Analysis Of Carolyn Forche's Poem 'The Colonel'

The Colonel by Carolyn Forché is about her experience when she goes to El Salvador and meets this honored officer. She was let into his house where she experienced something she will never forget, an experience that she put into a beautiful words to make readers feel what she felt that day. Thats what Carolyn does; she takes her experiences in her life and puts them into words, words that help her readers feel the way she felt, and help’s them see what she saw.
Carolyn Forché is an astonishing poet who was born in 1950 in Detroit, Michigan. Carolyn is not only a poet but an activist and a teacher. She writes poems about the things that she has observed and been present at times of stunning and disastrous events. She brings the political aspects

of events and joins them together with it’s personal side and does an breathtaking job of putting it into poetry. She is known as “one of America’s most important and aware poetic voices” (poetryfoundation.org). Her first book of poetry, Gathering the Tribes, was published when she was only 24 and won the award of Yale Series. She was highly glorified for her work and was thought of as extremely astounding for her book and the fact that she is so young. The book was about her childhood and everything that was happening at the time. She did an sensational job of bringing everything together, making her readers feel something when they read it.
The poem, The Colonel, was one of her most popular poems. It was a very moving poem about her meeting with an Salvadoran colonel, she does an remarkable job recreating her encounter with this man. A prominent point in the poem occurs when he empties the bag of human ears onto the table in front of her; she just sit’s there with no words at all. She tells her interviewer that she does “not make judgements” and “doesn’t really know what to think. All she can do is sit their and perceive and try to understand” (poetryfoundation.org).
In 1980 El Salvador’s Civil War officially began; it was against the poor and the wealthy of El Salvador. The poor were trying to overthrow the government because they were doing all the work and they were not being shared the profits equally, so anyone who supported the social and economic reform was killed. According to Maureen Kane, most victims were “unionists, clergy, independent farmers and university officials”. The military death squad destroyed many villages that were suspected of helping the guerrilla efforts. Kane states further that the FMLN were taking out anything that supported the economy and the government. They would capture government officials and kill them; in addition they started taking out buildings and area where government was located. The US fought to stop helping El Salvador because of the rape of women in 1980 and because the US was giving them money and help only to be destroyed and wasted. Kane concluded that over 75,000 people were killed and most were innocent people in the middle of a war. ( Maureen Kane)
Forche’s poem, The Colonel, is a great representation and understanding of everything that was going on during that time in El Salvador.

In the poem, Forche recounts, “ The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves”. Imagine sitting at a table and someone just dumping human ears front of you with no sympathy. What would you have done? He was one of the men in the military going around killing many people within the towns. He must have like to keep the ears of those he killed personally, as if it was some sort of trophy to him. No remorse of the lives he took, innocent or guilty we will never know. He might not even know who they were. All he knew is he took their lives thinking he was doing the right thing. As Forche talks about her experience in one of her interviews with Bill Moyers, she mentions that some of the military thought she was with the US government. She talks about how they thought that she could help them, that the US would want their services, would want to pay them (Bill Moyers). “The Colonel” was about her dinner experience with the high-ranking officer, a very intoxicated and very angry officer who thought she was apart of the goveremnt. Many officers at the time were not happy with our government because of our human rights policy; they thought it was very hypocritical. His way of sending a message to The Carter administration was pouring his victims ears onto the

table; many officers at that time kept a certain trophy from all their victims. (Bill Moyers, John Mann)
In the poem the writer recounts, “Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground”. In Forsche’s interview with Moyer she explains her imagery here. She connects it to the saying “ear to the ground”, saying that its like when a person puts an ear to the ground, he or she can hear a train coming. The colonel in the poem is now dead and so are all of his victims, but this poem is like a memoir, a part of history that is shown and that will never be forgotten. When this poem was mentioned in the Washington Post years later, many of the Salvadoran soldiers were proud, and the soldier that was in this poem was so proud he laminated it and carried it around to show to everyone. (Bill Moyers,)