Three central concepts underpin Gioconda Belli’s work: first, its vigorous political and social content supporting a liberated homeland, which is also applicable to other homelands; next, its profound exploration, its examination, the lifting of the veils of female identity; and, finally, the desire to shape a free poetics. This tripartite conjunction is connected, among other reasons, because the three parts are tackled subversively. Of the focal points that shape Belli’s poetic space, we will concentrate on the one in which our poet reflects on the poetic act, what traditionally has been referred to as poetic art. Because poetic art also serves to create spaces of liberty.
Before moving into an analysis of Belli’s poetic art, let us itemize some generalities connected with it: these are allied with Giocondian vitality which, through them, transmits what we detect in the totality of her poetics, that is to say: dynamism, vivacity, drive, impact, strength, energy, belief. In the poems she dedicates to meta-poetic thought, we find emotions which are closer to what is human than to what is typical of language, as, for example, experiences of pleasure and pain, as well as eroticism and sensuality. There is also a questioning of language, which at times flows in keeping with the amorous duel. The meta-poetic content suggests a similar direction to that of the colloquial poets who democratized poetry in Latin America in the sixties. Nevertheless, and as a logical consequence, with the passage of time her poetic art will flow in other directions, in line with advances in her poetic art.
There is no doubt whatsoever that Belli’s first book of poetry, Sobre la grama, published in 1974, is still considered, right up to the present day, an axial book of poems—a Giocondian catechism—in that therein are to be found the original themes that will be expressed in various and evolutionary modes in her later poetics. Slipping in among such celebrated pieces as “Soy llena de gozo” and “Y Dios me hizo mujer”—this latter an anthem today, though back then simply the lead poem of this incomparable book—are compositions in which Belli expresses the need to piece together what poetry is for her. And she does so in poems such as “Dándose,” “Credo,” “Cotidiano,” “Dáteme poema,” “Mi sangre,” and “A borbotones.”
The poem can become an act of devotion, like that of lovers, as in “Dándose,” in which Belli poses the need to write “to shape the world”; but writing also signifies an act of relinquishment—as is loving another—of sharing, of nourishment. “Credo,” the poem that follows “Dándose,” is a real declaration of principles, as is “Y Dios me hizo mujer.” In “Credo,” she writes, “I believe my poetry is born of happiness,” without this being an occasional hindrance to a painful awareness. For all that, and unlike those writers who understand the poetic act as a manifestation of unease, Gioconda Belli believes that “to write / I need to be happy, to feel like a / whinnying horse, to explore words / like great malinche trees,” concluding that “joy […] makes me a poet.” The pleasure our author feels when writing is similar to the one her body senses, especially when it has sex: surrendering to another body in the way one gives oneself to writing.
The quotidian guides each and every one of Belli’s poems, and the same is true of her poetic art. In the poem “Cotidiano,” they, the poems, “appear before me in the kitchen, in the study, / in the bedroom. They are strewn about / all around my messiness” because, as she tells us at the beginning of the composition: “My poems flow through my entire house.” The uniqueness of these verses lies precisely in what the final lines harbor like a treasure chest, lines in which the author ceases to be herself in order to become a poem.
We could consider “Dáteme poema” crucial, a title which, by way of parallelism, plays out in the composition. It is an axial text in so far as it transfers to this poem the themes to do with the body that Belli has been unfurling throughout the book. She demands that the poem not deny itself to her, that it not be elusive, as if she were dealing with a lover: “Do not play with me like a teasing child / in my dreams,” and that the poem present itself like a child; she gives birth to the poem “in a tiny egg / in my Fallopian tubes.” But at the same time—and this is where the shift from the individual to the social, so prototypical of colloquial poetry, occurs—the poem give itself to her out of commitment: “but shift my soul / redirect my gaze, / show me the dirty feet of my pueblo, / the large stomach of my pueblo,” concluding that, in the act of possession, the poem should follow the celebratory path of the sexual act.
From the act of possession to the interpretation of poetry as a birth, as we see in “A borbotones.” In the same way that female biological processes are a constant in this book, as we see in compositions such as “Menstruación,” “Maternidad II,” “Parto,” and “Dando el pecho,” so too these same physiological acts, so much a part of women, are applied to poetic art, an unconventional occurrence in the conceptualization of women’s art. We should not overlook the composition titled “Algunos poetas.” In it, in an act of rebellion, Gioconda Belli points an accusatory finger at some poets who, “following the old paternalistic tradition / […] try to adopt us,” and are incapable of understanding the essence of the poetic in, for instance, the wind, the forbidden fruit, “the mysterious fertility / of our poems.”
In Truenos y arcoíris, published in 1982, despite the fact that we are dealing with a poetry of circumstances built on political events, the book surprisingly opens with a poetics which we could designate as an “ars poetica that confounds.” The title is “Del qué hacer con estos poemas.” In reality, this is a dedication, a desideratum, a prelude: “A daring and beautiful book for you,” so that the beloved knows how much this woman, Gioconda, loves him. In a book like this one, born in the early days of a revolution, at a time of urgency, there had to be a poem titled “Obligaciones del poeta.” A very sixties piece about the duty of the Latin American intellectual and, specifically, of that poetry born of the clamor of the Cuban Revolution, which now transfers to revolutionary Nicaragua.
