Omar Cabezas, Nicaragua, and the Narrative of Liberation: To the Revolution and Beyond 1793606668, 9781793606662

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Omar Cabezas, Nicaragua, and the Narrative of Liberation

Latin American Decolonial and Postcolonial Literature Series Editor: Thomas Ward, Loyola University Maryland Latin American Decolonial and Postcolonial Literature features works that analyze and engage with Latin American decolonial and postcolonial literatures. Recent work by Walter Mignolo, Enrique Dussel, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Aníbal Quijano, and others has shown how colonial elements were instituted during the colonial period and offer mechanisms and methodologies to overcome the persistence of those colonial forms in literature, philosophy, theology, and society during the post-Independence era. This series focuses on the medium of literature. Decolonial can take the form of resistance to the colonial during that period or it can occur after independence trying to overcome the cultural and political heritage of the colonial interval. Some works in the series may depart from the Anglo-American perspective and use its terminology and thus would prefer the term “postcolonial.” Others may depart from the Mediterranean or Latin perspective à la Frantz Fanon and thus use the term “decolonial.” All decolonial or postcolonial perspectives on literatures of Latin American are welcome. Advisory Board Arturo Arias, University of California, Merced; Tara Daily, Marquette University; Juan G. Ramos, College of the Holy Cross; Javier Sanjinés, University of Michigan; Javier Valiente Núñez, The Johns Hopkins University; and Gustavo Verdesio, University of Michigan Titles in the Series Omar Cabezas, Nicaragua, and the Narrative of Liberation: To the Revolution and Beyond, by José María Mantero Decolonizing Indigeneity: New Approaches to Latin American Literature, by Thomas Ward

Omar Cabezas, Nicaragua, and the Narrative of Liberation To the Revolution and Beyond José María Mantero

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL Copyright © 2019 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. Excerpt(s) from THE COUNTRY UNDER MY SKIN: A MEMOIR OF LOVE AND WAR by Gioconda Belli, translation copyright © 2002 by Gioconda Belli. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, and imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Penguin Random House LLC for permission. Excerpt(s) from FIRE FROM THE MOUNTAIN by Omar Cabezas, copyright © 1985 by Omar Cabezas. Used by permission of Crown Books, and imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. “Terra Incognita” by Danilo Lopez Roman. Published in The Chachalaca Review. Excerpts used with permission of the author and publisher. The Complete Poetry: A Bilingual Edition by Cesar Vallejo, translated by Clayton Eshelman, © 2009 by the Regents of the University of California. Published by the University of California Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mantero, Jose Maria, 1964– author. Title: Omar Cabezas, Nicaragua, and the narrative of liberation : to the revolution and beyond / Jose Maria Mantero. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2019] | Series: Latin American decolonial and postcolonial literature | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019016664 (print) | LCCN 2019019575 (ebook) | ISBN 9781793606662 (electronic) | ISBN 9781498587983 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Cabezas, Omar—Criticism and interpretation. | National characteristics, Nicaraguan, in literature. Classification: LCC PQ6653.C14 (ebook) | LCC PQ6653.C14 Z76 2019 (print) | DDC 868/.6409— dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019016664 TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction

ix

1 2 3 4 5 6

Latin American Identity, Liberation, and Intercultural Philosophy Utopia and Testimonio Post-Revolutionary Autobiography in Nicaragua The Work of Omar Cabezas: Orality and Liberation Discourse Comedy as Subversion and Resistance in the Work of Omar Cabezas The Liberation of Fire from the Mountain: Testimonial Text, Documentary Film, and the New Nicaragua

1 33 71 107 129 171

Conclusion

187

Bibliography

201

Index

221

About the Author

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Acknowledgments

I would like to express my thanks to several individuals for their assistance with Omar Cabezas, Nicaragua, and the Narrative of Liberation: To the Revolution and Beyond. At Xavier University, my colleagues Tim White and Natalia Jacovkis first planted the seeds of a book I had wanted to write for many years. Shannon Byrne encouraged me at every turn, allowing me the benefit of her knowledge and experience. The generosity and support of David Mengel, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and Rachel Chrastil, associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, contributed meaningfully to the successful completion of this book. In Nicaragua, the life and work of Michèle Najlis had a profound impact on my research and served as a decisive introduction to the voices of Gioconda Belli, Omar Cabezas, Ernesto Cardenal, and Sergio Ramírez as well as Yolanda Blanco, Blanca Castellón, Marta Leonor González, Vidaluz Meneses, and Juan Sobalvarro, among many others. I also appreciate the suggestions of the anonymous referees, the logistical support of Jessica Thwaite at Lexington Books, and, most of all, the encouragement of Tom Ward. Last, I would like to thank my wife, Mila. Her patience with me over the course of various summers spent writing this book was tested time and again. For instilling in me the spirit of spontaneity, I thank her.

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In Nicaragua, the Revolución Popular Sandinista or Sandinista Revolution (1977–1979) left an indelible mark on the social, political, cultural, and economic institutions of the country and served as inspiration for other movements of national liberation throughout Latin America. In time, however, its long-term impact came to be mitigated by the election loss in 1990 against Violenta Chamorro and the Unión Nacional de Oposición (UNO), the return to the presidency in 2006 of Daniel Ortega, the perceived betrayal of Sandinista ideals by his victories and subsequent administrations in the general elections of 2006, 2011, and 2016, and actions of the government and paramilitary forces against demonstrators in 2018. 1 The publication of memoirs, autobiographies, and testimonios that bear witness to the origins and consequences of the Sandinista Revolution reflect the intimate connection that the Nicaraguan people came to have with national affairs and offered ample evidence of what Kimberly Nance has termed “the inherent complications of self-reporting” (14). Recent actions by the Ortega government; popular demonstrations; the actions of the police, the army, and paramilitary groups; and the deaths of protestors have once again thrust the country into the international spotlight. The testimonial works Fire from the Mountain (La montaña es más que una inmensa estepa verde, 1982) and Love song for mankind (Canción de amor para los hombres, 1988) by Omar Cabezas are crucial documents in furthering our understanding of Central American literary historiography and lend themselves to a reconsideration of the relationship between testimonial ethics and aesthetics and to an examination of broader parallels with a national and continental context. Our intention is to explore these multiple facets and use the works of Cabezas to give preference to these texts in order to analyze and contextualize them within a framework

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that examines their relationship to issues of Nicaraguan identity and liberation discourse. The wide variety of recent scholarship on testimonio and contemporary Latin American culture and literature recognizes the challenge to Eurocentric thinking and the colonial legacy posed by first-person narratives and how theoretical developments such as liberation theology and the challenges posed by globalization have participated in the renewal of utopian thinking throughout the continent. Currently inscribed in the literary canon, the testimonio was initially defined by John Beverley in the following manner: By testimonio I mean a novel or novella-length narrative in book or pamphlet (that is, printed as opposed to acoustic) form, told in the first person by a narrator who is also the real protagonist or witness of the events he or she recounts, and whose unit of narration is usually a “life” or a significant life experience. Testimonio may include, but is not subsumed under, any of the following textual categories, some of which hare conveniently considered literature, others not: autobiography, autobiographical novel, oral history, memoir, confession, diary, interview, eyewitness report, life history, novela-testimonio, nonfiction novel, or “factographic literature.” (“The Margin,” 24–25)

Intended as an inclusive attempt to delineate the thematic and stylistic borders of testimonio, the dated description offered by Beverley lists a number of characteristics that emphasize its distinctiveness: the combination of the written and spoken word, the reference to, inspiration from, or recounting of a “life,” its combination with any other “textual category,” and the intervention of a scribe or transcriber. Beverley continues and states that the narrator is an individual who is generally “representative of a social class or group” (27) and who “evokes an absent polyphony of other voices” (28). Offered in 1996, this description demonstrates how the testimonial genre has evolved in the last twenty years as an instrument of decolonization and, ironically, as the extent to which its canonization has also marginalized much of the conversation regarding the aesthetic merits of the works. The victory of the Sandinista revolutionaries against Somoza’s forces in July of 1979 represented a unique opportunity for Nicaragua, as it looked to remake itself in the face of over forty years of political and cultural repression. One of the accomplishments of the new Sandinista government that year was the formation of cultural organizations that would give voice to the Nicaraguan people through vastly diversified opportunities to write, compose, and create. During that time, Ernesto Cardenal, as minister of culture, initiated and implemented the well-known poetry workshops in which any Nicaraguan citizen could learn the basic rules for writing poetry. Despite this state support for the craft of poetry, the incipient poets came to follow this standardized set of rules rather blindly and produced verses that were ideologically similar and stylistically monotonous. The intention of the Ministry

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of Culture, however, was to connect the ideological position of the Sandinista Revolution with a greater freedom and ease of expression in the new Nicaragua and, in the process, frame national liberation within a poetic language that could, theoretically, be accessible to all Nicaraguans. The mythification of certain individuals or historical moments throughout Latin American history has proven to be a process intrinsic to the (re)construction of a nation’s identity, particularly one in which an armed revolution has managed to overthrow an authoritarian government and introduce itself into the discursive space of the country. 2 This re- or demythification, however, frequently involves conflicting intentions that strategically focus on both the past and future in order to refashion the image of the nation. By drawing attention to the more positive—and therefore redemptive—qualities of historically marginalized individuals and events, the most recent victors in ideological conflicts manage to both advance their ideological agenda and implicitly censure past administrations, expressing their hope in a rather idealized past and an attainable future. As David E. Whisnant has indicated, “The cultural dynamics that follow revolutionary triumph are likely to have a Janus-like quality: one face hopefully toward a still only dimly imagined future, the other nostalgically toward a prelapsarian cultural past which promises guidance toward that future” (190). In Nicaragua, the years following the victory of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) in 1979 involved the creation of a national narrative that idealized a disappeared and unattainable past while positing a yet unreachable future. The concluding document of the 1979 Episcopal Conference in Puebla, Mexico, reflected this perspective and looked to draw attention to the synchronous relationship between history and hope in Latin America: “In a word, our people wish for an integral liberation that does not exhaust itself in its temporal existence but rather projects itself toward a complete communion with God and its brothers in eternity, a communion that is already beginning to come true, however imperfectly, in history” (Doig, 438). Although the Puebla conference came to represent the institutional re-emergence of a more conservative position among Latin American bishops and the Catholic Church in general, the spiritual and somewhat utopian desire to construct a better future for the continent was linked to events played out on the stage of history. The “integral liberation” referenced by the statement finds its footing in a historical context marked by events that complement what the bishops rather abstractly perceived to be a “complete communion with God and its brothers in eternity” that harkened back to the days before the Second Vatican Council raised the continental consciousness. In his seminal work Mythologies, Roland Barthes analyzes the systematic creation of myths and the historical path that this formation takes in its subsequent efforts at restructuring society. According to Barthes, myth may be all-encompassing (109), is constantly evolving (123), ambiguous and un-

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connected to any “truth” (123), and may simply be undone by another myth (135). As Barthes notes, “Since myth robs the language of something, why not rob myth?” (135). One of myth’s most salient characteristics is its transparency, particularly its ethical innocence and its sudden appearance on the national cultural map as “natural”: “However paradoxical as it may seem, myth hides nothing” (Barthes, 121); it “does not deny things, on the contrary, its function is to talk about them; simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification, it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact” (143). The alleged self-evident nature of myth leads to a gradual and subtle territorialization of cultural ground, as past and present ideas and individuals associated with the most recent hegemony are incorporated into the national psyche, connected apparently effortlessly to the daily struggles of the people, and subtly imposed upon the historical memory of the country. Liberation, in this respect, participates in the struggle against the fossilization of society promoted by myths, since it looks to make fluid the historical processes of identity politics and disentangle apparently universal claims to distinctiveness from authentic discourses of otherness grounded in experience and epistemic authority. Both the Sandinista government during the 1980s and the subsequent Somoza administrations between 1937 and 1979 took numerous cultural icons and re-presented them in an attempt to fit them into the national weltanschauung. The Sandinistas, for example, rescued numerous stories and symbols from indigenous cultures in municipalities such as Nindirí, Diriamba, and Monimbó and attempted to integrate them into daily life. The paradox, however, was that the FSLN government ignored the needs of the indigenous cultures and subsequently marginalized and displaced the Miskito, Sumu, and Rama populations of the Atlantic coast, unwittingly creating resentments among them that led to their joining the contra forces. Associated with the apparent “naturalness” and transparency of myth is the manner in which it also distorts and manipulates historical processes, stealing from language in order to disintegrate the past and remake the present. As Barthes has indicated, myth “is always a language-robbery [as it] transforms a meaning into form” (131), “speech stolen and restored” (125) that may “easily insinuate itself into [language] and swell there: it is a robbery by colonization” (132). This manipulation of speech comes to include all forms of expression, and the materials of mythical speech (the language itself, photography, painting, posters, rituals, objects, etc.), however different at the start, are reduced to a pure signifying function as soon as they are caught by myth. Myth sees in them only the same raw material; their unity is that they are all reduced to the status of mere language (114). As Barthes declares, this manipulation of language ultimately serves to present an uncomplicated, clearer version of history that is meant to be metonymically associated with the new hegemony: “In passing from history to nature, myth

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acts economically: it abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectics, with any going back beyond what is immediately visible, it organizes a world which is without contradictions because it is without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evident, it establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to mean something by themselves” (143). The simplification of human existence, the accentuation of that which supposedly and unquestionably stands before us, and the elimination of any and all ambiguous notions regarding a specific set of historical processes are meant to impress a clarity of vision unparalleled in any other moment in a people or a nation’s history. In this manner, myth is therefore inextricably linked to this history and these historical processes, as it forms and informs the manner in which language and images are represented and ultimately exemplifies “a type of speech chosen by history” (Barthes, 110). The Cuban writer Miguel Barnet, author of testimonial novels that blend fiction with biographical elements, has written on the mythic dimension of texts, particularly those he terms “The fundamental classic tales”: “They possessed a dynamic, social function. They entered an organic all, complete, did not separate the sparks of imagination from real events, narrated faithfully. To the contrary, in that organic all they were mixed, reason and myth were confused” (“La novela testimonio,” 100). In his opinion, more contemporary texts and authors, those that he deems “primitive writers” and “less intellectual,” are “proposing a mythic literature” (“La novela testimonio,” 104). His descriptions of these “less intellectual” writers and the direction of their work locate testimonial texts within a larger continental narrative stream and underscore the mythic nature of testimonial writing in Latin America. Much as the testimonio has been elaborated principally by the subaltern subject, liberation has traditionally been grounded in what Enrique Dussel terms a “communal ethical legality” (Ethics and Community, 75) that has originated in the struggle of the most marginalized across the Americas. Recent research on testimonial writing has drawn attention to patterns that link the testimonio to distinct efforts at mythifying popular identity and the role that popular culture plays in exploiting ethnic or racial history. This mythification frequently offers a dualistic perspective of society vis-à-vis its dissection of historical memory and manipulation of national discourse. Barnet admits as much when he declares that writing a “testimonial novel” requires him to alter the original documentary evidence and factual details: “I could never faithfully reproduce what the recorder dictates” (“La novela testimonio,” 113). George Yúdice’s comments regarding the correction of “official history” and how the testimonio represents a “challenge to master discourse” (“Testimonio,” 17) are explicitly directed at the creation of such an “official history” by a (past and deposed) hegemonic power, while Barnet’s statement stems from apparent aesthetic and stylistic considerations; yet

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both disregard the fact that these modifications are themselves not-so-subtle manipulations of history and language, containing within them the seeds of yet another hegemonic construction. To these ends, testimonio connects both the personal and the collective (Yúdice, “Testimonio,” 15), allowing the subaltern group to ground itself in a mythic narrative that both transcends the moment and establishes itself within a contemporary historical arc in order to document the injustices and visualize the ultimate transformation of society. 3 As documents that contribute to our understanding of events such as the Sandinista Revolution, first-person narratives illustrate the difficulties of determining authority within the limits of textual criticism. In the case of the testimonio, those difficulties may be magnified due to the critical discussions regarding the role of the genre in bringing about social and political change and to an unfortunate willingness of many critics to center more on the circumstances of production and consumption rather than on the texts themselves. As Arturo Arias has written, “From a Latin American perspective, testimonio began as a means of creating primary sources for research to gain knowledge of Latin America’s own social formation in the 1970s. This process gradually evolved into an attempt to understand the social causality and subjective logic behind the breadown of civil society after the experience of political violence and increased authoritarianism” (Taking Their Word, 133–34). This perspective, however, is overly academic, as testimonios existed long before there was a desire “to gain knowledge of Latin America´s own social formation” in the seventies. According to Nance, critical response to the Latin American testimonio “has consisted in the main of thirty years of celebration and ten of suspicion, all focused more on the contexts, characters, and motives of testimonio’s speakers and collaborating writers than on the texts themselves” (5). Although seminal works by Rigoberta Menchú, Domitila Barrios de Chungara, and Omar Cabezas, among others, have been analyzed from a variety of perspectives that look to determine their narrative significance, these and other similar works are frequently lacking sorely needed critical perspectives that will place them within the context of Latin American literatures. Since the first Casa de las Américas award in testimonio or “testimonial narrative” was first bestowed upon María Ester Gilio in 1969, the genre has proven to be contentious critical ground for those scholars who have perceived the genre as being in opposition to canonical literature and have looked to examine the works as evidence of broader political or social currents. Monographic studies have included the edited collection Testimonio y literatura (1986) by René Jara and Hernán Vidal, The Real Thing (1996) by Georg Gugelberger, Teaching and Testimony (1996) by Allen Carey-Webb and Stephen Benz, Proceed With Caution (1999) by Doris Sommer, and a number of works by John Beverley that include “The Margin at the Center: On Testimonio” (Testimonial Narrative) (1996); Subalternity and Represen-

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tation (1999); “Testimonio, Subalternity, and Narrative Authority” (2000); and Testimonio. On the Politics of Truth (2004). The debate surrounding Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (1983) proved to be particularly fruitful, leading to the contentious publication of Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (1999) by David Stoll. More recent scholarship on testimonio has reflected the increasing fragmentation of the genre as critics have questioned its relevance as a social corrective, centering primarily on issues related to the construction and elaboration of historical memory. In sum, testimonio is “a privileged form of cultural production” (Beverley, “The Margin”) that “reached full genre maturity in connection with the revolutionary struggles of the 1980s” (Gugelberger, “Introduction,” 8). Writing in 1996, John Beverley noted that, in this sense, “The situation of narration in testimonio has to involve an urgency to communicate, a problem of repression, poverty, subalternity, imprisonment, struggle for survival, and so on, implicated in the act of narration itself” (“The Margin,” 26). The testimonio, as Arias wrote, “is a response to the power structures of dominant European culture, transcribed from the often rich oral discourse (occasionally in a foreign tongue) of dominated racialized subjects into the conventional written language of the dominant culture” (“Teaching Testimonio,” 314). These efforts to establish the academic caché of the testimonio led to the institutionalization of counterdiscourse and, in the process, “has helped to make ourselves visible to ourselves” (Gugelberger, “Introduction,” 3). Part of the appeal of testimonial works was their relevance to “the real” (Moreiras, The Exhaustion, 213), an attraction that, as Andrea Marinescu explains, “has challenged and changed our conception of literature, displacing the centrality of the ‘lettered city’ in terms of the written word’s potential for social change” (136). This privileged place of testimonio, however, was questioned by the publication of Stoll’s work in 1999, as he doubted that Menchú’s claims were her own first-hand accounts and, in the process, integrated the discursive presence of the testimonio with its truth. In sum, the mistake a number of critics made was in uncritically equating testimonio to truth instead of accepting it as an expression of memory and, hence, imperfect. Testimonio is, in fact, literature and, as such, is able to exercise a certain amount of creative license within the act of truth-telling. Truth is vaguely related to the intention of testimonio, as the most important goal of the genre is to provoke knowledge of inequality and discrimination (G. Williams, 83). As Marinescu acknowledges, this allowed testimonio to be a more empowering discourse: “By giving up on expectations of authenticity in testimonio, literary critics gain more freedom. No longer bound by trying to define the genre in formal terms, we can think of testimonio in terms of its discursive strategies” (138). How is literature testimonial in nature and, vice versa, what are the literary characteristics of testimonio? How can literature engage the public and how

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do we evaluate the discourse and aesthetics of testimonio? What role can aesthetics play in current social and political transformations in Latin America and beyond? While these may not be new questions, the path traced by testimonial narrative and subsequent criticism demonstrates that the perceived opposites of factual and emotive accuracy need not be opposites at all. In fact, if literature is to remain socially relevant, it may be more necessary than ever to recognize the complementary relationship between those alleged extremes. As we explore the potential of testimonio to redefine the role of literature within the public sphere and connect the multiple manifestations of popular culture with canonical aesthetics, the conceptualization of the genre elaborated by critics such as Beverly and Gugelberger in the 1990s has today become somewhat of a cliché. The post-Stoll crumbling of the testimonio has, ironically, opened the door for the testimonial genre to be more efficient in its efforts to stimulate change through an awareness of both social issues and literary aesthetics that, ultimately, leads to a consolidation of the two and leads to the popularity of new forms such as testimonial fiction. In this respect, critics today recognize the unrealistic expectations imposed upon the individuals and works of testimonio to be wholly accurate in the face of suffering and trauma. As Kate Dunn has written, “Any presumption that the testimoniante could always chronologically recreate scenes, or depict them exactly as experienced would be to ignore the post-traumatic state of the survivor. Doing this would also disregard issues surrounding the untrustworthy nature of memory—particularly in cases of trauma where the survivor may not wish to engage with certain memories or recount them—and it would also ignore the possibility for the incommunicable nature of terror” (657). Beginning in 1979, the publication and dissemination of testimonios in Nicaragua lent vocal support to the policies and legislation of the Sandinista Revolution and explicitly criticized previous Somoza administrations (1936–1979) and the intervention of the United States in domestic affairs. The decade of the 1980s in particular produced a vast quantity of testimonios and first-person narratives due in part to the emphasis placed on popular discourse by Ernesto Cardenal and the Ministry of Culture. The guidelines for writing poetry that Cardenal gleaned from Ezra Pound and that he incorporated into his popular poetry workshops and ultimately became the foundation for a particular style of verse known as exteriorismo, for example, looked to recover the national historical memory and discredit the impression that poems were an inaccessible literary medium to the general population by conveying that reading or composing poetry did not require a formal education. His recommendations that poems should not be rhymed, that regular rhythm is not effective, that specific images are preferable to vague allusions, that proper names improve a poem, that poetic language should be condensed, and that we should write like we speak (Wellinga, 179–80) incorpo-

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rated the people into the act of producing literature. In this way, these poems and the testimonios that emerged from Nicaragua during this time reflected a turning away from Eurocentric patterns of producing and consuming literature. Instead of being the sole possession of an intellectual class generally distanced from the concerns of the people, literature became an institutionally supported instrument of social and political change. As minister of culture, Cardenal and the Costa Rican writer Mayra Jiménez founded the Popular Poetry Workshops as a response to the cultural needs of both the people and the revolution. According to José Miguel Oviedo, “The workshops are cells of collective creation and discussion of young people radicalized by the struggle and that today work as laborers, artisans, or are students or street vendors, or serve in the militia, army, public administration, or even in the state security police; the purpose is to prolong the process of consciousness-raising through direct knowledge of the poetic phenomenon” (xv). The desire to incorporate the public reflected the desire on the part of the National Directorate of the FSLN that poetry should be a vehicle for an authentic artistic, revolutionary, and popular expression. “This is a poetry that documents reality,” “a poetry of the people” declared Cardenal (“Talleres de poesía,” 13). The intention to popularize the artistic process and democratize culture had created a new relationship between artistic and social progress (Craven, 25). Although the workshops were not a part of the official FSLN program, their geographic origin may be found in the Solentiname Islands in Lake Nicaragua, where Ernesto Cardenal had founded in 1965 a Christian peasant community. Mayra Jiménez visited Solentiname in 1977 and noted that the residents had never read the verses of Cardenal. Recalling the origins of the poetry workshops, Cardenal wrote in 1983: I thought that I couldn’t help them understand my poetry—although I had always tried to make it popular—because many of the words were peasant vocabulary. Mayra Jiménez had organized a poetry workshop for children in Costa Rica and others in Venezuela and the children had written very good poetry and had published two anthologies of that children’s poetry, of Costa Rica and Venezuela. And then she thought about making Solentiname an experiment in poetry workshops for adults. And it happened that soon the peasants understood my poetry and that of Coronel Urtecho and Pablo Antonio Cuadra and Silva and Rugama, and afterwards of North American and Cuban and Latin and Greek poets. (“Talleres de poesía,” 11)

The poetry workshops became an important part of the effort to bring together politics and art and of a systematic expression of cultural nationalism, subsequently being criticized for being Sandinista versions of censorship (Darling, A1). As Jorge Valdés has written regarding Cardenal’s Exteriorist poetry, “the emphasis on an external objective reality above the subjectivity

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of interior psychological states and mental processes clearly subordinates the private sphere of the individual to public and collective identities” (66). The term exteriorismo existed before the Sandinista rebellion of 1977 and was first applied to a type of writing style more than an organized school of poetic thought or a philosophical approach. In the prologue to the anthology Poesía nueva de Nicaragua (1974), Ernesto Cardenal declared that “the only poetry that can express Latin American reality, and touch the people, and be revolutionary, is Exteriorist poetry” (10). The hazard of the poetry workshops was that the socialization of the means of poetic production (Craven, 41) also represented the implicit imposition from above of a specific national ideology and an explicit support of the construction of said ideology in which, theoretically, every Nicaragua citizen would be included. As Juan Sobalvarro has indicated, The lasting mark left by Exteriorism is that it has been the only literary school [in Nicaragua] that has transcended all sectors of society. It could be said that Exteriorism demythified the idea that only geniuses can write poetry and pushed people of different social conditions to write with literary hope. But on the contrary, that popular poetry, in its jingoistic orientation, served to construct other myths because it fed into the idolatry of [Sandinista] commanders. (“Las verdades,” 8)

