Gioconda Belli’s complicity in our joint selection of representative poems from throughout her literary career for the anthology and critical study Parir el alba (a volume celebrating the thirty-second Reina Sofía Ibero-American Poetry Prize from the University of Salamanca) led to a series of fruitful encounters in Madrid’s La Latina neighborhood, as well as in Morille, a small town of great cultural importance near Salamanca, and, of course, in Salamanca itself. The following interview is the result of the warm, worthwhile conversations we enjoyed at the Café del Monaguillo, the Cementerio de Arte in Morille, and El Caracol restaurant in Salamanca.
María José Bruña Bragado: In your work, Gioconda, especially your poetry, there is always bliss. Bliss in life, pleasure in words and writing, bliss in one’s own body in connection with nature, with the physiological and hormonal changes a woman goes through, with menstruation, birth, and menopause as vital milestones; and bliss also in being/existing/merging with the the masculine other, with otherness, etc. According to Roland Barthes, truly blissful texts, in comparison with those that are merely pleasurable, are profound; they question, confound, unsettle, arouse emotions or sensations, take risks. Barthes says, “you cannot speak ‘on’ such a text, you can only speak ‘in’ it.” Tell us about this bliss in the act of writing, about erogeneity and letters, and bliss as a leitmotif or theme in your poetry.
Gioconda Belli: I believe bliss is indefinable because each person has his or her own idea of what it means. For me, it has to do with the sensation of being alive, of existing, along with everything that implies. To exist in soul, life, and heart, to give yourself over fearlessly to life, to be able to open yourself to the entirety of the human experience, to welcome life with wonder, to love it, to merge into what it offers us, be it painful or celebratory. It’s a matter of holding on to the notion of being just one drop swimming in a magnificent current, and experiencing the ability to sink as well as float, the gift of breathing, of feeling, of being conscious of immensity and therefore of the relative irrelevance of being just one drop in this millenary, multitudinous, multifaceted cascade. I believe it requires the humility of recognizing your own finitude and irrelevance. Letting yourself be possessed by the notion of existing and enjoying, knowing that, whatever may happen, you are among those privileged enough to receive the gift of being alive. That is my perception of bliss.
M.J.B.B.: To continue discussing this aspect of your work from a different angle, I’ll cite Hélène Cixous, who posits that bliss represents a sexual pleasure or ecstasy proper to women that combines varied mental, physical, and spiritual aspects of the feminine experience, an explosion or effervescence, unlimited abundance or expansion that implies a different way of loving, of reading, of writing, of understanding the world. Do you think there is an unequivocally feminine particularity to this gaze, omniscience, reading, connection to reality? Does one write, think, love differently as a woman?
G.B.: I remember the story of Tiresias’s conversation with Zeus and Hera, when they ask him—once, after having been transformed into a woman, he turns back into a man—about who feels more pleasure, man or woman, and he declares that a woman’s bliss is ten times greater than a man’s.
I believe the secret of a woman’s bliss is that it involves emotion, that the pleasure is derived not only from physical sensations, but also from the will to merge together, to become one with the masculine axis. Women have no reservations about giving themselves over to pleasure. We don’t fear love; on the contrary, emotional surrender is the culmination of pleasure. Men, on the other hand, are afraid of women, afraid of losing control—they don’t trust their feelings, and surrender, for men, means a risk they can’t accept the same way.
I believe we women believe instinctively in each other’s needs, and we believe in that tender, emotional existence through which a human being can attain the two-sided potential of being both oneself and the other. We have a sense of the positivity of the whole, undifferentiated human being. We are always longing for and seeking that fusion that makes what divides us lesser than what brings us together.
M.J.B.B.: Solitude and time are elements necessary to writing. In a beautiful text included in Rebeliones y revelaciones (Txalaparta), you call yourself a “gourmet of solitude,” and you talk about the difficulty of reconciling the artist’s life with motherhood and other practices. Solitude is the “writer’s sea,” you say. Is selfishness or misanthropy a definitive trait of creative people? Or is there always a certain dose of altruism and surrender to otherness, since the work of art wouldn’t make sense without an audience, without reception?
G.B.: We live in community, and the personal is collective. We have to look at others and be conscious of the difficulties that many are going through; we have to put ourselves in others’ shoes and be compassionate. I said so in my acceptance speech for the Reina Sofía Ibero-American Poetry Prize in the auditorium of the University of Salamanca. I’m a humanist—I care about social justice, equality in every sense of the word. I’m extraordinarily concerned about the gap between some people and others, about wars, oppressions, violence against women, women who can only keep hoping to be reconciled and live a decent life, without obstacles in their path. I despise the fact that women have to hide their faces behind veils, that they can’t be themselves, that their strength, their instinct, their identity is suppressed.
I’m highly interested, moreover, in how my work is read and received. Every time I publish a new book, whether it’s poetry or a novel, I’m afraid that people won’t like it, that what I wanted to achieve won’t be understood. In that sense, I’m an eternal beginner or apprentice. And it’s a challenge.
I believe writers dream things and can transform them through their writing, but not entirely. I am convinced that what the writer does affects the world.
M.J.B.B.: In La estética del cinismo: Pasión y desencanto en la literatura centroamericana de posguerra, Central American critic Beatriz Cortez explores how, in Central America, after all the revolutions and defeats, cynicism reigns as a fruit of postmodern skepticism lived in the flesh. Nonetheless, in your work I perceive nocturnality, melancholy, a certain disenchantment, especially in your latest books, but never disillusionment or cynicism because there is still enthusiasm, passion, a hopeful perspective on the future of humanity, of Nicaragua, of equality between men and women.
