Quote by Marjorie Agosín: “Exile is a wound that never heals, only changes its shape.”

Being forced from your homeland doesn't hurt less over time — the pain of exile transforms but never disappears. You may adapt, build a new life, and learn new languages, but the loss is always present, surfacing in different forms across the years.

Agosín wrote in the early 1990s as Chile's military dictatorship ended with the return to democracy in 1990. Thousands of exiles were choosing whether to return or remain abroad, and Chile was beginning a painful reckoning with the disappeared and tortured of the Pinochet years through the National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation.

Chilean-American poet, human rights activist, and professor whose work bears witness to the disappeared under Pinochet's Chile and to the lived experience of Jewish Latin American women. She has received the United Nations Leadership Award for Human Rights and the Gabriela Mistral Medal of Honor.