The tension between the defenders of Exteriorist poetry on one hand and, on another level, of the democratization of culture and those writers that looked to maintain a certain ideological and creative freedom culminated with the anticipated conflict between the Ministry of Culture—led by Ernesto Cardenal—and the Asociación Sandinista de Trabajadores Culturales (ASTC) (Sandinista Association of Cultural Workers), led by Rosario Murillo, Ortega’s long-time partner: the ministry defended a homogenization of cultural production in order to better communicate the Sandinista platform, while the ASTC designated some members as “prominent” and looked to establish a difference between “good art” and the rest (Whisnant, 238). 4 To summarize, [O]ne critical line of thinking posed that what the poetry workshops were doing was creating an assembly line of Ernesto Cardenals, but without the cultural dimension of the poet, while the defenders countered that a rural world was being submerged in great models such as César Vallejo or Pablo Neruda or North American poets such as William Carlos Williams, without neglecting Rubén Darío and other Nicaraguan poets. (Rovira, 233)

The poetry workshops began to produce a poetry immersed in a description of the external environment, all with the same objective: praising the revolutionary struggle through a language based on “a maximum of possible meanings that scorns the free association of audacious metaphors, imaginative

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incoherence, the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign” (Veiravé, 22). In the words of Cardenal himself, “Exteriorism is the poetry created with images from the outside world, the world we see and touch, and that is, in general, the specific world of poetry. Exteriorism is objective poetry: narrative and anecdotal, created with elements from real life and concrete things, with proper names and precise details and numbers and deeds and expressions” (“Presentación,” 9). A reading of the poetry produced during that period in Nicaraguan history emphasizes that there was never truly an Exteriorist school or technique with its own consciousness due to the fact that the rules of poetic engagement were imposed from above. In fact, “the only truth is that we cannot simplify the poets from the decade of the eighties obeying only the parameters dictated by the currents in style at the time” (González and Sobalvarro, 13). As Juan Sobalvarro has written, “It would be correct to stop speaking of an Exteriorist poetry as something autonomous and speak simply of Exteriorist elements” (“Las mentiras,” 25). This observation by Sobalvarro contests any efforts to essentialize Nicaraguan poetry and also dovetails with current debates surrounding testimonio: It is more accurate to speak of testimonios in the plural and recognize their inherently hybrid nature as an inclusive literary genre that combines fact and fiction, social concerns with aesthetic ones, contextual commentary with broader national and global implications. That the testimonio empowered more than one generation of Nicaraguans during the 1980s and beyond to document and relate their experiences with poverty, suffering, and the revolution owes much debt to the five-month literacy campaign—Talleres de alfabetización—organized by the Ministry of Education and Cardenal’s brother Fernando (who would later become minister of education between 1984 and 1990). Carlos Tünnerman Bernheim, minister of education (1979–1984), set the stage in 1980 when he wrote that “Now, the Ministry of Education has become a great workshop where a profound revolutionary mysticism and a Sandinista devotion to work converge in such a way that fixed schedules are unknown and the workdays extend as long as the new tasks require to be completed” (Ministerio de Educación, 22). The literacy lessons would therefore include a very specific ideological component that sought to further instill the ideals of the Sandinista Revolution. When teaching syllables, for examples, the Ministry of Education would use the name of the deceased comrade and co-founder of the FSLN Carlos Fonseca: “Fon-se-ca leads to the study of the syllables si, so, se, sa” (Ministerio de Educación, 160). And in a speech offered in Managua, Tomás Borge, another of the founders of the FSLN and minister of the interior, proclaimed that “Nicaragua must be turned into an enormous library, in the great library of Carlos Fonseca, where we will all read. At the same time, Nicaragua must be turned into a great trench to defend the homeland. A great library and a great trench, and that every Nicaraguan carry in their

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hands a rifle and a book” (51). The Sandinista Revolution had promoted the association between “culture,” “revolution,” and “politics” in order to create an unbreakable alliance between the artists and the people and break down artificial distinctions between “high” and “low” cultural production, leading to the appropriation of the act of writing itself and, consequently, to an eruption of poetry and both fiction and non-fiction prose. As Borge asked, “What meaning does a poem have that is not assimilated, recreated by the people?” (37). Ultimately, the illiteracy rate in Nicaragua dropped from 50.3 percent to 12.9 percent in five months and proved to be “probably the biggest venture of the Sandinista rule” (Hanemann, 2). As the poorest and most marginalized in Nicaragua were gradually incorporated into the revolutionary project by the poetry workshops and the literacy campaign, the intention of the National Directorate of the FSLN was that the ideals of the revolution would transcend the political arena and that the government be a representative voice for all sectors of society, particularly those who had suffered the most during the Somoza administrations, the underprivileged. To this end, many of the initial efforts at documenting individual experiences were not unlike the relationship forged between Rigoberta Menchú and Elizabeth Burgos-Debray, the Venezuelan ethnopsychiatrist who transcribed the interviews and published I, Rigoberta Menchú. Although works such as Tras los pasos de Sandino (1978) by Paulo Cannabrava Filho; Carlos Fonseca’s Un nicaragüense en Moscú (1980); Las sandinistas (1980) and Nicaragua, la mujer en la revolución (1985) by Elizabeth Maier; “Somos millones . . .”: La vida de Doris María, combatiente nicaragüense (1977), Todas estamos despiertas: Testimonios de la mujer nicaragüense hoy (1980), Risking a Somersault in the Air (1984), and Las mujeres (1989) by Margaret Randall; and La paciente impaciencia (1989) by Tomás Borge, among others, often gave voice to the marginalized, they also territorialized and frequently homogeneized the subaltern voice in an attempt to convey the experience of el pueblo and serve as standard-bearers of what would ultimately be recognized as a fractured event. The institutional attempt to incorporate a multiplicity of experiences, however, suffered from the absence of organic intellectuals, as many prominent members of the Sandinista hierarchy such as Tomás Borge, Carlos Fonseca, Silvio Mayorga, and Michèle Najlis, among others, were born into families that belonged to the upper classes. In a 1986 interview, Jaime Wheelock, minister of agriculture and agrarian reform, reviews the role that the bourgeoisie played in national affairs and declares that although between 1936 and 1979 there were a number of bourgeoisie groups that opposed the Somoza administrations, this resistance was generally “weak and indecisive” (6). The children of the bourgeoisie families that participated in this “weak and indecisive” resistance ultimately became the founders of an organized resistance against the Somozas. After the formation of the FSLN in 1961, many of those who demon-

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strated enthusiastically on university campuses against the government— particularly at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Nicaragua (UNAN) in León—became active members of campus movements and organizations that used a variety of strategies to further their objectives and the ultimate goal of toppling Somoza. The increase in the number of universities in Nicaragua between 1960 and 1978 reflected the growing industrialization of the country, the effort to consider itself a “lettered” equal of other Central American nations, and the desire on the part of the government to minimize the impact of the popular resistance movements originating at the UNAN-León (Equipo Envío). Industrialization in Nicaragua during this time, however, must be considered in light of the fact that economic betterment was generally limited to the most privileged sectors of the governing class, and that the country had the lowest industrial output in Central America, which in turn had the lowest industrial output in Latin America. Beginning in the late 1970s, a number of Nicaraguans that gave personal testimony in order to verbalize and render their experiences with the Somoza dictatorship and the Sandinista Revolution found a rhetorical ally in the principles of liberation theology. Initiated in 1962 by Pope John XXIII and concluded by Pope Paul VI in 1965, the Second Vatican Council (or Vatican II) looked to examine issues related to the role of the Catholic Church in the contemporary world and assigned separate regional councils the task of applying the conclusions of Vatican II to their distinct geographic areas. At the council’s conclusion, “Pope Paul VI had promulgated sixteen documents in his name and in the name of the council” (O’Malley, 4) that included four constitutions and nine decrees. These documents, however, were frequently overshadowed by the phenomenon of “the Council as event” (Sweeney, 255) and awaited more specific applications by the regional bishop’s conferences. As Renato Poblete indicated, the Conference of Latin American Bishops (CELAM) in 1968 “was structured around three fundamental topics: human promotion by the reaffirmation of justice and peace; evangelization and growth in faith; and finally, reflection on the visible Church and its structures” (35). The generalizations regarding Church practices and the socioeconomic makeup of its communities proved to be a stumbling block to the intentions of the bishops, as “Latin America is, and must be considered, a complex and differentiated unit. Each local church has its own characteristics derived from the richness of its particular history and varied local challenges” (Poblete, 32). For the bishops who had met in Medellín, this diversity found common ground in the search for justice and liberation from the stifling material poverty endured by Latin Americans throughout the continent. Among the most significant principles articulated by the Conference were liberation, participation, and a call to awareness: concientización (Poblete, 36). In 1971, the Peruvian priest and theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez published Teología de la liberación and defended a systematic commitment to justice

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throughout the Americas in light of Vatican II and the CELAM Conference in 1968. Arguably, one of the most significant concepts to emerge from Medellín in 1968 and the work of Gutiérrez was the “preferential option for the poor” that requires a commitment to those most marginalized by material poverty and to understand reality from their perspective. As stated in their concluding statement, the bishops called for “an effective preference to the needy and poorest sectors” (Allen, para. 7). Practically at the moment of its inception and for subsequent decades, liberation philosophy faced a number of challenges both within and from outside the Catholic Church: on one front, the Church hierarchy silenced the voices of liberation by integrating the principle tenets of liberation theology to more contemporary teachings of the Church; on another front, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the alleged demise of Marxist ideologies weakened the social hermeneutics that were favored by liberation philosophers and theologians. As Pablo Richard allowed in 1992, “It is commonly believed that with the fall of Eastern Europe’s socialist governments, the crisis in Marxist thought and the installation of the new world order, liberation theology has no future.” Richard continues, however, to describe the transformation and relevance of liberation thinking to a post-Berlin world where the term “poor” has now been broadened to include oppressive structures of race, gender, ethnicity, and nationality. During the Somoza regimes in Nicaragua, the Catholic Church was frequently perceived as an ally of the government and the oligarchy and a willing participant in the battle against Communist ideologies. According to Manzar Foroohar, in Nicaragua “The [Church] hierarchy was close to the ruling circle, and many clergymen were on the payroll of the government, serving as ambassadors and public employees” (67). In the late 1960s, however, “a vital nucleus of Catholics and Protestants found that their religious faith offered strong motives to join the cause of popular insurrection” (Dodson and O’Shaughnessy, 3) and the younger clergy across the country began to embrace the spirit of renewal advocated by Vatican II and further supported by the Medellín conference. The First National Pastoral Meeting in Managua in 1969 brought to light the differences between the hierarchy and the younger clergy (Foroohar, 71). Priests such as the brothers Ernesto and Fernando Cardenal, Miguel D’Escoto, and Uriel Molina, among others, did not initially address sociopolitical issues, choosing instead to focus their attention on forming a number of Christian Base Communities and “the creation of a communal spirit, suppression of machismo in the Church, family integration and liturgical renovation” (Foroohar, 68). The community that Ernesto Cardenal founded in Solentiname in 1965, for example, represented a return to the fundamental values of Christianity through “a deep appreciation for the campesinos’ culture and their ability to understand and interpret the Gospels” (Foroohar, 68). And recent events in Nicaragua have again

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forced the hand of the Catholic Church, siding explicitly with the people and declaring themselves in favor of a dialogue between the administration of Daniel Ortega and representatives of the demonstrators. The victory of the Sandinista Revolution in 1979 brought about a paradox: How would Catholic hierarchy in Rome react to those priests who would participate in a Socialist government, and how would the government address the stated mission of the liberation clergy and the existence of Christian Base Communities? When Miguel D’Escoto was named foreign minister of the Sandinista government in 1979, Ernesto Cardenal was also chosen minister of culture that year and his brother Fernando directed the literacy campaign. While these three priests would be publicly admonished by Pope John Paul II in 1985 for participating in political activities that lay outside their ecclesiastical purview, their participation in political matters did not conclude. D’Escoto, for example, was president of the United Nations General Assembly from 2008 to 2009. For individuals such as D’Escoto and the Cardenal brothers, there never existed a clear separation between religious and secular affairs, and their work encompassed a distinct variety of fields and responsibilities. As these and other men came of age during the birth of the FSLN in the 1960s, historical figures such as Augusto Sandino and Rigoberto López Pérez 5 radiated an aura of hope that would one day come to have a direct influence on the policies of the Sandinista government. The generation of priests represented by D’Escoto and the Cardenal brothers would ultimately serve as an ethical bridge of sorts between the efforts of Sandino and López Pérez to free Nicaragua from authoritarianism and foreign intervention and the construction of the New Nicaragua. It is no coincidence that the works published by these three men in the 2000s represent a coming to terms with the numerous foreign and domestic attempts to undermine that utopian project. Born in 1950 in León, Omar Cabezas became a member of the FSLN after participating in campus politics at the UNAN-León and joining the Frente Estudiantil Revolucionario (FER), a branch of the FSLN. His celebrated work La montaña es más que una inmensa estepa verde (Fire from the Mountain) (1982) describes his experiences with the FER at the UNAN in León, his incorporation into the FSLN, and, subsequently, his activity in the mountains of northern Nicaragua before the victory of the revolution. In 1988, Cabezas published a 700-page sequel entitled Canción de amor para los hombres (Love song for mankind) that has not received the same amount of popular nor critical attention. Traditionally understood, these two works challenge Eurocentric thinking and the colonial legacy. What has been frequently missed, however, is how language and the semantic aesthetics of the texts work to subvert conventional notions of the relationship between reader and writer. Much has been made, for example, of the role played by (historical) memory in the elaboration and consumption of testimonios; in the work

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of Cabezas, however, his frequent use of rhetorical questions throughout both volumes implicitly asks the reader to neglect more theoretical considerations and (mis)remember along with him. In Fire from the Mountain alone there are a number of examples: “Right?” (13, 36), “See?” (15, 46), “Can you imagine . . . ?” (27, 68, 74), “Could it be possible . . . ?” (54), and “You know what it’s like . . . ?” (89). It is no coincidence that the foreword to the English translation of Fire from the Mountain by Carlos Fuentes begins by drawing attention to the language of social movements, declaring that “The Spanish language has given few words to the international vocabulary on politics” (vii). Although the two volumes have been studied from a variety of perspectives, the vast majority of scholars have chosen to analyze these—especially Fire from the Mountain—from a broad perspective that looks to capture the relationship of his work to larger issues regarding the Sandinista Revolution, historical memory, and the trustworthiness of first-person narrators and of the testimonio genre as a whole. Both works lend themselves to a variety of theoretical approaches that have been absent from a majority of studies dedicated to the work of Cabezas. In a number of testimonios, for example, the descriptions of personal suffering include the implicit construction of an alternative space: a better place, accessible through time and patience. Although the concept of “utopia” became common currency due largely to the impact of Thomas More’s work Utopia (1516), the term itself does not do justice to the innumerable varieties implicit in the term and the myriad of possibilities suggested by the “plurality of individual utopias that are very difficult to gather under the utopian name” (Ricouer, 271). For Jan Gustaffson, utopic discourse “is a discourse about a more or less radical change that will offer a better life for a more or less limited group of people” (48). And Louis Marin emphasizes that “The strength of utopia resides in its possibility of transcending the real, as opposed to what could be called ideology, that successively adheres to what is given and, because of this, makes it endure” (Utopics, 50). These and other descriptions of “utopia” essentially originate in the etymological roots of the term: the fact that it is a no-place that is not—yet—in existence. In favoring a characterization that was centered principally around the concept of place, however, many have neglected to explore the fact that a utopia is also a no-time, a place that is not specifically grounded in calendar or linear time and is hitherto destined to be a timeless and virtual project-in-waiting. For Plato, the ideal Republic was presided by a Philosopher-King who ruled over a populace educated according to the strict vision of the ruler and devoid of any expression of opinion that was not explicitly sanctioned by the State. City of the Sun (1602) by the Italian Tommaso Campanella heralded a future in which men had multiple wives, property and children were communal, and the instrument of a better life was the Catholic Church and its

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representatives on earth, particularly the Pope and the Spanish monarchy. And in his essay Ariel (1900), the Uruguayan José Enrique Rodó (1871–1917) was inspired by the characters in Shakespeare’s The Tempest to proclaim that the future identity of Latin America was inextricably tied to the human intellect—as represented by the character Ariel—rather than the baser passions characterized by Calibán. While these and many other works are generally classified as works of or influenced by utopian literature, they bear little in common except for the fact that they describe a physical and/or emotional utopia, a no-place whose continued inexistence is far more important than its founding. The plurality of perspectives offered by the countless representations of utopia throughout history reminds us of the necessary contextual grounding of such projects and paradoxically connects them to that “no-place” that will remain permanently out of reach. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, explanations and descriptions of the term “utopia” and the varied utopian projects vary widely. While Gustaffson has explored the connection between utopian discourse and nation-building (48) and Yamandú Acosta has examined the unnecessary division between the polis and civil society in the enunciation of a utopia (155), there remain a handful of scholars and ideologues that have helped shape contemporary notions of this term. Toward the beginning of the twentieth century, Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) expressed the belief that utopias no longer existed and that the search for utopias had concluded because “the material and intellectual forces for the transformation are technically at hand” (64). Others, however, continued to express a belief in the permanence of utopian projects and in the transformative power of utopian thinking. Marcuse’s contemporary, Karl Mannheim (1889–1947), revised the more accepted notions of utopia as they had been handed down by St. Simon and Fourier, for example, and in his work Ideology and Utopia (1929) classified the growth of a utopian mentality in four distinct stages (52) that reflect a rather obvious Eurocentric perspective. In his writings, Mannheim represented utopia from a perspective that polarized reality and needlessly characterized society as two extremes, juxtaposing the “utopian” and “unreal” with an “ideological” and “real” state of mind that has its roots firmly grounded in “things as they are” (203). “A state of mind is utopian,” wrote Mannheim, “when it is incongruent with the state of the reality within which it appears” (192). On the surface, his view that we were witnessing an “end” to utopias coincided with that held by his contemporary Marcuse; yet Mannheim believed that these were disappearing because we were neglecting certain values and traditions, not because of the counterproductive technological advances of our societies: “Must not the gradual reduction of politics to economics towards which there is at least a discernible tendency, the conscious rejection of the past and of the notion of historical time, the conscious brush-

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ing aside of every ‘cultural ideal,’ be interpreted as a disappearance of every form of utopianism from the political arena as well?” (256). While the work of Latin America’s most influential intellectuals in the twentieth century was often informed by global trends in philosophy, art, music, or literature, their work was understood to be an amalgam of cultural traditions that would ultimately produce an artifact that was a synchronous manifestation of multiple expressions. Utopias and utopian visions formulated from within Latin America would often reflect the influence of Socialist, Communist, Marxist, and Fascist ideologies and gather the ideas of individuals such as Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Adolf Hitler, and Francisco Franco. It was ultimately demonstrated, however, that a careless application of European ideas to Latin American reality would pave the way for their eventual failure. As Juan Luis Segundo has declared, utopian politics, philosophy, and theology in Latin America emerged “out of the urgent problems of real life” (Liberation of Theology, 4), expressed, for example, through national literatures that would find themselves struggling to find their organic origins at the site of enunciation. A blind adherence to cultural standards originated in Europe or North America often negated any lasting impact on society. The role of orality and oral communication as found in the work of Cabezas has also been largely missing from the multiple studies on Fire from the Mountain and Love song for mankind. Emerging ineluctably transformed by European exploration in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Americas were shaped by colonial enterprises that looked to profit from their venture and that, in the process, imposed their own ethics and values on those located beyond their borders. As Walter Mignolo has written, “America, as a concept, goes hand in hand with that of Modernity, and both are the selfrepresentation of imperial projects and global designs that originated in and were implemented by European actors and institutions” (The Idea, 6). The intrusion of European customs and practices into both public and private life throughout the Americas gave rise to systematic reactions that looked to subvert colonial projects and ultimately to emancipate indigenous nations and communities subjugated by imperial politics and economics. The arrival of print culture in the Americas, for example, gradually constructed a colonial society that used European conceptions of literacy and privileged the written word in detriment to the oral customs that predominated at the time. Subsequently, teaching the Spanish language in the Americas became a vehicle for the extension of Spanish empire itself: “The Crown´s colonial project to teach Castilian in order to make good vassals was transformed into a national project of teaching Castilian in order to make good citizens” (Mignolo, “Afterword,” 309). The colonial image of orally centered peoples throughout the Americas served this purpose and concealed the importance of written systems of language to indigenous cultures, and current decolonial approaches contradict prevailing notions of indigenous illiteracy and have

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sharply corrected simplistic understandings of conquered communities as being exclusively submerged in orality. This traditional emphasis on indigenous orality runs the danger of homogenizing and objectifying these communities and representing the Spaniards as a culturally superior people. In 1562, for example, Diego de Landa’s auto-da-fé in Yucatán on July 12 tried to erase all trace of a written legacy from pre-Hispanic times. While written documents existed before the arrival of the Spanish, the presence of the spoken word and of oral culture throughout the continent continues to represent a subversion of print culture by distancing society from the grasp of modernity. The shortcomings of print culture with respect to the establishment of a more symmetrical relationship between communities, however, soon became evident in the context of a more profound and more symmetrical enunciation of liberation. Eugenio Mainer highlights the decontextualizing and denaturing capacity of written culture (115), and Walter Ong affirms that writing “is a particularly pre-emptive and imperialist activity that tends to assimilate other things to itself even without the aid of etymologies” (Orality and Literacy, 12). The written word, as an instrument of the colonial enterprise and a vehicle of imperialist strategies, and the elimination of any trace of written texts inevitably contributed to the subjugation of indigenous cultures and became identified with expressions of power that stilled the dynamic nature of synchretic traditions. In this respect, the written word has consistently— and paradoxically—employed oral strategies in its attempt to establish an urban hegemony of language emanating from the metropolis and to offer an implicit series of counter-strategies that establish the correctness of spoken and written language. The Nicaraguan corrido, for example, frequently introduced patriotic themes into the songs and contributed to manipulating the image of Sandino and to introducing it into popular culture. As Mary Louise Pratt has written, “Linguistic cooperation, in other words, is one kind of social cooperation. By the same token, linguistic rule-breaking, far from being a purely grammatical act, is an act which carries social weight” (214). In its “linguistic rule-breaking,” orality serves as the point of departure for organic narratives that look to interact with their audience and “invariably deal with states of affairs that are held to be unusual and problematic, in need of experiential and evaluative resolution” (Pratt, 140). 6 With regard to testimonio, the paradox of using print media to publish and examine the origins and impact of the works of has not gone unnoticed by the majority of critics. What has been frequently overlooked, however, is the role played by language and aesthetics in the transcription of principally oral enunciations. These transcriptions, in a sense, draw us back to pre-Columbian times in the Americas, when in many cultures the written and spoken word collaborated and complemented each other.

