To live in exile is to lose the familiarity of your own face, and walk
the streets of foreign cities without being recognized by anyone.
For a writer, exile is the solitude imposed in the house of memory,
the mirrors we carry around inside.
My father, Moises Agosin,
whose very name evokes
exodus, landed in Chile in
1926 aboard a fragile craft for
refugees and dreamers. He was
born in Marseilles, though his par-
ents were Russian Jews who had
Marjorie Agosin is a Chilean poet and
professor of Spanish literature at
Wellesley College. She is the author of A
Cross and a Star: Reminiscences of a
Jewish Girl in Chile, forthcoming from the
University of New Mexico Press. Trans-
lated from the Spanish by Mark Fried
fled the pogroms of Czar Nicholas.
Exile, always being from some-
where else, feeling separate and
different, is still an essential part of
my history and my identity. My
grandparents on my father’s side
spoke Russian, French and Turkish,
since before Marseilles they had
spent three years in Istanbul.
People say history moves in
cycles, repeats itself, but it is also
filled with mysterious chance
occurrences, unforeseeable coinci-
dences. My own exile was part of a
family tradition linked to the
vagabond fate of the Jewish people.
I also suffered exile, but I didn’t
travel in a cargo ship across the
Atlantic to the Pacific. We crossed
vast expanses in a giant airplane
that reminded me of a mischievous
bird turning pirouettes in the sky.
Back then, I was an adolescent who
oved the Beatles, black clothes,
Neruda’s poetry and my country, Chile.
In 1974, one year after the military
coup that overthrew President
Salvador Allende, my parents decid-
ed to go into exile, to leave their
country and our extended family in
order to live in freedom. They left
so that we would not have to attend
universities controlled by the mili-
ary or have to ask permission every
time we wished to get together with
more than three people at a time.
We left Chile one beautiful
September day. The myrrhs, those
lovely bushes of the Southern
Hemisphere, were in bloom, yel-
low, like butterflies suspended in
the air. I gazed nostalgically at the
Andes, splendid and majestic, and I
recalled that my mother’s parents
had crossed them by mule from the
Argentine border. Now I joined
them, joined that history of pilgrim-
age. This time not for being a Jew,
but for being a socialist. Just as my
grandparents arrived in Chile in
NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 12JOURNAL/ CHILE
search of political and religious
refuge, my parents and brothers,
nearly half a century later, aban-
doned that country which had
opened its doors to so many immi-
grants during the two world wars.
Now we too were searching for
the peace and freedom of expres-
sion all refugees long for, but with
the difference that my parents
belonged to an intellectual elite and
we were headed for a powerful
country: the United States. When I
got there, I did not know how to
speak English, and learning was a
painful and lonely venture. My
classmates in the public school of
Athens, Georgia made fun of me.
They called me “Jew” and
“Latina.” (In the early 1970s, mul-
ticulturalism was not yet in fash-
ion.) I couldn’t defend myself, or
even speak at all. Though I had left
behind the censors of my own
country, I found myself silenced
once again (in a democracy!). Since
the United States was responsible
for the military coup that overthrew
the government of Salvador
Allende, I felt as if I were living in
the country that had betrayed my
own. Because of that, and of my
scanty knowledge of English, I
grew quiet. For a long time, I lived
in the expanses of silence that bit
by bit were transformed into the
texts of my poems.
In my adolescence in Georgia, I
began to write long letters to my
girlfriends, asking about the weath-
er, certain flowers, fragrances, cer-
tain streets. I wanted to reconstruct
all I had lost and all I longed for:
my house, my grandparents’ gar-
den, the smell of the food, my
friends’ giggles when they talked
about love. The writer in exile tries
to recreate what has been drastical-
ly lost. Memory becomes her most
precious ally, as well as her most
disturbing obsession.
These letters allowed me to stay
in direct contact with my language, with my history. Later such epistles
grew into long poems that evoked
the land, the longed-for country, but
the political drama of Chile was
also present. The experience of
exile and the historical context of
my departure became the central
focus of my writing. Were it not for
the military coup of 1973, I would
not have written poetry about the
blindfolded and the disappeared,
about the pain of nameless bodies
buried in common graves. I wrote
obsessively because I could not for-
get, nor did I wish to, because by
writing about a darkened continent
I also reconstructed my own history
and my flight. My only possible
return was through words.
