Books
Poetry as a sanctuary for lost spirits
AN ABSENCE OF
SHADOWS By Marjorie Agosín Translated by Cola Franzen, Mary G.
Berg and Celeste Kostopulos-Cooperman Human Rights Series, Vol.
11 White Pine Press, 224 pages, $15, paperback
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By ROBERT BONAZZI
One is born with human rights, thus one is sacredly
connected to all living things, writes Marjorie Agosín, the
Chilean-American author and activist, in the preface to this bilingual
collection of 80 poems celebrating the 50th anniversary of the United Nations
Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Agosíns sense of sacred connection inspires
compassion for victims of political oppression. It strengthens a sense of
solidarity with peaceful struggles against violence and injustice. Desecration
of human dignity in Latin America -- and everywhere -- ignites her moral
outrage. When human rights are violated, she says, so is the
sacredness of the world.
The authors passionate concern for the Other and her
devotion to life as a res sacra, a sacred reality, link her directly
with the humane tradition of Chiles poet-activists in this century,
including the great Nobel laureates Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda.
It was Mistral (1889-1957) who led the first movements for child
welfare, womens rights and new laws to protect the indigenous peoples of
Chile during the first half of this century. Her boldly honest poems observed
the desolation of poverty, evoked the loving courage of families, and
commemorated the spiritual beauties of motherhood and nature.
Agosíns poetry of the 1980s and 90s remembers those
voices muzzled in dark and silent torture chambers, especially the women and
children who were forbidden to sing and denied the opportunity to grow ...
Neruda opposed several right-wing regimes in defense of the
working class poor and was forced into exile until the brief flowering of
democracy under Salvador Allende. Agosíns family escaped to the
United States before Gen. Augusto Pinochets military coup culminated in
the assassinations of Allende and members of his government.
Although I came of age in a foreign country speaking a
foreign language, writes Agosín of her exile, I witnessed
from afar the brutality of the Pinochet dictatorship that mutilated an entire
generation.
Agosíns poetic vision becomes a sanctuary for lost
spirits. The disappeared women slipped in among my dreams, she
says, and more than anything else they would ask me not to forget
them. Some poems evolve beyond memorials into psychic incarnations:
I am the disappeared woman/in a country grown dark/silenced by
the/wrathful cubbyholes/of those with no memory. A voice warns:
Dont conspire with oblivion/tear down the walls of silence/I want
to be the appeared woman/from among the labyrinths/come back, return/name
myself./Call my name.
The most tender lyrics embrace the surviving women who
search, inquire and weep, as they try to reconnect the dismembered
bodies. Look,/these are photographs/of my children;/this one here has an
arm/I dont know if its my sons/but I think it might be/that
this is his sweet little arm.
However, since we Chileans/are good about forgetting,
Agosín calls out those who practice the art of denial: You who
vainly/made your tongue/a map of forgetfulness;/you who vainly/keep silent
before/the memory of hollow stars.
Hollow, indeed, those stars sewn into the fabric of the Holocaust.
In El Salvador, she writes:
You dont want to think about a garden of the
dead because that would be like returning to Auschwitz. As you can
see, history returns in the memory of the living, who are the
guardians of the dead.
There are but a few references to the perpetrators of these
atrocities in the poems because Agosíns poetry is life-affirming
and healing. She does not indulge the popular obsessions with absolute power
and pornographic sadism or examine the pathology of evil. Her preface speaks
the simple truth: Some of my Chilean countrymen have betrayed not only
their dreams of democracy but also their souls. The former dictator is a
senator for life, an assassin is portrayed as a venerable grandfather and
torturers walk freely in the streets of Santiago without fear or
remorse.
In several poems about the eternal ceremony of
torture, we experience a depth of feeling that only poetry can invoke.
The pain, savage and exact, without guile,/explores over the sands of the
body,/glows, speeded over the burning/traces of a thousand bonfires./Someone
toys with the misery/of this prostrate body,/of this solitude between/the
howling/legs.
Most of these dark chamber scenes are projected from the viewpoint
of the blindfolded victims, who are the seers of an inward vision. This is from
Pupils:
Light overflowing and melodious breaches the corridors
of my sealed pupils. I conjure up greens, the generous open sea,
noble in its sublime depths.
Primal imagery flows from the cycles of nature in this stream of
life from a poem titled What Lies in the Depth of Your Eyes:
In the depths of your eyes, the sea, rivers
transformed into caresses into the roundness of living children. In
the depths of your eyes while darkness courses over their contours, and
blindfold is a dubious maimed nurse, you are there, because you are made
of light because you are a butterfly luminous/ in the mirrors.
This collection includes recent poems in an opening section and
two award-winning books, Circles of Madness (1992) and Zones of
Pain (1988), reprinted for this edition. There is a clear thematic
resonance throughout and an inventive range of poetic forms.
Agosíns poems have been anthologized widely under various rubrics
-- Chilean, Latin American, Latina, feminist, human rights -- and her 10 books
of poetry have been published in the United States, usually in bilingual
editions, which means she has reached a wide readership.
Zones of Pain, lucidly translated by Cola Franzen, has
become a classic in the realm of human rights literature. Most of the 31 poems
run from 12 to 40 lines and reveal a mastery of the personae lyric, in which
Agosín becomes the instrument for anothers song.
Circles of Madness, translated by Celeste
Kosopulos-Cooperman, is a sequence of 34 lyrics and prose poems. It pays
tribute to the courageous mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires,
Argentina. Between 1976 and 1983, these women gathered every week to represent
their loved ones who had been kidnapped, tortured and murdered by that
countrys military regime.
The recent news of Pinochets legal battle to maintain
diplomatic immunity from charges brought by Spain for genocide, torture and
terrorism against 94 international victims of his government may strike some as
comically surreal or, at least, ironic. But for the families of the 4,300
Chileans who disappeared during Pinochets bloody dictatorship
(1973-1990), anything less than justice would deepen their wound.
There is no doubt where Agosín stands, as her only poem
about Pinochet, called The President, makes clear.
Nothing interrupts his movement. He diligently marches
among the shadows of the dead. The general doesnt hear the
criesBR> The general doesnt stop before the dancing ears on the
pavement. Nothing stains his white suit.
Because human rights are abused daily on a global scale,
Agosíns tone is ever vigilant and deadly serious; because this
tragedy is so heartbreaking, her poems throb with pain. She will not debate the
niceties of ethical discourse or analyze the politics of diplomatic immunity,
but simply cry out against the injustice. She is too humane to rationalize one
moment of the horror and too sensitive to look away from the suffering.
Robert Bonazzi is the author of Man in the Mirror: John
Howard Griffin and the Story of Black Like Me (Orbis Books) and the editor
of Encounters with the Other by John Howard Griffin (Latitudes Books),
both published in 1997.
National Catholic Reporter, December 11,
1998
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