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Missing among a vast majority of the numerous studies on the work of Cabezas is the presence and role of humor in the construction of his message. In both volumes, the role of humor is vital in the transmission of both political and aesthetic values. Indeed, the potential of humor and comedy to subvert social structures only began to be examined at the turn of the twentieth century, when psychoanalytical theory and the ideas of Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Albert Einstein examined the systematic and frequently unimagined interconnections between the private self and the public persona. Influenced by their writings, a number of theorists in the twentieth century began to explore the relationship between an individual’s sense of humor and the social milieu. Freud’s work, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1960), for example, formulated a humor theory that was founded on the relationship between the id, ego, and super-ego and explored the manner in which humor may be related to the unconscious. Although his classification of what he termed “joke-techniques” and different types of humor is a rather anachronistic oversimplification of the varieties of comedy and the comic, his observations on the subversive potential of “the joke” are, in many ways, prescient in their contemporary analysis of social relationships and authority. “The joke,” wrote Freud, “will evade restrictions and open sources of pleasure that have become inaccessible” (103). The act of sidestepping “restrictions” has the potential to subvert authority, as the joke utilizes “pleasure” as a possible vehicle for social and political change and “represents a rebellion against that authority, a liberation from its pressure” (105). By singling out the heterodox nature of humor and its ability to circumvent mechanisms of social control and domination, Freud acknowledged the transformative potential of humor and explored the connections between private gratification and public power. The “rebellion” is, ultimately, a battle against conformity and against those who construct narrow varieties of socially acceptable behavior. Writing at the turn of the twentieth century, Henri Bergson also explored the liberating possibilities of humor and the comic. His seminal work Laughter. An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1999) is grounded on the notion that comedy is, above all, a human construction enabled by social interactions. In writing on laughter, for example, Bergson notes that “Laughter appears to stand in need of an echo” (11) and that it “must answer to certain requirements of life in common. It must have social signification” (13). “By organizing laughter,” he declares, “comedy accepts social life as a natural environment, it even obeys an impulse of social life” (153). “Social life” and the ensuing human interactions provide the framework for the comic and ensure that the birth of laughter and comedy occur within a context that gives meaning to comic utterances or gestures. 7 His classification of characters of comedy type—the “Jack-in-the-box,” the “Dancing-jack,” and the “Snowball”—and identification of three methods of “light comedy”—“repetition,

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inversion and reciprocal influence of series”—connect comedy not to a denatured set of fixed movements or perfunctory terminologies but to the subjective and improvisational nature of human dynamics. The aforementioned “social life” determines what is comical within the realm of the comic and gives rise to the liberation of the human experience, emphasizing “the supple, the ever-changing and the living” in the face of “the rigid, the readymade, the mechanical” (119). In this respect, comedy subverts authority by rendering the human experience as a struggle against limits on spontaneity and free expression. Published not inconsequentially in 1939, In Praise of Comedy by James Feibleman represents an extension of the concepts explored by Freud and Bergson as well as a systematic survey of the origins and consequences of laughter and the comic. His writings on the intersection of comedy and the social are particularly relevant as they shed light on the parallels between social critique and humor. According to Feibleman, comedy “ridicules new customs, new institutions, for being insufficiently inclusive; but even more effectively makes fun of old ones which have outlived their usefulness” (178). It is utopian in nature and therefore social (178–79), “a criticism of limitations and an unwillingness to accept them” (199), performs a socially corrective function (181), and possesses an “inherently revolutionary nature” (200). Laughter, in essence, allows us to overcome our shortcomings and forces us to realize how insignificant they are in the grander scheme of things (191). It is this dimension of comedy—its ability to participate in the construction of a better world—that connects the individual to the greater struggles against injustice, as comedy “is in sympathy with the revolutionary struggle for something better and again for something still better” (214). In his writings, Feibleman repeatedly underscores the subversive nature of comedy, particularly from a socially corrective perspective that looks to utilize humor as a sensible alternative to any traditions or practices celebrated uncritically. In a sense, comedy invokes the necessary laughter of the revolution. The path toward a social theory of comedy forged by the writings of Freud, Bergson, and Feibleman, among others, was also indelibly marked by Mikhail Bakhtin. Although much of his work has been discounted in the face of studies centering on postcolonialism, subalternism, and coloniality of power, recent research acknowledges his contributions. Daniel M. Sánchez, for example, recognizes the impact of Bakhtin on the study of individual and social activism in the age of Donald Trump. Irene Rocha Kalil and Adriana Cavalcanti de Aguiar apply Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony to an examination of gender roles in contemporary Brazil. And Giuliana Messina Dahlberg applies his concept of heteroglossia to the language-focused classroom. In his Ph.D. dissertation Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin explored the literary manifestations of power and authority in the work of François Rabelais and

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developed his theory of the carnivalesque in which apparent satire or ridicule of those whom today we would classify as the subaltern represents, in reality, a critique of authority. Basing his theory on folk culture, Bakhtin explored the multiple manifestations of folk humor and recognized its potential to undermine institutional authority. 8 The carnival and, by extension, comedy, represents a not-so-subtle subversion of accepted social norms through unacceptable behavior and language. “Abuses, curses, profanities, and improprieties,” for example, “are the unofficial elements of speech. They were and are still conceived as a breach of the established norms of verbal address; they refuse to conform to conventions, to etiquette, civility, respectability” (Rabelais, 182). Upon breaking accepted social codes, “common” language and the possible ensuing laughter “overcomes fear, for it knows no inhibitions, no limitations. Its idiom is never used by violence and authority” (Rabelais, 90). Laughter, according to Bakhtin, sabotages authority in its implicit denunciation of non-laughter, and one truth—the hegemonical truth—is supplanted by another, “the people’s unofficial truth” (Rabelais, 90). While the theory of comedy may have continued to progress at the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first and be heavily influenced by postmodern and deconstructionist considerations, little new ground has been tread with respect to the relationship between the social and the comic. The General Theory of Verbal Humor proposed by Salvatore Attardo, the OnticEpistemic Theory of Humor developed by Peter Marteinson, and Benign Violations Theory, among others, all take into account recent developments in psychology, gender studies, anthropology, and linguistics; yet a common thread is both their debt to and gradual growth away from one-dimensional reductions of comedy. Individuals such as Bergson and Freud, for example, were among the first to systematically explore the role of humor in the creation of our individual identities, and their work represented the intrusion of psychoanalysis into the field of comedy and its role in the formation of our social selves. Feibleman and Bakhtin analyzed laughter and the comic as potentially subversive in their capacity to throw off the limits of power and authority. For them, humor was a vehicle for the expression of social change and disaffection. And in the end, it is this dimension of comedy that has served literature well: By appearing to treat prejudice, ethical ambiguity, coloniality, exploitation, hegemonic discourses, marginalization, and selfrepresentation with humor, written works have paved the way for the consideration and ultimate implementation of social change. In studies on the work of Cabezas, comparisons have also been absent between Fire from the Mountain and the documentary film of the same name directed by Deborah Shaffer and released in 1987. The ability of testimonio to provide evidence of a particular historical period or of an individual’s representative struggle against marginalization finds its textual sibling in the documentary film, a genre whose origins in the 1920s may be traced to “three

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developments in particular: the appearance of a small avant-garde movement in European cinema; the work of a maverick filmmaker of Irish descent in North America, Robert Flaherty; and the creation of a revolutionary film industry in Soviet Russia which included the agit-prop of Dzigo Vertova and the comrades of the Kino-Train” (Chanan, 203). In this respect, the more current processes of the documentary have remained true to its beginnings, since today “[t]he social purposes of documentary are not journalistic nor are they propagandistic—they are promotional, certainly, and didactic, but they are interwoven with the development of citizenship in modern society and with the cause of social democratic reform” (Corner, 15). The development of a documentary film mirrors the organization of a testimonial text, as “The process of constructing meaning overshadows constructed meanings” (Nichols, 29). While critics such as John Corner (The Art of Record, 30), Bill Nichols (“The Voice of Documentary,” 18), and Julianne Burton (“Toward a History,” 5) have written on the aesthetic mechanics unique to the documentary, it is the ethical dimension of the films and their potential for unmasking sociopolitical inequities that clearly draw the genre closer to the testimonio. In their 1971 manifesto “Towards a Third Cinema,” the filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino declare that “The cinema known as documentary, with all the vastness that the concept has today, from educational films to the reconstruction of a fact of a historical event, is perhaps the main basis for revolutionary filmmaking” (46). Although the birth of a “revolutionary” non-fiction cinema unique to Latin America has its origins in events that include the celebration in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1954 of the Festival Internacional de Cine Documental y Experimental, and the impact of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 on national and continental standards of cinematic aesthetics and purpose, there are a number of difficulties that hinder a historiography of the Latin American documentary: the existence of “geopolitical boundaries,” the fact that “only an infinitesimal proportion of the region’s silent films survived into the sound area,” “the dearth of secondary resources,” “the difficulty in tracing the ‘traffic in documentaries’ between countries and regions,” and the reality that “a growing proportion of documentary production is becoming increasingly conjunctional, strategic, intentionally short-lived” (Burton, 8–9). These potential complications, however, are overshadowed by the fact that “many [Latin American] filmmakers have found themselves acting, through the agency of their films, as advocates and accusers, agitators and dissenters—if not voluntarily, then compelled by the contradictions of their situation” (Burton, 27), actively committed to creating their art in the service of political transformation. The varieties of liberation and the visual strategies of denunciation advocated and employed by the documentary film share much in common with testimonial texts that look to

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condemn marginalization and embark upon a constructive dialogue that considers the experience of the Other. In the 1960s, the documentary genre in Latin America became intimately associated with revolutionary positions and “assume[d] a counterinformation or even awareness function, inseparable from the establishment of new distribution circuits, distinct from commercial theatres” (Paranaguá, 54). The task of Latin American documentary and cinema in general at this time would be expressed through a variety of movements and subgenres that reflected the renewed approaches to the medium. “Revolutionary” or “Guerrilla” filmmaking, the “Third Cinema” of Octavio Getino, and the “Imperfect Cinema” of Julio García Espinosa would ultimately be included under the banner of New Latin American Cinema during this decade. The differences between these, however, reflected distinct sets of priorities. In the case of New Latin American Cinema, for example, “When the term is used today it always implies a socio-political attitude that constitutes the principal source of unity for these films and practices. That attitude can be summarized as a desire to change the social function of cinema, to transform the Latin American cinema into an instrument of change and of consciousness-raising or concientización” (Ana María López, 138–39). The directors and producers of New Latin American Cinema frequently found themselves in intimate dialogue with the concept of nationhood and became active participants in the construction of national identities, as cinema “was identified early on as a crucial site for the utopian assertion of a collective unity identified as the nation” (Ana María López, 141) and “posits the cinema as a response to and an activator of a different kind of nationhood or subject position of nationality than the one sponsored by the dominant cultural forms” (López, 141–42). The reference in the 1960s to specific national circumstances often dovetailed with the grander continental intentions of the filmmakers, yet “the panAmerican thrust [of the New Latin American Cinema] found expression only in the festivals themselves, for the filmmakers did not make ‘Latin American’ films” (Buchsbaum, 5). The seemingly unavoidable prominence of a nation-centered cinema during this time period would gradually change and come to reflect the continental momentum of a unifying aesthetics: specific works would surpass their respective national boundaries due, in part, to the fact that these “do not necessarily reflect a national project committed to shared goals” (Buchsbaum, 246). One continental approach to documentary film in Latin America would be symbolized by testimonial cinema, a subgenre of the non-fiction film that originates in Cuba after the revolution. According to Víctor Casaus, this cine testimonio is characterized by a “rapid and flexible filming of unfolding reality,” “themes of broad national importance,” “directly filmed interviews both for the narrative functions that they are able to fulfill and because they provide the means of bringing popular speech to the screen,” and the use of

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“audacious and intuitive style of montage” (cited in Chanan, 211–12). Ultimately, two separate strains of cine testimonio would develop: One, articulated by the Mexican Eduardo Maldonado in 1969 by the Grupo Cine Testimonio, “is concerned to put cinema at the service of social groups which lack access to the means of mass communication”; the other “is literary in origin,” has its beginnings in the “campaign literature” “of the nineteenth century Cuban wars of independence,” represents “accounts of participants writing in the heat and haste of events, aware of their necessarily partial but privileged perspective,” and reflects the writings of Eduardo Galeano and Omar Cabezas, for example (Chanan, 211). Ultimately, such documentary films would engage with processes of national liberation and appropriate much of the visual language employed in Latin America and other parts of the world. The cine testimonio of the late 1960s and the documentaries produced in Central America during the time of the New Latin American Cinema came to emulate and inspire the seminal Latin American documentary films of the period such as Por primera vez (Cuba, 1967), La hora de los hornos (Argentina, 1968) and La batalla de Chile (Chile, 1973–1978). According to Paulo Antonio Paranaguá, in Central America the genre “Repeated schemes from the militant theatre of previous years, with infrequent exceptions” (75). Yet the list of fifty Latin American documentaries included in his study “Orígenes, evolución y problemas” (2003) lists only one Central American documentary film, Alejandro, a 1994 production from El Salvador, critically overlooking works produced in Nicaragua during the 1980s. At this time, the films created in Nicaragua by INCINE, the Nicaraguan National Film Institute, represented “the most sustained practical laboratory of Third Cinema” (Buchsbaum, 259) and would be considered the last, final examples of “national militant filmmaking projects in Latin America” (Buchsbaum, 224). Such “militant filmmaking,” however, would be at odds with the political objectives of a Sandinista government that looked to squelch any voices that distanced themselves from its program of national reconstruction and would subsequently reflect the ideological conflict between Rosario Murillo and Ernesto Cardenal regarding the role of the artist during the post-revolution. In Nicaragua, the Sandinista victory in 1979 implemented cultural norms and standards that were frequently inspired by developments in Latin American cultural production such as New Latin American Cinema and testimonial literature. To this end, “The Sandinista documentary shares as a legacy from the New Latin American Cinema the important purpose of affirming the aspirations, achievements and potential for cultural rediscovery and reclamation” (John Ramirez, “Introduction,” 209). Before the Sandinista Revolution had concluded in July of 1979, that same year the incipient postrevolutionary government had created a Brigade of War Correspondents in April (Chávez, “Alsino,” 28, 32) that would reference the basic precepts of the Sandinista Revolution and frame the conversation surrounding national

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identity. In the process, they would receive the help of Latin American filmmakers such as the Bolivian Alfonso Gumuncio Dagrón, establish the Taller de Cine Super 8 “to teach workers how to make films about their own reality” (Hess, “Nicaragua,” 198), and, in the process, engage liberation philosophy and theology. One consequence of these efforts after the victory against Somoza was the creation of the noticieros, news featurettes especially popular from 1981 to 1985 that were approximately eight to ten minutes long that were shown in “regular movie theatres” and ultimately proved to be “a training ground for young filmmakers” (Buchsbaum, 12, 13). As Daniel Chávez has written, “In cinema terms, the ‘reconstruction’ tasks were part of the ideological combat against imperialism and of the attempt to create a new Nicaraguan identity” (“Alsino,” 32). During the decade of the 1980s, INCINE produced some seventy films—the majority of them “shorts”—with an unexpected degree of autonomy within the Sandinista cultural apparatus, a fact that proved to be both beneficial and detrimental to its existence, as INCINE was able to maintain a semblance of ideological independence within “limited resources” (Buchsbaum, 4). The organization took its task to heart and perceived its work as being directly related to the construction of a new national identity, stating in its “Declaration of Principles and Goals” its “commitment to ‘recovering national identity,’ [a] task that entailed producing not only Nicaraguan films, but also nurturing, even creating, a Nicaraguan cinematic culture” (Buchsbaum, 98). Between 1981 and 1989, INCINE produced a total of sixteen documentaries that included films on the United States invasion of Vietnam (Del águila al dragón, 1981), difficulties related to the import and export of national goods (País pobre, ciudadano libre, 1981), national agrarian reform (Nuestra reforma agraria, 1982), the consequences of the Contra war on the nation (Teotecacinte, el fuego viene del norte, 1983), the role of women in the revolution (Mujeres de la frontera, 1988), and INCINE itself, Historia de un cine comprometido (1983), among others. If the Sandinista government did not necessarily prioritize the activities of INCINE, this attitude would be belied by those who worked assiduously on producing films that would not only reflect its commitment to revolutionary principles but also express its desire to be an art form that looked to approach both aesthetics and ethics from an innovative perspective. An examination of the mythification of the Sandinista Revolution as it appears in Fire from the Mountain and its eponymous documentary film version will allow us to better understand the symbiotic relationship between the ethical positions taken by both works and their respective aesthetic considerations. These facets of Cabezas’s work—and of testimonio in general—have remained largely ignored by critics of the genre. As Kimberly Nance has written regarding testimonio criticism, “critical reaction [has ]focused more on the contexts, character, and motives of testimonio’s speakers and collabo-

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rating writers than on the texts themselves” (5). In the process, the text has played second fiddle to considerations of the social and political repercussions of the works. Our intention is to address a number of voids in the study of testimonio and of the two works by Cabezas. Chapter 1, “Latin American Identity, Liberation, and Intercultural Philosophy,” establishes our theoretical boundaries in order to delve into the history of liberation theology within the context of Nicaragua and Latin America and present a structured textual analysis of Fire from the Mountain and Love song for mankind. The second chapter, “Utopia and Testimonio,” references the construction of utopian discourse and centers on the idealistic possibilities offered by works of Latin American literature, especially testimonio and I, Rigoberta Menchú as well as Fire from the Mountain. Chapter 3, “Post-Revolutionary Autobiography in Nicaragua,” frames the discussion surrounding first-person autobiographical narratives in Nicaragua and examines the autobiographical works Adiós muchachos (1999) by Sergio Ramírez; El país bajo mi piel (The Country Under My Skin, 2001) by Gioconda Belli; Junto a mi pueblo, con su revolución (With My People, With Their Revolution, 2009) by Fernando Cardenal; and the three-volume set by Ernesto Cardenal, Vida perdida (Lost Life, 1998), Las ínsulas extrañas (The Strange Islands, 2002), and La revolución perdida (The Lost Revolution, 2004). Chapter 4, “The Work of Omar Cabezas: Orality and Liberation Discourse,” analyzes the work of Cabezas and connects liberation theology/philosophy to orality and oral communication. The exegetical possibilities of humor and the comic(al) ground the discussion in chapter 5, “Comedy as Subversion and Resistance in the Work of Omar Cabezas,” proposing that examples of comedy and the comic in both of his works further exemplify a spirit of liberation. Finally, chapter 6, “The Liberation of Fire from the Mountain: Testimonial Text, Documentary Film, and the New Nicaragua,” compares the written text to the documentary film of the same name in order to demonstrate that the “New Nicargua” founded by the FSLN mythified the national past in order to selectively amplify the nation’s historical memory. For our purposes, discrete manifestations of the political and cultural landscapes such as liberation theology, testimonio, and the Sandinista Revolution inform our examination of the work of Cabezas and their role in the construction of a Nicaraguan and Latin American identity. Our hope is that a contextualized examination of Fire from the Mountain and Love song for mankind within the framework of liberation will offer ample evidence of the prominence that Cabezas’s work should occupy in any Central American historiography and reconsider the importance of literary aesthetics in the study of testimonio.

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NOTES 1. Ortega had run for the presidency in 1996 and 2001, finally winning in 2006 with 38 percent of the vote and being re-elected in 2011 with over 62 percent of the vote and again in 2016 with over 72 percent of the vote. His victories have come at a significant price for the FSLN, however, as a number of historical party faithful such as Sergio Ramírez (vice president from 1985 to 1990), Ernesto Cardenal (minister of culture from 1979 to 1987), and Gioconda Belli, among others, left the party and publicly criticized the policies of Ortega. The Movimiento de Renovación Sandinista (MRS) (Sandinista Renovation Movement) emerged in 1996 and presented itself as an alternative to what has been termed the Danielismo of Ortega and the cult of personality surrounding him. 2. The articles “El FSLN y la ‘iconización’ de Sandino” by Catherine Lacaze and “Espectros de Sandino en la política nicaragüense (una interrogación)” by Sergio Villena Figo are particularly relevant to the study of the mythification of Sandino. 3. Like much subaltern speech, testimonio is also oral (Rivero, “Acerca del género testimonio,” 46), “naturalizes the exotic” (Jara, 3), is a “way of fighting” (Jara, 1), and, not unlike myth, is also articulated as something “natural” (Casaus, 326). According to Víctor Casaus, for example, the first Latin American testimonials came into being during the first part of the nineteenth century, when the colonies were fighting to liberate themselves from Spanish domination: “Born from the anti-imperial struggle of our America, these [testimonial] texts offer, through love and respect for the sources from which they came, a contribution in the battle to rediscover the true face of our people” (326). Once again, the explicit enunciation of an alleged “true face of our people” (our emphasis) conveniently conceals the fact that the apparent “naturalness” of these first testimonios and their connection to the continent and to a Truth represent another link in the chain of historical and linguistic manipulations that, through the imposition of a hegemonic gaze, look to establish once and for all—albeit fleetingly—a dominant continental discourse and control the historical memory. 4. In a 1990 interview in the journal Ventana, Rosario Murillo recognized the mistakes made by the Sandinista hierarchy regarding the imposition of discrete cultural policies: “It’s true. We erred with the organization. We erred by not openly venting our differences, in the manner in which some were promoted. We erred by importing programs and organizational forms that did not correspond with the reality of our country. We erred when we didn’t do everything necessary to impede the flowering—unfortunately circumstantial—of individual projects, designed by bureaucrats that . . . intended to make certain types of literary uniform” (1–2). 5. On September 21, 1956, the poet Rigoberto López Pérez shot and killed President Anastasio Somoza García. 6. In his 1972 work Language in the Inner City, William Labov coined the term “natural narrative” to describe the oral discourse that was emerging from within African American populations in cities throughout the United States. Typically, the “natural narrative” was composed of six sections: abstract, orientation, complicating action, resolution, evaluation, and coda (Labov, 363–65). According to Labov, such a narrative served as a counter-discourse to acts of speech prevalent at the national level as expressed by structures of power dominated by a White patriarchal society. 7. Writing of the physicality of comedy, Bergson distinguishes between “actions” and “gestures,” declaring that “Instead of concentrating our attention on actions, comedy directs it rather to gestures” (129). “Action,” in his opinion, “is intentional,” while “gesture slips out unawares” (130). 8. Bakhtin identifies three types of “folk humor”: 1) “ritual spectacles”: carnival pageants, comic shows of the marketplace (5–6); 2) “comic verbal compositions”: parodies both oral and written, in Latin and the vernacular (5); and 3) “various genres of billingsgate”: curses, oaths, etc. (5).

Chapter One

Latin American Identity, Liberation, and Intercultural Philosophy

In recent Latin American scholarship, the existence of a cohesive national or continental identity has been subject to intense scrutiny due in large part to the fragmentation of allegedly representative metanarratives. The revolution in Chiapas, Mexico, in 1999, the rise to power of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, the return of Daniel Ortega to the Nicaraguan presidency, and the election of Evo Morales in Bolivia, for example, have represented the rebirth of a Socialist populism that adapts capitalist strategies and projects itself to a national and continental level. These events, however, have paradoxically also served to heighten the interest in the determination and attempted return in many regions of the American continent and beyond to the construction of monolithic national identities. What constitutes a traditional national identity in Spain, for example, is being publicly questioned due to the rise of Galician, Basque, Catalonian, and other autonomous communities. Currently, a majority of nations in the Americas are considered as developed or developing countries, pregnant with political and economic challenges that, more often than not, are determined by the weight of political, cultural, and economic practices originating in the United States or European Union. The matter of a cohesive Latin American identity that frames the individual national identities has followed a separate path from European efforts to dovetail a continental discourse with national concerns. Pre-Columbian traditions were in place many millennia ago, yet these were interrupted and violently affected by a Spanish Conquest that chose culture as the locus of domination and that from the fifteenth century onward made “America” inseparable from imperialism and its colonial project. As Walter Mignolo states, “The very idea of America cannot be separated from coloniality: the entire continent emerged as such in the European consciousness as a massive 1

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extent of land to be appropriated, and of people to be converted to Christianity, and whose labor could be exploited” (The Idea, 7). While writers such as Eduardo Galeano, Néstor García Canclini, Tzvetan Todorov, and Stephen F. Hunsaker, among many others, continue to research the multiple connections between national fragmentation and continental reification, the fact remains that individual identity is a plural discourse whose emancipatory self-representation is consistently in danger of being postponed. 1 Within an epistemological context, the term “identity” is projected simultaneously from both individual and collective points of reference that share the interpersonal terrain. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines “identity” as “The quality or condition of being the same in substance, composition, nature, properties, or in particular qualities under consideration; absolute or essential sameness; oneness.” The “sameness” or “oneness” defined by the OED as an integral part of “identity” is the principal objection that many scholars hold today: it is impractical and frequently hopeless to reduce individual circumstances to a national or continental unifying “oneness.” The residents of those parts of the Americas that were conquered by Spain in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, for example, constructed themselves from within the empire and were inevitably conditioned by the subhuman treatment afforded by colonizers whose primary objective was material gain for themselves and the Spanish Crown. During this time, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas and the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, among others, contributed to the elaboration of an increasingly autonomous Latin American identity when anti-imperialist and subsequent decolonial struggles first began. Although the steps toward a synchronous Latin American identity were taken principally during colonial times, at the beginning of the nineteenth century such explorations into the wound of being began to reflect a pervasive concern among Latin American writers with a potential decolonizing project. Due to political conflicts within Spain, to its declining importance on the global stage, and to the growing strength of colonial self-rule in the Americas, independence came quickly during this time. Statesmen and writers such as Simón Bolívar, Andrés Bello, and Juan Bautista Alberdi, among many others, intended to construct the new nations as idealized locations where individual liberties and democracy would flourish. As Bolívar wrote in 1815, “More than anyone, I desire to see America fashioned into the greatest nation in the world, greatest not so much by virtue of her area and wealth as by her freedom and glory” (Selected Writings, 115). In turn, the nineteenth century in Latin America would be characterized by the debate between what was termed “civilization” (the application of European customs and models) and “barbarism” (the participation of self-determinate autonomous forces) and would last well into the twentieth century. During the rhetorical battle, the voices of such diverse thinkers as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, José Martí, and the future president of Venezuela, Rómulo Gallegos, would echo the

Latin American Identity, Liberation, and Intercultural Philosophy

3

sentiments of millions of continental compatriots who were coming to terms with a uniquely layered identity. 2 Literary discourse emerges from and within circumstances that act as bridges between the writer, the text, and the reading public, between the observed and the observer. Such circumstances form the base of an interpretation that is context-centered and that positions such discourse within any number of conceptual frameworks. To this end, literary discourse and exegesis in the 1960s reflected a global instability that originated in a set of political, economic, and social crises. The Vietnam War, the relatively recent independence of a number of African nations (Algeria, Morocco, Libya, Nigeria, Zaire, Kenya, and Equatorial Guinea, among others), student demonstrations in Mexico, the United States, and France, the feminist movement, the Cuban Revolution in 1959, and the deliberations and conclusions of the Second Vatican Council from 1962 to 1965 had global repercussions and demanded an ethical commitment from the writer. Founded in Guatemala in 1962, for example, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias (Rebel Armed Forces, FAR) already included revolutionary priests such as Maryknoll Father Thomas Melville and his brother and Sister Marion Peter among their ranks. This collaboration led to recruiting Mayas and launched the process of Maya empowerment throughout the country. In Nicaragua, guerrilla movements at this time included the Juventud Democrática Nicaragüense (Nicaraguan Democratic Youth), Juventud Revolucionaria Nicaragüense (Nicaraguan Revolutionary Youth), Frente Interno de la Resistencia (Internal Resistance Front), Juventud Patriótica Nicaragüense (Nicaraguan Patriotic Youth), Frente Revolucionario Sandino (Sandino Revolutionary Front), Movimiento Nueva Nicaragua (New Nicaragua Movement), and the direct predecessor of the FSLN, or the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (National Liberation Front). Although writers such as Leopoldo Zea, Ángel Rama, and Octavio Paz were also immersed in the detection and construction of a Panamerican identity and its respective national iterations and were actively debating the necessity of a politically and socially committed work that would emanate from an awareness of their own individual context, their task would vary from country to country. 3 During the 1960s, many writers raised systematic questions about the challenges facing their respective social, political, and economic infrastructures and continued to be critical of the role played by North American and European nations in what was perceived as their underdevelopment. During the fifties, sixties, and seventies, hostile United States interventions in a number of Latin American countries generated a series of challenges that would affect political, economic, social, cultural, and philosophical considerations of identity and provoke a countercultural response to the aggressions. Individuals such as Paulo Freire and Gustavo Gutiérrez took steps to forge an identity separate from the cultural products that were frequently and blindly imported from abroad and imposed upon

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populations influenced almost exclusively by European and North American aesthetics and standards. In Latin American fiction, the fifties and sixties gave rise to writers such as Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, José Donoso, Julio Cortázar, and Gabriel García Márquez and witnessed the birth of what is generally known as a Latin American “boom” that dovetailed with the confluence and growth of large publishing houses and a voracious reading public that searched for distraction from and meaning in the continental jostling and instability. During the twentieth century, another type of writing emerged from Latin America that looked to connect more directly with the context of its own multifaceted realities. In Mexico, for example, the writings of Justo Sierra, Antonio Caso, and José Vasconcelos influenced Samuel Ramos, who in his Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico (1934) performs a diagnostic vivisection of Mexican identity and arrives at the conclusion that “the Mexican psyche is the result of reactions that strive to conceal an inferiority complex” (58). The work of another Mexican, Leopoldo Zea, represents an important contemporary step toward the construction of what many consider to be the first Latin American contribution to global dialogue, the philosophy of liberation. In his writings, Zea emphasizes the importance of disavowing the weight of Eurocentric philosophy in order to assemble a stand-alone Latin American philosophy sin más, “without anything else.” According to Zea, the existence of an authentically Latin American voice began with the realization that the Latin American would assume such a discourse and that, upon doing so, it would transcend and emancipate itself from the European philosophical tradition and create a truly American way of thinking. In the words of Zea, “Truth comes now to the Westerner from the non-Western world, from the action that men from this part of the world are completing to escape from an alienation that has been imposed. An alienation that Western man has created himself” (La filosofía americana, 97). Instead of allowing Latin American identity to be manipulated by and from Europe, Zea offers another possible process: the European must be conscious of the meaning that philosophical discourse acquires in Latin America. It is in this de-Europeanizing tone that Franz Fanon highlighted the role of the “colonized intellectual” population and the microcosmically contextual nature of liberation: “This colonized intellectual, pulverized by colonialist culture, will also discover the strength of the village assemblies, the power of the people’s commissions and the extraordinary productiveness of neighborhood and section committee meetings” (11). Through a localization of its plural categories of representation, philosophical discourse in Latin America assimilates the hermeneutics of liberation and proposes, in the words of Zea, “to do what the European was not capable of doing, to avoid the dehumanization into which his limited humanism fell” (La filosofía americana, 108).

