Keynote Speaker: Marjorie Agosín
Marjorie Agosín, human rights activist, writer, and scholar, was born in Bethesda, MD, in 1955, but her family returned to Chile when she was only three months old. A descendant of Russian and Austrian Jews who fled pogroms and the Holocaust, she grew up in Santiago de Chile, where she attended the Instituto Hebreo (Jewish school) until she was fourteen. Then, the Pinochet dictatorship forced her family into exile. In 1971, they moved to the U.S., where Agosín completed her education. She is currently a professor of Latin American Studies at Wellesley College, MA. Agosín has won several awards for her human rights work, including the Good Neighbor Award given by the Conference of Christians and Jews and the Jeanette Rankin Award in 1995. She received also in 1995 two prestigious literary prizes: the Letras de Oro prize for poetry, and the Latino Literature Prize for her poetry collection Toward the Splendid City (1994).
Agosín is one of the most prolific Latin American women writers living in the US. She has published over 20 books of poetry, four books that could be defined as either autobiographical fiction or memoirs, three collections of short fiction, and 10 books that include scholarly work and personal essays devoted to women and human rights. She is also the editor of 18 anthologies of literary works, literary criticism, and autobiographical writings.
Her poetry, fiction, and most of her essays are published in Spanish. Her early poetry collections were first published in Latin America, but her latest poems have been first published in the U.S. in bilingual editions. Her autobiographical writings focus on her family background and her personal experience of displacement as a Jewish Chilean woman in the U.S. She defines herself as Latin American, rather than Latina, and considers herself primarily a poet. Cultural translation is an essential aspect of her works as a committed writer, educator, and scholar. As an editor, she is mainly interested in giving visibility to Latin American literature and culture, and especially women’s contributions in literature and in the arts.
In her creative works, Agosín retells her personal story from multiple perspectives, using different genres (mostly poetry) and discourses (mostly on feminism and human rights). She is especially interested in bridging collective and personal suffering as a way to empower damaged individuals and communities, as well as a way to educate the general public. To do so, she writes about her unique family background. For example, in The Alphabet in my Hands: A Writing Life (2000), she writes about her maternal great-grandmother, who fled Nazi Austria for Valparaíso, Chile, in 1939. She recreates a dialogue with her mother through fictional characters in A Cross and a Star: Memoirs of a Jewish Girl in Chile (1995), and devotes Always from Somewhere Else: A Memoir of My Chilean Jewish Father (1998) to her father, whose parents escaped pogroms in Odessa and settled down in Chile after migrating across Europe. In autobiographical works such as Circle of Madness: Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (1992) and Dear Anne Frank: Poems (1994, 1997), the stories of different generations of Agosín’s family allow her to build bridges between two dramatic experiences of displacement of the twentieth century: the Holocaust and repression in Chile.
In her latest works, even though she maintains an interest in hybrid literary genres and multiperspectivism, there is an expansion toward issues affecting women and human rights globally, beyond geopolitical boundaries. Secrets in the Sand: The Young Women of Juárez (2006) is a good example of her most recent approach. Her book is the first poetry collection that deals with femicide in Ciudad Juárez. Bilingual versions of the poems are particularly effective not only to represent conflict and violence in the borderlands but also to reach wider audiences and a Latino readership in the U.S. The authorial voice is prominent throughout the poems, but the fictional voices of the victims and their families haunt us constantly as apparitions in a violent, hallucinatory urban environment: the “gagged city” of Ciudad Juárez. This combination of perspectives in a liminal space allows Agosín to make new, innovative global connections between her personal story of displacement, and the violation of human rights at the US-Mexico border:
Las he visto antes |
I have seen them before |
Eventually, Agosín’s concerns and strategies have to do with the emergence of a feminist human rights discourse in literature that should not be ignored. Her works remind activists, writers, scholars, and educators (Agosín’s peers) of the essential function of literature as a tool for intellectual intervention. Overall, her writings teach us how to read the contemporary global scene through a complex interconnection of local and global discourses and vivencias (experiences).
