The Ethical in Marjorie Agosín’s Secrets in the Sand:

Notes Towards a Poetics of Responsibility

Hugo Moreno, Ph.D.

Visiting Assistant Professor, Lewis and Clark College

(Lecture given at Reed College on February, 2011)

The Jewish-Chilean-American poet, professor, and human rights

activist Marjorie Agosín is amongst those contemporary authors whose

writings are a kind of witnessing or testimony. Her texts preserve the

memory of the victims of the hatred of those considered alien or “other,” be

they working class women from the Third World, religious or ethnic

minorities, or the incarcerated and disappeared.

For example, her book of poems titled Secrets in the Sand is about the

numerous young women who have been brutally murdered in my hometown

Ciudad Juárez, México since the early 1990s, and whose cases and discarded

remains have been treated with callous carelessness and disrespect, often in

stark contrast to the special treatment Mexican authorities have afforded

their killers. Agosín’s Secrets in the Sand responds to the ethical demand

that we denounce these murders, their perpetrators, and the government

officials and political system that have allowed these criminals to kidnap,

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rape, torture, and kill with freedom and impunity. Agosín assumes this

responsibility by writing poems that tell the story of these murdered women

and that help readers connect with their difficult lives, shattered hopes, and

devastated families, friends, communities, and city.

An author who writes inspired by the ethical is not primarily

concerned with uttering melodious, linguistically rich, or philosophically

profound phrases. First and foremost, he or she is driven by the desire to

come to the aid of the other. What can a poet do to help the dead, their

families, and their communities, if not put his or her “gift for fine words

[and] songs” to use? (Levinas 1998, 142). Emmanuel Levinas, a Jewish-

Lithuanian French philosopher who is perhaps the foremost theorist of ethics

in the twentieth-century, suggests that poetry does not and cannot give

access to the ethical (Robbins 75). For, according to him, the “intoxicating

equivocations,” “incantation,” and “rhythm” of poetic language necessarily

“overwhelm or sublimate the sincerity” of the ethical relation with the other

(Levinas 1969, 202-03). Are Levinas’ doubts about poetry fully justified?

Does this mean that the poet who is truly concerned with the plight and

hatred of the Other should give up writing poems altogether?

My reading of Agosín’s Secrets in the Sand aims to show that ethical

and poetic inspiration are conflicting forces that push the poetic subject in

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opposite directions. In my view, under certain circumstances, an ethically

inspired mode of engagement can lead poems in the direction of

responsibility for the other. However, navigating the ethical in poetry is a

tricky and delicate undertaking. Secrets in the Sand shows how this is so. On

the one hand, ethical inspiration—the effort to denounce and bring an end to

the hatred and murder of those viewed as “other”—is clearly the main

driving force that prompts each utterance in Secrets in the Sand. On the

other hand, poetic inspiration—artistic expression through words—also

plays an important role in the construction of Agosín’s text. Ethical and

poetic inspiration are in tension with one another mainly because, under the

influence of ethics, the poet is driven by a quest for justice whereas, under

the influence of poetic inspiration, the poet is ultimately driven by a desire

for self-transcendence.1

The quest for self-transcendence, and the quest for justice imply two

entirely different kinds of relation with otherness. In the quest for self-

transcendence, which takes place in the realm of ontology, the poet seeks to

be at home in the world and to be at one with otherness. In other words, in

the quest for self-transcendence, otherness is both the impediment that keeps

the poet from being at home in the world, and the supplement that the poet

needs in order to overcome his or her own incompleteness and alienation. To

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be at home in the world, the poet must reconcile him or herself with what is

other. This process, as Levinas has shown in his critique of ontology,

reduces otherness to sameness.

By contrast, in the realm of ethics, the poet does not yearn to be at

home in the world. Nor is the poet impelled by the quest for self-

transcendence. In fact, far from seeking self-affirmation, empowerment, and

fulfillment, in the ethical relation the poet calls his or her own selfhood into

question. This kind of relation implies a subjectivity of responsibility for the

other in which, for example, the death of the other concerns me more than

my own. The ethical relation, says Levinas, is “an assignation to repond [to

the plight of the other], which leaves no refuge and authorizes no escape”

(2000, 187).

For this reason, as I will explain further along in the talk, even though

Agosín’s Secrets in the Sand is evidently inspired by ethics, it does not give

full access to the ethical. A poetry that gives full access to the ethical would

have to display a poetics of responsibility in an unambigious, unreserved

way. It would have to not only awaken a demand of responsibility for the

death of the Other, but, above all, the poet would need to articulate an

absolute and unequivocally disinterested response: a “Saying” or poem that

empowers the Other rather than the poet.

