Amigas: Letters of Friendship and Exile

Marjorie Agosín and Emma Sepúlveda. Amigas: Letters of Friendship and Exile. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. 180 pp.

Amigas is a curious book, by which I mean to say that it is difficult to classify (and just as difficult to put down.) Marjorie Agosín and Emma Sepúlveda, longtime amigas, have compiled a volume that transforms life into art, shifting from the privacy of personal correspondence to the public space of literature without losing the intimacy of two friends who share a lifetime of experiences. This collection of letters (with photos) written over the course of four decades (1965-2000) reads much like an epistolary novel, a testimonial narrative, and a dual auto/biography.

When I first read Amigas — in its manuscript form — I felt oddly uncomfortable; more like a voyeur than a detached reader. Perhaps I had this sensation because I was reading the manuscript, not the finished book, and because I have known both authors for several years. Even though they asked me, and trusted me, to read their letters, I couldn’t get over the feeling that I had come across something that I shouldn’t be privy to. After all, are we not taught that reading other people’s mail is at the very least ill mannered and at most illegal? Nevertheless, I kept on reading, my uneasiness as intruder surrendering to the engrossing nature of the prose. In fact, I read the entire manuscript at one sitting and by the end I felt grateful that the authors had allowed me to follow the path of their friendship.

In spite of their many previous achievements and publications, there may be those who are not familiar with these two amigas or their work. Marjorie Agosín is a writer (poet and narrator), a literary critic, and a professor of Spanish at Wellesley College. Her books, anthologies, and edited volumes are far too numerous to list here. Emma Sepúlveda is a writer, a literary critic, and a professor of Spanish at the University of Nevada, Reno, as well as being a gifted and award-winning photographer. Both women grew up in their native Chile, where they first became friends. In the United States they have been fervent defenders of global human rights, frequent lecturers, and political activists.

As I alluded to earlier, Amigas is much more than a collection of letters between two dear friends. It chronicles their journey from adolescence to adulthood, from Chile to exile in the US, from struggling students to successful career women, through tragedy and joy, triumph and sorrow. While their letters and stories are the personal accounts of two individuals, they could well be the stories of hundreds, even thousands, of other women from Chile or other Latin American countries. Their tales are unique to them and yet common, which is one element that makes the book of interest to a wide readership. It is the testimony of a journey told by two friends, but made by countless others, as Sepúlveda herself states: “The histories interwoven in our correspondence are not exceptions, they are the norm. These episodes from the lives of Marjorie and Emma are part of a voluminous tome of common histories that have been lived and continue to be lived by Latin American women, from our grandmothers to our daughters” (xvi).

Amigas is a book about growth and self-discovery, about triumph over adversity, and about the process of life itself. The parallel journeys of two friends from different religious and social backgrounds take the reader through a vast field of experiences and issues that include family, religion, political turmoil, cultural conflict, social responsibility, women’s roles, and much more. The authors have offered to share the experiences of a lifetime with any reader willing to accompany them down the paths that have lead them to where they are today. Again, this is a personal account of a collective history, as emphasized by Agosín: “We do not want this book to be a record of our personal afflictions. Rather we present it as a history of those from the Southern Hemisphere who were forced into exile for the crime of being young and wanting to change the world” (xi). Whether the book be read as a novel, as a testimony, or as merely a collection of letters between two women who share common histories, it is a journey well worth taking. Amigas is written with passion, humor, pain, and most of all hope.

Darrell B. Lockhart