Marjorie Agosín Quotes

Translations are like crossings of borders, crossings of landscapes, crossings of voices.

The blue cloud finally opens-just when the bell rings to let the Juana Ross School out for the weekend. (first sentence)

In the face of fear and death these testimonies say "no" to silence and to the fate of all the people missing in a subhuman and diabolical world. What would the political history of Argentina have been without the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo with their white kerchieves embroidered with the initials of their disappeared loved ones? Would the world, so often indifferent and astonished, have learned about the almost 30,000 people who disappeared in Argentina during the "dirty war"? From these spoils, writers, activists, and ordinary citizens constructed a language against authoritarianism, a language that accuses, denounces, and feels; words are the fundamental weapon against indifference, fear, and forgetfulness.

translators are the messengers of the spirit. You bring a message to someone who does not understand the original.

As a child I would always be asked whether I was Jewish or Chilean and, thus, my identity became always conflicted, always a matter of either/or and seldom both. ("Jewish Women in Latin America")

if we don't record this, through language, I feel memory vanishes. It's like almost—who said that, Virginia Woolf or someone—"What you don't put down doesn't exist." And that has been my preoccupation, my obsession, really.

"I am not worried about earthquakes that come from the ground as much as those that are born in the soul...When the earth trembles and you don't have anything to hold on to, you can't steady yourself. It seems like even your house, which you thought was so safe, is nothing but a flimsy raft being knocked about by waves...Our souls can crumble when we don't care about our neighbors, or when we say hateful things about others, or exclude people for being different. But remember, Celeste, that there are always so many more ways to heal and help a soul than to break one. Human beings are just like the earth. We want to be whole. Remember that. Promise?" (p44-5)

Writing is a body of human expression, in which the daily conventions of our lives join with the ambiguities and subtleties of literature. But we must add in the bodies of the disappeared without identity, without memory-and this becomes the existential body of this literature that is not quieted by the dominant ideology or its power to deny what is happening. In the context of the early 1970s, it is impossible to deny the bodies floating by the banks of the Mapocho River in Santiago. It is impossible to look at the streets of El Salvador and not see the mutilated bodies strewn throughout. The literature of this period gathers the victimized bodies and arms them with words; it restores them and offers them dignity.

Women and women artists are looking at a place to belong in the world and to call home in a very particular way. I think that women are looking for a place that will allow them to be visible. I think we live in very conflicted gender times, and most of it is the possibility for visibility: visibility as creators, visibility in the home. If you look at the whole scope of the human rights situation, you see how women are always hidden, even the veil is a form of hiding. So I think that home is to become visible.

Magic is another way of looking at the world. Magic cultivates the art of intuition and appreciation for the unexpected. Magic interprets the world through signs. In Latin America people live in a state of magic so I inherited this way of being. (2014)

At times of great political repression, literature acquires a powerful function: It legitimizes artistic expression in a totalitarian society whose government prohibits this expression. Women writers, through their words and stories, manage to reaffirm what the greater society has denied. Paradoxically, if patriarchal societies have historically denied the presence of women writers, and also those who write about politics, the existence of extreme conditions due to political and civil violence has allowed these women writers to create and through their texts become visible.

Home is understanding and being understood.

It is so important to learn how other people live; to become familiar with a language that is not your own; to feel like a stranger. You will have great empathy for and great understanding of the world around you.

To write is also to bear witness, to resist the dehumanization of the world, and to tell and reveal.

Writing and culture are very much related to the possibilities of the human imagination. The capacity of language allows the imagination to flow and to transform and mend the world.