Hayden Abroad

Dispatches from Somewhere in the World

Thursday, June 07, 2007

Eighth Book: Gioconda Belli´s ¨The Country Under My Skin¨

The truth is this: It has always been books that have sent me places.

After reading Ayi Kwei Armah´s classic post-colonial novel ¨The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born,¨ I decided I needed to go to Ghana to see the place he wrote about so evocatively for myself. Similarly, when I decided last fall to move to Central America to learn how to speak Spanish, the thought of one country immediately jumped out at me. During my senior year of college, I read Gioconda Belli´s celebrated memoir about Nicaragua, ¨The Country Under My Skin

And so along with wanting to go to a cheap and relatively untouristed country, and to a country where the need was very great (Nicaragua is the second poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, after Haiti), I wanted again to see for myself a world that had once been so richly created for me in words. And so knowing little else, knowing not a soul or a word of Spanish, I bought a plane ticket for Managua.

Having lived in Nicaragua for five months now, I decided that it was time to pick up this book again and re-read it from my newly gained perspective. Belli is an award-winning poet and a Sandinista operative. This ¨memoir of love and war¨ explores the fusion between her personal journey and the turmoil of her country during the 1970s and 1980s. She is a woman with many different identities -- writer and worker, militant and mother -- and this book explores the nexus and the conflicts that arise between these strands over time. She writes passionately about clandestine operations and sensual love affairs. She tells of fallen comrades and dangerous missions. She tells of failed marriages and family struggles. And yet there is an optimistic strand that runs through this book. It is the type of joy that comes when you see another living life fully, pursuing a course with all her heart.

This time I was reading her account of Nicaragua´s political developments more closely. She had deep contact, friendships, and sometimes relations with the most powerful members of the Sandinista movement. I wanted to read her impressions of Daniel Ortega, his brother Humberto, his wife Rosario, and other members of the National Directorate more closely. She describes with great deal the divisions, personal and ideological, that arose within the Sandinistas. She also became acquainted with Fidel Castro of Cuba and General Torrijos of Panama. I was paying closer attention to her description of the battles and movements during the revolution, the impact on places like Managua, León, and the Northern Highlands. Interesting, she accuses the current President of Nicaragua Daniel Ortega (whom she knows well) of betraying the spirit of the revolution by supressing dissent and using any means available to maintain his grip on power.

One thing I like about her writing is the way she sees the connection between her political cause and her personal growth as a woman. She writes profoundly about what it meant to be a Sandinista, what it meant to devote your life to this struggle:

Were we all mad? What mystery in the human genes accounted for the fact that men and women could override their personal survival instincts when the fate of their tribe or the collective was at stake? What was it that enabled people to give their lives for an idea, for the freedom of others? Why was the heroic impulse so strong? What I found most bewildering and extraordinary was the real happiness and fulfillment that came along with commitment. Life acquired unequivocal meaning, purpose, and direction. It was a sensation of complete, utter complicity, a visceral emotional bond with hundreds of anonymous faces, an intimacy of multitudes in which any feeling of loneliness or isolation simply evaporated. In the struggle for everyone´s happiness, the first happiness one found was one´s own.
The story of the Sandinista Revolution is the story in fact of two wars: The first was a guerrilla war that culminated in 1979 by removing the Somoza dictatorship from power. But after that feeling of euphoria, of overthrowing a dictatorship that lasted 43 years, a broken country was forced again into another more costly and ruinous war. When Reagan became President in 1981, he began funding the Contras, who invaded Nicaragua from Honduras. It was only at the end of the decade that this illegal and profoundly immoral activity came to a close. The result was ruinous for Nicaragua and for the Sandinista program.

Belli describes many victories and setbacks, yetthe overall tone remains triumphant. This is a story about what it is possible to do with a life. In this vein, Belli quotes the words of an anonymous Vietnamese poet:

We fill the craters left by the bombs
And once again we sing
And once again we sow
Because life never surrenders.

(Next up: Ann Patchett´s ¨Bel Canto¨)

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