Why believe? Why keep believing in joy, in optimism and hope? Is tenderness, faith in feelings and in compassion and joy something we can still cling to? How are we supposed to keep dreaming?
G.B.: I believe it’s a decision like so many others: the decision to keep believing, to trust. Trust in our species, in our neighbors, is essential for me because I accept myself and I exist as a social being. Of course, it’s not a matter of turning a blind eye or being naive. There is something terrible about the human capacity to be atrocious, cruel, and destructive, but I don’t think that something must irremediably triumph. I think there is a sense of good and evil in every one of us, and the search for virtue, for beauty—since time immemorial—is in response to a survival instinct because evil leads to self-destruction. I conceive of literature, of poetry, as our species’s stubborn effort to imagine ourselves and reflect on ourselves in a positive way, to create our own redemption and salvation. I believe the truth of the word must be defended with energy and impetus because it is clear that the war for the future means to deprive the word of its power and truth.
M.J.B.B.: In your work, Gioconda, there’s a mastery of many varied genres: the autobiographical chronicle, the journalistic article, narrative fiction, and poetry. Certain themes and a common language seem to permeate your entire body of work, forming a solid, unmistakable block; whether you’ve written a poem, an article in the press, or a novel, we always know we’re reading Gioconda Belli. And this, we should remember, is the hardest part: attaining one’s own style. How do you choose a literary genre? Tell us, for example, about that political disappointment you turned into a novel in Un silencio lleno de murmullos. Although it could have been a chronicle, it could have turned into poems, in that case you chose the novel…
G.B.: That’s because I don’t conceive of myself only as a yarn-spinner, but also as someone who drinks, from life, the elixir of creativity, and above all of experience and reflection. Through my words, I have taken part in the life of the polis, incorporating the opinion article, the essay, the intervention as part of existing within a collective. My most recent novel is personal, but also collective; it’s a reckoning with what we have lived through and suffered in Nicaragua, but also a human and feminine perspective on what it means to be a woman and take an active, rigorous political position, despite predetermined roles, like motherhood and its patterns, for example. The novel is a game of mirrors, in terms of the mother’s action and the daughter’s reaction, in the framework of two phenomena bigger than them and the revolution: the anti-revolution and the pandemic. And, within these phenomena, the effects of personal decisions, like whether or not to have an abortion, for example; whether or not to leave a country, or to accept that a phase of life has ended or not, and also, in the daughter’s case, to see that her actions have consequences that will lead her to live in exile, for example, and to consider how our judgments cannot obviate our circumstances. I wanted to bring together the complexities of a life dedicated to a cause and to show how much it weighs on us as human beings to live according to certain principles. That’s what the novel is about, I think: those existential crossroads in the struggle between good and evil that we constantly face.
M.J.B.B.: The coupling or axis between intimacy and universality, or individuality and collectivity, permeates and is the backbone of your work, coherently and almost inseparably; it is an ars poetica. Is the task of the intellectual still, as Palestinian intellectual Edward Said told us, to “speak truth to power”? Is it possible to continue acting through the word without losing one’s own intimate essence? To what extent is this action contradictory?
G.B.: I think it can be done. It’s a matter of priorities, of convictions. How much are you willing to sacrifice for your convictions? What’s the weight of your ideological position in your own life, of social responsibility versus the responsibility to attain self-realization, love, happiness?
There is an inevitable confrontation between personal happiness or “tranquility” and social commitment, and these alternatives put our values and desires on the line, especially at a time when the individual is revindicated as paramount.
M.J.B.B.: What is a homeland? We know it’s not a passport, and it is writing, it is the symbolic library, but where do you think that belonging to a certain territory lies, that identification with a landscape, embodied—in your case—in ceibos, lakes, and volcanoes? Can a person be from many different places? José Gaos uses the term “transterrado” instead of “desterrado” or “exiliado”… And that brings us back to roots, to earth, to transplanting a tree. Alberti said it best: “¿Por qué me trajiste, padre, a la ciudad? / ¿Por qué me desenterraste del mar? / En sueños la marejada me tira del corazón; / se lo quisiera llevar” [Why, father, did you bring me to the city? / Why did you unearth me from the sea? / In dreams the swell tugs on my heart / and wishes to take it from me]. You have stated, with a truly impressive ability to adapt to and value the present, that you feel warmly welcome in Spain, but to what extent are you still tugged by the swell of your heart? What do you miss most about Nicaragua?
G.B.: Life is always putting new challenges in our path. Just as I was hoping to live out my days in Nicaragua, comfortably surrounded by my books, my landscape, my house, my dogs, I had to leave that calm and satisfaction behind and start again. That act of making myself start again, this time in Madrid, in Spain, has meant, at the end of the day, a new readaptation with new hopes, new friends, new books, new challenges. I think I’m a very lively person, a person who accepts challenges, even when they also imply and bring along pains, losses, absences, and pushing Sisyphus’s rock, as my poem says. Failure makes us grow. I value the positive side of each moment. Every day is a new start, full of wonderful things, and “the rain in Madrid will smell the same,” like in Managua. “I am saved” and my writing will last longer than any passport. I am Nicaraguan and my writing is there. As has been said so many times before, writing, the library, and feelings can be your homeland too. And as long as I keep writing, I will keep appearing in my books as a Nicaraguan writer. And when everyone has forgotten this dictatorship, someone, I hope, will remember Gioconda Belli, the Nicaraguan writer. That was the idea.
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