Just as language was censored,
usurped in the nations of the
Southern Cone in the 1970s and
1980s, in my exile language
became my only possibility of free-
dom, of touching my history, my
country, my identity. Words
brought me closer to that memo-
rable natural world of Chile, to
clandestine conversations, and it
allowed me to say the unsayable. I
was in exile and I could dare to say
what could not be said there, in the
South. But I always wondered: For
whom do I say the unsayable? I
wrote in Spanish and always had to
rely on a faithful translator to tell
my story, so that other readers
could understand something of the
mothers who clutched photographs
of their loved ones to their breasts
and asked, “Where are they?”
The writer in exile writes for an
audience of remote phantoms. I
wrote to say something about that
gagged place called Chile, about
the silence and indifference of peo-
ple who succumbed to the demons
of fear. But I also wrote for a U.S.
audience who, though untouched
by that fear, felt solidarity and
sought to understand those stories
of repression and pain. My status as
a Chilean writer in exile and living
in the United States was, and con-
tinues to be, problematic. Despite
the fact that large numbers of Latin
American intellectuals and writers
emigrated to the United States in
the 1970s, we were always a small
and isolated minority. Except for
people like Ariel Dorfman and
Isabel Allende who wrote for a
mass market, Chilean writers wrote
for themselves, for each other, and
for those interested in exile.
Though we became members of the
intellectual community in the
United States, I suspect our experi-
ence was not really of interest to
many, especially from 1973 to
1977.
Vol XXVIII, No 6 MAY/JUNE 1995 13JOURNAL/ CHILE
Personally, I didn’t take part in
U.S. movements, like those of
Chicanos and Puerto Ricans. We
Latin American writers, especially
those of us from the Southern Cone,
had a radically different experience
from those born in the United
States. Our political ideology was
also different. Besides, because we
appeared to be an elite, we were not
always accepted by Latinos in the
United States. Those who wrote in
English built alliances and made
names for themselves, but those of
us who were in thrall to the trauma
of exile and the unceasing chimera
of return could not, nor did we wish
to integrate ourselves into a multi-
cultural and multifaceted communi-
ty. We lived immersed in our histo-
ry, in our cultural heritage, quite
apart from that of Latino writers,
and perhaps we never emerged from
that status. When we were intro-
duced, it was as writers in exile, as
if exile were a temporary illness, or
an ID card.
For many writers of my genera-
tion and the one that came before,
exile became a subject that defined
us, marked us as if that experience
were the only true sign of identity. I . . . I I
the pain of living the loss of a com-
munity, the loss of contact with
ancestral roots. Some writers
turned that pain into a tourist attrac-
tion, made for export. Their books
were easy sentimental reads, rather
than demanding reflections on the
pain of loss that went beyond an
individual’s concerns.
Although obsessed, I did not take
part in the tourism of pain, nor did I
fall into doing agitprop poetry bare-
ly respectful of the subject. My
books, Las zonas del dolor (The
Zones of Pain), Circulos de la locu-
ra (Circles of Insanity), and my new
novel Una cruz y una estrella, remi-
niscencias de una niiia judia en
Chile (A Cross and a Star:
Reminiscences of a Jewish Girl in
Chile) all allude to living on the
edge of the historical circumstances
in which the writer finds herself. I
wrote about Chile’s prisons, about
faces tattooed by torture, their gazes
vague and silent. Distance helped
me to recreate my memory, to invent
a Chile that was different from the
one others lived, a Chile of myth, a
Chile invented through distance.
My exile was like the one that
Homer describes in The Odyssey: a
form of disappearance, of ceasing to
exist in the familial setting of mem-
ory, of ceasing to be part of the great
clan of family alliances. I left, disap-
peared, and joined the nameless gen-
eration of those born between 1950
and 1955, humans moved by utopi-
an dreams, who tried to transform
Chilean society in the 1970s, many
of whom then disappeared without
leaving a trace of their young bodies
filled with life. Only a few write now
about those who died or even invoke
their memory. Only their relatives
remember them. I am one of a few
women writers in exile who, as a
form of survival, write about that
lost generation, about those young
people who made the revolution
with pencils and poems. I write by
their side, and I name them again
and again, not for the tourism of
pain, but for the hope of rescuing
their memory, reinventing it, making
it my own and everyone’s, raising
the consciousness of future genera-
tions in Chile and elsewhere.
