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.