Moving Really Does Matter
March 20, 2025Making Memory: Marjorie Agosín (June 15, 1955 – March 10, 2025)
On March 10, 2025, Marjorie Agosín, a Chilean Jewish poet, novelist, and essayist who spoke out for those without a voice, and in so doing preserved their voices in our cultural memory, passed way. She was a dear friend and fellow collaborator.
I met Marjorie in 1998 at a poetry reading sponsored by the newly introduced Human Rights Program at Trinity College. Marjorie read many of her powerful poems that late afternoon as she talked about the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile and the Mothers of the Disappeared, women who found ways to protest the disappearance of their loved ones – an estimated 3,000 in Chile and 10,000 in Argentina. Her own life experience infused her talk with passion and knowledge, having spent much of her youth in her native Chile before moving to the U.S. right before the Pinochet takeover and having to remain here.
The images that I heard that day stayed in my mind. One in particular was a poem titled “El Presidente” from An Absence of Shadows (White Pine Press, 1998), excerpted here:
The general parades among the dead,
Pretending they are alive.
Only the general marches for his country,
A garden of bones,
A park of searching mothers,
A country searching for a name.
The imagery of this and her other poems stayed strong in me, with a persistence that told me a performance piece was coming. They became the seed for a piece about the Mothers of the Disappeared in Chile and Argentina titled ¿dónde estás? that brought me and my husband Blu to Chile and Argentina with Marjorie’s considerable help to meet the Mothers of the Disappeared and visit the sites of the disappearance of their loved ones and where protests occurred in the plazas and streets. It was a deep and dark immersion in two countries whose people and place captured our hearts and whose history of that time awakened and saddened us.
¿dónde estás? premiered in 2001 and became a turning point for me in my own artistic trajectory, expanding my commitment to art and social justice in a bigger and more complete way.
Marjorie was a sister in spirit in this pursuit of art and human rights. Two more pieces followed in the almost 30 years of our friendship, one in 2015 titled Lighthouse celebrating lighthouses as beacons of light in the increasing dehumanization resulting from technology, and most recently In the Presence of Trees (2023), a piece developed in seasonal incarnations about the wisdom of trees and the urgent need for their preservation.
We were on the way to collaborating on a piece about books and the right to read—Book Dances, the first version of which was performed at Hartford Public Library’s downtown atrium on March 31, 2025. That collaboration was sadly interrupted by a yearlong illness and her recent passing.
Marjorie continues to be a presence in spirit as we celebrate books and libraries and words as the keepers of memory in this developing piece. We cannot let society forget. In an interview in 2004 she said, “…A lot of historical monuments are going to be vanished according to wars, earthquakes. The only thing that remains are words.”
Let’s make sure her beautiful words are heard and listened to – her brave spirit and her humanity is an inspiration. As she gave voice, let us each do the same in whatever capacity we can. This is the moment.
As someone eloquently said at her memorial, “Your life is a memory that will bless the world.” And so it will.
“Memory is a process, a constant commitment; without it we won’t remember the future. Memory is the future of the past.” (Marjorie Agosín)
For more on Marjorie’s celebrated career, see https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/agosin-marjorie
