Verse and Versatility

Like Chamorro, the poet, now in his eighties, is a cousin of Coronel’s. White-bearded and wearing a Che Guevara beret atop his shoulder-length white hair, Cardenal is dressed in blue jeans and a cotona, the traditional Nicaraguan peasant shirt that he brought back into fashion. He delivers a stern corrective to Chamorro’s association of Coronel with a poetry devoid of national significance. The poem that Cardenal reads, “Epistle to José Coronel Urtecho,” is written in the concrete, declarative style that he was accused of imposing on younger poets in the Sandinistas’ poetry workshops. It rehearses the two cousins’ political disagreements, culminating in Coronel’s conversion to the Sandinista cause. In spite of his age, Cardenal’s voice remains powerful. When he belts out lines like, “The land belongs to all, not to the rich!,” voices in the crowd respond with “¡Viva! ” It feels as though we are back in the 1970s.

As Cardenal reads, Chamorro sits with his head turned away from the podium, staring at the ancient flagstones of the church patio. When the poet finishes, a nearby group of men in baseball caps start chanting that the brutal dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle was “the best president Nicaragua ever had!” As the crowd shouts them down, Chamorro runs for a waiting car. The readings continue for another hour. The final reading, by Gioconda Belli, reasserts the Sandinista value of poetry as the expression of national history: a semi-mystical allegiance similar to that of belonging to a religious community or an underground political movement. A tall, striking woman in her late fifties, Belli (whose mother was a close friend of the Chamorros) incarnated the sexual liberation of Nicaraguan women in the 1970s by writing erotic poems that put into print words, longings, and acts that no upper-class woman in Catholic, patriarchal Nicaragua had voiced before. One of the poems that Belli reads encapsulates Nicaraguan history through a series of evocations of night-time landings at the airport in Managua in different eras. The men who want the Somoza dictatorship back start shouting again, but the crowd silences them.

The 1979–1990 Sandinista government is remembered, among other things, for its literacy campaign, its poetry workshops, and for the large number of writers who occupied administrative posts. The opportunistic, windily populist rebranding of the old revolutionary party that returned former president Daniel Ortega to power in the November 2006 elections has destabilized this intertwining of left-wing culture and literary allegiances. The culture of globalization is a culture of aliteracy: a consumerist amnesia dependent on the suppression of the historical memory inscribed in poetry. One of the changes I discovered on returning to Managua for the first time in twenty years was that the capital’s new core is an enormous shopping centre called Metrocentro. A replica of a North American shopping mall, with equivalent prices, Metrocentro is adored by well-off Nicaraguans. Yet as I wandered past the stores, many of them familiar, I realized one outlet was missing: there was no bookstore. In Central America, bookstores and shopping malls exist in opposition to each other; to include a bookstore in Metrocentro would be to negate the mall’s identity as the purveyor of globalized postmodernity. While the mall strives to be timeless, reading instills an awareness of language and history, and in the Central American context these values remain subversive.

“These Nicaraguan poets,” the young Guatemalan poet Julio Serrano said to me at the festival, “they won’t even let you make jokes about the left!” In Nicaragua, the Sandinista revolution institutionalized the literary vision of the nation, just as the first three post-1990 governments, through projects such as Metrocentro, institutionalized the idea of Nicaragua as a coincidental space within an undifferentiated planetary market. The two clashing visions both command the authority of having governed the country. In other Central American countries, these tensions play themselves out in different ways.

In El Salvador, where the guerrillas not only failed to take power but murdered Roque Dalton, the country’s quintessential revolutionary poet, the left and literary culture remain as inextricably linked as they are in Nicaragua, but they have seen their influence retreat. Poor, forgotten Honduras next door never attempted a revolution because during the 1980s the country was used as a staging ground for American military operations. Honduran women poets continue to fight battles that Gioconda Belli fought in Nicaragua in the 1970s. When I asked Lety Elvir, Honduras’s best-known younger woman poet, about her expression of female desire, she became almost defensive, as though anticipating a machista attack. Honduran poetry struggles partly because the left-wing culture on which it depends never became strong enough to institutionalize its legitimacy as it did in Nicaragua and, to a lesser extent, in El Salvador.

Guatemala, which contains almost one-third of Central America’s population, doesn’t have as active a political left as Nicaragua does; the country’s indigenous movement forms the most dynamic opposition force to the free trading right. About 60 percent of Guatemala’s population classifies itself as indigenous, or Maya, distinguishing it from El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua, which traditionally have seen themselves as mestizo societies. The 1996 Guatemala Peace Accords, which ended a thirty-six-year civil war that left more than 200,000 dead, the majority of them Maya civilians, included an indigenous rights chapter. Despite international pressure, post-1996 governments have failed to implement this section. Julio Serrano, like some other Guatemalans I know, fears that his country is disintegrating into fiefdoms defined by region and race. When I challenge him on his political beliefs, he claims to belong to neither the left nor the right. “I’m beyond all that,” he says.

Many younger Central American poets, particularly women and those from minority backgrounds, are trying to move beyond ideology. They struggle to disentangle poetry from nation-building without handing over the muse to an authoritarian globalization. In Guatemala, one way of doing this, although not a common choice, is by writing in Mayan languages. Humberto Ak’abal is a Mayan traditionalist who lives in a remote highland community and publishes his poems in bilingual editions with Quiché Maya and Spanish versions on facing pages. Epigrammatic in their brevity and vaguely Buddhist in their serene assessment of natural rhythms, Ak’abal’s poems work on a variety of levels to evoke a distinctively Mayan cosmos. As with many other Central American poets, his work is a form of political expression, whether he is writing about civil war massacres or about working the land.

Throughout Central America, the splits between nationalistic left-wing movements and right-wing globalization supporters obscures a racial complexity that is only beginning to be acknowledged. Dominated by the blending of Spanish and indigenous cultures on the Pacific coast, Central American nations have ignored or suppressed the isolated Afro-Caribbean communities of the sparsely populated Atlantic coast. Twenty-one-year-old Wingston González’s The Wizards of the Dusk (and blues again) is one of the first collections of poetry to be published by a Guatemalan of Afro-Caribbean descent. Drenched in pop culture (the first poem is about Marilyn Monroe; others allude to the 1970s rock group kiss), the book is hardly a refutation of globalization. But neither is González’s globalization, steeped as it is in an acute environmental consciousness and a respect for local cultures, that of the Chamorros. On the Atlantic coast, English and Spanish coexist with indigenous and Caribbean-influenced languages, and González’s book includes a poem entitled “Lagiiribudubá Yurumein woun” (literally “St. Vincent will return to us” ), written in the African-descended Garifuna language spoken in some parts of the region.

During readings at the Granada Poetry Festival, children wander in front of the colonial mansions, begging for coins from the festival audience. It’s a reminder that while poetry can frame society’s problems, it doesn’t offer immediate solutions. As miserable as Central American society has become in recent years, with its ever-widening chasm between rich and poor, there may be space on a purely aesthetic plane for a middle ground between a state that disdains national history and a poetry that assumes national self-definition as its natural prerogative. The second-to-last night of the festival closes with a reading by Carlos Rigby, a Bob Marleyish-looking poet from Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast. Rigby’s performance stands apart from the rest. He free-associates, teases English echoes out of Spanish words, falls silent, walks off the stage then returns, makes bilingual puns, and speaks of his parents’ understanding of love. He seems to be dismantling not only the dominance of the Spanish-descended oligarchy, but the authority of the poet as cultural arbiter. The crowd, Sandinistas and Chamorristas alike, applauds him with an enthusiasm that borders on rapture.