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Secrets in the Sand contains fifty-nine poems written in free verse.2

Most of them are quite short, and many of them read like fragments of a

larger, incomplete poem. The text contains both narrative and lyrical poems.

The narrative poems tell the story of the murdered young women of Juárez,

and describe the physical, psychic, and social environment of this border

Mexican city located just across from El Paso, Texas. The lyrical poems

record the subjective experiences of a female writer from the U.S. who

makes a journey south of the border, and who, after accomplishing her

literary mission, returns home wiser and more self-realized.

Agosín’s poetics of responsibility is most forcefully and persuasively

articulated in the narrative poems. In general, a poetics of responsibility is

one in which the poet speaks as a “here I am” rather than as an “I” or ego.

An “I” or ego, says Levinas, “abides with itself and possesses itself; it is the

master of itself as of the universe” (Levinas 2000, 181). In contrast, in the

ethical relation, something entirely different happens to the ego. For

example, the death of the other calls into question the ego’s ability to abide

with itself and possess itself. In the ethical relation the ego becomes

“unseated” because it is forced to respond at once to the demand of the other

(180). The ego becomes a kind of “hostage” of the other (180). In the ethical

relation, says Levinas, “the ego [is] stripped by the trauma of persecution of

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its scornful and imperialist subjectivity, [it] is reduced to the ‘here I am,’ in a

transparency without opaqueness, without heavy zones propitious for

evasion” (1998, 146).

According to Levinas, the reponse of responsibility of the subject as a

“here I am” is, first and foremost, a “Saying without a Said” (Levinas 2000,

191). What Levinas calls a “Saying without a Said” is a species of “contact”

in Roman Jakobson’s sense. Jakobson identifies six “elements” or “factors”

that are essential in any act of communication: “the “addresser” ([or]

sender . . . of the message), the “addressee” ([or] receiver . . . of the

message), the message itself, the code (in terms of which the message

signifies), the context (or referent to which the message refers), and the

contact (the psychophysiological connection between the addresser and the

addressee)”(Prince 16; the emphasis is mine).

A “Saying without a Said,” like “contact” in Jakobson’s sense, is the

act of saying something rather than the specific content of what one says. An

example of such “contact” would be the manner in which a friend sits with

someone beloved in mourning saying “nothing in particular.” In such

moments, one does not offer advice or stories of the self. One does not seek

to learn something from another’s tragedy. Instead, one offers quiet solace, a

sharing of grief and nothing more. One says and expresses as a way of being

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present for the other, while not seeking to say or impose anything in

particular. This is an example of what Levinas calls the “Saying without a

Said” of the “here I am.”

Interestingly, poets frequently write to say “nothing in particular.”

However, the usual poetic mode of saying “nothing in particular” is quite

different from the ethical “Saying without a Said.” Typically, poets write to

produce art with words. This kind of “poetry for poetry’s sake” is

emphatically not what Levinas means by the “Saying without a Said” of the

“here I am.” Levinas often contrasts this ethical “Saying” with the songs of

the lyrical poet. According to Levinas, “[H]ere I am signifies a being bound

to giving with hands full, a being bound to corporeity; the body is the very

condition of giving, with all that giving costs” (2000, 188).

Despite his pessimism regarding poetry’s capacity to achieve an

ethical relation with the other, Levinas does suggest that a handful poets do

accomplish an ethos of responsibility. The example he proposes is the

German-speaking poet Paul Celan who conceives of a poem as a kind of

“handshake” (quoted in Levinas 1996, 40). As Levinas points out, conceived

in this way, a poem is indeed “a saying without a said,” “an elementary

communication without revelation,” “a language of proximity for

proximity’s sake,” “a gesture of recognition of the other” (40-43). Celan’s

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poetry, as Levinas points out, signifies at the pre-syntactic, pre-logical level

of “pure touching, pure contact . . .” (41). According to Levinas, what is

most significant about Celan’s poems is their “gesture of recognition of the

other” rather than their “message” (43).

Agosín’s Secrets in the Sand is also a “Saying” in the sense of

Levinas. Although it is not situated at the pre-syntactical, pre-logical level as

Celan’s poetry, Agosín’s poems are nevertheless, above all, a gesture of

recognition of the other and an interpellation. They are poetic utterances that

signify our awakening by the death of the young women of Juárez. They are

also a challenge in that they invite us to “dare to offer a supplication/ For the

dead women of Ciudad Juárez.” Or, in Spanish: “Atrévete/ a una plegaria/

para las mujeres muertas/ en Ciudad Juárez” (Agosín 70).

