Gioconda Belli’s poetry has done something to me ever since I first read it, and since it became my preferred way to relate to her work: it has catapulted me into the future. Her poetry displays different ways to imagine tomorrow, to spur us to action (including the internal action implicit in all intimate reflection), to shift through time and converse with beings from the future (be they familiar or imaginary).  Her art lies in not doing so from the naivety of a blind, propagandist faith, but rather from the pained optimism of one who has experienced catastrophe, loss made flesh. This is the source of the potency and universality of her voice, its inevitable identification. Belli’s enunciative focus is on an underscored, exalted “woman’s flesh”—the same flesh extolled by her compatriot Rubén Darío in the seventeenth poem of his Songs of Life and Hope, now in the first person.

Such enthusiasm for the future is not a commonplace habit among poets. Looking back, Orpheus lost his beloved in the underworld and was condemned to lyrical solitude. In her essay The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym studies the acts of singing nostalgia, a better past, an idealized childhood, and distinguishes a “restorative” nostalgia (whose aim is physical return or the reconstruction of home) from another, “reflexive” nostalgia, centered on suffering, that does not seek to transcend meditative longing. In the latter case, return is merely symbolic and takes place through memory. In a sense, we might say that any excess of nostalgia invalidates the present and lowers the status of the future. But, in Belli’s case, imagining the future does not exempt the poetic self from either denouncing the past or judging the present—which are, in effect, the raw materials of change. Her speaking of her country, “its bell towers an eternal lump in my throat,” of her “beloved Nicaragua, raped child,” reveals that nostalgia is a complex emotion, not limited to yearning for what has been lost, but rather open to projecting that adverse past over other temporal categories such that it might fuel a transformation. Linda Hutcheon tells us, “Nostalgia is less about the past than about the present. It operates through what Mikhail Bakhtin called an historical inversion: the ideal that is not being lived now is projected into the past. It is ‘memorialized’ as past, crystallized into precious moments selected by memory, but also by forgetting, and by desire’s distortions and reorganizations.”

The future, Gioconda Belli’s poetry, is explored through different spheres and subjects. One, which is fundamental, is hope for political change. Along these lines, her verses take on the combative tone of the manifesto, but her discourse is mediated by the presence of the body, the Nicaraguan landscape, or love (be it filial, romantic, or erotic). Belli writes from her consciousness that it is impossible to evade historical responsibility, since “You do not choose your time to enter the world; / but you must leave a mark in your time. / […] create the world / where the seed we brought with us / will sprout and grow” (“Uno no escoge”). In her poetry, political revolution is often inseparable from loving treatment. As in much of Neruda’s political poetry—we might take as an example “The Flag,” included in The Captain’s Verses, dedicated to his third wife, Matilde Urrutia—the poem is a proclamation, an invitation directed to an “us”: “The man who loves me / […] will not doubt my smile / or fear my abundant hair […] like a Revolution / that makes each day / the beginning of a new victory” (“Reglas del juego para hombres que quieran amar a mujeres mujeres”). This oracular tone, proper to a call to action, has contributed to her being profiled as a “soldier-poet,” as her biography attests: from 1970 to 1993, Belli formed part of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), organized in opposition to the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza. Her militancy led to her exile in Mexico and Costa Rica until, with the victory of the Sandinista Revolution in 1979, she was able to return to her country. “This joy is as painful as childbirth,” she declares in her poem “Patria libre: 19 de julio de 1979.” She later formed part of the Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS), born in 1995 as a schism from the FSLN. From a young age, she grew accustomed “the smell of gun oil” and to “fulfilling a duty of love”; in her prose poem “Vestidos de dinamita,” included in Línea de fuego (1978), she declares that it is necessary to don dynamite and go “occupy government buildings, ministries, barracks… clutching a tiny match.” This combative line through Belli’s poetry favors the future tense, casts aside the tepidness of the conditional, and appeals, at times, to the present subjunctive, with valiant desire projected upon imaginary, longed-for scenarios. The optimism of the lyrical self is remarkable, even in the most adverse of circumstances: “Only love will endure / while days, months, years / collapse like detonated towers” (“Solo el amor resistirá”); “That we will not be the last to inhabit the earth, / that without us / the empire will fall / to ruins” (“Ayúdame a creer que no seremos los últimos pobladores de la tierra”); “Home / Land / I will perish / My anguish will cease / but you will remain / rooted in this space / sheltering my memories / and my bones” (“Nicaragua”). This line at which homeland and eros intersect is what led Harold Pinter, winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature, to say her talent is “wonderfully free,” and what made Salman Rushdie say she embodies “a kind of public love poetry that comes closer to expressing the passion of Nicaragua than anything I [have] yet heard.” 

Another of her treatments of the future is grounded in nature’s cycles as the foundation of a cosmic order. This hope for the future entails a paradox: the temporal evolution of the lyrical subject implies her dissolution, her physical death. This celebration of cycles (whether hormonal, diurnal and nocturnal, of the seasons, of fertility, or of the phases of life) converges, in Belli’s poetry, with the ecofeminist current of thought, placing environmental justice in dialogue with gender equality:

We are like plants:
our skin is leaf and veins […]
we are the dance and to dance the wind
is in the power of our legs free from roots […]
because life feeds on life
we will burn on the funeral pyre and not die.
Songs and myths will outlive us,
just as the tree endures
chopped and dead to give me the tool
to write these thoughts […]
To love, sing, declare beautiful verses
and then
to sleep. 

