The Colonel

Carolyn Forché, “The Colonel,” pages 981 in Legacies

Forché’s piece is a prose-poem, a kind of hybrid, as the name suggests, between poetry and prose. We’ve not really talked about poetry yet, so rather than any technical questions, I’ll just ask for your responses to the piece. What did you notice? What do you have questions about?

Note: It helps to know (for context), that the poem and the book it comes from treat El Salvador during a time of revolution. The government there, backed by the U.S., was fighting a Communist insurrection. However, the government was corrupt and deadly to its own people “disappearing” people by the thousands, many students like you who ended up tortured in prisons and often buried in mass graves. The movie Salvador treats the subject.

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