening for everyone.
And so you're going to hear some of that here.
He wanted to show me the whole country
and not to tell me what to think.
He's the main character of this book.
He's very intriguing.
He's very funny.
He's hilarious.
So despite what you will hear in these passages,
there are funny things in the book.
It does have some humor.
And I was always-- he was taking me to meet military officers
all the time.
He seemed to know everyone in the country.
And these military officers got more and more interested in me
as they began to think, mistakenly, that I
worked for the US Embassy.
And they wanted to impress the US Embassy
with their knowledge of all things happening in El Salvador
because they wanted money--
they wanted money from the Americans
to deliver information.
So I would always ask them about people who
had disappeared and imprisoned.
And Leonel told me this is not such a good thing
to be asking them.
And so, finally, one day, he pulled up to a place.
And he said, "I tell you what--
I want you to--
are you willing to go inside a prison?
Because I can arrange this for you.
You will be visiting someone.
You pretend you knew them in the past.
And he will show you around inside.
And I want you to see as much as you can.
And then, you can tell human rights
organizations about this place.
And maybe they will visit.
And maybe that something will happen."
So this is the prison.
It was in Ahuachapan.
I call the man Miguel in this.
He did take me with him.
Leonel wouldn't come with me.
He said, "It's better if you go by yourself."
And I said, "Do you think it'll be OK?"
And he said, "You'll have 30 minutes inside.
I think you will be OK," he said.
He just thought so.
So here is a little bit of that time.