Award-winning poet, essayist, and human rights advocate Carolyn Forché stressed the significance of using literary art as a form of witness— particularly in times of oppression and dictatorship— to a nearly-packed room in Brennan Hall’s Pearn Auditorium on Feb. 16.  Forché’s lecture, “The Voice of Witness,” was presented by Education for Justice and featured a number of historical poems of witness interwoven with personal anecdotes and poems inspired by her travels to Eastern Europe and El Salvador.

Forché began by explaining how poetry is used to recount times of injustice and suffering, such as during World War II, and described the art’s function of bringing history to life decades after it took place.  

“Aftermath became in this way a temporal debris field where historical remains are strewn…large events and those regarded as peripheral or lost, where that which happens remains present, including the consciousness in which such events arose and transpired,” Forché said.

She discussed her experience in El Salvador during the Salvadoran Civil War and how it changed her not just as a person, but as a poet with a newfound meaning of poetry of witness.

“In my sense of the term, it is a form of reading than of writing, of a reader’s encounter with the literature of that which happened, and its mode is evidentiary rather than representational,” she said. 

She also addressed the power of language and how easily it can be distorted, diminished or even developed. “There are things about language— how language can be damaged, how German was damaged in the mouths of the guards and the camps, how language can be crippled in misuse, how language can be illuminated and full of grace in another kind of use,” she said. She further drew upon the magnitude of language, encouraging students to not be afraid to use it, and to perfect and practice whatever their talents may be. “We are all sent to do something here…that something is your vocation,” Forché said. “That something has to be made beautiful; that something has to be nourished.”