“NAMING REALITY” With Poet, Journalist, and Activist Gabriel Furshong

Recently, I spoke with the writer Gabriel Furshong, who has just released a collection of poems detailing his experiences in Guatemala, engaging with the complex history of its people and the violence detailed throughout. He and I discussed the impacts of several moments in both Guatemalan and his own history, and how each of these aspects influenced the work he has put out and the importance in keeping history in more current discussions through art.

In your preface, you use the phrase “naming reality”. In this age of fairly constant media bias, how do you feel that poetry and poets can uniquely “name reality”?

The phrase “naming reality” is borrowed from Czesław Miłosz. It’s a statement of purpose or intent for poets working under certain conditions that he returned to repeatedly in a set of four lectures delivered in 1981 and 1982 while he was the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University. They were later collected in a small book titled The Witness of Poetry. Here’s an excerpt from the final lecture, The Ruins of Poetry, published by The New York Times Book Review in 1983.

“A hierarchy of needs is built into the very structure of reality and is revealed when a misfortune touches a human collective, whether that be war, the rule of terror, or natural catastrophe. Then to satisfy hunger is more important than finding food that suits one’s taste; the simplest act of human kindness toward a fellow being acquires more importance than any refinement of the mind. The fate of a city, of a country, becomes the center of everyone’s attention, and there is a sudden drop in the number of suicides committed because of disappointed love or psychological problems. A great simplification of everything occurs, and people ask themselves why they took to heart matters that now seem to have no weight. And, evidently, one’s attitude toward the language also changes. It recovers its simplest function and is again an instrument serving a purpose; no one doubts that the language must name reality, which exists objectively, massive, tangible, and terrifying in its concreteness.” 

In Guatemala, a “rule of terror” was imposed by the United States in 1954, when the CIA overthrew democratically elected President Jacobo Árbenz, and it was carefully sustained over four decades by U.S. politicians and militarists who trained legions of young Guatemalan men to torture, rape, and murder. We refer to this “misfortune” as a civil war when it was, in fact, an imperial project that enabled a genocide of Mayan peoples.

Both then and now, the denial of human experience is essential to the efforts of those who wish to accumulate wealth and power in the hands of the few. The official line in Guatemala: the church was empty, the village was relocated, her whereabouts are unknown. The official line in the United States: limited support for security operations against violent insurgents. 

Yet, because reality is observed and recorded, we know the church was full of children, the villagers are buried beneath the village square, and she was tortured for many days in a numbered room of a government building. We know the United States established specific training protocols to sustain terror, and taxpayer funding for this purpose was precisely documented. So, we rely on anyone with this knowledge to convey it to others so that we may construct a shared perception of reality. We rely especially on journalists who are paid to bear witness and accurately convey what they have witnessed to a wider world. 

I believe we can also rely on poets and poetry to access and call attention to truth in ways that are different from truth-seeking journalists, lawyers, researchers, and anthropologists. We can rely on poets in this way because poetry is the language of invention, and it exists to transcend the usual limits of the written word. It can draw from many wells: the plain language of reportage, the personal language of memory, the clinical language of biology, and the metaphorical language of literature. As such, poetry has a superior capability to facilitate comprehension of what we might otherwise consider intellectually unimaginable. It can conjure empathy for those who have experienced events that we might otherwise consider emotionally unrelatable. 

For example, when we read Ezzideen Shehab’s poem “And Hunger Was Given Dominion Over Us,” we are called to witness in various ways. We receive a report of the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, including a quote from a doctor, “a man who once delivered babies, who now delivers bodies.” We are given memories of the Al-Baqa’a Café: “A café by the sea. A place of books and coffee and long talks about impossible futures.” We also experience a poetic transversal from the description of a singular event, the carefully mismanaged distribution of food aid to starving people, to a metaphorical verification of how hunger inspires violence—and not just their hunger but our hunger, hunger itself.

