To Forché, he is a mentor, and that is the role he plays in the book. As readers we understand that Gomez Vides deliberately presents himself as a mystery he is a man who has posters of both Che Guevara and Mussolini in one of his homes so as not to reveal his political leanings, at least on the surface level.īut the crux of his identity is besides the point. The stranger is Leonel Gomez Vides, and he is central to Carolyn Forché’s riveting memoir, “ What You Have Heard Is True,” a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for non-fiction. El Salvador is about to go to war, and she needs to bear witness, to make people in North America understand. It is the 1970s, and she is needed, the stranger tells her. It begins with a stranger in a white Toyota Hiace with an El Salvador license plate, the car that pulls up outside poet Carolyn Forché’s house in California.
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