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The development of this current of Latin American discourse would be what Zea described as “a philosophy committed to its reality” (La filosofía americana, 55) that could not be easily exported to other continents without losing its meaning and original intention. In order to be truly continental and decolonial in scope, however, this “committed philosophy” would also need to possess a degree of universality that would allow other peoples to grasp it and subsequently disseminate it from within their own particular context. As Zea wrote, this philosophy “born from the feeling of crisis of Western man gives rise, at the same time, to a new conscience of universality which man from this America is an ineluctable part” (La filosofía americana, 77). The new identity is constructed through an encounter with the colonial past and an appreciation of community, evoking the fulfillment of the individual and the recognition that the particular and the universal are inseparable. For Zea, the Western philosphical tradition has neglected the importance of individualizing and contextualizing identity. The apparent antithesis between particular and universal values, between the microcosm and macrocosm is merely a synthesis of complementary cultural elements that are not easily negotiated nor disregarded. We may better appreciate these dialectically opposing elements in a philosophical and theological context, particularly in the tension that has existed historically in Latin America between a theoretical language imported from abroad and a tradition of autonomous cultures that, from within, expresses the need to progress within a Latin American reality where the vast majority of the population continues to be Protestant or Roman Catholic. Due to these circumstances, an exploration of Latin American identity is difficult to realize effectively without an understanding of the contemporary presence of evangelical traditions and the hegemonic influence that Rome, the Catholic culture, and Christianity in general have had on the continent. In Latin America, Catholicism as imported from Spain and Portugal over five hundred years ago has gradually enunciated the fact that the majority of the world’s Catholics and, therefore, the future of the Church may be found in this part of the globe. Fashioned in Europe after centuries of theological debate, many Latin American cultures absorbed Catholicism and reshaped it through such synchretic figures as the Mexican Virgin of Guadalupe and the Peruvian Santa Rosa of Lima, among many others, and the influences of indigenous, Asian, and other non-Christian cultures. The same occurred with the transformation of traditional theological discourse. From a Eurocentric perspective, “making theology” meant beginning at the theoretical levels of thinking, invoking authorities such as Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas, analyzing their writings, and then applying that exegesis to lived reality. In Latin America, this theology was often passively accepted until social and political conditions gave birth to other voices and other theologies that would elaborate syntheses of the particular and the universal, of Catholic

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ideals and Latin American realities, so that the starting point for a new theology would be the praxis of millions. As Dina V. Picotti has written, what would come to be known as liberation philosophy “emphasized the need for freedom from normative Eurocentric logic, which conditioned and impaired the continent’s sense of identity and its concrete display in all layers of society” (“Towards,” 188). The “Eurocentric logic” had framed virtually all attempts to define an autonomous—read “non-European”—identity and, in the process, hindered its coming of age. THE ORIGINS OF LIBERATION During the 1960s, as many territories throughout the world openly and violently rebelled against colonial rule and the imperial legacy, a number of developing nations began to actively demand a voice in the free determination of their future and to initiate wars of national liberation against their colonial occupiers. On the surface, liberation theology was born from a desire within a more progressive part of the Catholic Church hierarchy to engage with traditionally marginalized populations throughout the globe, particularly those in the Americas, Asia, and Africa. On a deeper level, however, the emergence of liberation theology and philosophy approached unjust economic practices, gender, ecology, and globalization from a new interdisciplinary approach that connected the Christian theological tradition with a renewed criticism of Eurocentric thinking. Although the struggles against inequality and injustice frequently enabled a broad set of goals among diverse populations, approaches to liberation clearly varied according to race, ethnicity, geography, and gender. Indigenous and African American cultures, environmental concerns, (eco)feminism, and the transformation of the global economy, for example, have all inspired distinct iterations of liberation theology. In an attempt to dilute the influence of liberation theology, the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith in 1984 unwittingly recognized its impact by emphasizing its fragmentary nature and declaring that “it helps to speak of theologies of liberation, since the expression embraces a number of theological positions, or even sometimes ideological ones, which are not simply different but more often incompatible with one another” (16). The “incompatibility” of “a number of theological positions” or ideologies in fact facilitated the construction of alternative Christian theologies that were inspired by the decolonizing purposes of liberation theology. Global instability and the emergence of social movements during the 1950s and 1960s profoundly affected the work of Catholic priests—particularly in developing countries—and bishops and obliged Pope John XXIII to convene the Second Vatican Council in Rome in order to reflect on its own mission and on how to adapt itself to the times. Notwithstanding the efforts

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of a conservative Roman clergy to redirect the agenda toward a set of principles more in line with traditional Catholic customs, a group of bishops rejected any attempt to guide the council down a more conventional path and established an open atmosphere of dialogue whose impact on Latin America would last far beyond 1965. As Phillip Berryman has noted, “Far more important than any of its particular decisions was the fact that the council led Latin American Catholics to take a much more critical look at their own church and their own society. Not only did they seek to adopt the council to Latin America—they began to ask Latin American questions” (17). In 1961, one year before the convocation of the council, the publication of the papal encylical “Mater et Magistra” by Pope John XXIII represented a reaction against the physical and spiritual violence of the period throughout the world and entered into the debate surrounding the apparently irreconcilable ends of capitalism and socialism, establishing the tone for the next year’s council. Upon specifically mentioning the difficulties faced by the developing countries, John XXIII declared, “As for the problems which face the poorer nations in various parts of the world, we realize, of course, that these are very real. They are caused, more often than not, by a deficient economic and social organization, which does not offer living conditions proportionate to the increase in population” (80). The “deficient economic and social organization” mentioned by John XXIII was directly linked to the excesses of global economic systems that disenfranchised workers so that profits took precedence over human development and progress. The innovative feature of his message was that he began to place part of the blame for the socioeconomic conditions and the resulting poverty lived in many developing nations around the world squarely on this very specific and materialist “economic and social organization” that was inextricably linked to human life. Interestingly, however, this encyclical did not commit itself further and did not specify whether those at fault were the developed nations (the oppressors) or the developing nations (the oppressed). The identification of unjust social, political, and economic structures that create material poverty, its origins and subsequent erradication have motivated those thinkers who, within the current of liberation theology, sought to reconstruct the asymmetrical relationship between the center and the periphery. In the 1967 encylical “Populorum Progressio,” Pope Paul VI identified the principal characteristics of poverty from the perspective of the Catholic Church: “What are less than human conditions? The material poverty of those who lack the base necessities of life, and the moral poverty of those who are crushed under the weight of their own self-love; oppressive political structures resulting from the abuse of ownership or the improper exercise of power, from the exploitation of the worker or unjust transactions?” (187). For the Catholic Church, the multiple manifestations of poverty gave rise to debates that included yet transcended mere economics: poverty is, in essence,

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a diminished physical state of lived possibilities that reduces the capacity of human beings to live a rewarding life. For liberation theologians, however, part of the problem in the struggle against poverty was the ambiguous message conveyed by the hierarchy of a Catholic Church that acknowledged the existence of “less than human conditions” for millions of people around the world yet continued to maintain itself and live surrounded by material wealth. 4 In response to this contradiction, the theologian Jon Sobrino declared that “In a world that is predominantly poor, the Church ought to be in poverty simply so that it may be real, to avoid communicating the painful impression of unreality and irrelevance, as happens when it merely seeks to offer intentions” (“The Economics of Ecclesia,” 85). Within liberation philosophy, then, “institutional poverty” as applied in Latin America and other emerging economies may be understood as having two denotative possibilities: the poverty that is accepted and perhaps generated by the institutional Catholic Church, and that which is constructed and produced by asymmetries within and between social, political, economic, and cultural institutions. Currently, the boundaries between state-sanctioned political parties, multi-national businesses, non-governmental organizations, labor unions, and cultural networks, for example, are becoming more nebulous, as their interests have expanded into non-traditional areas in order to expand the ideological terrain and gather supporters for a cause. 5 In Nicaragua, for example, the Comisión del Proyecto de Desarrollo del Canal de Nicaragua (Commission on the Canal Development Project)—a group that included ex-Vice Chancellor Manuel Coronel Kautz and Laureano Ortega, the president’s son—has been in conversations with China and recently secured a financial commitment from businessman Wang Jing to build a $40 billion interoceanic canal. Lately, however, Wang Jing and his company HKND, Hong Kong Nicaragua Development Investment Co., have suffered a series of economic setbacks that put the future of the canal in doubt. 6 One of the arguments made by activists such as Mónica Baltodano and Francisca Ramírez against the project is that it is simply an excuse for HKND and the Nicaraguan government to confiscate rural lands and that the canal would, subsequently, exacerbate poverty for many of those living along the canal route in Nicaragua. According to liberation philosophers and theologians, the plural history of the term “poverty” underscores its relevance as a lens through which we can today better understand neoliberalism and the excesses of free enterprise. For Gustavo Gutiérrez, one of the architects of liberation theology, “Poverty means death: lack of food and housing, the inability to attend properly to health and education needs, the exploitation of workers, permanent unemployment, the lack of respect for one’s human dignity, and unjust limitations placed on personal freedom in the areas of self-expression, politics, and religion” (A Theology of Liberation, xxi). Leonardo Boff proclaims that “Poverty represents an evil; for the Bible it is one

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of the forms in which death manifests itself in human life” (Teología del cautiverio, 295). Pedro Trigo states that “Poverty simply says lack and the impossibility of correcting it due to a lack of power caused by the disgust of those who possess and hold power” (303). And according to Sobalvarro, “Poverty is a misery that truly brings death closer and the poor are those whose most important task is simply to survive” (“La esperanza,” 594). Presently, factors such as climate change in the Atlantic coast region and urban poverty in cities such as Managua, León, and Granada are directly affecting the most socially vulnerable in Nicaragua and compelling the government to address these most recent challenges. The ethical dimension of poverty originates in those material needs described by Gutiérrez, in its inherent iniquity and in its concrete manifestation through the lives of those for whom, as Sobrino implies, material subsistence is of primary importance. Poverty as a statistical and epistemic conceptualization acquires a necessary physicality and an ethical substance when framed in reference to individuals and their respective circumstances, referring us to the primordial significance of historical context for the elaboration of a liberation philosophy. In Latin America, for example, poverty has become a way of life that frames and determines the existence of millions marginalized by political corruption and perennially unsolvable economic imbalances. Among these nations, Nicaragua has been one of the poorest in the hemisphere. 7 Since the elaboration of a liberation discourse, churches of all denominations throughout Latin America are involving themselves and addressing economic disparities at the local, regional, national, and international levels from a variety of theological positions that consider both ecumenical praxis and the distinctiveness of their respective communities. In particular, Catholic churches across Latin America, according to Antonio Celso Queiroz, “Are known for the first time as different due to ‘their own’ and not to their inability to be equal to the European churches; they begin to speak of and communicate what is characteristic to them” (325). The uniqueness of Latin American churches serves to underscore the need to elaborate a discourse separate from Europe and to draw attention to the material circumstances of both Catholics and non-Catholics around the continent. Even in this respect, national and regional differences continue to contribute to the construction of a dialogue of liberation that draws its strength from discrete groups within Protestant evangelical churches and the historical presence of African cultures and indigenous movements, for example. The attention that liberation discourse has centered principally on addressing material deprivation and on the most marginalized of society, however, runs the danger of depersonalizing the exploited subjects by idealizing and romanticizing the circumstances of their impoverished existence (Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation, 22–23; Segundo, “Crítica y autocríticas,” 234), articulating a “messianism of the

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poor” (Puleo, 199), and ignoring non-traditional forms of poverty (Tamayo, Presente y futuro, 94). In order to avoid being reductive, a hermeneutics of poverty must, by necessity, be inclusive and consider the numerous possibilities of the concept and its destabilizing influence on multiple sectors of society. Due in large part to the impetus of “Mater et Magistra” and “Populorum Progressio,” a more progressive sector of Latin American theologians took the reins of the Second Vatican Council and undertook a systematic analysis of the mission of the Catholic Church that acknowledged and incorporated the daily realities of millions of impoverished citizens across the continent. In July of 1967, Gustavo Gutiérrez offered a series of conferences at the University of Montreal in which he reflected on a more contemporary and inclusive perspective on modern theology. At a national meeting of clergy in Chimbote, Perú, in 1968, Gutiérrez presented a paper with the title “Toward a Theology of Liberation” that systematized and moved toward such a theology and ultimately resulted in his well-known work, ATheology of Liberation. In his book-length essay, Gutiérrez offered the characteristics of “a new way of doing theology,” taking as his starting point a profound concern for the daily reality lived by the poor in Latin America and a reformulation of the term “poverty.” For liberation theologians, the next ten years would prove especially productive as individuals such as Juan Luis Segundo (From Society to Theology, 1970), Hugo Assmann (Theology from the Praxis of Liberation, 1973), and Leonardo Boff (Theology of Captivity and of Liberation, 1978) would publish seminal works in the field. What emerged was what many considered to be the first authentic philosophy born in the Americas, as the rather revolutionary message of liberation theology intended to infuse the daily reality of Latin America with a renewed evangelical message fashioned in order to connect with the poverty and marginalization suffered by millions across the continent. Liberation theology was born from the philosophical and theological repositioning that the Roman Catholic hierarchy underwent as a consequence of these events. In turn, the Second Vatican Council was witness to the individual, national, and transnational questioning that had such an impact on Latin America. As Phillip Berryman has noted, “With Vatican II the Catholic Church, as it were, turned itself inside out. Prior to the council Catholics were taught that their main business in life was to remain in the ‘state of grace’ and get to heaven. Far more important than any of [the council’s] decisions was the fact that the council led Latin American Catholics to take a much more critical look at their own church and their own society” (16–17). From the movements in the United States that advocated gender and racial equality to global demonstrations against the Vietnam War and the university protests across the world, a rebellion erupted against the dominant elites and orthodox perspectives and ideologies. In this respect, the Second Vatican

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Council echoed the instability of society at large and pitted a “progressive” part of the Catholic Church against socially static Church doctrines and the hierarchy that defended them. As a reply to the criticisms and in order to apply the conclusions of the Second Vatican Council to Latin American theological praxis, approximately 130 bishops met in Medellín, Colombia, in May of 1968. Among them was Gutiérrez, who declared that theological deliberation should be “a criticism of society and the Church insofar as they are called and addressed by the Word of God; it would be a critical theory, worked out in light of the Word accepted in faith and inspired by a practical purpose—and therefore indissolubly linked to the historical praxis” (A Theology, 11). For many in developing nations, the hierarchical and institutional Catholic Church represented both a throwback to colonial systems of repression and control and the systematic implementation of decontextualized traditions that frequently presented a racializing dilemma. As Fanon wrote in 1961, “The Church in the colonies is a white man’s Church, a foreigner’s Church. It does not call the colonized to the ways of God, but to the ways of the white man, to the ways of the master, the ways of the oppressor” (7). For Fanon, there was no contradiction between the spiritual message of the Church and the social, political, and economic legacy left by colonialism, since one was part and parcel of the other and the hierarchical structures of each dovetailed from the end of the fifteenth century until well into the twentieth century. In time, others have come to criticize the role that the Church had played in repressing independent thought and to call attention to the need to transform itself. Upon a visit to Nicaragua in 1986 and observing the relationship between the residents and the Church, Bishop Pedro Casaldáliga wrote in his travel journal that in that country “It is also true that many times the ecclesiastical authorities, the clergy in general, live a bit distant from the pain of the people, from the historical processes, from the strong moment [lived by] the respective nation” (76). Writing in 1993, José Comblin pronounced that “There is relative unanimity that we [the Institutional Church] do not know how to communicate with the poor, that is, with the new poor of the urban masses” (43). In Latin America, “The aforegone conclusion is that the social doctrine of the Church, far from being a stimulus for action, is an instrument made for impeding action, at least concrete historical action” (Comblin, 52). The differences between Fanon, Casaldáliga, and Comblin reflect the context and priorities of each: From Africa, Fanon addressed issues of national and continental identity at a time when Marxism was the dominant ideological template for liberation struggles and from a racial perspective that made the work of the Church concomitant with oppression and colonialism; Casaldáliga recognized the distance between the Church hierarchy and a profound connection with the people in concrete historical circumstances, implicitly affirming that the Church had chosen to sidestep a commitment to

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very real material issues, difficulties, and crises; and Comblin declared that the Church impedes any authentic action and recognized a more contemporary phenomenon, that of urban migration and the related urban poverty evident in many Latin American metropolitan areas. Notwithstanding their distinct positions, the three statements reflect over three decades the growth and transformation of criticism of a Church that, in its intransigence and social indifference, frequently became an obstacle to the social, political, and economic progress of a people and advocated instead the abstract spirituality of individuals rather than recognizing the significance of their respective social, political, or economic context and living conditions. Although a progressive Catholicism spread around the globe with equal speed and intensity in locations such as South Korea, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Ireland, for example, Latin American reality proved favorable for the dissemination of this authentically Latin American theology and for the articulation of the primary message of Medellín, “the preferential option for the poor”: that the Church should make an explicit commitment to the betterment of the material life of the poor and oppressed that called for an alignment of the Church’s interests and priorities with those of the most marginalized across the globe. According to Antonio Celso Queiroz, “The preferential option for the poor, as the most conscious and pastorally lucid spheres of our churches have attempted to put into practice, is an evangelical position of solidarity, of commitment and of struggle” (321). Through the preferential option for the poor, the connection between theological reflection and pastoral action finds its common ground not only in identifying a context but in experiencing it first-hand. As Raúl Fornet-Betancourt has written regarding the authority latent in the hermeneutical praxis of liberation philosophy, “It is not exaggerated to say that the Latin American philosophy of liberation marks the innovative turn through which philosophical reflection in Latin America, systematically and explicitly, connects with the social reality of the subcontinent, beginning in this way its own discourse, marked by cultural and contextual differences” (Hacia una filosofía, 15). In Latin American nations such as Nicaragua, the coexistence of the richest and the poorest in society and the practical nonexistence of a middle class underscore great contrasts that have existed and, in many cases, continue to exist. Although these reflecting “realities” may also be found in other nations where the Catholic Church has exercised an important influence, the extremes have been mitigated by the presence of a middle class. In nations such as El Salvador, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua, the life of those who travel to the United States, Europe, or Asia once a month to go on shopping trips coexists alongside—and frequently thanks in part to—the misery of their homeland. Recent technological advances and developments in global communications have also served to update the material desires of the population, yet “73% of Latin American’s total R&D expenditure was con-

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centrated on Brazil (42%), Argentina (20%) and Mexico (11%)” (Shixue, 4). In the past, poverty, inequality, and injustice allowed liberation theology to reach a wider audience in those nations whose people continued to be oppressed, whose life circumstances were, until then, justified by the hierarchy of a Church immobilized in a distant long-ago. It is no coincidence that current criticism of Eurocentric thinking and of the inequalities sustained by the global economy may be directly linked to the development of liberation theology and is taking us back to its principal tenets. In this sense, liberation theology initiated a relationship with indigenous and Afro-descendant subjects: Movements born in the 1970s are a direct result of efforts by priests and bishops to apply the social teachings of Jesus and more contemporary works such as the principles found in Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and inspire marginalized populations to take the reins of their own emancipation. The black theology of liberation enunciated by James Cone, for example, allows us to trace the impact of decolonial thought and serves to illustrate the impact of more contemporary factors in the elaboration and transformation of an alternative theology, one that adequately addresses the needs of a historically marginalized population. From his publication of A Black Theology of Liberation (1986) to his contact with Freire in the early 1970s and more contemporary shifts in his thinking, Cone acknowledges the historical factors during this time that came to influence his approach to a black theology of liberation. In a 2011 interview, Cone declares that “A black theology of liberation is an interpretation of the Christian Gospel that emerged out of the history of black religion and of the black church in general” (“Chapter Eight,” 198), addressing how the fall of the Soviet Union and the Berlin wall in 1989 as well as the increasing presence of African Americans in prisons (201–3) have impacted his own notion of what a black theology of liberation should be. The influence of historical factors is also evident in the elaboration and adaptation of liberation thinking to current events, as previous versions of a monolithic liberation theology have fragmented in order to address more discrete racial, ethnic, feminist, and environmental concerns and issues of sexual identity and economic instability. Arguments that liberation theology is no longer relevant overlook its presence in any number of social movements. In Latin America, liberation philosophy has grown from being a ecumenically centered theology to a series of platforms that advocate for and incorporate such diverse issues as the preservation of the Amazonian ecosystem, intercultural education in Ecuador, women’s rights in rural Nicaragua, Islam and post-secularism in the Americas, Andean sustainability, solidarity with the LGBT community in Mexico, and evangelical churches in Central America. In the past, the fact that liberation theology received its initial impulse from papal encyclicals and from the Second Vatican Council as inspired by

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the historical figure of Jesus and by a number of the books of the Bible (such as the Book of Exodus) did not mean that it was disconnected from current circumstances nor consented by the Catholic Church hierarchy. For the traditional Church, liberation theology represented a threat to the typical way of “doing” theology. Meeting in Puebla, Mexico, in 1979, the Latin American bishops responded aggressively to the Medellín conference of 1968 by returning to more traditional theological positions and stating in their concluding document that a historical liberation is in the service of an “eternal” atemporal liberation and that an earthly liberation must not take precedence over a spiritual liberation that is greater than the sum of its historical circumstances: “In a word, our people wish for an integral liberation that does not exhaust itself within the framework of its temporal existence, but rather that it projects itself toward the whole communion with God and his brothers in eternity, a communion that has already begun to be achieved, however imperfectly, in history” (Doig, 438). While for many years the Church hierarchy was publicly silent in the face of the growing popularity of liberation theology, in 1984 the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, headed by Cardinal Josef Ratzinger—who would in 2005 become Pope Benedict XVI—published the Instruction on Certain Aspects of “Liberation Theology” in order to defend the Church from the threat posed by this attempt at renewing Church theology. In the Instruction, the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith condemns liberation theology for being too terrestrial in its desire to change the material living conditions of the poor, since “God, and not man, has the power to change the situations of suffering” (10). The publication of this pamphlet meant that liberation theology was acknowledged as a threat to traditional Catholic praxis and that it had gathered significant strength within the Church. Implicitly, it was evident that the most effective way to silence the voices of liberation theology was to co-opt their message and subsume its principal ideas within the general social mission of the Church. The basic point of departure for liberation theologians was the construction of a theology that has as its hermeneutical praxis the daily reality lived by those marginalized and living within asymmetrical social, economic, and/ or political structures. Its most urgent concern was to make known to the poor the fact that God searches for a way to improve their living conditions and that God is present in their daily lives, not just in the physical structure of the Church or in the iconography of the saints. The initial intention of liberation philosophers and theologians was to begin with substantive action and reformulate theory in light of this praxis in order to not lose themselves in theoretical abstractions that did not ground their discussions. The process passed from an emphasis on theory to a desire to construct an orthopraxis and, consequently, theopraxis: a theology in practice that would facilitate dialogue through both individual behavior and communal action. Emerging

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from these considerations, the Christian Base Communities became the site of the communion between theology and daily life. These communities, according to John Berryman, “may be defined as small lay-led communities, motivated by Christian faith, that see themselves as part of the church and that are committed to working together to improve their communities and to establish a more just society” (64). The base communities, however, underwent their own series of crises as they were forced to question both the content and the structure of their gatherings in the context of post-revolutionary societies that witnessed the progressive disappearance of armed struggles (Comblin, 37–38) and the relatively sudden demographic transformation of urban and rural populations. 8 Although liberation theology has been criticized for having remained theoretically static over the course of the years and not developing in accordance with the times (Berryman, 202; Puleo, 213), it can also be acknowledged that, through the work of progressive clergy and laypeople, it was able to manifest itself in multiple facets of daily life in communities across Mexico, Central America, and parts of South America and contributed to the construction of an awareness that today connects with a global identity and continues to question the colonial legacy and its presence in neo-imperial projects. Liberation philosophy, the recurrent and non-ecclesiastical twin of liberation theology, has been shaped according to a community’s needs and gave birth to a black theology (James Cone), a feminist (Ivone Gebara) and a womanist theology of liberation (Ana María Isasi-Díaz), an ecotheology of liberation (Leonardo Boff), and a Protestant theology of liberation (Rubem Alves). Throughout the years, the theology of liberation has managed to maintain its currency by reflecting on the impact of cultural and economic globalization on the most marginalized, by considering the impact of contemporary phenomena such as urban migration and transnational immigration, and by legitimizing the construction of a utopia in today’s world. CONTEXT AND LIBERATION THEOLOGY The fact that any discourse is expressed from and in direct connection to its cultural context is of utmost importance when approaching the past and present hermeneutical history of liberation theology. According to liberation theology, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church has not been committed to resolving social, political, and economic inequalities, especially for those who reside in developing countries with emerging economies. As José Comblin wrote, many liberation theologians were of the opinion that it was a grave mistake on the part of Rome to universalize concepts and contexts originating in European discourse: “The Holy See seems to ignore or to want to ignore the specific and proper paths of Latin America and looks to Latin