Secrets in the Sand is Agosín’s offering to the dead women of Ciudad

Juárez and their families and communities in the form of a book of poems.

Impelled by the love and compassion that the death of the other inspires in

her, Agosín joins the chorus of supplicants and the procession of concerned

and outraged citizens from Juárez and elsewhere in their effort to provide

justice for the dead and safety for the living. This book, in good measure, is

essentially an utterance of the Levinasian “here I am” in that it offers “[a]

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question [and a prayer] that contains the response as ethical responsibility”

(Levinas 2000, 117).

The poetic voice of Secrets in the Sand is deeply affected by these

murders. The silenced voices of these dead women have called her to

assume a subjectivity of responsibility. Her first act is to visit and describe

the place in the outskirts of Juárez where the unburied remains of many

women have been found since the mid nineteen-nineties.

No había en aquellos sitiales

Ni plantas ni rocas.

Sólo la muerte desnuda y pérfida.

En aquellos páramos donde las encontraron

Había ciertos ecos llamados vacíos. (Agosín 24)

No plants or rocks

Were in those places

Only naked and perfidious death.

On the places where they found them

There were certain empty echoes. (Agosín 25)

In the wasteland surrounding Ciudad Juárez the speaker hears the

“empty echoes” of otherness in Juárez. These “echoes” interpellate her.

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They demand justice for the murdered young women of Juárez, and,

implicitly, for all the other victims of misogyny throughout the world.

In the second poem the speaker conveys outrage both for the murder

of women in Juárez and implicitly for the negligence with which Mexican

authorities have treated their cases:

De sus muertes tan

Sólo la muerte

Espectacular vacío

Ausencia ahuecada

Silencios pérfidos

De sus muertes tan

Sólo interrogantes,

Rezos. (Agosín 24)

All we know about them

Is their death

Spectacular emptiness

Hollowed out absence

Perfidious silence.

About their deaths

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Only questions,

Prayers. (Agosín 25)

The hundreds of unsolved murders of women in Juárez open up a vast

hollow in the lives of their families and communities; an emptiness carved

out by the absence of their loved ones, their unanswered questions, and their

prayers with no reply. The women of Juárez lay a “traumatic hold” upon the

poetic voice (Levinas 2000, 187). As Levinas says, “[t]his is the hold that I

discover in the extreme urgency that calls for my help . . . [It is a demand in

which] [e]very me is elected or chosen: no one else can do what [I] must do”

(187).

If the speaker initially hears the voices of otherness as “empty

echoes,” these increase in volume and urgency as her account advances and

as she prepares to tell the story of the young women of Juárez. In the eighth

poem, she says,

Las voces eran rugidos, murmullos como un terciopelo desgarrado, y

eran voces claras como los espejos del agua y eran voces que no

dejaban de preguntar y susurrar y llamaban en el idioma del amor y

llamaban en el idioma de la memoria. (36)

The voices were bellows and murmurs, like torn velvet. They were

clear, like water mirrors. They were voices that didn’t stop inquiring

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and whispering. They called in the language of love, in the language

of memory. (37)

The poet’s response to the call of the Other is articulated in the two

languages she invokes – the language of love and the language of memory.

Her response embodies the language of love because, as Levinas suggests,

“love is par excellence the fact that the death of the other affects me more

than my own” (2000, 105; the italics are his). It is also written in the

language of memory because these poems serve to remind us of these

women, and indirectly of all the other women who have been murdered

under similar circumstances in other parts of the world and whose cases

remain similarly unresolved, from Canada to Mexico to Guatemala.

Half of the poems of Secrets in the Sand are devoted to telling the

story of the young women of Juárez and their plight. The other half contains

lyrical poems in which a female intellectual from the U.S. expresses her

opinions about the situation in Juárez and writes about her personal

experiences, and especially about her inner, subjective experiences as she

writes.

In the remaining part of this presentation, I wish to focus on the

ethical questions these lyrical poems raise from a Levinasian point of view.

These poems, which are interspersed throughout the book, manifest an

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entirely different sensibility from that of the narrative poems. In poems such

as “Me acerco a mi jardín nocturno” the speaker breaks with the mode of

sitting in vigil with the women of Juárez and momentarily escapes from “the

night of Ciudad Juárez.” Whereas in a previous poem she claims the night of

Juarez “didn’t have a beginning or an end/ Just fear/ Just death” (28), in

“Me acerco a mi jardín nocturno” the speaker experiences a perplexing joy,

peace, and beauty in an edenic “nocturnal garden” of her own making.