They do not run when the signal comes.
They are unleashed. “Go.” A single syllable that tears them open like wolves.
Five hundred boxes. Ten thousand men. And they fight.
Not out of cruelty, but because hunger is older than kindness.

So, yes, I believe poets and poetic writers—anyone who writes with an eye and ear for poetic practice—have exceptional methods for opening our hearts and minds to the suffering of others. I also believe poets who reflect on Miłosz’s advice, even if they do not always follow it, have a better chance of naming reality because they are paying particular attention to a hierarchy of needs, because they struggle to avoid the overwhelming temptation to avert their eyes and stop their ears, and because they wish to resist the impulse to adorn reality, which is always plain, always and only the bare skin of being.

While working on poems like these which deal with such a serious, real-world event, how do you, as a poet but also, in this situation, a semi-journalist, balance personal artistic style with clarity of idea?

I was nineteen when I first visited Guatemala, and I didn’t begin working as a freelance journalist until 2007, years after my last visit to the country. For periods of time, however, I lived with my older brother who worked in Guatemala City as a journalist for Inforpress Centroamericana, and I sometimes joined him on reporting trips. 

During the eleven months I spent in Guatemala, across four trips in five years, I was primarily a language student, tourist, and diarist. I was mostly self-involved. I read and wrote as a matter of necessity because the way I felt about myself and where I came from were upset or overturned by the people I met and places I visited. 

At the same time, I gave my labor to others. I volunteered with several different non-profit organizations including an orphanage, a weaving cooperative, and an NGO that arranged human rights accompaniment for autonomous communities aligned with the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico. I organized events back home and raised money for Families of the Disappeared in Guatemala (FAMDEGUA) and other organizations doing life-saving work. I came to know many remarkable people who shared personal stories with me, and I was changed by what they told me and what they showed me. 

I share this background because there are many ways we can enter a community that is not our own: through acts of political solidarity, mutual education, social service, journalistic endeavor, religious practice, or artistic interest. Naturally, these decisions over whether and how to connect with others involve questions of empathy, sacrifice, and privilege. I don’t want to tire readers by describing this background, but I do want to clarify that I entered the community in limited ways while I was in Guatemala, so the value of what I have to share—the value of these poems—is also limited. 

Now, I think your question is probing not only how our role influences what we witness but also how we bear witness—how we relate what we have witnessed to a wider world, which is not only a process of sharing what we hear or see but also a process of interpreting what we hear or see. It is a process of figuring out what things mean and attempting to express their meaning. 

So, how do I balance artistic style with clarity of idea? I suppose I have tried to avoid looking at these poems as accounts of historical events or as works of art. They are not. They are encounters, observations, reflections, and questions from time spent in a war-torn country. As a writer, I’ve tried to hold my attention on the words and images that I heard and saw in Guatemala, which I feel morally obligated to share and to share in ways that might open the minds and bodies of readers to people and places they’ve likely never met or visited. 

My intent has been to exercise loyalty to clear memories and plain language, and perhaps these are journalistic devices or standards that have infiltrated my poetic practice. I’ve returned constantly to Miłosz, Forché, Celan, and to first-person testimony of torture, massacre, and genocide to reestablish my compass points as a witness rather than a victim of events. When I’ve lacked clarity, I’ve tried to use my imagination with great caution. And I’ve tried to maintain a precise awareness of the distance I keep from the suffering I recognize and to interrogate this distance in full view of anyone who reads these poems.

How do you feel that images of beauty and horror interact throughout these pieces? How do you go about divining the beautiful from the horror contained within these various snapshots?

Should words be beautifully arranged to describe human suffering? If the answer is yes, then should they be beautifully arranged to describe mass murder, infanticide, or rape? If the answer is still yes, then how should we act on these affirmations? These are questions that have troubled poets for centuries, and like Miłosz, many have offered useful replies. 

I believe all poets should at least write with a heightened awareness of our desire to enhance images so that readers might also feel what we feel. We know this desire can lead to a transformative connection between writer and reader and between the image and the imagination. For this reason, we habitually work to renew or refresh images—with metaphor or rhyme, for example—in ways that encourage readers to lend their full attention. 

