The Poetry of Witness as a Form of Resistance in Selected Poems of Carolyn Forché

Abstract

This article contends for a poetics of witness that, looking to both texts in the light of each other, sees Carolyn Forché’s poetry as an instance of a poetics of witness as resistance to political violence, imperialism, and the silencing of marginalized voices. By close reading the two poems “The Country Between Us” and “The Boatman,” the essay examines how Forché blends her own lived experience with historical trauma to bear witness and contest hegemonic narratives. The thesis takes a postcolonial theoretical perspective, using Achille Mbembe, Edward Said, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's ideas to analyse how Forché's poetry subverts Western complicity in international atrocity and reclaims the silenced subaltern voice. The research is designed to examine the ways in which poetic form, imagery and voice act as instruments of resistance in situation of political conflict and displacement. It tackles the following guiding questions: How is the Forché’s poetry expressing in marginalized voice? How is she employing the language of poetry to address the historical and political horrors she’s encountered? Where can her works be located in the discourse of postcolonial resistance? Through a qualitative analysis and close reading of text, the paper argues that Forché’s poems are not narrations of suffering but constitutes interventions in the politics of memory and ethics. The speciousness of the charge does nothing to diminish “The Country Between Us,” which meditates on American imperialism in El Salvador through visceral imagery and testimonial voice, or “The Boatman,” which reimagines the Syrian refugee crisis with lyrical empathy and moral urgency. Both works illustrate the poet’s function as witness and mediator between historical trauma and ethical participation, and the work of poetry as a form of resistance to silence and a reaffirmation of human dignity.