The Colonel

Carolyn Forché published “The Colonel” as a part of her second collection of poetry, The Country Between Us (1981). This collection consisted of poems Forché wrote while traveling through the Republic of El Salvador, a country on the brink of a bloody civil war. The book helped launch what would become Forché’s primary literary focus, namely, blending the personal and political into what she called a “poetry of witness.” “The Colonel,” while somewhat atypical of Forché’s work stylistically in its minimalist, almost journalistic prose, was and still is one of her most famous and influential poems.

Poet Biography

Carolyn Forché was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1950. Forché earned both an undergraduate and a master’s degree in creative writing. When the poet was 24, her first book, Gathering the Tribes, won perhaps the most prestigious of all first-book awards in poetry in the United States, the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition. Forché has worked as a translator in multiple languages, working with the texts of a wide range of poets, including Claribel Alegría, Georg Trakl, and Mahmoud Darwish.

After traveling through El Salvador on the funding of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Forché began to blend journalism with literature in her poetry. Her next book of poetry, The Country Between Us (1981), catalogued the human rights violations she observed in El Salvador and set the tone for the remainder of her career. As of 2022, Forché directs Georgetown University’s Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice. She has won numerous awards, fellowships, and grants, including the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundations Award for the political impact of her poetry. The poet has published a myriad of translations, poetry collections, and nonfiction. Forché is famous for coining the term “poetry of witness” to describe the type of poetry she passionately writes, which blends the personal with the political to communicate the social and political plights of underrepresented peoples, political groups, and stories.

Poem Text

Forché, Carolyn. “The Colonel.” 1978. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

To understand the poem’s narrative, readers must first know that it describes a dinner scene that the poet experienced first-hand; the poet, Forché, is therefore the speaker. She wrote the poem journalistically as she ventured through the Republic of El Salvador in the 1970s to document the ongoing political atrocities. The Republic was fraught with turbulent class division and corrupt politics; there had been many uprisings by the oppressed classes, only to be violently quashed by the wealthy aristocracy who wielded governmental military power.

Forché begins her prose poem with the sentence “What you have heard is true” (Line 1). After introducing the reader to the poem as a journalistic text, she begins the narrative retelling of the story that the reader has supposedly already heard. Although the poem does not immediately identify the character whose house the speaker “was in” with “[h]is wife” (Line 1) and “daughter” (Line 2), the title hints toward his occupation as a colonel.

In the first portion of the prose poem, Forché’s simple, declarative sentences describe what resembles a very traditional domestic setting. A wife carries “a tray of coffee and sugar” (Line 2), a daughter “file[s] her nails” (Line 2), and a “son [goes] out for the night” (Line 3). The first sign of violence appears as a “pistol,” grouped together in an unassuming list of “daily papers, pet dogs” (Line 3) and “cushion[s]” (Line 4).

Snuck in among other details about the “moon […] over / the house” (Lines 4-5) and an American “cop show” playing on the television, there are soon other ominous details. The walls of the house are “embedded” with “[b]roken bottles” (Line 6) that can “cut [a man’s] hands to lace” (Line 7). As the poem delves further into the militarization of the home, with “gratings” “on the windows” (Line 8), it abruptly returns to domestic details: “We had / dinner, rack of lamb, good wine” (Lines 8-9).

The domestic details also demonstrate the wealth of the Colonel’s family, who use a “gold bell / […] for calling the maid” (Lines 9-10). After family and guests enjoy a decadent meal punctuated by small talk (“I was asked how I enjoyed the country” [Line 11]), the dinner table discussion turns to politics. The Colonel first demonstrates his aggression when he tells his parrot “to shut up” (Line 14). At this first sign of the atmosphere shifting from pleasantries to something darker and more genuine, the poet’s friend (apparently also at the dinner) warns her “with his eyes: say / nothing” (Lines 15-16).

Without shifting from the simple, declarative sentences that progress the narrative in matter-of-fact terms, the speaker describes the Colonel pouring a sack of “human ears on the table” (Line 17). In one of the poem’s very few moments not purely devoted to observation, the poet compares the ears to “dried peach halves” (Line 18), stating, “There is no other way to say this” (Line 18). At this point in the after-dinner horrors, the Colonel shakes a severed human ear “in [the poet and her friend’s] faces” (Line 19) and drops it in a “water / glass” (Lines 19-20).

At this point in the evening, the pretense of civility is finally dropped. The Colonel says to the speaker and her friend, “I am tired of fooling around” (Line 20). He continues to rant, demonstrating contempt and disregard for “the rights of anyone” (Line 21). To complete his tirade, the military figure “swe[eps] the ears to the floor with his arm” (Line 22). After yelling and throwing human ears around, he holds “the last / of his wine in the air” (Lines 22-23) and speaks directly to the speaker, slyly commenting the event is “[s]omething for [her] poetry” (Line 23). Forché concludes the poem by focusing on the ears scattering the floor, suggesting that they “caught [the] scrap of [the Colonel’s] voice” (Line 24).