Me acerco a mi jardín nocturno

La quietud yace en la mirada

Avanzo en la desnudez

De una primera inocencia

La niebla me conduce

Hacia flores que en la noche

Emiten fragancias extrañas

Presagios que embriagan

A lo lejos las luciérnagas

Iluminando travesías. (50)

I approach my nocturnal garden

A stillness rests in my gaze

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Advancing in the nakedness

Of an early innocence

The mist leads me

To the flowers that emit

Strange fragances in the night

Omens that intoxicate

Distant fireflies

Illuminating crossings. (51)

The lyrical “I” that speaks in this poem is clearly not the “here I am”

of the ethically inspired subject. Instead, it is what Levinas calls the “I of

enjoyment,” the subject that gives existence a purely aesthetic orientation

(Levinas 1969, 120). The modality of enjoyment describes the set of

relations that are produced when the subject distances itself from the trials

and tribulations of ordinary life. In the modality of enjoyment the subject “is

a citizen of paradise” (Levinas 1969, 145). Everything is there for the ego’s

enjoyment. The distance between desire and fulfilment disappears.

The contrast between the subjectivity of responsibility and the

subjectivity of enjoyment couldn’t be greater. In a subjectivity of

responsibility, the self is a kind of “hostage” of the other. As Levinas says,

“[I]t is a being torn up from oneself for another in the giving to the other of

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the bread out of one’s own mouth” (Levinas 1998, 142). By contrast, when

the subject lives in the modality of enjoyment, the whole world seems to

exist for, and revolve around, the self. Says Levinas, “In enjoyment I am

absolutely for myself. Egoist without reference to the Other, I am alone

without solitude, innocently egoist and alone. Not against the Others . . . but

entirely deaf to the Other, outside of all communication and all refusal to

communicate—without ears, like a hungry stomach” (134).

How can these two tendencies co-exist or be reconciled without

subordinating or supressing either one of them? On the one hand, the ethical

relation implies the negation and dethronement of the self. On the other hand,

the aesthetic orientation calls for self-affirmation and egoist enjoyment. To

seek a compromise between these two options entails undermining the

alterity of the other and thus filling in the gap that, according to Levinas,

should always exist between the self and the other. This would reduce the

other to the same, which is precisely what happens in the realm of ontology

when self-transcendence become the focus and goal.

How does the tension between these two opposite tendencies gets

resolved in Secrets in the Sand? As stated in the introduction, the speaker is

driven both by a quest for justice and by a desire for self-transcendence. The

quest for justice demands the imprisonment of the killers of women in

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Juárez, the removal of corrupt government officials, the empowerment and

well-being of the working class women of Juárez, and more. Meanwhile, the

desire for self-transcendence involves attaining for oneself renown, esteem,

eminence, wisdom, grace, etc..

A poetics of responsibility, in my view, should not only demand

justice for the women of Juárez, but should also articulate a disinterested

response, a Saying that empowers the women of Juárez rather than their

advocates.

Instead, in Secrets in Sand the lyric poems that mark different stations

in the speaker’s poetic journey in Ciudad Juárez turn out to be a productive

enterprise for their advocate, Agosín. As I will illustrate below, Agosín’s

poetic persona returns home wiser and with a story that ultimately does more

to enlighten American readers than keep vigil with the women of Juárez.

Even as the poetic voice’s journey is emotionally difficult, she creates a

solace for herself in the wonders of a nocturnal garden refuge which

showcases Agosín’s literary skill, poetic inspiration, and aesthetic sensibility.

Perhaps more disheartening from an ethical standpoint, the journey then

veers from the path of mourning, turning instead toward her discovery of

what the speaker describes as “the pleasure of knowing oneself alive,” and

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“that/ Life is worth living” (55). As she says at the end of one of these lyrical

reveries:

Y así entre estos bosques donde yo escribo

Alguien susurra a mi oído que

Valía la pena esta vida. (54)

And here among the trees where I write

Someone whispers in my ear that

Life is worth living. (55)

Her journey to Ciudad Juárez thus becomes a venture leading her to a

new wisdom about life in general. In similar fashion, other fragments tell us

of how the sands of Ciudad Juárez taught her lessons about love (110),

transitoriness (112), and the unfathomable (114). She also learns to endure

grief and death:

Y el dolor se inclinó junto a mí

Sin premura

Me aligeró el cuerpo

Me enseñó a convivir con él

A sentirlo llegar como si fuera

El aire más dulce

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La paz más soberana

Y así pude por fin vivir contigo

Sobrellevar la muerte

No anularla

No negarla

Pero vivirla

A tu lado

Sentir que no llegaré a encontrar

Tus pasos ni tu frente

Ni tus manos que ahora son

Mariposas traviesas. (100)

Grief leaned toward me

Slowly

It lightened my body

It taught me to live with it

To feel it arrive as if it were

The sweetest air

The most sovereign peace.

