Poetry & Politics: Forché and Rich Introduction

Carolyn Forché and Adrienne Rich are two female American poets whose work integrated the personal and the political into the poetry. Forché, for example, was responsible for coining the phrase “poetry of witness,” as she felt her poems were testimonies to the political events that were oppressing people around the world (Poetry Foundation, 2018). Rich likewise made her poetry into a type of testimony, though her aim was different. Whereas Forché focused on issues like the civil war in El Salvador, Rich focused on the political situation at home and the rise of the Feminist Movement (Martin, 1984). This paper will show how Rich and Forché used their own personal experiences and observations to give voice to marginalized people, those oppressed both abroad and at home, and those in need of testimony.

The Poetry of Forché

One of Forché’s best known poems is “The Colonel” written in 1978 and published in The Country Between Us in 1981. The poem is about the violence that consumed El Salvador under the dictatorial government by the U.S-supported military government, which was fighting the country’s National Liberation Front. “The Colonel” describes a scene that Forché witnessed personally. It is a prose poem written in block form and at first does not look like a traditional poem at all—but this is appropriate because the point of the poem is to give testimony to a gruesome reality in El Salvador that newspapers back home in the U.S. would not be giving. The poem tells the story of a Colonel who treats the poet and her friend to dinner—lamb, mangoes, wine, etc.—before bringing out a sack of human ears that have apparently been collected from the local rebels. He empties the sack on the table and tells the American that her people have no rights, that they can go “fuck themselves,” before sweeping the ears to the table and announcing, “Something for your poetry, no?” (Forché, 1978). This poem generated a great deal of attention for Forché, as it touched upon a nerve of Americans back home. What was the American government doing in El Salvador? What was happening in the country? Forché helped awaken the national consciousness to the cruelties of proxy war, of the barbarism of American-backed dictators. Her poem “The Colonel” was what she called a documentary poem—a poem meant to bear witness to political and social oppression abroad.

Her poem “The Visitor” written in 1979 was another example. In this poem, she was visitor a rebel who had been arrested by the government and imprisoned. Her view in the poem is that of an outsider—literally—as she is not inside the prison cell but rather viewing the experience from the outside. As in the “The Colonel,” Forché describes the scene in El Salvador from the perspective of the person who is a native there, the person who is actually experiencing the horrors of the country first hand. Whereas “The Colonel” deals with a person in a position of power, “The Visitor” deals with a person who is politically oppressed. In both, however, Forché is an observer who is describing the experiences of others rather than her own. In “The Visitor” she describes Francisco whose time is literally running out, which Forché symbolizes with the scythe...

There is nothing one man will not do to another” (Forché, 1979).
The Poetry of Rich

Rich’s focus was not so much on others as it was on her own personal experiences. Likewise, her focus was not on political happenings abroad but rather on socio-political movements at home in the U.S.—namely the Women’s Movement and Women’s Liberation. Adrienne Rich wrote in the American Feminist tradition that emerged in the first half of the 20th century with works like The Awakening and “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin, “A Room of One’s Own” by Virginia Woolf, and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which arrived at mid-century to take the literary themes circulating among 20th century American women writers and distill them into the ideological expression that became known as Feminism. Other women like Gloria Steinem, founder of Ms. Magazine and Feminist activist kicked off the Women’s Liberation movement in the U.S., and Rich emerged from within this movement as its poetic voice. In “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers,” Rich explored many of the themes discussed in feminist literature and shared similar tropes with other stories of oppressed women who found the weight of their wedding ring (a symbol used in “Tigers”) to weigh heavily on their hands—whether they were the kitchen-confined woman described by Friedan or the woman who killed her husband after years of mental abuse in Susan Glaspell’s Trifles. The Feminist tradition flowed through Rich’s works, were served as emblems of Feminist and Lesbian activism.

One of the recurring themes of feminist literature is the concept of the woman who is oppressed by her matrimonial life and feels crushed by her husband’s presence, which serves as a kind of patriarchal shadow hovering constantly over her and blocking out the sun and light of life. The Feminist Movement became aligned with lesbian activism and took up issues such as “reproductive rights,” even pushing Old World institutions to recognize their positions (Ruether). Judith Butler would also strive to define “gender identity” in the midst of a new revolution in terms of how women viewed themselves as opposed to how they traditional culture defined them as male counterparts.

Rich herself aligned with these issues and ideas. Born to a Jewish father and a Protestant mother, Rich was encouraged by parents to pursue self-expression through the poetic form. She attended a girls’ academy which introduced her to “fine role models of single women who were intellectually impassioned” (Martin, 1984, p. 174). Rich honed her poetry writing skills in college and her first book of poems, A Change of World, was picked by poet W. H. Auden as winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award (Flood, 2012). Rich was then awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship at Oxford but chose instead to travel Europe and seeing the Continent.

“Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” was written by Rich in 1951 and marked the beginning of Rich’s career as a poet. It also foreshadowed many of the themes that she would explore in her feminist writing and later in her activism…