A Nation Tempered by Poetry

Los Angeles Times, July 26, 1999

Nicaraguans, hardened by a history of invasions, brutal dictatorships and natural disasters, turn to poets for healing and guidance. They are the country's heroes.

By JUANITA DARLING, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

MANAGUA, Nicaragua--On a terrace overlooking Managua, sipping an after-dinner rum--better than brandy on a balmy tropical night--old friends reminisce, and their recollections lead to poetry.

A top officer of the Central Bank and confirmed believer in free-market economics begins. Eyes moist, she recites the warning from Ruben Dario, her country's most famous poet, to Teddy Roosevelt after the fourth U.S. invasion of Nicaragua: "Be careful. Spanish America lives! There are a thousand cubs of the Spanish lion on the loose."

In Nicaragua, even disciples of conservative U.S. economist Milton Friedman recite anti-imperialist poetry. And what's more, many of them write it, along with love poems and odes to nature.

"Every Nicaraguan is a poet until proven otherwise," Jose Coronel Urtecho, another famous poet, once quipped. Nicaraguans even call out "poet" to greet a friend, the way cowboys would shout "pardner."

On weekdays, children wait outside television stations with poems in hand to read them on morning variety shows. On Saturday mornings, Nicaraguans find pages of poems in the weekly literary supplements of the country's major daily newspapers. On weekends, audiences pack La Casa de los Mejia Godoy, a '90s coffeehouse, to hear brothers Carlos and Luis Enrique recite poetry and sing songs--many of them poems set to music.

Further, international critics agree that Nicaragua produces a remarkable amount of excellent verse. "Bad poetry is not tolerated," said Steven White, language professor at St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y., and translator and editor of numerous volumes of Nicaraguan poetry.

Poetry arguably is all that still unites Nicaragua after 20 years of revolution, counterrevolution and corruption.
"Nicaragua needs a lot of healing, and through its best product, poetry, it can be healed," contemporary Nicaraguan poet Yolanda Blanco said by telephone from her New York City home. "Great poets are like teachers--they are listened to in Nicaragua."

Why do poets and poetry have such an important voice in the second-poorest nation in the Americas, a country where nearly one-third of its 4 million people are unable to read, and where all are marked by their history of invasions, brutal dictatorships and natural disasters?

Nicaraguans reply that they write and revere poetry precisely because of that. "This is an illiterate, despotic, rebellious country," said poet-musician Luis Enrique Mejia Godoy, "with a great need to define itself culturally."

Part of that definition includes a long tradition of oral poetry. A popular figure in town festivals is El Cabezon, the Big Head, a masked character who composes extemporaneous couplets, usually teasing the audience or criticizing the government.

After 8-year-old Maria Nazareth Sevilla saw El Cabezon at the Easter festival in Chinandega, in western Nicaragua, she challenged her father on the ride home: "OK, Daddy, first you say a rhyme, then I'll say a rhyme."

"Our children invent rhymes from the time they are little because that is part of tradition," explained her father, Roger Sevilla, who oversees the secondary school curriculum at the Education Ministry.

Poetry became the language of rebellion in a heavily censored country during the four-decade Somoza family dictatorship that ended 20 years ago. "This has produced a poetry of giving witness, a poetry with fire," said Ariel Montoya, publisher of the Decenio literary magazine.

Still, it is hard to imagine that a nation of poets could have been produced without the influence of one man: Dario, the father of modernism, not just in Nicaragua but in the entire Spanish-speaking world.

"He pulled poetry from a humdrum repetitiveness as old as [Miguel de] Cervantes [author of the early 17th century masterpiece 'Don Quixote'] that imitated prose," said Pablo Antonio Cuadra, himself among Nicaragua's most respected poets and literary critics. "A tree of that dimension had to produce a commotion in his own country."

Dario is the standard by which poets are measured in Nicaragua, not only for the quality of their verse, but also for the depth of their commitment to their country and to developing the next generation of poets.

"Nicaraguans do not have a lot to give us glory or examples," said Education Ministry spokesman Sergio Boffeli. "Our politicians are ward bosses. So poets attract us. . . . They are our national heroes."

Dario brought both glory and example. A century ago, he wrote carefully crafted, sophisticated verse that can be easily understood, still a characteristic of Nicaraguan poetry today.

First-graders at the Colegio Calasanz break up into teams to recite his sonnet "Caupolican." Each group learns a couplet, and one after the other they can recite the entire poem.