For years I thought my poems
and essays were written for the
inhabitants of my far-off country,
that somehow my writing belonged
to them. But exile also gave me the
power to exist in many lands, on iousands of borders, in many lan-
uages. The experience of being a
outhern Cone writer in exile
allowed me to become universal, to
become an ally as well of the
nothers who search for their chil-
iren in El Salvador, in Guatemala.
could write about Anne Frank
because she, like my generation,
was robbed of the right to live and
be happy.
Gabriela Mistral was a perpetual
exile and traveler who in numer-
ous poems and letters alluded to
the fact that to live outside your
own country is to live without
happiness. Without the intuitive
familiarity of things, I would add.
To live without certain noises that
put us to sleep very early in the
immensity of the night and that
awaken us in the softness of the
14 NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS
aken usi esonsoft JVJY 1″.a ” l, — —
NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 14JOURNAL/ CHILE
morning. To live in exile is to lo!
the familiarity of your own fac
and walk the streets of foreig
cities without being recognize
by anyone. For a writer, exile i
the solitude that is imposed in th
house of memory, the mirrors wi
carry around inside.
Writers in exile can go back t(
their country when democrac)
returns, and many have done so.
But others, though they try, find
they cannot, and still others do
not even want to try. Exiled
writers get insidious and satiri-
cal comments from those who
think they lived like heroes in
their adopted countries. No one
thinks about the poor neighbor-
hood where they lived, the
restaurant where they waited on
tables, or whether they could learn
the language.
I have discovered that return
implies another exile. The mythical
Chile of my childhood, the Chile of
my early adolescence and of the stu-
dent Bohemia has disappeared. The
Chile of my parents has vanished. We
Chileans today are concerned with
feeding our children, with getting the
basics to survive. We were once a
generation of poets and dreamers, but
we lost our lives in prisons or in clan-
destine jails. And we also lost our
lives in exile.
Both the writer in exile and the
one who stayed behind were sub-
jected by the dictatorship to a
heartrending silence, to a culture of
fear, to writing in secret self-
imposed codes, and to existing in
the sacred no-man’s land where
reading is considered a subversive
act. Both the exile and the one who
stayed behind lived in a dangerous
and foggy place, where every word
could be a metaphor. Those who
stayed behind were translated to the
language of secret codes, the writer’s
accomplice. And those, like me, who left, were catalogued as foreign
writers, exiles who need to be trans-
lated not only literally but in vary-
ing contexts and shades.
For me, returning to Chile is
fraught with conflict. The Chile of
Salvador Allende is but a myth of
the past, the now-quelled dream of
my parents that only exists in the
memory of those who-shuttered
in their homes in exile-listened to
Violeta Parra, drank pisco, and gave
their children a persistent longing
for their lost country.
My children were born in the
United States, but they speak
Spanish; they like empanadas, and
periodically they visit their great-
grandmother on my mother’s side,
the same great-grandmother who
crossed the Andes on the back of a
mule and survived ancestral wan-
derings. My children love that
country where my childhood was
magical, with colorful rocks and
poets walking its shores. I tell them
about these things I lived and per-
haps I am repeating what my par-
ents did when they told me there
was a country called Chile, so far
away that it seemed like a star at the
end of the world.
During these long years outside
Chile, I have lived in a space where
borders get watered down, where
writing is not so tied to place, since
it includes a larger community of
human beings. The possibility of
being translated into English has
opened new doors. I think of myself
as being from a long, narrow and
far-off country, but also as being
from everywhere. When I go back
to Chile people call me “la gringa,”
or they say “You’re from there
now.” When I go to the United
States they tell me, “It must be so
sad to leave your country and be a
foreigner.” Such comments are part
of my reality, a hybrid complex
reality, a bicultural and bilingual
reality caught between two coun-
tries, two languages, and two her-
itages-Christian and Jewish.
My grandparents’ wanderings
helped me to feel comfortable in
foreign lands. I carry my father’s
name, Mofses, like a solid metaphor
of the lives of these travelers.
Judaism, which was always some-
thing uncomfortable for Chilean
society, especially for the upper
class, has allowed me to feel com-
fortable in the diluted and foggy
zones of nations and borders. It
seems that I am always prepared to
leave somewhere, taking with me
the only possible homeland: lan-
guage, memory, the invention of it.
But I also think that even if they
blindfolded me in the dark, I would
find my way back to Chile.
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