When writing about certain times and places, however, this instinct to deepen the colors of what we experience or observe can inadvertently reimagine that which is singularly terrible. The result, then, might accidently alter images that are actually horrifying. Such alternations can reinforce misunderstandings of human suffering and diminish opportunity for empathy. Such mistakes might divert readers’ attention away from what has actually happened and toward descriptions of what is merely imagined. 

When I lived and traveled in postwar Guatemala, between 2000 and 2005—and while writing and revising the poems gathered in this chapbook—I became aware of these risks and have long tried to avoid them. Of course, I sometimes failed and had to seek correction. It remains possible that some readers will notice persistent failures in these poems, and if so, then I would ask their forgiveness. My intent, at least, has been to follow Miłosz’s advice and allow my attitude toward language to be changed by what I have seen and heard. 

I have also sought to pay out the attention that understanding costs. I’ve tried to remain hyperaware of how my mind and body respond to the decisions I make as a writer: when to provide report, when to infer meaning, when to attempt a description of the feelings of others, when to describe my own feelings, what to make of the distance between myself and the suffering of others, and how to characterize the privilege that governs that distance. 

I’ve tried to make these decisions ethically and effectively, but it is important to acknowledge that this trying is not an act that can ever be finished, and the results of this trying cannot be resolved as entirely ethical or effective or, for that matter, simply unethical or ineffective. 

As Omar El-Akkad has written, “Language is never sufficient. There is not enough of it to make a true mirror of living. The soothing or afflictive effect of stories we tell is not in whether we select the right words, but in our proximity to what the right words might be. This is not some abstraction, but a very real expression of power—the privilege of describing a thing vaguely, incompletely, dishonestly, is inseparable from the privilege of looking away.”

How does writing from the first-person point of view influence how you engage with the stories? How does it affect your writing process?

In these poems, I’ve used the first-person singular when the relationship between myself and who I’m seeing or listening to feels immediately relevant to the poem. For example, in “Things Children See,” a wordless exchange takes place between me and a girl who is mistreating her younger sibling. Because this exchange troubled me, the poem is simultaneously about what I’m physically seeing and about why I feel troubled. Then again, it’s also about the nature of seeing across distance, about how we can feel connected to a stranger and disconnected from that stranger at the same moment.

On the topic of perspective, perspective changes take place quite often across this collection, as you employ “you”, “we”, “I” and the omnipotent third person. How might a perspective such as the one in “A Fighter Returns to the Field” influence the opposite decision to use the omnipotent narrator voice found in a piece like “Pigeon Hunter”?

I don’t recall deliberating much over how these poems were voiced. I’m sure the voice in each poem evolved during years of revision, but each poem’s voice also seemed inherent from the beginning. Your question, though, makes me think more deeply about why the voice changes from poem to poem, and I suppose there are several reasons. 

I use the first-person collective in “A Fighter Returns to the Field” because the poem documents several experiences that occurred during a three-day trek that my older brother and I took with a former Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG) soldier in San Marcos Department. 

In “Light” and “Pigeon Hunter,” I use the third-person objective because the relationship between the witness and those who are witnessed is not a subject of either poem. The people who animate these two poems were only tangentially aware of my presence. In the first case, I was one person in a group of people listening to a woman’s personal account of state terror. In the second, I was casually observing the movements and conversation of pigeon hunters in Guatemala City’s central square. 

In “Unrestored,” a long poem divided into four sections across nine pages, I use both the first person collective and the third person for reasons already mentioned above. It’s worth noting, however, that both voices describe a similar sense of alienation and bewilderment in the struggle toward understanding and relationship. An echo, perhaps, of the Salvadoran poet and activist Roque Dalton’s assertion that we are all inherently alike one another, that “my veins don’t end in me,” but also a reminder that experience divides us—a reminder of the distance that lies between perception and empathy and between empathy and solidarity.