Works by Marjorie Agosín
Poetry
Conchalí (1980)
Brujas y algo más/Witches and Other Things (1984)
Women of Smoke (1987)
Zones of Pain (1988)
Bonfires (1990)
Generous Journeys (1992)
Circle of Madness: Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (1992)
Sargasso (1993)
Toward the Splendid City (1994)
Dear Anne Frank: Poems (1994, 1997)
Starry Night (1996)
Council of the Fairies (1997)
Las chicas desobedientes (1997)
Melodious Women (1998)
An Absence of Shadows (1998)
Lluvia en el desierto/Rain in the Desert (1999)
El ángel de la memoria/The Angel of Memory (2001)
At the Threshold of Memory: New ans Selected Poems (2003)
Among the Angels of Memory/Entre los ángeles de la memoria (2006)
Secrets in the Sand: The Young Women of Juárez (2006)
Cartographies: Meditations on Travel (2007)
Autobiographical Fiction, Memoirs, and Letters
A Cross and a Star: Memoirs of a Jewish Girl in Chile (1995)
Always from Somewhere Else: A Memoir of My Chilean Jewish Father (1998)
The Alphabet in my Hands: A Writing Life (2000)
[with Emma Sepúlveda] Amigas: Letters of Friendship and Exile (2000)
Fiction
La felicidad/Happiness (1993)
Furniture Dreams (1995)
Women in Disguise: Stories (1996)
Non-Fiction
Pablo Neruda (1986)
Scraps of Life: The Chilean Arpilleras: Chilean Women and the Pinochet Dictatorship (1987)
The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo: The Story of Renee Eppelbaum (1989)
Women of Smoke: Latin American Women in Literature and Life (1989)
Hay otra voz: Essays on Hispanic Women Poets (1995)
Ashes of Revolt: Essays (1996)
Tapestries of Hope, Threads of Love: The Arpillera Movement in Chile, 1974-1994 (1996)
Passion, Memory and Identity: Twentieth-century Latin American Jewish Women Writers (1999)
The Invisible Dreamer: Memory, Judaism and Human Rights (2001)
Women, Gender, and Human Rights: A Global Perspective (2001)
Books Edited
María Luisa Bombal: Critical Essays (1987)
Landscapes of a New Land: Short Fiction by Latin American Women (1989)
Secret Weavers: Stories of the Fantastic by Women of Argentina and Chile (1992)
Surviving Beyond Fear: Women, Children and Human Rights in Latin America (1993)
A Gabriela Mistral Reader (1993)
These are Not Sweet Girls: Poetry by Latin American Women (1994)
What is Secret: Stories by Chilean Women (1995)
A Dream of Light and Shadows: Portraits of Latin American Women Writers (1995)
A Necklace of Words: Mexican Women Writers (1997)
Magic Sites: Women Travelers to the Americas (1997)
A Woman’s Gaze: Latin American Women Artists (1998)
A Map of Hope: Women Writers and Human Rights (1999)
The House of Memory: Stories by Jewish Women Writers of Latin America (1999)
Uncertain Travelers: Jewish Women Emigrants to the Americas (1999)
Taking Root: Narratives of Jewish Women in Latin America (2002)
To Mend the World: Women Reflect on 9/11 (2002)
Gabriela Mistral: The Audacious Traveler (2003)
Writing Toward Hope: The Literature of Human Rights in Latin America (2006)
Internet Resources on Marjorie Agosín
www.justbuffalo.org/media/pdf/Agosin_Resource.pdf
A “Reader’s Resource Guide”, educational resource
http://voices.cla.umn.edu/authors/MarjoriesAgosin.html
“Voices From the Gaps.” Includes a profile, biography, bibliography, secondary bibliography and links to other resources
http://www.wellesley.edu/PublicAffairs/Profile/af/magosin.html
Wellesley College profile
http://www.cwru.edu/pubs/cnews/1997/9-4/chileart.htm
Information on arpilleras—Chilean folk-art tapestries—from Marjorie Agosín’s 1997 traveling exhibit of her private collection of 40 arpilleras
http://www.wingspress.com/Titles/agosin.html
http://www.shermanasher.com/featureslluvia.html
Information on Rain in the Desert, including some poems