What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance
- Submitting institution
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University of Newcastle upon Tyne
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 272149-211735-1282
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
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- Publisher
- Allen Lane
- ISBN
- 9780525560371
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- March
- Year of publication
- 2019
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- Written over 15 years, and based on extensive historical research, What You Have Heard Is True is a substantial (400pp) memoir which painstakingly captures the author’s life in El Salvador during the late 1970s. Despite the book’s extended form, the book is stylistically condensed and lyrical, and draws upon the author’s accomplished skills as a poet to capture the limited point of view of the memoir’s young narrator. As Forché’s character changes in the book, so does her memoir’s language.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- What You Have Heard Is True uses the memoir form to examine human-rights abuses in El Salvador and to document the ways in which a life is not singular but is profoundly marked by the encounter with another. In the memoir, Forché looks back to formative experiences as both a poet and a civil rights activist shaped by her time in the late 1970s. This includes, for example, the formative contexts that shaped her major collection The Country Between Us (1981), a book which itself bears witness to what the poet saw in El Salvador. What You Have Heard Is True is inflected by a concern for questions about memory, time and trauma. In many ways it exemplifies her influential notion of ‘poetry of witness’ that was first introduced in her ground-breaking volume, Against Forgetting (1993).
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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