I felt that to lose my language was to lose my soul, my being, and again, it's the image of being in a void. I think to be displaced is like in a voi… - Marjorie Agosín

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 sky has the same constellations. The trees and the faunas do not have the same names or sounds, or the rubbish the same smell. How does one recover the familiar? How does one name the unfamiliar? How can one be another or live in a foreign language? These are the dilemmas of one who writes in Spanish and lives in translation.

To be Jewish in Chile was to be above all a foreigner

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.