Here in the United States where I have lived since I was a young girl, the solitude of exile makes me feel that so little is mine; that not even the … - Marjorie Agosín

Quite close together, in the warmness of shared bodies, they dared to dream of the sea. Some imagined it as the deep well of the soul; others sketched it out like the face of a drowned man, weighed down with broken seaweed and shells. (first lines of "First Time to the Sea")

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.

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