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America for the manifestations of the problems that worry it. The Roman Church gives the impression of thinking that its problems and concerns are the problems and concerns of the universal Church, of all the Churches” (30). In its desire to export the Faith, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church has been the victim of its own self-absorption and is perceived as complicit with a number of European and North American governments in imposing a set of ethics that have contributed to the growth of asymmetrical living conditions in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. At its inception, liberation theology looked to contextualize the Catholic Church: to reflect, to consider, to incorporate historical reality into its hermeneutics, and, in this way, to modernize it so that the realities of the daily life of the oppressed would not be in conflict with the practices of spiritual communion promoted by the Church. Although it emerged from a set of Latin American circumstances, the ideals of liberation theology emphasize the fact that other societies and nations exist whose situation may be best understood through the theoretical lens of liberation philosophy and its most salient features: the treatment of the poor and of poverty, the relationship between oppressor and oppressed, the significance of the phrase “Kingdom of God,” the development and role of the “new priest” in building a better society, and the participation of the Church in social, political, and economic matters on behalf of the most marginalized, among other topics. In light of the conditions existing in a number of developing countries, “The theologians of the Third World have had no choice. Because of the poverty of their situation, they have been providentially forced to remain in close contact and solidarity with the questions and struggles of their people” (Elizondo, 21). From a perspective that applies a liberation philosophy, the importance granted to context, be it historical, political, or economic, is difficult to overstate. For many liberation theologians, such an emphasis originates in discussions and discourse surrounding the historical figure of Jesus Christ. Leonardo Boff argues, for example, that “The timeless and valid meaning revealed by the Gospels must be regained after beginning with the historical (and not only theological) context of the death of Christ. Only in this way will it stop being ahistorical and, in the end, empty and will gain truly valid aspects for our faith today” (Teología, 227). Paul Lakeland also underscores that “The whole process by which Jesus comes to be proclaimed as Lord and God has its indispensable starting point in the concrete history of Jesus of Nazareth” (27). According to the Gospels, Jesus Christ consistently declared that eternity was for those “poor of spirit.” Taken as historical documents, these texts regularly indicate that he endeavored to improve the material conditions of those “poor in spirit” and to connect this betterment to a spiritual existence that transcended the physical form. In this respect, the historical authority and legacy of Jesus Christ are framed by his actions and by the conditions of life during his time. It is from documents such as the Gospels

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and the Book of Exodus that liberation theology excavated the notion that the Kingdom of God was to be created here on earth, from our very concrete sets of life circumstances. Liberation theology confirmed the inextricable connection between the thinking and the doing, between theory and praxis, and affirmed, as Juan Luis Segundo declared, that “the most serious assault on Latin American theology will always consist of any attempt to separate the life of the theologian from that of his own country” (De la sociedad, 17). The theologian and the thinker, not unlike the historical figure of Jesus, are to address all forms of oppression and to work toward their eradication so that a broader and more inclusive sense of social justice may prevail throughout the institutional structures of all nations, developing and otherwise. In this respect, economic categories of analysis are significant theoretical tools due to the focus on material well-being and to the evident hermeneutical commonalities between materialist dialectics and socialist ideologies. Currently, this theme has been particularly evident in the criticism by liberation theologians and philosophers of the extreme form of global capitalism that arose after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and may be seen in the strategies behind current trends in transnational capitalization. As Enrique Dussel has written, “The ethical factibility for the reproduction and development of the life of the members of impoverished and peripheral countries and devastated cultures consists of halting such processes of globalization whose only criteria is the ‘efficient competition’ in the marketplace” (“Globalization,” 102). In the opinion of Dussel, the improvement of the conditions of life in developing nations hinges on the reduction or disappearance of “processes of globalization” that dehumanize the individual and reduce human development to a series of economic choices. Paradoxically, the increasing emphasis on the individual and the subsequent ethical alienation of this individual from the community that is evident in a number of “peripheral nations” is a result of an amplified political culture homogeneized by the illusion of a representative democracy and by the demands of a marketplace unconcerned and unaffected by issues of integrity and equality. And while the phenomenon of social media has served to reconnect individuals, it has also served as a very real reminder of the material differences between these individuals and the technological challenges facing any nation if it is to be truly inclusive of the population. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, liberation philosophers and theologians faced growing criticism for their inability to progress beyond a materialist dialectic that was imbued with an anachronistic Marxist ideology and for not distinguishing sufficiently between Marxism and Socialism, often giving the impression that “Socialism” is the heading under which “Marxism,” “Communism,” and any other similar-minded ideology may fall. This absence of a clear ideological articulation pales in comparison with some of the more recent criticisms of liberation philosophy. Examining the arguments

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against the centralizing and self-centered tendency of historical Modernism, José Luis Gómez-Martínez asserts that neither liberation philosophy nor postmodern discourse “Assumes the anthropic, dynamic reality of human becoming” (167). Juan Luis Segundo declares that the stated and repeated emphasis on the poor and marginalized led liberation theology to ignore the middle class and to idealize poverty (“Críticas y autocríticas,” 231, 234). And José Comblin notes how the discourse of liberation changed from being a reflection on praxis and historical context to a prophetic albeit dehistoricized theology that ultimately pushed the popular classes away instead of mobilizing them. Ultimately, this led to the ultimate fragmentation of liberation theology into discrete communities whose needs were not met by the broader theoretical framework of liberation philosophy (Comblin, 38–41). Apart from the expected criticism that it received from the institutional Church and its respective hierarchy regarding the application of Marxism when considering the reality lived by the poor and oppressed, thinkers such as Segundo and Comblin emerged from within the ranks of liberation philosophy and took it to task for what they perceived to be a tendency to anachronistically view the world through a class-based lens that polarized any attempt at a unifying dialogue and that took little notice of socioeconomic differences and developments within individual nations. The repeated critique of liberation philosophy originally emerged due to the relationship that many theologians perceived between Marxist theory and the principles of liberation theology, yet the same individuals would continue to utilize Marxism as a functional lens through which daily reality on the American continent could best be perceived and examined. Conversely, the influence of Marxism in Latin America cannot be understood without understanding the social, political, and economic circumstances that shaped lives throughout the continent. As Gustavo Gutiérrez wrote in A Theology of Liberation, “On this continent, the oppressed and those who seek to identify with them face ever more resolutely a common adversary, and therefore, the relationship between Marxists and Christians takes on characteristics different from those in other places” (60). At this historical junction, Marxism represented an instrument that served to better understand the economic realities in developing countries. José Porfirio Miranda, Leonardo Boff (Ecology, 120), Clodovis Boff (104), and Ignacio Ellacuría (“El auténtico lugar social,” 102), for example, defended the necessity of delving into Marxist theory so that context is not lost among reflections regarding net worth and gross domestic product and sought to explicitly connect the biblical message of social justice with the thinking of Karl Marx. According to Michael Zweig, Three aspects of Marxist economics commend it to the attention of liberation theology. It locates the individual in a social network of substantial human

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relationships and seeks to penetrate the complexities of these relations in order to understand the mutual determination of the individual person and society as a whole. Further, it is dynamic, providing the basis for understanding social change, which characterizes capitalist society. And, related to the dynamic character of the analysis, Marxism is historical in its approach, tracing the intimate connections between economic processes and historical development. (33)

For a number of liberation theologians and philosophers, Marxism contextualizes and considers historical and economic forces that conditioned the industrial processes undergone by a society, a significant fact for the identity of a people that look to identify themselves within a larger global community. In the interim, the most significant criticism made of liberation theology is that it is simply Marxism made to fit Catholicism. In 1986, the Sacred Congregation for the Defense of the Faith took issue with the inclusion of Marxist tenets in liberation theology and declared: “Let us recall the fact that atheism and the denial of the human person, his liberty and his rights, are at the core of the Marxist theory” (19). Ultimately, the Church coopted many of the basic tenets of liberation theology by accepting the intrinsic value of its underlying principles and disallowing the relevance of Marxist methodology to contemporary life. Even Gerhard Müller, prefect of the Sacred Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith from 2012 to 2017, declared in an interview that “The negative aspects of liberation theology referred to by Benedict XVI are the result of the misunderstanding and wrong application of this theology” (Redzioch). In the beginning of the 1990s, a number of liberation theologians took a bleak view, declaring that there was no epistemic alternative to capitalism and that the social inequalities that existed would continue to be accepted as part of a depersonalized economic system. As the Spanish theologian Juan José Tamayo observed, “With the fall of communism and the end of the EastWest contradiction, capitalism presents itself as the absolute victor; it no longer has a rival and appears as the only alternative for the whole of humanity. There is only one master, only one owner, only one empire, only one power: capitalism, but without a human face” (Presente y futuro, 78). In order to recover the human dimension, liberation theology had initiated a dialogue with Socialist-inspired ideologies and applied a methodology that took as its starting point the analysis of material inequalities in societies. Without being excessively reductionist nor viewing all battles from a class perspective, liberation philosophy insisted on constructing societies that would be grounded on other options besides capitalism and economic Darwinism. In his work Education for Justice, Brian Wren writes a type of education primer and underlines the necessary juxtaposition of entertaining both competing ideologies:

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Chapter 1 Because [conservative ideology] depends on competitiveness, it sets people against each other and so can do no more than verbal homage to mutual respect and a fundamental equality of worth. It respects the individual freedom of those who “succeed” only by neglecting the freedom of those who “fail.” . . . A socialist ideology therefore tries—by different methods and with varying degrees of success—to limit private ownership and to use goods, services, land and capital for the equal benefit of all. It takes redistribution and positive discrimination much further, and more seriously, than the liberal view. It has its historical roots in a passion for justice, a moral partisanship for the poor and the oppressed. (105, 112)

The historical development of the socialist ideological tradition appeared with the intention of distributing more equitably the minimum goods and services for every individual. Recent history in Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia, however, demonstrates that the majority of Socialist political structures frequently ignore the myriad of individual motivations and often force citizens to become rather insignificant cogs in a very large and dehumanized national infrastructure. In Nicaragua, the victory of the Sandinista Revolution in 1979 represented a unique opportunity to incorporate the more progressive social ideas espoused by liberation thinkers and theologians to the Socialist program advocated by leaders such as Daniel Ortega and Sergio Ramírez. Clergy such as Miguel D’Escoto, Ernesto Cardenal and his brother Fernando, among others, played prominent roles in the Sandinista government and participated in enacting laws and policies that combined a liberation perspective with the goals of the National Directorate. Begun in 1979 and led by Fernando Cardenal, the Cruzada Nacional de Alfabetización—the national literacy campaign—was one of the more ambitious and successful accomplishments of the Sandinista years (1979–1990). When the Sandinistas came into power in 1979, it was estimated that more than half the population over ten years old was illiterate. In 1980, Cardenal organized nearly one hundred thousand volunteers to travel throughout the Nicaraguan countryside and offer reading and writing lessons to those who had no access to any organized schooling or instruction, ultimately reducing the official literacy rate to approximately 13 percent (Sandiford et al., 36). By engaging them directly, the volunteers shared in the material difficulties of the families and encountered living conditions that many had suspected but never experienced first-hand. During the 1980s, Ernesto Cardenal would also be instrumental as minister of culture in the education of the Nicaraguan people through his poetry workshops and his efforts to demythify poetry and make it accessible to all. While priests such as Ernesto and Fernando Cardenal actively participated in the post-war reconstruction of Nicaragua and enjoyed a relatively productive and respectful relationship with members of the Sandinista directorate, the Church hierarchy objected to their accepting political charges and to

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their very public participation in the national government. The growing tension between the Catholic Church hierarchy in Nicaragua and those priests who were imbued in liberation philosophy and were part of the growing “popular church” came to a head when Pope John Paul II visited the country in 1983 and, upon his descent to the tarmac at the Managua airport, publicly admonished Ernesto Cardenal for his participation in political affairs. With the victory in 1990 of Violeta Chamorro and the UNO coalition of conservative political parties, however, the relationship between the hierarchy of the Nicaraguan Church and the elected government would become mutually beneficial as many members of UNO expressed their support of traditional Church tenets and of those priests who obeyed ecclesiastic authority. With the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s and the “capitalization” of the Soviet bloc nations and of other countries such as China, Brazil, and India, the Socialist methodology applied by liberation theology came up for debate and was pronounced woefully inadequate in identifying and correcting the ills of society. For some, the apparent demise of Communism and, subsequently, of Marxism represented more than a mere ideological failure of the left: “It was lucidly perceived that the fall of the East implied the loss of a practical and alternative political point of reference to the capitalist system” (Gómez-Caffarena, 330). In many respects, however, the apparent death of Communism left a practical and ideological vacuum that traditional capitalism has been unable to address or fill. Currently, the Latin American brand of Marxism that influenced the construction of nationalist philosophies and liberation discourse in the twentieth century has developed into a postpolitical twenty-first century Socialism that intends to construct a viable alternative to neoliberal and globalizing approaches to transnational politics. In looking to connect dialectical materialism to contemporary circumstances, the transformation of Socialist thought is heavily dependent on a change in methodology more than on its application. As Sirio López Velasco has pointed out in his work El socialismo del siglo XXI en perspectiva ecomunitarista a la luz del “socialismo real” del siglo XX (XXIst-Century Socialism from an Ecocommunitarian Perspective in Light of “Real Socialism” of the XXth Century), twenty-first-century Socialism in Latin America has transcended twentieth-century Marxism in a number of ways that include the construction of an ecological discourse that is directly tied to the betterment of the people, a reevaluation of national political legitimacy, the relevance of direct participatory democracy, a respect for religious freedom within Socialist ideals, and a balance between a strong military/economic state and the voice of the people. To repeat what many have said before him, López Velasco stresses the importance of context and declares that “It is clear today, especially in the case of Latin America, that the Socialism of the twenty-first century will not be based solely on Western sources, but rather should dialogically incorporate the original positive contributions from other

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sources (particularly the indigenous, black and oriental)” (22). Although López Velasco defends the “socialization of the means of production” inherent to the distinct Socialist ideologies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (14), in his notions surrounding an incipient “ecocommunitarianism” he advocates that collective ownership of goods and property be entrusted and passed along to the people in order to effectively combine distinct forms of public property: “From an ecocommunitarian perspective, what I defend is that indirect social property under the charge of the State should quickly and continuously be transformed into direct social property” (15). Such an approach represents the adaptation of the traditional Socialist conceptualizations of property ownership distribution to more contemporary ideas that combine forms of public and private property and that rely on a transparent shared governance marked by the multiple possibilities inherent to political participation. 9 In this respect, this process reflects those undergone by nations such as China that have adopted capitalist methodologies without being consumed by them. CURRENT TRENDS IN LIBERATION THEOLOGY Given the social and political transformations that have occurred throughout many developing nations after 1990s and as the emergence of counter-neoliberal movements of liberation such as the 1999 Zapatista rebellion in Mexico, the 2005 election of Evo Morales as president of Bolivia, and the papacy of Francis I, for example, the relevance of liberation philosophy to these historical watersheds and its impact on contemporary religious and political thinking continues to be debated. While the middle class is growing in a number of Latin American nations and research indicates that citizens throughout the continent are enjoying nominal material growth, 10 the reality that gave birth to liberation theology remains relatively unchanged: the 2008 global recession, for example, highlights the fact that a disproportionate number of people live at or below the level of basic material subsistence and languish in a dehumanizing poverty. In light of these sobering realities, Juan José Tamayo declared that “The universal strength of LT [liberation theology] emanates not so much from the formal validity of its doctrinary formulations but rather from its organic connection to the historical project of the poor, in the assumption, as our own, of the universal causes of life, of justice, of liberty, of equality, and in the defense of human rights for those who are oppressed” (Presente y futuro, 37). Considering the crisis in the 1960s of a Catholic Church whose hierarchy had become distanced from both its local religious communities and the faithful, liberation theology came forward as a particularly Latin American occurrence that to this day remains an emancipa-

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tory alternative that can contribute to the epistemology of both developed and developing countries. As Enrique Dussel wrote in 1972, The “theology of liberation”—derives from the “theology of revolution” its point of departure, from “political theology” its conditioning, from the “theology of hope” its future, and from the “theology of questioning” an outlook— attempts simply to arrange scientifically in a thematic fachion the concrete structure that is fulfilled in the prophet-people dialectic in its totality. Or, putting it another way, it is all the traditional theology committed to a paschal movement from the perspective of the oppressed. (A History of the Church in Latin America, 244)

While it may be more difficult to perceive, liberation theology has also had an important impact on developed nations due to the continued prevalence across the globe of the basic preconditions of poverty and injustice and of a violent social and economic inequality that threatens to continuously polarize society and effectively eliminate any gains made by the middle classes. Writes Tamayo: “For the first time in history, a theological creation of the Third World has acquired relevancy and meaning in Europe and the First World. Indeed, it has produced an unexpected impact here, and stirred the most widely varied reactions” (“Reception,” 33). As Hugo Assmann noted, what liberation theologians were interested in was not a change in theories of dominance and subjugation but a transformation of the reality lived by millions (85). For liberation theologians, therefore, the imposition of a capitalist discourse that masquerades as neoliberal “free market policies” initiates the ultimate “denial of the human person” and shifts the epistemic debate to the inordinate importance granted to private property. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the emphasis on industrial growth inspired the creation of worker’s movements across Europe and motivated the encyclical “Rerum Novarum” (1891) by Pope Leo XIII. In the document, Leo XIII took up a defense of the concept of private property and declared that “private possessions are clearly in accord with nature” (18), proclaiming that “Private property ought to be safeguarded by the sovereign power of the state and through the bulwark of its laws” (32). In light of growing social unrest and injustice in the 1920s that saw the rise of Fascist parties in Europe and originated in the unfettered pursuit and accumulation of material wealth, however, the Church began to modify its original position with respect to private property. In 1967, Pope Paul VI was one of the first pontiffs to explicitly dignify the topic of social justice and to address the very specific construction of a more just world, especially for the oppressed. In the watershed encyclical “Populorum Progressio” he addressed the economic inequalities that existed throughout the world, placing the blame squarely on economic and political structures and defending the need to include the world’s marginalized com-

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munities within the framework of a more just distribution of income: “Unless the existing machinery is modified, the disparity between rich and poor nations will increase rather than diminish; the rich nations are progressing with rapid strides while the poor nations move forward at a slow pace” (sec. 8). Such a sentiment is echoed later in the document, when he advocates the construction of a more just society by distinguishing the “less than human conditions” from “truly human conditions” that include “the rise from poverty to the acquisition of life’s necessities” and “the elimination of social ills” (sec. 21). Regarding private property—so strongly defended by Leo XIII— Paul VI proclaimed that “No one may appropriate surplus goods solely for his own private use when others lack the bare necessities of life” (sec. 23). The prominence of social justice throughout this document, however, is also taken to an extreme position that perilously idealizes poverty by recommending that we “acquire a taste for the spirit of poverty” and is sidestepped by the rather anthropocentric biblical mandate that Man should “Fill the earth and subdue it.” Some ninety years after Leo XIII and not fifteen years after Paul VI, Pope John Paul II recognized the workers as the subjects of history (Comblin, 51) in his encyclical “Laborem Execrens” (1981) and asserted that “The right to private property is subordinated to the right to common use, to the fact that goods are meant for everyone” (312). The encyclical went on to condemn the actions of a severe capitalism: “The position of ‘rigid’ capitalism continues to remain unacceptable, namely the position that defends the exclusive right to private ownership of the means of production as an untouchable ‘dogma’ of economic life” (313). Two more encyclicals, “Libertatis Nuntius” (1984) and “Libertatis Conscientia” (1986) by John Paul II would essentially adopt many of the ideals espoused by liberation theology, including the preferential option for the poor and a broader acceptance and exploration of the term “liberation” (Comblin, 51). More recently, in 2013 Pope Francis I published the Apostolic Exhortation “Evangelii Gaudium” and drew attention to the continuing plight of the poor and the need to repudiate “the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation” and offered a direct criticism of Adam Smith’s concept of the “invisible hand of the market” (Apostolic, para. 204). While these more recent efforts of the Catholic Church have certainly been welcome, from the beginning liberation theologians condemned the excesses of capitalism and of its offspring, neoliberal economic policies and globalization, maintaining that the appeal to and consumption of private property by the developed countries continued to play a role in the poverty that remained all too prevalent in Latin America. In his canonical work A Theology of Liberation, Gustavo Gutiérrez maintains that “the dynamics of the capitalist economy lead to the establishment of a center and a periphery, simultaneously generating progress and growing wealth for the few and so-

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cial imbalances, political tensions, and poverty for the many” (51). Writing in 1993, the Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff maintained that “We urgently need glasnost and perestroika in capitalism. What quality of life does Capitalism actually produce? What type of democracy is it planning? One cut off from the people by political institutions, by the vote, and by bills of rights that do not extend into the economic sphere, protected from free choice and market forces? In effect, liberal democracy stops at the factory gate” (Ecology and Liberation, 106). The difference between the positions expressed by Gutiérrez and Boff represents the growing maturity of liberation theology and the continued importance of historical context: while Gutiérrez, in 1971, condemned capitalism without offering an alternative, Boff affirmed in 1993 that capitalism had to incorporate the perestroika and glasnost of Mikhail Gorbachev, who developed both concepts in an attempt to describe the new path for the Soviet Union and to modernize the fragmenting national economy and society. In the last twenty years, liberation theology has undergone a rather important modification through a reconstruction of its theoretical boundaries and a critical reformulation of its principal tenets with a view toward the contemporary challenges of global plurality and a Catholic Church that continues to lose numbers of faithful. In 1984, Virgilio Elizondo already perceived and critiziced the homogenizing tendency of the most recent liberation philosophy of the time and recommended that it reorient its perspective toward its original public, “truly exercising their ministry of theologising with and for their own local church” (20). In 1993, Pedro Trigo reminded us that liberation theology had lost is justification if it could not be witness to its original inspiration, the historical strength of the poor, or if it believed that this no longer exists (299). More recently, Iván Petrella acknowledges the impact of neoliberal policies on the construction of a postcolonial discourse and, ultimately, of a renewed liberation philosophy. His three “responses to the increasing dominance of neoliberal market capitalism” consist of “reasserting the core ideas,” “reformulating or revising basic categories,” and “critiquing idolatry” (202) and call for embracing a more dynamic role for liberation theology. Petrella touches on them in more detail (202–10), yet these three “positions” can be said to represent a temporal defense of the basic tenets of liberation theology. In order to “reassert the core ideas,” it will be necessary to return to the epistemological origins of liberation theology and recover its organic roots. The challenges of the present epoch, the gradual growth or reduction of the middle class, and the social, political, and economic transformations that Latin America has undergone in the last forty years serve to emphasize the need for liberation theology to evolve along with the times. And the future relevance of liberation philosophy is directly related to the progressive growth of globalization in developing economies and the adverse consequences that the population may suffer due to social policies that in-

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creasingly isolate the poorest from the richest. The solution, Petrella proposes, is that liberation theology must once again construct a historical strategy: “Without a historical project, liberation either loses its connection to the real world or too quickly identifies itself with a political program” (215). The future relevance of liberation theology will be determined by its strategic adhesion to what the Church has frequently termed “worldly concerns.” In this respect, a dialogue between postcolonial theorists and those who advocate the decolonial project in Latin America appears to be required more than ever. In the case of Nicaragua, writers such as Rosario Aguilar, Gioconda Belli, Omar Cabezas, Ernesto Cardenal, Fernando Cardenal, and Sergio Ramírez, among many others, have utilized prose and poetry to elaborate an emancipatory discourse that repudiates the neosandinismo of Daniel Ortega, that looks back on the national past and projects it into the future in an attempt to both recapture and renew the national narrative. The evidence of a liberation philosophy in Nicaragua predates the Sandinista uprising of 1977 and includes poems by Ernesto Cardenal (Salmos, 1964) and by Michèle Najlis— especially El viento armado (1969)—but it was during that revolution and the decade of the 1980s that the hermeneutical praxis of liberational thinking began to be systematically applied to national reality. Although tensions would emerge from the confluence of historical trends—as bishop Pedro Casaldáliga noted in his travel journal, Nicaragua. Combate y profecía— Nicaraguan society and culture in effect experienced a reawakening that would lead it to unearth its pre-Columbian past and narrate it within the contemporary framework of liberation philosophy. In light of recent Nicaraguan history and contemporary global developments, a rereading of liberation theology today goes beyond a mere criticism of globalization and of the imposing capitalist economy of scale to offer modifications to the global structure of social justice in order to be “a theology of the periphery” (Dussel, Ethics and Liberation Theology, 166). Only in this way can liberation philosophy assume and survive the crisis that appeared on the heels of the apparent demise of Marxism and continue to be current in a world that begins to reassess Socialism and consider other options besides those offered by rather totalitarian strategies of dependence, neoliberal policies, and the offhand transference of Western pluralist democracy to other parts of the globe. THE INTERCULTURAL TURN AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF POST-PESSIMISM By the beginning of the twenty-first century, it was clear that a Marxist paradigm was neither practical nor relevant. In light of the recent excesses of capitalism, however, many throughout the globe sought to modify the exist-

