What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance

Name: What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance
Price: 14.76 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Carolyn Forché
ISBN: 9780525560371

Carolyn Forché is twenty-seven when the mysterious stranger, Leonel Gomez Vides, appears on her doorstep. The relative of a friend, he is a charming polymath with a mind as seemingly disordered as it is brilliant. He has driven from El Salvador to invite Forché to visit and learn about his country. Captivated for reasons she doesn't fully understand, she accepts and becomes enmeshed in something beyond her comprehension.

Together they meet with high-ranking military officers, impoverished farm workers, and clergy desperately trying to assist the poor and keep the peace. These encounters are a part of his plan to educate her, but also to learn for himself just how close the country is to war. As priests and farm-workers are murdered and protest marches attacked, he is determined to save his country, and Forché is swept up in his work and in the lives of his friends. Pursued by death squads and sheltering in safe houses, the two forge a rich friendship, as she attempts to make sense of what she's experiencing and establish a moral foothold amidst profound suffering.

What You Have Heard is True is a devastating, lyrical, and visionary memoir about a young woman's brave choice to engage with horror in order to help others. Written by one of the most gifted poets of her generation, this is the story of a woman's radical act of empathy, a poet's experience in a country on the verge of war, and a journey toward social conscience in a perilous time.