The Angel of History by Carolyn Forché
"The Angel of History" by Carolyn Forché is a poetry collection that reflects on the complexities of human suffering and the burden of historical memory. The title is inspired by Walter Benjamin's concept of the angel of history, who observes the relentless passage of time while grappling with the overwhelming debris of past calamities. Through a chorus of voices, Forché articulates the experiences of individuals affected by significant historical traumas, including the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and various wars and atrocities of the 20th century. The poems often employ fragmented narratives and vivid imagery to create a mosaic of collective memory, emphasizing the interconnectedness of individual suffering within broader historical contexts.
Central to the work is the exploration of the role of God in the face of suffering, as well as the responsibilities of the artist and poet in witnessing and representing these experiences. Forché questions whether the artist should engage deeply with suffering or maintain a critical distance, and she addresses the ethical implications of transforming personal trauma into art. Ultimately, "The Angel of History" serves as a meditation on the act of witnessing as a form of spiritual practice, suggesting that articulating horror can lead to redemption and understanding in a world fraught with chaos and pain. The collection is a compelling invitation to consider the significance of memory and the artistic response to the relentless march of history.
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The Angel of History by Carolyn Forché
First published: New York: HarperCollins, 1994
Genre: Poetry
Subgenre: Lyric poetry
Core issues: Despair; doubt; good vs. evil; knowledge; social action
Overview
The title of Carolyn Forché’s book is drawn from Jewish German Walter Benjamin’s essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940), in which Benjamin talks about the power of history to overwhelm human memory and understanding. The angel of history, Benjamin says, watches events hurtle past, while debris from disaster after disaster piles at his feet. History can be lived meaningfully only through redemptive vision and practice, and otherwise is only a dead set of facts. The angel hopelessly yearns to reassemble the smashed fragments of the past but is rendered unable to engage in that task because of the pressures of the future. Benjamin says, “The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But . . . the storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.”
Benjamin’s angel, who records history as he witnesses it, is the being to whom the multitude of voices in Forché’s book speak. Many of the voices making up the poems are deliberately ambiguous, without gender, and unknowable, mere fragments that swirl past in the whirlwind of history. Others are more developed and specific, allowed to speak at length: Forché’s paternal grandmother Anna, a Czech immigrant; a suicidal mental patient in Paris whose experiences with the Nazis have led him to believe that God is a psychopath; Hungarian poet Miklos Radnoti, found buried in a mass grave of concentration camp victims, his poems crumpled in his pocket; and a survivor of Hiroshima who has become a tour guide in the Garden Shukkei-en, telling a tourist: “We have not, all these years, felt what you call happiness/ But at times, with good fortune, we experience something close.”
The accomplished and moving poems rely on verbal as well as visual fragments to display the historical entities too large to be shown in any other fashion: a boy pedaling a bicycle, blank-eyed, a broken doll in the basket before him; a flock of crows descending on a dead child, pulling at its hair in order to feather their nests; and a hungry baby crawling over its mother’s corpse, crying for milk. Again and again, the poems present individual visual fragments that, collected into a mosaic, show the landscape of death, devastation, war, and horror that makes up the twentieth century. In a similar strategy, Forché presents the group of individual voices speaking at each moment as a means of encapsulating the experience of a group of survivors who become representative of humanity overall and the suffering to which all human beings are subject.
This collection of voices contemplating history in retrospect makes up the voice of the soul, the angel of history seems to insist, as voice after voice passes like a witnessing ghost through the pages of the book. These are the voices that must make sense of the events that they have lived through, as people’s individual souls must make sense of the storm of history whirling around them in their daily lives.
In this way, the narrator of the poems becomes not a single “I,” but rather a collection of history’s voices over the course of the twentieth century, witness after witness to suffering and evil who insist on asking the question, “What place does God have in such a world as this?” From the launching point of this question, Forché posits poetry as a force that enables us to contemplate the sacred. The act of iterating the events, of contemplating horror and transmuting it into something, elevates the soul, and that is the duty of those trying to make sense of this world.