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ing theoretical structures of traditional Socialist thinking in order to initiate infrastructural transformation at the local level and address the challenges posed by the continued social, political, and economic disparities. Due principally to the continued ideological differences in Latin America between, on the one hand, nations such as Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico whose presidential administrations have welcomed and implemented neoliberal economic strategies and, on the other, the collection of Socialistinspired ALBA nations (Alianza Bolivariana para América: Bolivarian Alliance for America) that include Bolivia, Cuba, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, researchers of American distinctiveness and identity have identified an authentic and culture-centered dialogue that looks to be emerging from the margins, inclusive of particular differences and aware of the transitional nature of any identity. As Mario Teodoro Ramírez asserts, in this respect liberation may continue to be relevant: “Only if posed solely as a process of cultural self-affirmation and self-valuation can the act of liberation become authentic and efficient, that is to say, to avoid—to deny in reality— the supposition that for the dominated ‘to liberate oneself’ has to signify to deny their individual cultural being in order to access ‘with full rights’ the supposed benefits of the ‘dominant culture’” (41). As José Luis GómezMartínez affirms, the discourses of modernity and postmodernity have failed to grasp the individual subject within his own dynamic potential, since, respectively, the first projected contextual truths as universal ones, and the second repeatedly postponed the act of signifying through a convenient deconstruction of every center (27–28). Articulating the canonical construction of an intercultural philosophy from a theological perspective, Virgilio Elizondo listed the “three ecclesial conditions that are fundamental pre-requisites for an authentic theologic dialogue” (21–22) and indicated that “An authentic intercultural dialogue within the Church will touch on aspects of Church life which have heretofore remained untouched and sacrosanct. Furthermore, questions will be asked not from the perspective of the relationship of the Church to others, but in the name of the very unity and catholicity of the Church” (19). The pillars were in place for the elaboration of an intercultural philosophy that would serve as a possible successor and response to liberation philosophy and that would also look to transcend the destabilizing tendencies of any self-centered enunciation that did not consider every culture to be in a constant state of flux and transformation (Heise et al., 15). Emerging as a school of thought in the middle of the 1990s in Latin America, intercultural philosophy laid the foundations of a thinking that is post-pessimist in its desire to leave behind a destructive discourse that served only to center on the cultural differences in society and, in the process, alienate us from ourselves. In light of the modernist metanarratives and postmodernist fragmentation, intercultural thinking also looks to be respectful of cultural differences yet inclusive in its attempt to accommodate an ever-

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shifting dialogue between conflicting perspectives. In the last ten years, the early definitions given to interculturality and intercultural philosophy differ modestly. Raúl Fornet-Betancourt, one of its principal architects in Latin America, offers seven characteristics of intercultural philosophy (Hacía una filosofía, 12–14) and takes as his starting point the departure from an immoral “asymmetry between cultures” “that comes from outside the cultures, because it is the historical result of a colonialism that, to some extent, is perpetuated by multinational enterprises and financial centers with their strategy of market globalization” (“Interaction and Asymmetry,” 33); Rik Pinxten describes interculturality as “a bidirectional process of knowledge building” (199), while Raimon Panikkar illustrates the priorities of intercultural philosophy by reminding us of the fact that, due to the highly self-centered quality of every culture and that all of us, in one way or another, are a part of at least one culture, it is impossible to establish a “hierarchy of cultures” (129). As evidenced by the arguments presented against any cultural hierarchy, the implied point of departure here is historical Modernism. As constructed and projected by their respective colonial enterprises, European nation-states traditionally utilized cultural mechanisms as a way of imposing discrete political, social, and economic conventions upon people who were ultimately transformed, marginalized, and expelled from the absolutizing discourse of the colonial imagination. The epistemological reaction to colonial thinking, however, located individuals within an impenetrable wall and removed any possibility of communitarian signification. As for many postmodernists such as Michel Foucault, the initial locus of signification and representation for intercultural thinkers is the expression of culture. Interculturalism, however, transcends the particular by looking to cultural diversity and subjectivity as potential facilitators of communication and understanding instead of obstacles. A constructive dialogue between distinct cultures is possible if, as Fornet-Betancourt and Panikkar indicate, priority is given to recognizing the inherent prejudices of one’s own cultural context and eliminating a priori value judgments that position one culture over another and that only serve to further make difficult the emancipatory projects of people around the globe. For Latin American interculturalism, social, political, and economic circumstances and contexts are but referential manifestations of individual cultural behaviors that generate inequalities that more often than not were imposed by a colonial infrastructure. The priority today, then, is to deconstruct said asymmetries from a post-pessimist position and take as the starting point an unadorned interest in human relations, in an appreciation of the resulting dialogue and in the reconstruction of cultural loci that will, in turn, renegotiate social, political, and economic categories of identity and construct a more symmetrical society. Interculturalism then dovetails with the priorities of the decolonializing project. In this respect, a number of writers

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have pronounced themselves in favor of a more humanist philosophy that contextualizes each framework within a specific set of circumstances—framing the frame, as it were—and takes as its starting point the human. Maria Heise et al. have connected interculturality to the construction of a discourse that stands in direct opposition to authoritarianism, dogmatism, and ethnocentrism (5) and proposes a critical interculturality that deconstructs discrimination (172). Felipe González Ortiz also defends an interculturality that aspires to an integration of humanity that respects cultural differences (70), and José Luis Gómez-Martínez goes further and suggests the enunciation of an anthropic “human-centered” discourse and takes as his starting point the perspective “that the objective of language is to facilitate communication between the multitude of individuals” (37). The significance of an anthropic discourse and of an intercultural philosophy is that categories of repression and prejudice must first be recognized and identified as disempowering mechanisms that serve principally to isolate human cultures from one another. Consequently, this isolation can be broken only by a turning outward, toward dissimilar populations, acknowledging their otherness and using language to transcend the postmodern principle that language is ultimately subjective and, therefore, that any true communication between us is perpetually elusive. The intention of intercultural philosophy is to identify the preconditions for understanding from an optimistic hermeneutics and to assemble a dialogue between distinct communities, using language to build bridges across cultural divides and to connect with other residents of the human neighborhood. To this end, no place equals the communicative potential of the Americas since, as Aínsa writes, “the Latin American countries have been pioneers in recognizing cultural and ethnic diversity and in the affirmation of their plurality and of their own values of non-Western roots” (“El destino,” 41). The dialogue alluded to by Fornet-Betancourt, Tubino, and Panikkar, among others, would renew and reconstruct each culture from both within and without, allowing ethically ambivalent arguments to be circumvented and epistemological interaction to become a mutually beneficial experience. In this respect, then, the starting point is culture. A respect for ourselves (Elizondo, 22) and for cultural diversity and the right to cultural self-determination (Fornet-Betancourt, “An Alternative,” 230, 231) are of primary importance to an intercultural philosophy that defends the reality that every culture is theoretically receptive to a decentralizing dialogue. “Interculturality,” as Raimon Panikkar has declared, “describes the dynamic situation of the person that, conscious of the existence of other people, values and cultures, knows that they cannot isolate themselves within themselves” (130). If repeated, the dialogic process does not culminate in the establishment of an unconstructed static position but rather maintains a dynamic fluidity that, paradoxically, fixes cultures in a state of constant transitional progression

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through repeated and renewed contact with the other. As Virgilio Elizondo has written, dialogue “involves the risk of being challenged, the vulnerability of being known in one’s own weakness, and the possibility of discovering that one might be wrong. Yet, dialogue is not argument, it is not, per se, a confrontation, but the common struggle of arriving at truth” (23). The hopeful self-respect and regard for other cultures aids in the construction of a space defined by porous borders that overlap in regard to discrete cultural qualities and customs. It is at this point, the point of contact and communication, of commonality and disagreement, that we are better able to step outside ourselves and perceive others on their terms and reconfigure ourselves in our own gap. 11 Ideally, public spaces and public discourse would be the first location of an intercultural philosophy that would be implicitly supported by public institutions and initiatives sponsored by the nation-state, but globalization has tended to derail the best of dialogic intentions by unlevelling the playing field. It is in this respect that liberal democracy has faced its greatest crises in the twenty-first century, since it has demonstrated that its structures and institutions are not easily applicable to all equally. Interculturality has taken up rhetorical arms against globalization and what it perceives to be the fallacy of liberal democracy by emphasizing the collaborative potential of humankind, not the competitive nature of neoliberal development strategies that pit neighbor against neighbor. As Fornet-Betancourt wrote, “Calling attention to the ideology and philosophy of history underlying the neoliberal discourse on globalization, intercultural philosophy asks with what justice the system that today defines globalization is itself ‘globalized,’ and it questions fundamentally the ethical and cultural legitimacy of globalization” (“An Alternative,” 231), proceeding to brand globalization as an effective “recolonisation of the world” (“Intercultural Philosophy,” 160). The ethical and cultural dilemmas posed by the diffusion of globalization are, for intercultural philosophy, one symptom of what has come to be known as the crisis of liberal democracy. The work of Anthony Arblaster (Democracy), Norberto Bobbio (The Future of Democracy), Giovanni Sartori (What Is Democracy?), and María Zambrano (Persona y democracia), among others, highlights the wide-ranging loss of confidence in a system that is frequently seen as participating in maintaining existing inequalities across the globe. In Latin America, the necessary change will not occur within the existing political and cultural framework, as there exists “a social and historical reality upon which a model has been grafted—that of Western representative democracy—that cannot resolve the tension between crude reality and the desired ideal” (Aínsa, Espacios, 72). What is currently occurring is the construction of a discourse that takes as its inspiration the dialogic potential of humankind and projects it into a once possible future that looks to propose an alternative to the radical globalization of the world and to “resolve the tension” between the real and the ideal. In the application of liberation philosophy to literary

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analysis and of an intercultural approach to works produced in Latin America, distinct and subtle notions of oppression may be revealed and censured in an attempt to identify their underlying practices. NOTES 1. Describing the construction of autobiographical discourse, for example, Hunsaker emphasizes the plurality of possible relationships between the writer and reading public, indicating that “Autobiographers write the story of identity with a reader in mind. Similarly, the way autobiographers imagine their national community depends on the anticipated audience” (4). 2. Gallegos’s novel Doña Bárbara (1929) narrates the struggle between the two forces, ultimately advocating the victory of civilization over barbarism. 3. In this respect, Che Guevara’s writings on the New Man, for example, take on an importance that to this day continues to frame the discussions surrounding the existence of a cohesive Latin American identity and the relevance of Socialism, Marxism, and Communism to contemporary political projects around the continent. 4. It is interesting to note the Church’s declaration that “God, and not man, has the power to change the situations of suffering” (Sacred Congregation, 10), essentially freeing it from any and all moral responsibility from mitigating human “suffering.” 5. An example of such a transformation is the FSLN. While it began as a strictly political organization, the revolutionary triumph in 1979 and the electoral victory of Daniel Ortega in the general elections of 2006, 2011, and 2016 and a series of legislative manipulations have allowed him to freely pursue an active and partisan political agenda. Such legislation is transforming the national landscape by employing a (post-)Socialist rhetoric refashioned in order to both attract and gain entry into the global marketplace. 6. Passed without any popular or legislative debate or referendum, in 2013 Daniel Ortega and the Ortega-led National Assembly approved the concessions of key pieces of land to Chinese businessman Wang Jing to build an interoceanic canal along approximately its southern border with Costa Rica. Since then, there has been little progress on the actual construction of the canal and, as Andres Oppenheimer wrote in the Miami Herald on July 5, 2017, “There are fears that Wang could now use his 50-year concession to sell the rights to [Nicaraguan] ports, airports, and tourism complexes, with zero benefits for the Nicaraguan people.” 7. Since the end of the Sandinista Revolution in 1979, Nicaragua has suffered from a series of administrations that fail to adequately respond to a crumbling infrastructure, mounting foreign debt, environmental vulnerability, and an un(der)employed urban population. While structural readjustments implemented since 1990 have attempted to palliate the symptoms of an endemic poverty, statistical evidence demonstrates that, in this time, these measures have not realized their rather ambitious objectives. The Gross National Income (2014), for example, is $1,870 per year, one of the lowest in the Western hemisphere (compared, for example, to $2,280 for Honduras, $3,410 for Guatemala, and $3,950 for El Salvador) (World Food Programme). According to the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), there also continue to exist critical economic differences between Nicaragua and other Latin American nations with respect to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita ($834 per year vs. $3,780 per year), GDP growth (–5.64 percent vs. –1.5 percent), and the percentage of people living at or below the poverty line of $2.15 per day (48 percent vs. 29 percent) (Interamerican Development Bank). 8. As José Comblin wrote in 1993 about the communities, “Before they found their identity and their fundamental raison d´etre in the fight for the transformation of society. In the present situation, in which the struggles are fading out progressively, they feel without a program of action and without content” (38). 9. López Velasco’s provocative writings regarding a twenty-first-century socialism for Latin America include reflections on intercultural philosophy, the environment, euthanasia, and homosexuality as well as a lucid critical analysis of Cuban and Venezuelan socialisms.

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10. Eliza Anyangwe and Anna Leach call attention to the fact that, “In 2011 for the first time ever there were more Latin Americans in the middle class than living in poverty, and it’s one of the only regions in the world where the income gap between rich and poor is narrowing.” 11. It is no coincidence that the space where intercultural dialogue occurs has been described as an example of “border thinking” (Mignolo, The Idea, 9) that represents the epistemic shift from a limited vision of the other to the creation of an “in-between space, an inter” (Oosterling, 21).

Chapter Two

Utopia and Testimonio

UTOPIC DISCOURSE By 1905, at the dawn of a new century, the United States was attempting to gain a foothold in the Americas and the Caribbean and had demonstrated its incipient political and economic power through hemispherical interventions in Mexico, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Panama, among other countries. As a response to these incursions, a generation of Latin American writers and intellectuals of the time offered essays, poems, plays, and novels that lamented the increasing might of their northern neighbor and warned of its growing influence in national and continental affairs. Published in the volume Songs of Life and Hope (1905), the poem “The Optimist’s Salutation” by Rubén Darío (1867–1916), for example, reacts to the increasing presence of the United States at a time of widespread political instability and participates in the construction of an autonomous American identity firmly rooted in a past marked by both European and indigenous cultures and approaching an encouraging future. His verses implore the people of America to turn away from pessimist attitudes and to avoid the temptation to assess the past or the future in a negative light, commanding them to turn away from defeatist acts of speech, from apocalyptic prophecies, and from destructive acts that look to refashion the past (63). Instead, hope must be found in the rekindling of historic connections that will bring a renewed harmony to the people of America: “[I]n spirit united, in spirit and longings and language, / see the moment coming when new anthems will be sung” (65). The synchretic connection between distinct continents—implicitly Europe and America—will be made manifest in the “new anthems,” a term whose effective patriotic connotations manage to announce the victory of a very tangible and positive future over those who foretold only trouble and difficulties for the American 33

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people. Ultimately, the poem “The Optimist’s Salutation” depicts the future birth of a Latin American weltanschauung that is, in a word, hopeful, inciting the people to disregard those who focus almost exclusively on past defeats and difficulties and, in its final verses, declaring that “The Latin race will see the great dawn of the future” (64). Due in large part to the frequency of both United States and European interventions in sovereign affairs during the last half of the nineteenth century, a number of Latin American writers at this time began to delve into issues of national and continental identity from a perspective that took as its starting point the challenges of daily subsistence for many of their compatriots and envisioned for them a life of political freedoms and opportunity, devoid of material hardship and tyrannical rule. The poems and essays of José Martí (1853–1895) and the writings of José Enrique Rodó, for example, would call for a defense of Latin American land and identity and construct a rhetorical America where no one nation was subjugated by another and the influence of the United States in national and international affairs was offset by the strength of a continental consciousness. In 1928, the Peruvian José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930) would publish Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality and call for Socialist and Communist parties in Perú and throughout the Americas to adapt themselves to Latin American reality and to not blindly adopt European tenets and ideals. While current theorists take Mariátegui to task for “The methodological inconsistency between an emphatic and meticulous grounding in economic facts” and a “recurrence to a notion of spirit” (Hanneken, 5), his desire to blend a clinical analysis of “Peruvian Reality” with a spiritual appreciation of Perú’s past reflected ideals grounded in both historical context and cultural symbolism. This confluence of benchmarks effectively makes Mariátegui one of the first contemporary thinkers that manages to integrate material analysis with an atemporal utopian vision imbued with permanent possibility. The utopian visions of writers such as Darío, Martí, Rodó, and Mariátegui not only had their continental precursors in Francisco de Miranda (1750–1816), Simón Bolívar (1783–1830), and other figures prominent in the fight for independence: They could also locate their epistemic roots in pre-Thomas More works such as The Republic by Plato and City of God by St. Augustine that “not only idealized the past but also idealized the future, distancing themselves from that which they truly disdained: the present” (Spagnolo, 226). While the independence of the colonies in the nineteenth century freed them from the control of Spain, European economic interests and the construction of particular national identities brought renewed conflicts between those struggling to establish their own dominance within each territory. Bolívar and San Martín, for example, were instrumental in the search for political autonomy, yet these men were also educated within a European tradition that favored the written word. Each, in their own right,

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sought to define not only the principal characteristics of a transcontinental identity and of their respective emerging nations but also the essential qualities of any nation that sought a sovereign identity. The utopian Panamericanism that Bolívar defended in his well-known “Letter from Jamaica,” for example, found its corollary in the numerous regional conflicts that emerged soon after the staggered independence of the Spanish colonies. The nation was, after all, a relatively recent and abstract creation founded in part by writers, individuals who, as Doris Sommer has written, “[W]ere also among the fathers of their countries, preparing national projects through prose fiction, and implementing foundational fictions through legislative or military campaigns” (Foundational Fictions, 73). The written word became one of the battlefields on which the distinct characteristics of individual nations were shaped. Timothy Brennan, for example, declares that “literature participated in the formation of nations through the creation of ‘national print media’—the newspaper and the novel” (48). And for Benedict Anderson, the novel and the newspaper “provided the technical means for ‘re-presenting’ the kind of imagined community that is the nation” (25). In Embers of the Past, however, Javier Sanjinés recalls a number of writers critical of Anderson’s Eurocentric ideas of nationhood and finds fault with Anderson’s conception of the nation: “To my way of understanding, the nation can only be theorized in strict relationship with the theme of ethnicity, which is linked to profound cultural conflicts that influential modern essays have ignored. For Benedict Anderson (1983), the origin of the nation lies in a ‘print-capitalist’ nationalism that emerged from the sphere of the educated elite. This nationalism swallows up ethnic differences with a Eurocentric vision that overlooks or minimizes local differences” (58). We would also do well to remember that in the formation of Latin American nation-states that took place during the nineteenth century and typically fell along the “liberal” and “conservative” fault lines, political leaders generally had little understanding of the concerns of the general population: “Recall that both liberals and conservatives belonged to the same oligarchy, making it difficult to distinguish between them as two sharply antagonistic social sectors. In general, neither of those two sectors had any interest in responding to the pressing demands of the people” (Sanjinés, 67). What have been characterized as competing concepts of national identity throughout the Americas are actually two sides of a rather limited vision that privileges the interests of those that possess economic and political power. By the second decade of the sixteenth century, European explorations of the “New World” would leave their mark on works such as More’s Utopia and hint at yet another locus amoenus that offered residents the possibility of living out their material and spiritual dreams. The utopias at this time represented, above all, a reformulation of how Europe viewed itself (Spagnolo, 228), as this encounter with what would soon be known as America forced

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Europeans to reassess the assumed advances of their “civilized” societies, explore the reflection of their own self-image, and recover the search for a better, ideal place. As Juan Durán Luzio has indicated, “The ‘discovery’ of America encouraged the resurrection of utopias, forgotten since the times of Plato” (13). In this respect, the utopias were a reconfiguration of coloniality and imperial designs, projecting into the future those characteristics which were judged to be lacking in societies. At the same time, the search for a utopia represented the tacit endorsement of a colonial enterprise that looked to appropriate both spiritual and material wealth from the Americas and rescue timeworn Europe from its hoary decadence. From 1918 to 1939, the concept of utopia was viewed in light of the barbarous developments in warfare—as witnessed by World War I—and the economic depression that affected practically every corner of the globe during the first part of the 1930s. Artists and writers during this time were influenced by the gradual economic rebirth of the United States and by technological developments that forced them to reconsider the subversive power of art in the face of a growing worldwide consumerism. Dada and surrealism, for example, would influence the Expressionist distortion of the visual field, the futurist faith in technology, the multichromatic explorations of fauvism, and the cubist deconstruction of visual perspective. The destructive consequences of historical processes, however, forced many to reconsider the implicit and almost invisible connection between the political arena and the utopian landscape, pointing future generations of artists down a path that reconstructed the varied utopias from a perspective that valued social structures that were not explicitly political in form or function. Mannheim’s lament regarding the “reduction” of all things political to a matter of economics centers around the fact that “the state of reality” does not incorporate cultural discourse, that politics and economics have become self-determining, and that, in the wake of this collaborative tendency, they have colluded to eradicate utopias from the “political arena.” His observation, however, expresses an implicit distinction between “high” and “low” culture and needlessly reduces the construction of utopias to the political sphere of society, neglecting the fact that “the past,” “historical time” and “culture” can, of themselves, locate both “politics” and “economics” in an ancillary position in order to construct a utopian vision for the future that takes as its stimulation those cultural values that have, as Mannheim intimates, unfortunately been “brushed aside.” Marcuse himself exclusively connected the death of utopia and utopian projects to the demise of worker’s rights and the success of a capitalist project that centered its energies on the political-economic sphere and that, ultimately, viewed society’s progress in terms that focused almost solely on the “forces of production.” The writings of Louis Marin (1931–1999) delve into the definability of a utopia, particularly from a perspective that transcends notions of class and

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addresses the interplay of factors that affect the formation of a utopia. His notion that “Utopia is a critique of modern ideology” (Utopics, 194) contradicts Mannheim’s opinion that “It is always the dominant group which is in full accord with the existing order that determines what is to be regarded as utopian” (Utopics, 203) due to the fact that, for Marin, the Modern has been the colonial space of repression and authority. His assertion then enters into dialogue with the multifacted representation of utopia and leaves Mannheim sounding somewhat dated in its homogenous interpretation of the term. Utopia, then, has gone from being an extension and an enabler of hegemonic discourse (Mannheim) to an explicit extension of plurality (Marin), presented in such a fashion that its transformative process represents an empowering site of enunciation, especially for the marginalized subject. Within a narrative context, then, “Utopia as a figure inscribed within a fable-producing discourse puts ideological discourse and its representations into play in a double sense—implicitly but critically questioning them, and setting them apart in order to reflect upon the presuppositions of their internal systems” (Marin, Utopics, 197). As it criticizes the “dominant ideology,” utopia also acquires a certain essential distance from it in order to better gaze upon its structure. This distance that utopia acquires from its subject of examination is nowhere more evident than in its liminal condition. Utopia is, according to Marin, the intersection where orthodox and heterodox views continuously brush against each other in their struggle for power: “Where to situate the subject of utopia if not, by a theoretical fiction of the analytical metadiscourse, in the place of a gap, an interval where our attempt of seeing together the dominating term and the dominated one, the beholding process and the fact or feeling to be seen, would change itself into a neutral or neutralizing relationship” (“The Frontiers,” 404). This “frontier” is an ou-topos, a “noplace” marked by the juncture of apparently concurrent mechanisms of selfrepresentation and by the symbiotic enunciation of contradictory epistemes that, ultimately, function together in creating the next hegemony. For Marin, breaching the “gap” is not as significant as staging the discourses. Engaging each with a set of critical tools that will allow us to understand that their ultimate transcendence is dependent on a sort of transubstantiation will, in the utopian interstice, allow for the transformation of each into something both empowering and disemboweling. Michel Maffesoli (1977) has also written on the capability of utopia to transcend “the real,” yet his conceptions delve into the power of the imaginary and present it as the source of utopian projects and ideals that can be, as he declares, a double-edged sword: “Living our dreams instead of living our life continues to be the foundation of the imaginary, but this implies numerous traps” (80). With respect to the construction of a utopian framework, his distinction between “our dreams” and “our life” implies a mutual incompat-

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ibility that implicitly identifies “our dreams” with the illogical and “our life” with the logical, echoing Mannheim’s distinction between “reality” and “unreality.” Maffesoli, however, does not center his comments on class struggle and allows for a reconstruction of permeable utopian borders, including attributes of our lives that may transcend the economic framework that Mannheim and Marcuse envisioned for utopian ideals. For Maffesoli, the interplay between the real and the imaginary is the driving force behind a utopia that ultimately looks to construct an alternative, improved reality: “The imaginary would not be a thinking separated from the real, but rather an attitude that works a certain distancing, a ‘setting aside’ that would be more methodological than systematic and that would allow the criticism and the realization of the possible at the same time” (81). The fictional distinction between the imaginary and the real expressed by Maffesoli is not unlike the traditional categories of distance consigned to narrative fiction and non-fiction, as each plays off of the other in search of constructs that combine elements of both and allow for the integration of non-traditional elements. In this respect, the imaginary would then be a site of and facilitator for utopian ideals, one that would ground the real in its own transcendence by way of a utopian project. The locus of this structure would be, as Maffesoli indicates, a dynamic position that explores progression and dialogue in order to make real the imaginary. The plural initiatives surrounding utopia that have emerged from Europe since approximately the beginning of the twentieth century have struggled to recognize the implicit position that utopias are an organic part of Western history. These, however, have generally been rooted in a European context that all too frequently marginalized the voice of the Other. In Europe, for example, liberation theology’s counterpart was political theology, a term first coined by Johannes Metz (1928) in a series of lectures at the University of Münster in 1965 and 1966 that described a progressive ecumenical movement influenced strongly by the existential crisis undergone by Europeans following World War II. For Metz, the key to political theology was the projection of memory as “not forgetting”: “The Christian memory of suffering is in its theological implications an anticipated memory: it intends the anticipation of a particular future of man as a future for the suffering, the hopeless, the oppressed, the injured and the useless of this earth” (117). Another political theologian, the German Jürgen Moltmann (1926), maintained in 1974 that “Political theology wants to awaken political consciousness in every treatise of Christian theology. Understood in this way, it is the premise that leads to the conclusion that, while there may be naive and politically unaware theology, there can be no apolitical theology” (19). The abstractions of political theology reflected a position that privileged the contexts of the developed nations of Europe and North America and sidestepped the consequences of colonialism. Due to this fact, it rarely addressed the

