Language and Meaning

Forché's poem shows the insufficiency of language to accurately represent the horrors of violence and war. By using two voices, one a report on the survivor's experience and the other direct speech from the survivor, Forché attempts to show the victim's trauma from two perspectives, as if testimony from the survivor herself were not enough. The survivor tells her companion, "If you want, I'll tell you, but nothing I say will be enough," and at another point she asks, "Perhaps my language is too precise, and therefore too difficult to understand?" The survivor's distrust of language to adequately convey her experience is a distrust shared by many poets and writers, who experiment with point of view, word choice, and narration to evoke rather than represent emotion and events. The shift in the survivor's speech at the end of the poem from concrete to...