Bearing witness from El Salvador to Pakistan

Feb. 28, 2002

Dear Julie,

Twenty years ago, when the United States was funding a regime murderously trying to retain power in El Salvador, Carolyn Forche published a book of poetry that crystallized the conflict and galvanized the political debate over El Salvador just as the four American churchwomen were found killed.

In the poem titled "The Colonel," a Salvadoran military officer having a dinner party produces a grocery bag filled with human ears. Forche likens them to dried peach halves. He is tired of fooling around, the colonel fumes.

Terrorism is not new.

"The Country Between Us" shocked not only through the brutality Forche journalistically described, but perhaps because this was a woman, a sensitive one, bravely bearing witness to our culpability in a government's murder of its own people.

Days before his assassination, Archbishop Romero, the champion of the Salvadoran people, urged her to go home to America and convince her countrymen to stop military aid. Forche's poetry made personal that dirty little civil war.

She calls her work the "poetry of witness." She and writers like her are compelled to tell of the atrocities human beings commit against each other so we will not forget and so we will remember that we somehow persist as a people.

Here is her poem "The Visitor":

In Spanish he whispers there is no time left,

It is the sound of scythes arcing in wheat,

the ache of some field song in Salvador.

The wind along the prison, cautious

as Francisco's hands on the inside, touching

the walls as he walks, it is his wife's breath

slipping into his cell each night while he

imagines his hand to be hers. It is a small country.

There is nothing one man will not do to another."

Daniel Pearl was in Pakistan to bear witness, too. Vainly I try to understand why terrorists think that killing reporters helps their cause.

Pearl went to listen to the point of view of people who claimed to be members of the Islamic militant underground. Few reporters will take that risk to listen now. Fewer will be psychologically and emotionally open to their grievances.

DC and I watched Pearl's wife, Mariane, on TV bravely talking about her husband, their unborn child and her future. She does not blame the Pakistani people. She hopes her husband's death makes people ask more questions about their country's foreign policy, its commitment to oppose terrorism and its commitment to understand more about conditions that foster terrorism.

This sweet-faced, pregnant widow makes terrorism personal.

If Arabs have reasons to complain about how the rest of the world has treated them, and they do, Sept. 11 and atrocities like the murder of Daniel Pearl only make it more difficult for the rest of us to respond to those grievances.

Terrorism estranges us all from understanding.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.