Leonel Gamboa teaches his third-graders at the Sept. 14 Elementary School in a working-class Managua neighborhood to recite the first verse of "Sonatina," Dario's tribute to inspiration in the guise of a listless princess: "The princess is sad. What could be wrong with the princess? Sighs escape from her strawberry mouth, which has lost its laughter, lost its color."

At first the children are embarrassed, but soon, encouraged by applause from their classmates, volunteers emerge. Jerzog Morales, 11, smilingly addresses his recitation to Gladys Montenegro, 7, who sits in the front row like a princess herself in her dark ponytail and curly bangs.

Dario is as familiar to schoolchildren as nursery rhymes. As they grow, they learn what he and other poets contributed to their history.

Dario was an ambassador who encouraged a spirit of public service among the emerging poets whom he influenced. Decades later, desperate to try to end the repressive Somoza dictatorship, one young poet, Rigoberto Lopez Perez, assassinated Anastasio Somoza Garcia in 1956 and paid with his life. The tyrant's son Luis rounded up other young poets, like Cuadra, and jailed them.

When the Sandinista National Liberation Front finally overthrew the last Somoza dictator, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, in 1979, the internationally recognized poet Ernesto Cardenal became culture minister. He tried to institutionalize Nicaragua's tradition of poetic mentoring through workshops in neighborhoods, factories and army barracks.

Poems from the workshops were widely published and translated by international scholars such as White, who were intrigued by the Sandinista revolution.

The most successful workshops, according to Cardenal, were those in military and police barracks. "There was discipline," he recalled. "People were not absent."

Nevertheless, the workshops did not produce poets of stature. Cardenal blames their collapse on the intrigues of his political rivals. Other writers argue that the workshops were a Sandinista version of censorship that prized "externalism," or outward-looking poetry, above good writing.

One middle-aged poet who is consistently published recalls that he was refused admission to Cardenal's workshops because his poems were "too intimate."

"It was as if they said, 'Your poetry is no good,' " he said.
Crushed, he told a friend, who introduced him to Cuadra, then editor of the literary supplement of the respected newspaper La Prensa. Cuadra published his work.

Even after Cuadra went into exile, other Nicaraguans struggled to prevent the Sandinistas from appropriating poetry and Dario the way they had appropriated their country's guerrilla hero, Augusto Cesar Sandino.

"We have no more important hero than Dario," said sociologist Oscar Rene Vargas. "We are divided over Sandino."

Even after decades of fighting, Nicaraguans see themselves as poets, not warriors. That is partly because they poeticize their history, Vargas said.

Not all the effects are positive, however. "Poets have taken on the role of troubadours," Vargas said. "Poets have done the work of historians, filling the void."

The result, he said, is that instead of history, Nicaragua has mythical figures, like those who inhabit a mural on his living room wall: the Gueguense, or mule-headed man, along with La Llorona, the crying woman, and a dozen other legends.

"Real history is replaced by virtual history," Vargas said. "Magic has taken the place of reason."

So, Nicaraguans do not learn from their history, he said, because they do not analyze it.

"With poetry, you cannot prove anything, you can only imagine it," he said. "We make the same mistakes over and over. We are condemned to believe that we are beginning history."

But Nicaraguans insist that poetry remains the way for outsiders to follow the threads of their history and arrive at what this nation is today. "If someone wants to understand my country, read Nicaraguan poetry," Mejia Godoy advised.

What readers of recent Nicaraguan poetry will find are works of disillusionment, said literary critic Jorge Eduardo Arellano.

"It attests to a frustration with the post-utopia," he said. "There is a consciousness of having been cheated. What was believed pure turned out to be corrupt, and what was thought perfect turned out to be perverse."

Nine years after the Sandinistas were voted out of power, Nicaragua remains a bitterly divided nation. Even though the Sandinistas left the country deeply in debt while party chiefs lived in mansions they expropriated from the rich, activists remain fiercely loyal to their leaders.

Blanco's hope is that poetry can help Nicaraguans find a way from a violent past to a peaceful future. This fall, she will release "Nonantzin," or "Beloved," a collection of verse by well-known Nicaraguan writers of different political stripes, which she has set to music.

"Today's Nicaragua wants to purge itself of the 1980s," Blanco said. "The poetical-musical anthology I offer is a little song to give a good birth to a new people, a people who deserve a better fate."

She chose poems by Cuadra, who was exiled by the Sandinistas, and by two prominent Sandinistas, Cardenal and the late Urtecho. She said politics weren't a consideration in her selection.

"They are poems looking for a guitar," she said. "I want this to be a balm for wounds, a way to say, 'Listen, follow your poets; there is wisdom in their words.' "

For more on Nicaraguan poetry, go to:p/www.dariana.com.