Like Benjamin, Forché sees history, particularly twentieth century history, as an epic story of catastrophe that shows no sign of ever coming to an end. Calamities like the Holocaust, Hiroshima, World War II, the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, Chernobyl, and atrocities in El Salvador appear over and over again like haunting presences in the book, the repetition bonding the past and the present together, as the survivors themselves are haunted by the events that they have been forced to witness.
Forché deals with the intersection of poetry and politics in the poems and says in her foreword:
The Angel of History is not about experiences. It is for me the opening of a wound, the muffling and silence of a decade, and it is also a gathering of utterances that have lifted away from the earth and wrapped it in a weather of risen words. These utterances issue from my own encounter with the events of this century but do not represent “it.” The first-person, free-verse, lyric-narrative poem of my earlier years has given way to a work which has desired its own bodying forth: polyphonic, broken, haunted, and in ruins, with no possibility of restoration.
Indeed, it is the broken nature of history that contains much of its appeal for the writer, and it is the acknowledgment of the brokenness that is created by wanting to fix history that forms the hypnotic maze of fragments that holds the angel of history’s gaze so fixedly and unwaveringly.
Christian Themes
One of the central questions that the multitude of suffering voices that speak in the poems ask in their interrogation of history is “Where is God’s place in a world that is filled with so much suffering?” How, the poems ask, are we to regard a God who seems content to witness suffering rather than alleviate it?
Another core theme of The Angel of History is the responsibility of the Christian poet who witnesses suffering: Should the poet embrace it or keep a distance that allows objective testimony? Where is the dividing line between the impulse to record and the movement to take suffering and transform it for the entertainment of others? Forché writes, “Surely all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end,” and she goes further to ask what the ethical implications are of art arising from such acts.
One of the poems with which The Angel of History is often compared is T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), which attempted a similar task of making sense out of unimaginable horror and its coexistence with the vacuity of modern life and what part faith or spirituality should play. Like Eliot before her, Forché contemplates the position of the spiritual person when confronted with the banality and horror that make up modern existence and tries to determine whether the effort should be to distance oneself from or fully engage with the horror.
In the end, the act of witnessing and the art created by that act of witnessing become the only coherent and meaningful narrative that can be rescued from the chaos of history and the only sign of God’s presence in a world that seems a collision of catastrophic moments. The horrors can be transformed, or so Forché seems to insist, and that act is the only possible spiritual practice in the face of evil.
Sources for Further Study
Ashton, Jennifer. From Modernism to Postmodernism: American Poetry and Theory in the Twentieth Century. Boston: Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture, 2006. This exhaustive collection includes Forché and many of her contemporaries, placing them in their individual spiritual and political traditions.
Bergen, Dan. “Muses of History: ’The Angel of History’ by Carolyn Forché.” The Nation 259, no. 13 (October 24, 1994): 464.
Cohen, Leslie. “Resisting Catastrophe.” Jerusalem Post, May 1, 1997, p. 5.
Forché, Carolyn, ed. Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993. This collection of political poetry was put together by Forché to showcase 140 poets from five continents.
Gregory, Eileen. “Poetry and Survival: H. D. and Carolyn Forché.” In H. D. and Poets After, edited by Donna Krolik Hollenberg. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000.
Mark, Alison, and Deryn Rees-Jones, eds. Contemporary Women’s Poetry: Reading/Writing/Practice. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. This anthology discusses the intersection of women’s political practice and spirituality in the twentieth century.
Owens, Rochelle. Review of “The Angel of History,” by Carolyn Forché. World Literature Today 68, no. 4 (Fall, 1994): 816.
Ratiner, Steven. “Carolyn Forché: The Poetry of Witness.” In Giving Their Word: Conversations with Contemporary Poets, edited by Steven Ratiner. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002.