Writer, political activist and well-known feminist Gioconda Belli says that “it took an act of empathy” to write her latest novel from a male point of view. In her new work, Fevers of Memory, the protagonist is a man – Charles Choiseul de Praslin.
The next stage of the struggle in Nicaragua must lead to defining an organization that can bind together and legitimize the self-organized movement; a body that succeeds in uniting us around proposals and ideals that move away from the failures that we’ve experienced.
On January 1st, time gives us 365 days in blank. How will those 8,760 hours be filled in this homeland besieged by the storm of a people blowing winds of change against the closed gate of stubbornness and cruelty of its rulers? What have they gained in these months? Their victories are pyrrhic, deceitful, fragile victories.
“At this juncture how can I not ask myself if it was worth it to have given over my youth and a large part of my life to a revolution that I saw as the most beautiful thing that could possibly happen to me? The horror of the events that have occurred in Nicaragua since April 18th, when a citizen protest was violently repressed, doesn’t cease to astonish me.
According to the well-known feminist poet, Gioconda Belli, the international community must “act for the good of the Nicaraguans and convince Ortega that in this century there can no longer be tyrants who try to lock a country in a cage and throw the key out to the sea.”
A few days ago, I called a businessman friend who is usually a jokester. I didn’t expect that when I asked him how he was, he would answer – “very depressed”, then be unable to continue any further. His voice broke, and I could hear that hoarse sobbing that emerges when men don’t want to cry but can’t hold it back.
“I don’t know what we could expect from you, a mother who showed no pity for her own daughter, flesh of your flesh and blood of your blood. But even amid the grief of over 170 deaths, you haven’t stopped the lies, nor felt any scruples…”
In 1978, during the last years of the Somoza dictatorship, I wrote a poem calling for a strike. I never thought this poem would once again be necessary, much less while engaged in the burning effort of my youth: overthrowing what I thought would be the last tyrant my eyes would ever see…
Dear Luis Almagro, I understand that it’s difficult for you to assimilate the fact that Daniel Ortega, one of the nine leaders of the Sandinista Revolution, has become a dictator. How can you ask us to “strengthen the democratic institutions” of the Ortega dictatorship if there IS no democracy?
Here’s a poem by Gioconda Belli published for Nicaraguan Mothers Day which falls each year on May 30th. On the date this year, hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans joined the mothers of so many young people killed in the government repression of peaceful protests since mid-April.