(“Consuelo para la temporalidad”)

The certainty of death does not nullify the individual’s usefulness in the attainment of a higher goal, nor does it banalize the mandate of a life, as long as it is lived ethically and courageously:

To dig for hope through despair,
to search through bitterness
for the well-known, predictable, familiar
flavor of honey […]
as my outstretched arm into the future
from the mirror reveals to me
that I am complete,
strong and fragile,ready to face
the unknowable
future. 

(“Poda para crecer”)

Desire distorts and rearranges the past (just as the mirror reflects the passage of time), but the poet never falls victim to a nostalgia that invalidates the present. Even in those poems in which she turns to the memory of pain to avoid a second symbolic death of the loved one, as well as a third death (her own), there is a will for the future. This is evinced in her evocations of her revolutionary comrade Carlos Fonseca, and in the cutting memory of her former partner, Marcos, murdered in 1976 by Somoza’s national guard. The latter is recalled in the poem “Te busco en la fuerza del futuro”: “Only I, my love / and you wherever you are / […] and I leap, splash, strike out / searching for you / in a future time filled with / the strength of your strength.” Her faithfulness to this love is projected into the future and forms the foundation—the strength—of her struggle. Thus, the sting of memory—instead of invoking oblivion, in Cernudian fashion—becomes, in Belli, a longing proportional to experience: the more it matters to the person, the greater the emotional loyalty when it comes to an end. In this sense, nostalgia, in Belli’s poetry, is a form of gratitude.

Belli’s poetic enunciation is also influenced by a future dimension. In her poetry, we often read appeals to interlocutors and recipients based on the presumption of acts of reading yet to come. We find the ironic didacticism of her “Reglas del juego para los hombres que quieran amar a mujeres mujeres,” the fact-checking and warnings about married life of “Los casados,” and the proclamation of feminist vindication—in which the lyrical self becomes plural—of “Ocho de marzo” or her “Consejos para la mujer fuerte.” She also makes clear that she is writing for future readers in poems dedicated to her daughters, present in different books: “How do I explain to you that we are creating a new country for you?” she writes in the heartrending poem “Ya van meses, hijita.” Or, in “La madre de mis hijas”: “the one who wrote them love poems / for a time when they could understand her, / without the sting / of resentment.” Other poems are addressed to a gendered collective, as in “Menopausia”: “Build a bonfire with them in your backyard. / Take off your clothes. / Dance the ritual dance of middle age. / And survive / as we will all survive.” Her conversational, dialogical, oral tone often takes on the form of deferred discourse, becoming counsel or instruction tailored to the specific circumstances of whomever may be reading her, depending on their age, their relationship status, and their social environment. She demonstrates a will to pass down personal and political experience as a legacy for coming generations. Yet Gioconda Belli never does so with the high-handedness of a magisterial voice, but rather with the tenderness and compassion of one who has revelled, suffered, fallen, and loved.

In her three latest poetry books, Fuego soy, apartado y espada puesta lejos (2007), En la avanzada juventud (2013), and El pez rojo que nada en el pecho (2020), she accentuates the consciousness of loss associated with physical changes. Mirrors, which began to appear in Apogeo (1998), are repeated, recalling the inexorable passage of time, as we read in “Dolor de los espejos,” which shows how a woman approaches the mirror fearfully, day after day, to make note of the gradual transformations in her appearance. Her body, which was once predictable and trustworthy, starts revealing itself to be alien, obedient to the “the menstrual cycle of memory,” which lends the poem “Calendario del cuerpo” its title. At any rate, the lyrical self continues championing her natural defense of hope and commits to “await another twilight / remain brave / grabbing life / by the horns.” Memory has the power to safeguard that which is lost with the irremediable surge of time, questioning its power as the absolute degradative. In consonance with what I said above about the ecofeminist focus of Belli’s poetry and its consideration of nature’s cycles as the foundation of a cosmic order, in these latest books we witness a fantasy of vegetable dissolution, of withdrawal and return to the earth. She makes use of imagery in which beginning converges with end: “I am made of plants, I am carnivorous / at once nourishing and prey animal / time caresses my body and climbs the sides of my legs […] it surrounds me sweetly / carrying me away,” she writes in “Tiempo vegetal.” Thus time, hour after hour, “cloaks my life in jungles.” Once again, a celebration of cycles, despite the inevitable doom they bring along with them. 

In her as-yet-unpublished poems, written between 2021 and 2023 and foreseen in the volume Parir el alba (2024), edited by María José Bruña Bragado for Ediciones de la Universidad de Salamanca in honor of the thirty-second Reina Sofía Ibero-American Poetry Prize, Belli gives a place of privilege to the present, at the expense of her habitual focus on the future. This handful of poems gives us the sensation of temporal suspension, of a frozen present. “I greet the day, / I celebrate it. / Joy and nostalgia find space within me. / I do not survive. / I live,” she writes in “Sísifo.” “I am saved,” she concludes in the poem “La lluvia huele en Madrid.” It seems the emergency must be narrated in the present; urgency must be brought home at once. Exiled in Madrid, the writer was deprived of her Nicaraguan nationality in February of 2023, along with ninety-four of her compatriots, including Cervantes Prize-winning writer Sergio Ramírez, by order of Daniel Ortega. These forthcoming poems take as their subject the “thievery” of the tyrant, his “brutal usurpation.”

I believe the womb—and this noun is far from innocent—of Gioconda Belli’s torrential lyrical strength lies in her commitment to hope. In her poetry, the most effective path with which to reform the future is to start imagining it. And to make it known. 

Essay translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon

Poems by Gioconda Belli translated by Stacey Alba Skar-Hawkins

Main image: Armando Morales, Paysage avec Chien Deux Baigneuses XXII, 1996, oil on canvas.