“The Colonel” by Carolyn Forché: A Critical Analysis

• State Violence and the Normalization of Atrocity
  The Colonel by Carolyn Forché exposes how extreme state violence becomes disturbingly normalized within authoritarian power structures, presenting brutality not as an aberration but as an everyday administrative reality. The poem situates political terror within a domestic setting—coffee trays, family routines, polite conversation—thereby collapsing the boundary between private life and institutional cruelty. This normalization is most powerfully articulated through the colonel’s casual display of severed human ears, which are treated not as evidence of crime but as conversational props. The horror lies not merely in the violence itself but in the perpetrator’s ease, his bureaucratic confidence, and his belief that governance necessitates such acts. Forché thus critiques a system in which violence is routinized, justified through political rhetoric, and absorbed into social custom. The poem forces readers to confront how authoritarian regimes depend not only on coercion but also on the moral desensitization of those who exercise power.

• Silencing, Surveillance, and the Politics of Listening
  The Colonel by Carolyn Forché centrally interrogates the politics of listening, using the recurring motif of ears to symbolize surveillance, silenced dissent, and the contested terrain of testimony. The severed ears represent those who once listened, spoke, or resisted, and whose punishment was mutilation—both literal and symbolic. In this context, the act of listening becomes politically dangerous, while enforced silence becomes a tool of governance. The colonel’s obsession with ears reflects a regime that fears what it cannot fully control: memory, communication, and the circulation of truth. Even after being discarded, some ears are described as “pressed to the ground,” suggesting that suppressed voices continue to listen, record, and bear witness beyond death. Through this unsettling image, Forché asserts that authoritarian power can maim bodies but cannot fully extinguish perception or historical memory, thereby reaffirming listening as a form of resistance.

• Poetry as Witness and Ethical Responsibility
  The Colonel by Carolyn Forché positions poetry as an ethical act of witnessing rather than aesthetic detachment, explicitly challenging the poet’s role in relation to political violence. The colonel’s taunting remark—“Something for your poetry, no?”—forces a confrontation between art and atrocity, implying that poetry risks complicity if it merely observes without moral engagement. Forché rejects the notion of poetry as ornament or escape, instead advancing a poetics grounded in responsibility, testimony, and historical record. The poem functions as documentary evidence, insisting that language must register suffering truthfully, even at the cost of comfort or beauty. By refusing metaphorical distance at key moments, the poem compels readers to acknowledge their own position as witnesses. In this way, poetry becomes not a refuge from violence but a medium through which violence is exposed, remembered, and ethically confronted.

• Hypocrisy of Power and the Illusion of Civility
  The Colonel by Carolyn Forché dismantles the illusion of civility that often masks political repression, revealing how refinement and brutality coexist within structures of power. The colonel’s cultivated environment—fine food, polite conversation, cultured manners—stands in grotesque contrast to the violence he orchestrates, highlighting the hypocrisy at the heart of authoritarian leadership. Governance is discussed as a technical difficulty rather than a moral catastrophe, reducing human suffering to an administrative inconvenience. This façade of order allows atrocity to appear rational, even necessary, while insulating perpetrators from accountability. Forché suggests that such hypocrisy is more dangerous than overt barbarism because it normalizes cruelty under the guise of stability and decorum. By exposing this contradiction, the poem critiques not only tyrants but also global audiences who may be seduced by surface civility and fail to interrogate the violence sustaining it.

◆ Question 1: How does the poem transform personal witnessing into political testimony?

“The Colonel” by Carolyn Forché transforms private observation into public testimony by positioning the speaker as a reluctant but ethically compelled witness to state-sponsored violence, thereby collapsing the boundary between personal experience and political responsibility. The poem opens with an assertion of truth—“WHAT YOU HAVE HEARD is true”—which establishes a testimonial framework rather than a lyrical one, and this insistence on factual accuracy continues through the speaker’s restrained, documentary tone. By narrating ordinary domestic details alongside extraordinary cruelty, the speaker refuses sensationalism and instead allows the facts themselves to indict the regime. Moreover, the speaker’s silence—reinforced by the warning “say nothing”—mirrors the enforced muteness of victims, making the act of later narration a form of resistance. Through this strategy, Forché turns poetry into an archival space where suppressed histories are preserved, ensuring that private witnessing becomes a moral and political act addressed to the global reader.

● Question 2: In what ways does the poem critique the relationship between power and language?

“The Colonel” by Carolyn Forché offers a profound critique of how authoritarian power manipulates, empties, and ultimately destroys language, particularly the language of rights and morality. The colonel’s explicit dismissal of human rights—“tell your people they can go fuck themselves”—demonstrates how political authority reduces ethical discourse to obscenity, replacing reasoned governance with brute force. Language in the poem is repeatedly shown to fail: conversation drifts aimlessly, television broadcasts are trivial, and even poetry is mocked as a decorative afterthought to violence. Yet, paradoxically, the poem itself resists this collapse by insisting on precise description, most notably in the line “There is no other way to say this,” which asserts the necessity of naming atrocity accurately. The severed ears, symbols of listening and speech, further reinforce this critique by embodying silenced voices, suggesting that when power annihilates language, poetry must reclaim it as an instrument of truth.

■ Question 3: How does juxtaposition function as a moral strategy in the poem?

“The Colonel” by Carolyn Forché employs stark juxtaposition as a deliberate moral strategy designed to expose the normalization of terror within structures of everyday life. The calm domestic setting—complete with family rituals, fine food, polite conversation, and even a parrot—stands in chilling contrast to the sudden appearance of mutilated human ears, creating a cognitive and ethical dissonance for the reader. This contrast forces an awareness that violence is not an aberration but an integrated feature of authoritarian governance, comfortably coexisting with bourgeois refinement. By refusing transitional commentary, Forché allows the juxtaposition itself to perform the ethical work, compelling readers to confront how easily atrocity is accommodated within systems of privilege and power. The technique dismantles any illusion that brutality occurs only in chaotic or visibly monstrous spaces, revealing instead that the most extreme violence often operates behind polished surfaces, sustained by social rituals that conceal moral collapse.

▲ Question 4: What is the significance of the poem’s final image of the ears “pressed to the ground”?

“The Colonel” by Carolyn Forché concludes with one of the most haunting images in contemporary political poetry, as the ears “pressed to the ground” signify the persistence of listening, memory, and testimony even after extreme dehumanization. This image reverses the colonel’s attempt to render his victims silent, suggesting that truth cannot be fully eradicated by violence. Although the ears are severed from bodies, they retain a symbolic capacity to hear, implying that the oppressed continue to bear witness beyond death and that history itself remains attentive to injustice. The line also implicates the reader, who becomes the one now listening, positioned ethically as a receiver of this testimony. In this way, the poem refuses closure or consolation, ending instead with an enduring demand for attention and accountability, reinforcing Forché’s central claim that poetry must serve as a site of moral listening in the aftermath of political terror.