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

In this article I draw on Carolyn Forché’s memoir What You Have Heard is True (2019) to elucidate the centrality of Paulo Freire’s concept conscientización to her poetics and to poetry of witness, conceptualized by Forché. Analysing key moments in her memoir and poems from The Country Between Us (1982) through the lens of Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and his concept of the limit-situation, I show how two ‘modes’ of poetry of witness – the evidentiary poem and the readerly encounter – expose the force of denial through the creation of limit-situations. Denial is a continuous presence for Forché’s implied readers, situated in the Global North. Thus, poetry of witness invites a process of conscientización that can lead to transformative watershed moments for the reader. This shows how poetry of witness acts as a ‘parola contraria’ to denial, and accounts for its profound transformative potential.