And thus, I finally was able to live with you

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To endure death

Not annul it

Or negate it

But live it

By your side

To feel that I will never find

Your footsteps or your face

Not even your hands that are now

Mischievous butterflies. (101)

The speaker’s discovery and her imagery of enlightenment stand in

sharp contrast to the compellingly self-less poems of the arid Juárez

wasteland entombing the bodies of the murdered and surrounding the

tragedy of this community. Poems in the lyrical mode of self-revelation

weaken the ethical promise that Secrets in the Sand makes to the women of

Juárez. Where the focus and the goal become the speaker’s self-

transcendence and the reader’s aesthetic enjoyment the vividness and call of

the women of Juárez fades. This is precisely what Levinas means when he

says that poetic language tends to “overwhelm and sublimate the pure

sincerity of [ethical relation with the Other]” (1969, 202). For this reason,

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Levinas is insistent that ethical inspiration should not be confused with “a

gift for fine words or songs” (142).

This does not mean, however, that poetry in and of itself cannot give

access to the ethical. Nor does it mean that the poet who is truly concerned

with the plight and hatred of the Other should give up writing poems.

Agosín’s narrative poems in Secrets in the Sand demonstrate that a poetics

of responsibility is both urgently necessary and possible. Her book of poems

reminds us of the ongoing plight and fight of the women of Juárez and of

other parts of the world. It allows us to understand their situation from an

intimate and personal perspective.

Secrets in the Sand also illustrates the tension that exists between

ethical and poetic inspiration, the quest for justice and for self-transcendence,

responsibility and enjoyment, ethics and ontology, and more. It bears

witness to and denounces the injustices and violence perpetrated against

women in Juárez and also challenges us to dare offer a supplication for them.

And, while imperfect, the imperfections and contradictions themselves urge

and challenge us to consider how to keep vigil under such tragic and

overwhelming circumstances. This critical reading of Agosín’s important

book is my own personal effort to respond to this challenge.

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WORKS CITED

Agosín, Marjorie. 2006. Secrets in the Sand: The Young Women of Juárez. Translated by

Celeste Kostopulos-Cooperman. Buffalo, NY: White Pine Press.

Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by

Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press.

-----. 1996. Proper Names. Translated by Michael B. Smith. Stanford, CA: Stanford

University Press.

-----. The Levinas Reader. Edited by Sean Hand. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Malden,

MA: Blackwell.

-----. 1998. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis.

Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press.

-----. 2000. God, Death, and Time. Edited and Annotated by Jacques Rolland. Translated

by Bettina Bergo. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Paz, Octavio. 2005. El arco y la lira: El poema, la revelación poética, poesía e historia.

3rd

. Edition. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica.

Prince, Gerald. 2003. Dictionary of Narratology. Revised Edition. Lincoln: University of

Nebraska Press.

Robbins, Jill. 1999. Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature. Chicago, IL: University of

Chicago Press.

1 “La inspiración es una manifestación de la ‘otredad’ constitutiva del hombre. No está adentro, en nuestro

interior, ni atrás como algo que de pronto surgiera del limo del pasado, sino que está, por así decirlo,

adelante: es algo (o mejor: alguien) que nos llama a ser nosotros mismos. Y ese alguien es nuestro ser

mismo . . . Así, la creación poética es ejercicio de nuestra libertad, de nuestra decisión de ser. Esta

libertad . . . es un acto por el cual vamos más allá de nosotros mismos, para ser más plenamente. Libertad y

trascendencia son expresiones, movimientos de temporalidad. La inspiración, ‘la otra voz,’ la ‘otredad’ son,

en su esencia, la temporalidad manando, manifestándose sin cesar. Inspiración, ‘otredad’, libertad y

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temporalidad son trascendencia. Pero son trascendencia, movimiento del ser ¿hacia qué? Hacia nosotros

mismos” (Paz 179). 2 In addition to Agosín’s poems, the book contains three poems written by Guadalupe Morfín—one of the

special federal commissioners on violence against women in Ciudad Juárez appointed during the

administration of former Mexican President Vicente Fox. It also contains a preface and English translations

of both Agosín’s and Morfín’s poems written by Celeste Kostopulos-Cooperman.