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praxis of marginalization and allowed itself the luxury of maintaining a critical distance from the lived reality of those subjugated by social, political, and economic forces. This distance frequently meant that churches in developed countries had a difficult time identifying with and ministering to underprivileged populations in their communities, since “the churches in the North cannot escape the fact that they are predominantly middle class. They are not churches of the poor, and they have great problems relating to the poor, or demonstrating their relevance to them” (Forrester, 147). The churches—and the corresponding societies—frequently confused “justice” with “charity,” paying a great deal of attention to the concept of “Freedom” while, in the developing nations, “Liberation” is the term most frequently used (Assmann, 32). The European constructs of political theology and utopia alike take as their starting point a dangerously abstract imaginary that, while located in a lived reality, frequently displace it in favor of a more intangible future framework that favors economic suprastructure over cultural significance. In 1925, the Dominican writer and intellectual Pedro Henríquez Ureña (1884–1946) offered a conference at the University of Mexico entitled “Utopia of America” in which he reflected on the immediate future that lay ahead for a nation that had just emerged from a divisive civil war that not only split the country politically in two but also tore the revolutionary effort into two camps, one headed by Emiliano Zapata in the south, the other by Pancho Villa in the north. In his speech to students and administrators, Henríquez Ureña drew attention to the uniqueness of Mexico among Latin American nations, declaring that “Mexico is the only country of the New World where there is a tradition, long, enduring, never broken, for all things, for all types of activities: for the mining industry as for textiles, for the promotion of astronomy as for classical letters, for painting as for music.” Later, he addresses the subject of utopia and its connection to the Americas of the day, proclaiming that, “We must broaden the spiritual field: let’s give the alphabet to every man; let’s give each one the best tools in order to work for the good of all; let’s make the effort to approach social justice and authentic truth; let’s advance, in the end, toward our utopia.” His opening characterization of Mexico as a nation defined by its multiple traditions throughout history serves to establish the country as a paradigm of a cultural continuity that will be a pathway for its future progress. These traditions, he later explains, are part of a broader spiritual identity, intimately connected to the betterment of the entire population through literacy and social justice. Improvement of the country is not achieved by economic means alone: true advancement comes from ensuring that all residents are treated equally and included in any efforts to eliminate poverty. Like the ideas promoted by Henríquez Ureña, the majority of utopias that have historically emerged from Latin America have in one way or another incorporated aspects of social justice, equality, and political liberation. In his

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work El socialismo del siglo XXI en perspectiva ecomunitarista a la luz del “socialismo real” del siglo XX (Socialism in the XXIst Century in an Ecocommunitarian Perspective in Light of the “Real Socialism” of the XXth Century ), Sirio López Velasco offers descriptions of Latin American Socialism in the twenty-first century that suggest a somewhat utopian vision of contemporary Socialist thinking on the continent. As he revisits the past and acknowledges the gains made by Latin American Socialism, he laments that “we cannot stop from confirming how, many years after the revolutionary turn, the Socialist countries kept having notorious problems with food supply, shelter, school materials, [medical] remedies and public transportation” (14). His proposals for a twenty-first-century socialism in Latin America maintain that doing away with poverty is intimately connected to the “preservation-regeneration of human and non-human nature” (17), and suggest that political parties should be transformed into a series of autonomous “political networks” (25–26), that government bureaucracy should be gradually dissolved through direct political participation (29), that the written and audiovisual means of mass communication should be squarely placed in the hands of local and national communities (32), and that firearms should be stored in community warehouses for safekeeping (38). In this manner, López Velasco offers a roadmap that is guided by an idealized fluid “heterogeneous social group” (40) and is inclusive and conscious of its own multiplicity, not by those isolated from the majority of the population nor Gramsci’s “organic intellectuals.” His deconstruction of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin American Socialism—particularly its most recent versions in Cuba, Venezuela, and Bolivia—establishes a connection between the present and an imagined future as he supports the continuation of a reformed Socialism in the Americas that is acutely aware of its own limitations and of society’s contemporary needs. In effect, López Velasco’s proposals not only locate him within contemporary Latin American utopian thinking, but also situate him within the framework of intercultural studies as his ideas offer both an alternative to the policies being promoted by free enterprise and a discursive location for the expression of the continent’s ethnic, racial, cultural, and linguistic diversity. Fernando Aínsa (1937), Uruguayan of Spanish origin, exemplifies current theoretical trends in Latin America by focusing the construction of a utopia on a collective perspective that takes as one of its principal tenets the nonnegotiable respect of unlike belief systems and cultural customs without neglecting social justice. While Aínsa is the author of novels (El paraíso de la niña María Julia, 1994), short stories (Ciempiés: Los microrrelatos de Quimera, 2005), and literary criticism (Del topos al logos: Propuestas de geopoética, 2006), he is best known perhaps for enunciating a Latin American identity that searches for a set of unifying continental characteristics, that protects the most marginalized, and that values its inherent hetero-

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geneity. For Aínsa, the construction of a better future and, consequently, any utopia is inextricably bound to the concept of change. Utopias are therefore consequences and initiators of both political and cultural changes, examples of a “latent subversion that pushes and makes dynamic all social reactives, utopic propensions that inhabit social change” (Espacios, 25). Utopic constructions “cannot ignore the complex cultural realities threatened by economic-financial globalization. Categorically, cultural changes are the only ones that can give permanence and consistency to those political changes” (“El destino,” 39). For this reason, “Utopic thinking can only be local and planetary, transcending the traditional dilemma of the classic utopia” (“El destino,” 30). By describing utopias as both subversive in nature and capable of inducing social change, Aínsa supersedes conventional classifications of the term and inscribes utopian discourse within a broader dynamic practice that is linked to other social and political structures. The “latent” effects of a utopia include influencing an ever-problematic present that serves as stage for both the successes and failures of human nature and for a future that maintains itself as the only possible location of improvement for the present, giving life to a utopia that has its roots in local structures and a “planetary” worldview. As political systems and their respective structures are consistently shaped by changing social dynamics, the only true constant in the enunciation of a utopic project, then, is the framework fashioned by the “complex cultural realities.” Utopias and the enunciation of utopian projects steadily become the privileged sites of interplay between historical legacy and the fleeting present, as both (in)advertently cooperate in the construction of the future. This future, Aínsa declares, will require the integration of values that serve as ethical reference points during the process. These include compassion, nobility, solidarity, respect and responsibility and are to be reassessed periodically (“El destino,” 34). While these principles are not necessarily ends unto themselves, they represent rather integral parts of the process that will lead to the improvement of human existence through a deepening mutual consideration for cultural differences that, in the past, have served only to alienate and separate communities. For this reason, the most significant characteristic of the utopian alternative proposed by Aínsa is its inherent intercultural diversity. In a number of his writings, Aínsa explores the more abstract possibilities of interculturality as applied to utopian studies. If the traditional utopian perspective, for example, “must today reconcile the universal values of reason with the passions, with differences and fragmentation and with cultural diversity” (“The Destiny,” 175), a more current version of utopia today “can begin to build itself as a true patchwork of cultural fragments and diverse ideologicals trends” (“El destino,” 36). Ambitious as these declarations may be regarding “differences and fragmentation,” “cultural diversity,” and “cultural fragments,” without a geopo-

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litical context they run the danger of having a limited impact on the development of any utopian project tied to a particular culture and geography. His projection of these ideas to the American context, however, takes into consideration the cultural and geographic identities of the continent and explores the current advantages and limitations to regional, national, and continental utopian configurations. In his writings, for example, Aínsa emphasizes the inherent intercultural condition of a Latin American utopia that takes as its tangible point of origin the racial and ethnic hybridity of the continent (“El destino,” 38, 45; Espacios, 25), “proclaiming the right to ‘our utopia’ as an inalienable right of critical thinking and of the liberating discourse in which it finds itself” (“La utopía,” 13). The heterogenous origins of contemporary society across the Americas have been historically polyphonic, functioning to smooth the progress of any utopian project by nominally being grounded in a desired—if not always achieved—transcendence of colonial structures. Hybridity and performative coexistence have been the norm in the recent formation of governments in Guatemala, Panamá, Bolivia, Perú, and Ecuador, among others, and the ideas regarding utopian discourse proposed by Aínsa take as their reference point the association between interculturality and a certain human universality of values without neglecting their discrete political consequences. The political instability endured by the majority of Latin American nations throughout the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would then be a mere symptom of cultural inequalities that continue to manifest themselves into the present day, when liberal democracies are perceived to be the zenith of human political development. This theoretical confrontation between intercultural studies and contemporary democracy suggests that models of representative democracy imported from North America and Europe and utopian proposals are nominally incompatible. If a utopia is conceived for the theoretical benefit of all its citizens and residents, then “Democracy must be developed with respect to the creation of possibilities that will allow the unprotected—those that live in poverty and those that live in misery—opportunities to become full citizens and effective participants of specific benefits” (Balcárcel Ordóñez, 163). Considering that unrestrained economic globalization has contributed to the continued concentration of wealth among a vast minority of the population, to the growing poverty of the most marginalized, and to the Westernization of global cultures through an increased commodification of human existence, it is evident that the political vehicle for its dissemination, liberal democracy, is itself in crisis. The expectation from democracy is, as Aínsa asserts, neither the creation of “new men” nor the invention of a paradise, but the guaranteeing of equal opportunities to all (Espacios, 73). To this end, he proposes a “democratized utopia” and offers measures that will facilitate its construction: “the recovery of the imaginary,” “a redefinition of the role of the State,” “a democratization of

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knowledge,” and the “construction of a democratic culture” (Espacios, 74–82). In order to offer its residents the “equal opportunities” defended by Aínsa, Latin American states must bring together an equitable translation of liberal democratic culture and an explicit respect for hybridity as demonstrated by an inclusive approach to economic development. Writing on the capacity of current Latin American neostructuralism 1 to be an effective alternative to neoliberalism, Fernando Ignacio Leiva indicates that neostructuralism “promises to transform Latin America . . . by replacing the market dogmatism of the 1970s and 1980s with a more holistic approach that restores the political, institutional, and cultural dimensions to economic development” (3). The “holistic approach” referred to by Leiva alludes to the construction of a Latin American utopia that will emerge only after a call for unity that accepts and respects minority voices, that, as Raúl Fornet-Betancourt states, defends and proclaims its universality and self-determination (“An Alternative,” 231). The process will require the dialogue that Virgilio Elizondo defines as that “common struggle of arriving at truth” (23) in order to consider all subjects evenly and level a playing field that is all too often subject to the economic whims of a select global minority. Only then will factors such as social justice and literacy, as advocated by Pedro Henríquez Ureña, be taken into serious consideration as bases for the elaboration of a better society. The ultimate consequences of any utopian discourse will be to facilitate the independent and interdependent cultural, social, economic, and political conditions that will allow Latin America and Latin American nation-states to meet and anticipate the needs of the people. UTOPIA AND LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE The independence of Venezuela and Paraguay in 1811, Argentina in 1816, and Chile in 1818 brought unanticipated challenges for those such as Simón Bolívar, Francisco de Miranda, and José San Martín (1778–1850), for example, who had led different regions in political and military rebellion against Spanish rule and, paradoxically, who had been ideologically formed within a paradigm that served to disseminate European ideals. Yet their actions on the American continent were faithfully rebellious in nature. By 1810, Spain had grown politically and economically weak and her efforts at maintaining political hegemony in the Americas were growing more futile. As expected, the Spanish American members of the Cortes in Cádiz that same year were quick to realize the increasing frailty of the once-powerful nation. The essays and letters of the founders of Latin American autonomy and self-representation embody a revolutionary spirit that combines with a utopian vision for the new nations, the continent, and its people.

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In his well-known “Letter from Jamaica” (1815), Simón Bolívar wrote at length about the ongoing insurgent struggles at that time and responded to the pessimistic spirit that was surging throughout much of the continent, defending the cause and asking, “[I]s not the entire New World in motion, moved and armed for defense?” (105). He continues and establishes the political character of a people who, accustomed to years of subjugation and control, are in need of a “paternal” presence to guide it through the initial tumultuous years of independence. Toward the end of the letter, he offers a few opinions that include the prediction of an incipient Central American confederacy, host to the “the empire of the world,” whose “canals will shorten distances throughout the world” (119). While his hopes and forecasts for the American nations may not have been entirely accurate—predicting for Chile, for example, that “the vices of Europe and Asia arrived [sic] too late or not at all to corrupt the customs of that distant corner of the world” (117)— they did in fact reflect the utopian farsightedness of one of the first visionaries and constructors of Latin American identity. The combination of political fervor and utopian spirit evident in the writings of Bolívar serves to exemplify the historically engaged role of many Latin American intellectuals at the time who strove for a break with traditional categories of representation and endeavored to seek political, cultural, and economic emancipation from Spain. If, in fact, utopic discourse “is a discourse about a more or less radical change that will offer a better life for a more or less limited group of people” (Gustaffson, 48), then an exegesis is required of how that “radical change” may be brought about and what it signifies for contemporary societies. Many of the ninteenth-century foundational fictions 2 analyzed by Doris Sommer, for example, evidence that “Romantic novels have shown that Romantic novels go hand in hand with patriotic history in Latin America” (Foundational Fictions, 7) and challenge declarations by writers such as Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) and Mario Vargas Llosa (1936) that they considered themselves “literary orphans” (1) due to the poor quality of previous works. The Romantic search for an ideal interpersonal relationship, Sommer indicates, frequently paralleled the desire to build a model nation. In his work Creación y utopía, Juan Durán Luzio has reflected on the utopic function of Latin American writing, declaring that “If the first descriptions [of America] produced numerous disappointments, there was the enormous task of reconstructing for the European reader an optimal medium that was beginning to wane; and that was the mission of the writers” (19). His study of works that contributed directly or indirectly to the construction of a Latin American utopia includes the letters of Christopher Columbus (1451–1506), the epic poem La araucana (1589) by Alonso de Ercilla (1533–1594), the Comentarios reales chronicles (1609) by Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1539–1616), the idealism of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811–1888) as evidenced in the novel Facundo (1845), the essays “Nuestra

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América” (1891) by José Martí and La raza cósmica (1923) by José Vasconcelos (1882–1959), and the more contemporary novel Los pasos perdidos (1953) by the Cuban Alejo Carpentier (1904–1980). Durán Luzio also includes the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) by Gabriel García Márquez as an example of an anti-utopia that reflects the demise of the paradise myth in the Americas (192). The constructs of American utopias are also evident in fictional works such as La isla de Robinson (1981) by Arturo Uslar Pietri (1906–2001), Daimón (1978) by Abel Posse (1934), and La guerra del fin del mundo (1981) and La historia de Mayta (1984) by Mario Vargas Llosa (Aínsa, “La utopía”). Current theoretical trends also suggest the need to expand the frontiers of what has traditionally been known as utopian literature in Latin America to include anarchist and ecological perspectives (Demyda and Favarón, respectively), for example, in order to respond to the shifting epistemological terrain. Notwithstanding the initial idealized accounts and descriptions offered by Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci (1454–1512), Peter Martyr D’Anghiera (1457–1526), Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566), Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (1490–1559), and Bernal Díaz del Castillo (1492–1584), the utopias enunciated by Latin American poetry and prose over the course of the last five centuries have frequently been overlooked due largely to the fact that these works have not fit neatly into the category of “utopian literature” as characterized by scholars in Europe and North America. If we take Gustaffson’s notion of utopian discourse and broaden it to include those works that narrate the implicit or explicit realization of a better life through denunciation, foretelling, projecting, and/or broadcasting, Latin American literature then offers fertile terrain for a critical, revolutionary, and ultimately empowering (re)visioning of continental history. As Durán Luzio notes, La Araucana (1569, 1578, 1589) by Alonso de Ercilla and the Comentarios reales (1609) by the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega respectively construct a legendary heroic culture and future utopia centered on the recovery of an indigenous Latin American identity through the narration of legendary deeds and actions (74). In the seventeenth century, for example, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–1695) managed to take the baroque lyrical style of the Spanish poet Luis de Góngora and write poems, plays, and essays that were innovative in their approach to the representation of gender inequalities and in their defense of women’s emancipation. Her well-known essays “Carta atenagórica” (1690) and “Respuesta a Sor Filotea” (1691) epitomize the defense of the right of self-determination for women and the search for more equitable gender relations in the social, political, and economic spheres. As the movements for independence coalesced at the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth and Spain was further weakened by political and economic turmoil, the writings of Latin American statesmen reflected an anticipated desire to construct a better life for all those

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subjugated by colonial rule since the arrival of the Spaniards at the end of the fifteenth century. These individuals, however, soon witnessed their ideals become altered by the realities of political bickering and territorial conspiracies that, sadly, simply mirrored the ideological divides that had been exported to the Americas during approximately three hundred years of Spanish rule. As Maria Odette Canivell has written regarding these men, “As writers ‘writing’ and ‘constructing’ utopias, they could dream of a perfect nation; but when they became part of the political ‘machine,’ their dreams died. If utopia perishes when it becomes an actual ‘articulated’ project, the role these intellectuals played as politicians caused this demise” (4). This implied distinction between their intentions and actions, however, would not hamper their efforts at building a more just society. These efforts, occurring as they did at a time when the fate of the Spanish territories occupied a liminal space—they were neither colony nor independent nation but a dynamic inscription of the two on continental reality—exemplify the notion proposed by Maffesoli that utopias ultimately intend to transcend the real through direct resistance to a dominant ideology (Lógica, 50). Unfortunately, upon independence, the dominant ideology of Spain was simply substituted by that of the ruling class and oligarchy of Latin American political figures, writers, and intellectuals. While it is evident in his writings that, by his death in 1830, Bolívar had lost hope in the political unification of the Americas, his works stand as evidence of a utopian spirit that challenged the leaders of the continent to participate in constructing a more egalitarian society. Also active in the struggle to rid his homeland of tyrannical rule was Bolivar’s contemporary, the Mexican José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi (1776–1827). As the author of works that frequently challenged the moral right of the Spanish Crown and its inefficiency, his novel El Periquillo Sarniento (1816) managed to criticize the endemic corruption in colonial Mexico, advance an abolitionist perspective, and promote “liberal values” such as freedom of thought and speech at a time when there were none (Williamson, 287). His compatriot, the priest Fray Servando Teresa de Mier (1765–1827), offered a rather utopian perspective in his essay “Can New Spain Be Free?” (1820) and proposed a set of conditions for the achievement of Mexican autonomy and self-government that included first and foremost “liberation,” followed by the formation of a national Congress and an army and appointing a diplomatic attaché that would request formal recognition from the United States. Practical as they may appear, the enunciation of these intentions manifest a rather critical idealization of the efforts behind national organization (one that, ultimately, depended more on international approval than on domestic support). Even the works of the Venezuelan Andrés Bello (1781–1865) and the Argentineans Esteban Echeverría (1805–1851) and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, distinct as they were in style, context, and ideology, project a vision that searches and struggles to improve the quality of life for the continent. Pub-

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lished while living in England, the poem “Alocución a la poesía” (1823) by Bello, for example, personified poetry as a female figure and intended to recapture her epic spirit for the continent by reminding her that her true home was not the Europe of violence, corruption, and authoritarian rule but the America of grace and “innocent nature.” It may be a rather idealistic vision, but it was an idealism that searched to fashion an unprejudiced identity separate from European history. The nineteenth century also witnessed the coalescence of the fight for indigenous rights and the organization of indigenous movements that struggled to return an element of autonomy and self-determination to original populations throughout the Americas. By idealizing the past of indigenous peoples and adopting a moralizing tone, however, novelists such as Juan León Mera (1832–1894) (Cumandá, 1879) and Jorge Isaacs (1837–1895) (María, 1867) paid little attention to the contemporary injustices surrounding the indigenous peoples, pontificating and neglecting to explore the possibilities for a better life in their homelands of Colombia and Ecuador for these populations. 3 It was not until the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century that individuals such as Vasconcelos (La raza cósmica), Manuel González Prada (1844–1918), and Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre (1895–1979) paid substantial attention to the improvement of material living conditions of indigenous populations. The twentieth century in Latin America and the dawn of an improved and more contemporary vision of continental life begin to come into view in the work of writers such as José Martí and Rubén Darío, two of the original founders of a literary Modernist movement in Spanish that would have a lasting impact on literature and the Spanish language. Frequently criticized for being a writer whose early poetry offers a superficial and elitist distortion of Latin America, Rubén Darío has come to be synonymous with a continental Americanism that offers a departure from European norms and that does not eschew an ethical confrontation with imperial powers. In sacrificing his life for the independence of his Cuban homeland and dying in battle before he could witness the results of his actions, Martí fought vehemently with pen and sword in an effort to build a nation that would offer both refuge and liberty. His essays “Our America” (1891) and “My Race” (1893), for example, refashion the topic of an American identity and associate it with an unselfish respect and understanding of each nation’s particular reality that does not exclude a broader continental connection. Durán Luzio writes regarding “Our America” that “His language is prophetic because it reaches beyond his own time, it expresses more than his personal situation as a patriot devoted to a cause that, as he knows, will not end with the battles” (109). Offering his own vision of national and continental unity, Martí declared “That a country’s form of government must be in keeping with its natural elements is a foregone conclusion. Absolute ideas must take relative

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forms if they are not to fail because of an error in form. Freedom, to be viable, has to be sincere and complete. If a republic refuses to open its arms to all, and move ahead with all, it dies” (Our America, 92). The utopian vision that he proposes in this essay takes, as its inspiration, those “natural elements” that serve as context and framework and that represent the need to discount the blind imposition of any laws or systems detached from this context. Explicitly, the political is disassociated from those cultural customs that will ideally serve to give “permanence and consistency to political changes” (Aínsa, “El destino,” 39). If these “natural elements” that Martí references are not considered, if political self-determination does not consider the needs of the people and “freedom” and “liberty” are simple rhetorical devices used to promote a particular political agenda or a specific ideological position, then certain failure awaits both Cuba and the rest of the continent. His rather disingenuous dissection of the differences between the political and cultural spheres belies his own life experience and the application of principles that constructed a unifying vision for his incipient nation. Many of the poems and essays of Rubén Darío are equally prophetic and visionary in nature in that they enunciate a better life through ideals such as freedom, self-determination, and cultural authenticity that, although not always explicitly political, managed to sympathetically introduce themselves into the political arena. In his poem “Canto a la Argentina,” for example, “The poet invites the races of the world to the breadth and riches of the virgin plains [of Argentina] in order to found tomorrow’s homeland for humankind” (Durán Luzio, 134). His poem “To Roosevelt” also presents the mestizo cultural roots of Latin America in direct opposition to the threat posed by Theodore Roosevelt and, more specifically, to the core values of consumerism and innocence embodied by the United States. In similar fashion, the prophetic “Litany of our Lord Don Quixote” juxtaposes the alleged eternal values represented by Cervantes’s literary creation with the disintegration of contemporary ethics and norms. In his projection of what Don Quixote was, Darío addresses the fictional figure directly and implicitly reminds us of the mistakes we are making today as we search for meaning and faith among the shadows, the challenges, and the ruins of our life. The North that we have lost is simply, in Darío’s opinion, a matter of a misplaced direction exemplified by our awkward existence and our absent faith in something larger than ourselves, something that the character Don Quixote realized existed. In the poem, Darío enters into a direct dialogue with his epoch in order to draw attention to the contradictory advances of his time and asks that God liberate us from sadness and discomfort, from bad poetry, from “the Academies,” “from the supermen of Nietzsche,” and “prescriptions signed by a doctor” (225). For Darío, the suffering, “supermen,” mediocre poetry, medical “prescriptions,” and “Academies” do not represent advances for society: they stand for the greatest of all maladies and symbolize the lack of substance and

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stuff in his time, the fallacy of submerging oneself in fatalistic, speculative, and frequently rather apocalyptic customs that only conceal the possibility of a better life. Interestingly, the absence of a comma between the “horrible blasphemies / of the Academies” pleads for a liberation that will free the human race not only from those “Academies” but from the very pronunciations that they dictate from their lofty perches (quite possibly a not-so-veiled criticism of the French and Spanish language academies). Even the music of the time, the “aphonic songs” he mentions, may be understood as a reference to both the music and poetry of his time, as, for him, they are regularly toneless and rhythmless expressions that, ultimately, do not contribute to improving our lives. Darío’s imploration to Don Quixote and subsequent denunciations are offered as possible rhetorical instruments in the search for a better life and for the ultimate transcendence of the moment. In this context, an exegesis of the poem need not neglect its privileged situation within the European imaginary as it takes Don Quixote—a figure central to the development of Spanish narrative—and references “knights” (v. 13), “Orpheus” (v. 25), “Roland” (v. 26), and “Pegasus” (v. 28), among others. Yet the central theme of the text is the appreciation and appropriation of what was—the essence of Don Quixote—in order to construct what might once again be, the return of the noble, adventurous, genuine, and eminently human spirit of Cervantes’s literary creation. The idealism and visionary capacity of Martí and Darío was echoed by José Enrique Rodó, whose allegorical essay Ariel (1900) confesses a cautious admiration for the United States that, in his opinion, Latin Americans must temper by invoking the spirit of Ariel, Shakespeare’s character from The Tempest. In his essay, Rodó wrote, “That which humanity needs, to be saved from all pessimistic negation, is not so much a belief that all is well at present, as the faith that it is possible through life’s growth to arrive at a better state, hastened and discovered by the actions of men” (22). His words, directed to the youth of Latin America, enunciated not so much a utopian project, but a belief that each individual should reflect on the process necessary for the construction of a “better state” that would disown itself of any gratuitous idealism. As Aínsa has asserted, “Utopia should not so much warn of and propose a predetermined change as contribute to its orientation, which will depend in good measure on the occurring cultural transformations” (24). The principles expressed by Rodó managed to influence an entire generation of Latin American writers and intellectuals who sought to give voice to an infectious idealism mitigated by the increasing challenges to economic and political sovereignty. The idealism of the Chilean Gabriela Mistral, for example, emerged from a strong Catholic faith that dovetailed well with her explorations of a woman’s role in society. It also utilized poetry as a means of exorcising her personal frustrations and construct idealistic renderings of archetypal concepts such as motherhood. Her implicit criticism of stultifying

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gender roles and denunciation of injustices served to put her literary work on par with the humanitarian nature of her chosen profession, teaching. The poetry of the Peruvian César Vallejo commonly denounced injustices and violations of human rights, particularly with respect to the poorest and most marginalized of society. The only novel he produced, El tungsteno (1931), illustrated the plight of his indigenous countrymen as they labored in the mines for little compensation under a tyrannical capitalist system that exploited them in order to maximize profits and minimize overhead costs. Published posthumously in 1939, his last collection of poetry, Poemas humanos, censures the inhuman treatment of the poorest members of society and offers optimistic glances of a collective existence improved by individual efforts. The poem “Me viene, hay días, una gana ubérrima, política” concludes with the following stanza: I desire, finally, when I’m at the celebrated edge of violence or my heart full of chest, I would desire to help whoever smiles laugh, to put a little bird right on the evildoer’s nape, to take care of the sick annoying them, to buy from the vendor, to help the killer kill—a terrible thing— and I would desire to be good to myself in everything. (521, 523)

The surrealist imagery that Vallejo handled so deftly and expansively serves here as a vehicle from which to project his hopes for the future and to declare his role in improving the lives of fellow human beings. His desires, however, are not necessarily transparent, as he employs rather oblique and surrealist metaphors to express the desired changes: “to take care of the sick by annoying them” and “to help the killer kill,” for example (a verse which may also be translated as “to help kill the killer”). The litany of associations is a step toward resuscitating the human element that has been squelched by the mindnumbing routine of the day. The more transparent images represented by “helping [someone] laugh” and purchasing something from a salesman exist in conjunction with the illogical “placing a bird on the evildoer’s nape,” “taking care of the sick [by] making them angry,” and “helping the killer kill.” Obscure as they may appear at first glance, these wishes share the common characteristic of connecting the narrator’s own life and work to others by taking steps toward improving their lot. Even his self-referential conclusion, that “I would desire to be good to myself / in everything,” transcends its solipsistic frame of reference by including the term “everything” and combining the realm of the possible—self-improvement—with the impossible: including “everything” in that project.

