‘From Now On’ : Concientización, Evidentiary Poems and Readerly Encounters in the Work of Carolyn Forché

Gräbner, Cornelia (2023) ‘From Now On’ : Concientización, Evidentiary Poems and Readerly Encounters in the Work of Carolyn Forché. Comparative Critical Studies. ISSN 1744-1854 (In Press)

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Abstract

The publication of Carolyn Forché’s memoir What You Have Heard is True (2019) permits new insights into the emergence of her poetics and especially, the centrality of conscientización to her work as a poet, translator and anthologist. Drawing on the conceptualization of conscientización put forward by Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I explore the interplay between this process and two of the ‘modes’ of poetry of witness identified by Forché: the evidentiary poem and the readerly encounter. For the implied reader of Forché’s poetry and anthologies – situated in the Global North – a critical reading of the limit-situations imposed by denial is a crucial element of evidentiary poems and of the readerly encounter with them. Through evidentiary poems and readerly encounters, poetry of witness invites a process of conscientización in the implied reader and in so doing, creates a ‘parola contraria ’ to denial and facilitates the capacity for transformation.