Celebrating a Poetic Voice of Hope and Resistance

Abstract

By acknowledging Marjorie Agosín’s work as a celebration of individual lives interwoven with others transcending time and space, a poetic re-affirmation of hope in times of sorrow is achieved. Thus, a ‘narrative presence’ is established where otherwise untold individual and collective (hi)stories are remembered and recounted, re-creating the unique experience of past lives with implications for the present and the future. Similar to the scripted recollections of her past, Agosín uses the process of writing not to establish a chronological documentary, but to create a hopeful voice of poetic resistance. Appreciating commonalities and differences, Marjorie Agosín’s work reflects her family’s past as a descendant of Russian and Austrian Jews in both specific as well as general terms as an experience of being expelled, of searching for identity in loss, and finding it in language and writing. By focusing on aspects of hope and resistance in Agosín’s approach to writing, the ‘evocative power’ of stories is established and the importance of time and place for the past, present, and future – constructed, de-constructed, and re-constructed is affirmed. By reflecting individual experience over time and emphasizing the general meaning of poesis as a creative act of establishing a voice, where we as friends and readers can experience her life and her work as integral part of our own lives.