Another axial moment in the poetic trajectory of our author, also in terms of poetic art, was the publication of Apogeo (1998). This collection of poems is the flipside of the coin to Sobre la grama. Her vision is now much more complex and insists on the notion—already conceived in her earlier poetic work—of the many women that each one of us women contains, and of today’s woman as the sum of all those women who preceded us, thereby producing the idea of a lineage. There are two titles in this collection that lead us to reflections about poetry: “El poeta se reúne con sus palabras” and “Insomnio con palabras.” Note the repetition of the axial word “palabras” (words); it would seem that in this book, it is only this word which impregnates the poetic act: not what is generic, which is the poem, but what nourishes it, the embryo of language. In the first poem, an extensive one in dialogue form, it is Gioconda who gets together “with my heated words,” in the same way as Miguel de Unamuno in his “nivola” Niebla, in which the creator meets his creation. Here, the words converted into characters—like “Rabia,” “Dolor,” “Tristeza,” “Desorden,” and “Paciencia”—initiate a discussion with Belli, who insists on her suffering in the moment of conceiving the poem and requiring an exact role for them. In the following poem, “Insomnio con palabras,” she resorts again to personification, the sole objective of which is to highlight the overriding power of words over the poet: “At night, words / walk on tiptoes.” These lines reflect a common theme in the poetic arts, that of the impotence of writing, the fruitlessness that the act of writing occasionally becomes.
Gioconda Belli launches the twenty-first century poetically with Mi íntima multitud (2003) and Fuego soy, apartado y espada puesta lejos (2007), and poetic art surfaces moderately—in the first of these books, in one title, “Creación,” and in the second, with “Las palabras,” again, words. The first of these poems could be linked with the previously cited “Insomnio con palabras,” as our poet returns to the romantic vision, so customary in metapoetics, of the loneliness of the writer; the nightmare of the blank page of yesteryear which now materializes on “the illuminated screen distant and blue like a starless sky.” The element of surprise comes at the end, the idea of the all-powerful creator, of the deicide: “A Universe where I am the only imaginable Goddess,” a sentence that links directly to the poem’s title. Poetry as the place where the impossible is possible. In “Las palabras,” she continues to highlight the commanding nature of words, their magnanimity, how they envelop the author both within and without, and how they alone are capable of providing her with what she is looking for: beauty.
References to love, feminism, and the denunciation of injustices continue to be present in En la avanzada juventud (2013) and El pez rojo que nada en el pecho (2020). In the 2013 collection of poems, continuing with the notion of the sovereignty of words, she includes two metapoetic texts of a diverse nature: “Poder de la poesía” and “Madre mía de las palabras.” In the first, she insists on the demiurgic nature of the person writing, despite the fact that the poetic deed is openly combined with the game of love: “My words and I share the most insignificant gesture.” The second, dedicated to her mother, is very interesting because of its originality. If there is a genealogy in literary writing, it also exists in the approach to the theme of womanhood, and here, the principal lineage is through the mother. In this piece, our author also categorizes from the first line: “I am a woman made of words,” and she is this because her mother, who involved her in the world of words at her maternal breast, wanted it to be so. Her progenitor was a teller of amazing stories, the person who introduced her to the universe of the pagan gods in that house full of books: her “words always traveling / from her mouth to mine, a mesmerized child […] instinctively making me what I am / this skeleton of consonants and vowels / lovingly / remembering her / on this night.”
The line-up is rounded out with “Poesía en tiempos de crueldad,” from the most recent book of poems by Gioconda Belli, El pez rojo que nada en el pecho. The latter is divided into three parts, and Belli gives the last part the title “¿Qué puede hacer la poesía?”. This is where the aforementioned poem is located. This could be poetic art at an inopportune moment; in other words, written at a time when poetic art has lost its primary place, as poets these days express their meta-poetic thoughts outside the poem; that is, above all else, as opinions in the media and social media. Never mind the social and political nature—here understood as the purpose of the poetic, the constant repetition throughout the poem “¿Qué puede hacer la poesía?”—which characterized poetry in the sixties and early seventies. It is as if, in these lines, Gioconda Belli were expressing what her poetic art has been up to this point. “Poesía en tiempos de crueldad” poses the question which has been key throughout so many decades, principally of the twentieth century, in order to demand an active poetry today as well, a reference precisely to what the linguistically informal poets attacked in the abstract and obtuse poetry that did not maintain a fluid relationship with the reader, with the people:
Poetry requires an eye to rise up and go forth.
You need time, love, and horror
for poetry to turn on like lamplight
and to bring out its matches and fireflies
to illuminate night.
The poem is undoubtedly a Giocondian manifesto of the vindication of poetics as more than necessary in serious and difficult times. At the same time, it is written in the same modes and styles as the previous ones; in other words, the same modes and styles generally present in her poetry: free verse, an agile tone, verbal freshness, rhetorical figures which refer us back to the source of the poetic and which confer on the poem an epiphanic effect through the presence of anaphora, parallelisms, powerful images, and direct and frequently sustained metaphors:
Poetry embodies that silent tenacity.
hushed intensity
the soul speaks
refusing to surrender.
This is Gioconda Belli’s poetics, and this is how she has revealed it to us for more than fifty years. Social and political compromise, vindication of the feminine in line after line, and passion for the poetic—these are the key drivers of a body of work that was forged in times of struggle, and which continues unscathed in these times of cruelty.
Essay translated by Lilit Žekulin Thwaites
Poems by Gioconda Belli translated by Stacey Alba Skar-Hawkins
