Reading Ourselves or Nothing, by Carolyn Forche

Shona's Shennanigans

She reads it better, here on youtube: Carolyn Forche performs her poem "Ourselves or Nothing." It is dedicated to the late Terrence Des Pres, whose book The Survivor, a much-admired account of holocaust survivors' will to bear witness, entailed a great struggle for the author. Forche, who knew Des Pres later, witnessed forms of that struggle. Des Pres taught at Colgate University and he was one of the first to offer a course in the literature of the holocaust (in the mid-1970s). The poem refers to Forche's own work in El Salvador supporting those who bore witness to atrocities committed there. https://youtu.be/5jIiRvFRj18