Who Killed Marta Ugarte?
In this unforgettable elegy, Jeanne-Marie Osterman takes us to Chile during the Pinochet era, beginning with a compendium of atrocities spanning 17 years. The narrator makes her way across the Chilean Coast, the Atacama Desert, and to Villa Grimaldi, scrutinizing and logging artifacts of torture–tracks, nails, metal coils, the black ink of redaction. With care and precision, she remembers, “dusts off bits of bone… [reimagines faces] through the shape of a skull.”
Having grown up under a brutal dictatorship, these poems remind me of the power of witness and history. Given time, given distance, and memory’s purchase, how do we discern what was revised, and why. In “What I Remember About El Museo de la Memoria,” the narrator provides a context for her excavation of the disappeared, and “their poetry of how to survive.”
I remember thinking that in a country accused of forgetting, . it was all here to remember…
In “Who Am I,” the narrator critiques her own role in the retelling, her place in this witnessing:
to be a voice for the disappeared, . fifty years later,
put into words wounds
of a country not my own, . language not my own,
More than remembrance, the narrator acknowledges “wounds/ from guns of country, my own…” and “junta by telex/ from Henry Kissinger…” referring to how the U.S. supported authoritarian regimes that were more aligned with U.S. policy:
Poetry of witness—I witness
only to television reports
sent by satellite morning of September 11, 1973
Osterman masterfully builds tension with imagery and lyricism, even as the reader in outrage moves against it, an involuntary impulse in the face of horror. However, we cannot, must not look away. To dismantle tyranny is to witness for each other. Say the names of Marta Ugarte, of Giana Rosetta Pallini González, and the names “engraved in the sidewalk outside #38.” We need to remember “to return to the heart” because history cannot, must not be allowed to repeat itself.
About Jeanne-Marie Osterman:
Jeanne-Marie Osterman is the author of three collections of poetry: Shellback (Paloma Press), named by Kirkus Reviews one of the top 100 indie press books of 2021; All Animals Want the Same Things, winner of the Slipstream 34th Annual Poetry Chapbook Competition; and There’s a Hum (Finishing line Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared in Borderlands, 45th Parallel, The Madison Review, New Ohio Review, and other journals, and in 2018 she was a finalist for the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Jeanne-Marie resides in New York City where she is poetry editor for Cagibi, an online journal of poetry and prose.
About Aileen Cassinetto:
Aileen Cassinetto is a 2021 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow and Commissioner on the Status of Women for San Mateo County. She was named a YBCA 100 honoree in 2023 for her contributions in building regenerative and equitable communities through the arts. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Anthropocene, American Poets, Cultural Daily, Poetry Magazine, and poets.org, among others. She co-edited the climate change anthology, Dear Human at the Edge of Time (2023), a companion to the congressionally mandated Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5).