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Other Latin American contemporaries of Mistral and Vallejo expressed a utopian project and shared their concern in promoting social justice, yet their priorities, methods, and ideological perspectives varied greatly. In Altazor (1931), for example, the futurist pronouncements, confessions, and declarations of the Chilean Vicente Huidobro reveal the construction of an eponymous protomythical protagonist that yearns to create something entirely new through the vehicle of language. This search is reflected throughout the text by the symbolic fall as a rite of passage that, after reflecting on the nature of God (Canto I), Woman (Canto II), and Time (Canto V), transforms him into a more perfect being that gradually harnesses his own strength and becomes a god in his own right. The apparently nonsensical utterances of the narrator in the final Canto VII—beginning with the first verse, “Ai aia aia,” and ending with the final line, “Ai a i a a i i i i o ia” (Huidobro)—replicate the existence of someone who has become unadulterated energy and has, through the act of falling, reached the desired zenith of his existence. His destiny, reflecting Huidobro’s own Creationist philosophy, has brought something entirely original to life on earth and has, implicitly, improved life for those who seek to connect with him. While the poetry of Huidobro may not possess the explicit social consciousness of novels by Miguel Ángel Asturias (El Señor Presidente, Hombres de maíz) or of verses by Pablo Neruda (Canto general), for example, it does share with these works an uncontained idealism that advocates some type of radical social or political change (Aínsa, Espacios, 25) and, to paraphrase Louis Marin, presents a sometimes vicious critique of dominant ideology (Utopics, 197). The impact of individuals such as Huidobro, Asturias, and Neruda who often presented rather utopian alternatives may be considered in light of other Latin American writers in the twentieth century who were also politically active, who participated directly in political life, or played a significant role in a concrete revolutionary process. The writings of Mariátegui, Augusto Sandino (1895–1934), Fidel Castro (1926–2016), Che Guevara (1928–1967), and Rigoberta Menchú (1959), for example, represent the unambiguous search for and projection of a better future, fruit of the struggle against imperialism and the remaining colonial structures of control and marginalization. In a letter from 1931 titled “Light and Truth” detailing his spiritual vision for the future for fellow Nicaraguan revolutionaries, Sandino mentions Justice, Light, Truth, God, and the “Divine impulse that supports and protects our Army” (Sandino). He also urges them to continue fighting and predicts during the twentieth century “That the oppressed peoples will break the chains of humiliation” and that “The only one that will remain buried forever is injustice” (Sandino). In reminding his soldiers of a Final Judgment, Sandino writes, “The Final Judgment of the world should be understood as the destruction of injustice across the world and the reign of the spirit of Light and Truth, that is to say Love” (Sandino). While his rhetoric is rather

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abstract and lacking in substantive details regarding the process that will allow “the oppressed peoples to break the chains of humiliation,” his representation of a better world and the intention to continue the struggle and to stand for the marginalized is clearly utopian in nature. After the victory of the Sandinista Revolution in 1979, the historical figure of Sandino “is transformed from a resistence figure to a protective image that inspires the creation of the new nation . . . that the revolutionary government intends to realize” (Villena Figo, 23). Like Sandino, Castro’s renowned and lengthy declaration during his trial in 1953 that “History will absolve me” encourages Cubans to construct a singular nation and look beyond the present moment, particularly to when future generations consider his legacy. In reflecting on the efforts of the Cuban generals to silence him and the small audience granted him at his trial, Castro declares: “I only wish I could have the whole Army before me! I know, one day, this Army will seethe with rage to wash away the terrible, the shameful bloodstains splattered across the military uniform by the present ruthless clique in its lust for power. On that day, oh what a fall awaits those mounted in arrogance on their noble steeds!—provided that the people have not dismounted them long before that!” (Castro). These comments allude to a future transformation of the armed forces, when they will renounce their violent past and be brought to justice by “the people.” When on January 3, 1959, he offered his speech “The Revolution Begins Now,” Castro proclaims that “The Revolution cannot be completed in a single day but you may be sure that we will carry the Revolution through to the full. You may be sure that for the first time the Republic will be truly and entirely free and the people will have their just recompense” (Castro). This reference to an abstract future time when the efforts of “the people” will be rewarded with a “truly” free country justifies the difficulties that will come with the victory of the revolution. It is also an explicit allusion to the collapse of the “Good Neighbor Policy” promoted by the United States during the 1940s and the disastrous Latin America policy of the Eisenhower presidency (1953–1961), predating liberation theologians by almost a generation. In the letter “Man and Socialism in Cuba” from March of 1965 to Carlos Quijano, editor of the Uruguayan journal Marcha, Che Guevara’s design for the “New Man and Woman” is continental in nature and invokes the present as fulcrum from which to raise the edifice of a better future for the Americas. In his opinion, the utopia will require a reconceptualization of labor: Man has still not transformed all the coercion surrounding him into conditioned reflexes of a social nature, and in many cases, he still produces under the pressure of the environment (Fidel calls this moral compulsion). He is still to achieve complete spiritual recreation in the presence of his own work,

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without the direct pressure of the social environment but bound to it by new habits. That will be communism. (Guevara, “Man and Socialism in Cuba”)

The “new habits” he mentions represent the redirecting of work by the necessities of the revolutionary program and of the nation as a whole. Specifically, economic production would be inseparable from ideological education in the creation of the New Man and would represent the continuous and selfless pursuit of an improved life. This New Man, however, would be a continuous work in progress, as men and women would be ceaselessly striving to improve themselves and their country in “a perfect identification between the government and the community as a whole.” “The image [of the New Man],” he wrote, “is not yet completely finished—it never will be, since the process goes forward hand in hand with the development of new economic forms” (13). Liberation, it seems, would be always within reach yet slightly out of their grasp in order to avoid complacency and motivate the people to recalibrate their relationship to revolutionary ideals. The utopias that Sandino, Castro, and Guevara were looking to construct employed a certain revolutionary mysticism to criticize (neo)imperialism, the United States, and global capitalism. For Sandino, however, this mysticism expressed itself through direct references to a “divine impulse,” “an invisible force,” Light, Truth, God, and “the laws that rule the Universe” (Sandino). In his speeches, Castro alluded to the power of the people in the transformation of a country, citing concrete historical injustices (the presidency of Gerardo Machado, for example, between 1925 and 1933) and wielding an array of facts and figures in support of his arguments. Guevara’s utopian vision centered on the privileged position of labor in the reconstruction of Cuba and the role of art and the artist in the revolution and was markedly more continental and global in nature (hence his correspondence with other revolutionary leaders throughout Latin America, his visits to over sixty nations, and his death in Bolivia). In Nicaragua, however, Sandino’s utopian vision was interrupted by his assassination in 1934 and by the decades of Somoza rule (1936–1979), further distorted by the second presidency of Daniel Ortega (2007–present). In Cuba, the utopian project envisioned by Castro and Guevara was plagued by economic ineffectiveness and a systematic intolerance of opposing ideological perspectives. Ironically, the construction of a path toward a new and improved Cuba whose citizens would enjoy a free education for life and comprehensive health care also facilitated the emergence of a parallel dystopian path characterized by censorship and a rigidly centralized national economy. The rhetoric surrounding the creation of a perfect Cuba has not diminished with the death of Fidel Castro, however, and the future role of the state in national affairs has not been reevaluated in light of changing global realities.

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In order to effectively impact a population, the formulation of a utopian vision frequently requires a denunciatory discourse that highlights the incongruities between public life as it is and as it should be. In Nicaragua, the writings and actions of Sandino in the 1920s against the US presence in his country inspired the foundation of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) in 1961. As an underground political organization that looked to unite the principal opposition movements in Nicaragua that soon became the chief avenue of resistance against the government of Anastasio Somoza, the FSLN was strongly influenced by the success of the Cuban Revolution and found much of its inspiration in the figure of Sandino and his struggle for Nicaraguan autonomy. Individuals such as Carlos Fonseca, Tomás Borge, and Michèle Najlis, among others, complemented the demonstrations, protests, and acts of resistance with essays and poems that contextualized the Somoza hegemony by imagining a post-Somoza Nicaragua. The poems of the priest Ernesto Cardenal, for example, began appearing in 1960, describing the growing unrest in Nicaragua with a language that combined social realism with a prophetic vision that foretold of a nation—and a continent— free of authoritarian leaders that ruled through fear and repression. His contemporary renderings of the biblical Psalms, Salmos (translated into English as The Psalms of Struggle and Liberation), manifested in verse form an apocalyptic vision of the present that incorporated biblical imagery and projected it toward an uncertain future filled with both possibility and dread. In the poem “Hear My Protest” (also known as Salmo 5 or “Escucha mis palabras oh Señor”), Cardenal exclaims, “At the time of the alarm siren / you will be with me / you will be my safety on the day of the Bomb” (Psalms, 16) and imagines a future in which all dangers will disappear as the presence of God will comfort and safeguard him. This God is not an intangible, abstract God, but a Being willing to accompany him and protect him from contemporary perils that reveal the contradictory existence of a perilous present and a better future. The “Bomb” is consequently capitalized to emphasize its very real potential to eliminate millions of human beings and its ability to serve as a mechanism of social control. The very literal “day of the Bomb” is accompanied by a self-indulgent understanding of a God that, in this text, represents a personal refuge that protects only the narrator. In “I Will Sing to You Lord of Your Marvelous Works” (also known as Salmo 9 or “Cantaré Señor tus maravillas”), Cardenal writes of those political figures who use violence to accomplish their goals, stating that “They will be defeated by their own armaments / and wiped out by their own police / Just as they purged others / others will purge them” (20). The text “Why Have You Abandoned Me?” (also known as Salmo 21 or “Dios mío Dios mío ¿por qué me has abandonado?”) predicts that “The poor will sit down to banquet / Our people will celebrate a great feast / This new generation soon to be born” (36). “The God of Vengeance” (also known as Salmo 93 or “Dios de las venganzas”) is more

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straightforward, concluding: “But the Lord is my defense / He will turn their own bullets against them / he will defeat them with their own political system / The Lord will wipe them out” (56). The rhetorical use of violent images is not necessarily novel in the condemnation of oppression and marginalization, yet Cardenal manages to use phrases such as “They will be defeated,” “He will defeat them,” “their own bullets,” and “wipe them out” as dynamic instruments that herald the advent of a future in which “This new generation soon to be born” will benefit from the injustices and the struggles of those who, like Cardenal, sacrificed personal gain in order to construct a better world. The rhetoric is reminiscent of the Crusades that the Church undertook during the Middle Ages, as the intention is to retake a moral ground that has been violently occupied by the US economy and military. God, Cardenal insists, is on the side of the just. The bases in this case, however, are entirely ethical, as it is the poor—with the help of God—who will transform society and create “This new generation soon to be born.” If the enunciation of a utopia is indeed “a critique of modern ideology” (Marin, Utopics, 194), then the criticism that Cardenal offers of prevailing economic and cultural structures, armed conflicts, and the escalating arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union dialogues neatly with his circumstances and offers a haven for those who wish for a continent free from the influence of the global superpowers. Although today the political authority of those global players has been somewhat distilled and companies from nations such as China, Germany, Canada, and Spain are currently investing in the Nicaraguan economy, there is a very palpable sense that little has changed for the majority of the nation’s poor. 4 Between August 2007 and October 2011, for example, the cost of a “basic food basket doubled” (World Food Programme, 5). If anything, the state is developing economic relationships that force the country to depend almost exclusively on a limited number of foreign enterprises for the vast majority of its income and, in the process, continue to offer few opportunities for individual growth. 5 The possibility of an alternative existence that would improve current circumstances first saw its literary manifestations in Latin America in those individuals who committed themselves to denouncing injustices. A number of the political and intellectual founders of modern Latin American nationstates such as Francisco de Miranda, Simón Bolívar, and Andrés Bello were from upper-middle- or upper-class backgrounds and may have been guilty of replicating colonial power structures and of maintaining the cultural and economic inequalities that had been established during the reign of the Spanish Crown (Miranda, for example, was perceived to be a friend to Spain). Yet they also envisioned a future in which individuals would participate more directly and effectively in an emancipatory national and continental project. In his well-known “Letter from Jamaica” (1815), Bolívar expresses his pessimism and disappointment in Latin American politicians and leaves room for

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the occasional glimmer of optimism, stating in one of the more famous lines that “More than anyone, I desire to see America fashioned into the greatest nation in the world, greatest not so much by virtue of her area and wealth as by her freedom and glory” (Bolívar). This “desire,” however, is tempered by the difficult realities facing Latin American emancipation from Spain. As an observer and erstwhile participant in the American and French Revolutions, Francisco de Miranda was older than either Bolívar and Bello by over thirty years and had a privileged position on the historical circumstances of his day. In 1784, when Bello was three years old and Bolívar a twelve-month-old toddler, Miranda had met with Henry Knox and Alexander Hamilton in New York about the liberation of “the entire Spanish-American continent,” believing in the primary role that politics and political action in human events. The nation-state he envisioned for Venezuela had certain imperialist characteristics, yet his idea included emancipation for all from the yoke of the Spanish crown, differing “nation” (i.e., Spain) from “homeland” (Venezuela). His loyalty, however, would be questioned by Bolívar—his military subordinate— when, after forty years in exile, Miranda returned to his homeland at the age of sixty-one in a frustrated attempt to rebel against Spain and, in defeat, laid down his weapons at the feet of the Spanish authorities. Bolívar ended up turning him in for treason, forcing Miranda to spend the rest of his days in jail. As a public intellectual, Bello engaged both Miranda and Bolívar on different fronts. In his writings, for example, Bello struggled to come to terms with the apparent contradiction between “freedom” and “liberty,” giving primacy to the freedom of the individual over social freedom or what he termed freedom of the whole. This freedom—whichever freedom—was specific, not an abstraction, something centrally rooted in a specific context: “[Bello] acknowledges the convenience of adapting the form of government to the locality, customs, and personalities of every nation, recommending legislators to distance themselves from sparkly theories and, instead, to feel out the nature and necessities of the people to whom a specific legislation should be applied” (Squella, 231). Although Bolívar, Miranda, and Bello may be considered precursors of the independence movement throughout the Spanish colonies, there were important differences. Miranda, for example, had lived outside his homeland for some forty years, dividing his time between travels to North America, France, and other locations, meeting and corresponding with Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, and Robespierre, among others, as well as Bolívar and Bello. In Venezuelan historiography, however, Bolívar has occupied a privileged position. Yet it was Bolívar who turned Miranda in and brought about his imprisonment. As Xavier Reyes Matheus indicates, “Asked about these events, official Venezuelan history has preferred to ignore them rather than clarify that the vileness which surrounds them is attributed to the memory of the Precursos

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[Miranda] or the Liberator [Bolívar]” (70–71). Given the radical difference between the ideal and the real, these projects and the ideas of Bolívar, Miranda, and Bello would ultimately possess more authority as cartographic documents of the Latin American imaginary than as templates of political or cultural emancipation. UTOPIA AND TESTIMONIO In the process of formulating and articulating their vision, utopias reflect and establish a dialogue with a vast array of epistemologies and have consistently sought to expand the boundaries of any number of ideological spaces. These utopias have, throughout history, represented the “inverted reflection of the society from the author’s imaginary” (Aínsa, “El destino,” 37). Considering this “inverted reflection” of reality and the manner in which emancipatory narrative in Latin America denounces oppression to advocate social, political, economic, and cultural liberation, the testimonio commonly employs a utopian visualization of the future that participates in the dynamic construction of sites of solidarity such as local microcommunities, urban centers of population, and rural areas, as well as national and transnational hierarchies of power. As Arturo Arias has written, the stories told by testimonios “accumulate rhetorical power because they lean on rich narrative structures, because they accumulate rhetorical power in their retelling, in those processes that create exemplary lives supported by ethical action, in which we may still see the traces of utopian plots and of literary games telling stories that integrte the ‘is’ and the ‘should be’” (“La literariedad,” 202–3). Since the inception in 1969 of the Casa de las Américas literary prize for testimonial narrative as a challenge to Eurocentric literary norms and as a response to those prose works that transcend the boundaries of traditional non-fiction prose, testimonio has been subject to any number of intricate definitions that have, ultimately, defied any facile attempt to delineate its borders. Although some trace the roots of the testimonio to the first European chronicles and reports written at the beginning of the Conquest (Prada Oropeza, 7) and to the works of Bolívar and Martí (Beverley, “The Margin,” 25), the first contemporary manifestations of the genre may be found in works such as Biografía de un cimarrón (1966) by Miguel Barnet and Operación masacre (1957) by Rodolfo Walsh, as well as the Chilean journal Solidaridad (1976–1990). Despite predating Menchú’s work by six years, “Si me permiten hablar . . .”: Testimonio de Domitila, una mujer de las minas de Bolivia (“Let Me Speak!”: Testimony of Domitila, A Woman of the Bolivian Mines, 1977) by Domitila Barrios de Chungara has not received the critical attention it deserves. In Nicaragua the most significant precedent for the testimonio continues to be Hombre del Caribe (1977) by Sergio Ramírez, a

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work that offers the memoirs of Abelardo Cuadra Vega—one of the men who participated in the assassination of Sandino in 1934—and made Ramírez particularly noticeable in the Central American struggles of the second half of the 1970s. Miguel Mármol (1972) by the Salvadoran Roque Dalton (1935–1975), a close friend of many Nicaraguan writers in the 1960s and 1970s, provided the foundation and the continuing legacy of the historiography of the 1932 peasant massacre into the foundational discourse of the FMLN in El Salvador. As is evident by references to numerous testimonial works, the testimonio also participates in the process of nation-building (Beverley, On the Politics, 24) and is to be distinguished from autobiography in that testimonio continuously iterates a “connection with a group or class situation marked by marginalization, oppression, and struggle” (Beverley, “The Margin,” 36). Due to its inscription within “struggles” of national, gender, cultural, ethnic, or racial liberation, testimonio is also an expression of what in 1986 Fredric Jameson termed Third World literature (“Third World Literature”), a concept further explored by in 1991 by Georg M. Gugelberger. 6 The debate surrounding testimonio shifted around 2000, when considerations on its nature became secondary to the nature and role of memory itself (i.e., forms of representation vs. forms of memory). How do testimonialists problematize their community, gender, subalternized, and racialized subjects? They add depth and complexity to the category of testimonio itself. As later debates would demonstrate, contemporary testimonios do not enunciate the truth: They construct the differentiated lived experiences of testimoniantes as they fight for their daily survival and attempt to give meaning to the condition of their existence. Recent writings by Arturo Arias, for example, demonstrate how the critical debate has shifted surrounding testimonio, notably in the differences between critical studies on the genre in the United States and Latin America. 7 In his work, Arias has also taken on recent sanctifications of the testimonio and subtly asserts its independence, declaring that “[I]t is not the responsibility of cultural thinking to find new political possibilities within the limits of a globalized and neoliberal present” (“La literariedad,” 198). He has also criticized the manner in which testimonio and literature became rather interchangeable, denaturing the essence of the works and observing that “The substitution of testimonios alone for literary texts also risked essentializing the former, simplifying complex social processes and relations and fetishizing their subaltern subjects” (Taking Their Word, xii). His own reflections on the matter, however, reflect a certain tendency to essentialize the genre and associate it rather exclusively to I, Rigoberta Menchú, the Stoll controversy, the Maya, and, ultimately, Guatemala. More currently, a neotestimonio of sorts has emerged in light of recent global and neoliberal policies that introduce a representative yet marginalized voice from within a construct

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that is gradually beginning to privilege social media and its limited power to address injustice. The considerations of Arias, Beverley, and Gugelberger, among many others, 8 have often facilitated an understanding of the intricate essence of the testimonio, a genre that has begun to wane on the literary scene as movements of national liberation install themselves within the limits of hegemonic discourses; yet the delimitations that have been suggested often consider the subaltern subject as an object of observation and analysis that is inspected according to the degree or distance of (dis)similitude existent between the subject, the interlocutor, and the gaze of the reader. The commonalities between testimonio and the poetry workshops offered by Ernesto Cardenal and the Ministry of Culture during the first years of the Sandinista government in the 1980s, for example, speak to the decolonizing role of memory in the construction of a (new) national identity, particularly in processing the experience of dehumanizing trauma. The fact, for example, that testimonio generally encompasses various literary genres and subgenres and that it is initially produced as a non-written (read “oral”) document from cultures situated in emerging economies suggests that it has been the academies in North America and Europe that have largely contributed to its definition and canonization through its transformation into an emancipatory document. Many of the accepted definitions of testimonio, for example, insinuate that the text works through a form of osmosis that is able to absorb the salient characteristics of a representative life and, through the intervention of a second individual that helps to tell the story, transform it into something textually familiar to audiences outside the margins so that the story may be told. While the “second individual,” the interlocutor, may intervene in the text as seamlessly as possible, the fact remains that the work is typically a manipulation of the subaltern subject’s language and projects an ideological or epistemological bias upon the reader. The issue is not that it occurs, but rather that the impression is often given that these discourses emanate organically and spontaneously from the subaltern’s social, political, or cultural context. As a consequence, the scribe, transcriber, or editor subsequently runs the danger of appropriating and territorializing subaltern discourse. As the author of over eighty works of essay, poetry, and oral history, Margaret Randall has dedicated her career to researching and writing on the liberation of the marginalized and oppressed in countries such as Cuba and Nicaragua. 9 In her work Testimonio: A Guide to Oral History (1985), Randall offers a functional list of characteristics of “testimony” that includes “the use of primary sources,” “the presentation of a story through the voice or voices of the people who have experienced it,” “immediacy,” and “a keen esthetic sense” (7). Yet her advice and reflections on writing the actual “testimony” represents an evident alteration of the “story”: “We want to communicate with our readers. We want to transmit to them not only certain informa-

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tion with its multiple facets but, more importantly, we want them to be touched by what they read: to feel what we feel, to understand—in the time that it takes to read a book or testimonial work—what we have come to understand through a long period of work” (33). Without disregarding the self-determining genuineness and authority that temper her comments, the transparent treatment of a narrative that ultimately looks to reflect the painstaking and prolonged amount of work and emotional capital that the interlocutor invested in the project speaks as much to the manipulation of the subaltern subject as it does to the authenticity and importance of the message contained in the work. As researchers such as John Beverley have noted, this dilemma has called into question the alleged “objectivity” of the testimonial interlocutor and, ultimately, led to the disintegration of the conventional rules of engagement “between the text and history, representation and real life, public and private spheres, objectivity and solidarity” (“Testimonio, Subalternity,” 259). 10 It also highlights the distinct manners in which a testimonial text may be intercepted by a second narrator. 11 In his work The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Frantz Fanon coined the expression “combat literature” to designate those works that actively engage a people and contribute to the revolutionary construction of national identity: “Literary creation addresses and clarifies typically nationalist themes. This is combat literature in the true sense of the word, in the sense that it calls upon a whole people to join in the struggle for the existence of the nation. Combat literature, because it informs the national consciousness, gives it shape and contours, and opens up new, unlimited horizons” (173). While testimonio may not explicitly “call upon a whole people,” the presence of an interlocutor who looks to transmit a particular social, political, cultural, or economic problematic and of a representative narrator whose locus of enunciation is on the margins of globalization situates the work squarely within the parameters of national identity. The priority of testimonio, however, is not generally the construction or articulation of a national identity that looks to define itself in the face of a colonial enterprise, but the manifestation of a “sincerity” (Beverley, “The Margin,” 26) that finds itself on the edges of and, frequently, at odds with national discourse. As Beverley has written, “[T]he subject that speaks in testimonio has a differential relationship with the nation and ‘the general will’ expressed in representative democracy: it is what is not, or not yet, the nation” (Testimonio, 18). Testimonio, therefore, takes Fanon’s concept of combat literature and transforms it into a revolutionary literature that transcends the boundaries of the nation. 12 The epistemic presence of the revolution in testimonio as expressed by the individual voice of the narrator ultimately connects with the experience of thousands of compatriots and serves as a subtle pedagogical instrument. As Enrique Ubieta Gómez has

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written, “To live the experience of a revolution is an irreplaceable school for the masses, for each individual” (269). Considering the frequent revolutionary genesis and potential of testimonio, it is evident that the genre possesses a utopian dimension with apparent implications on future constructions of individual, community, and national identity that much of the critical literature surrounding testimonio has overlooked. 13 It is this dimension, however, that is most decisive in its ultimate impact on social, political, cultural, or economic practices. In works of testimonio, the past and present life experiences that the narrator relates and the explicit denunciations evident in the work may then be understood as a template with which to construct a better future through a narrative that, although anchored in the relative autonomy of the text, is known to be bursting with life lessons that individuals may find useful. As George Yúdice has indicated, a specific intention of the genre is to connect the people as plural subject with the possibility of a better existence as, in testimonio, “Truth is summoned in the cause of denouncing a present situation of exploitation and oppression or in exorcising and setting aright official history” (“Testimonio and Postmodernism,” 17). This is, in essence, the implicit message of utopian works that have traditionally been enunciated within the confines of contextual history and in response to historical circumstances in order to compose and offer an alternative to what is perceived as the inherent asymmetry of the hegemonic power structures. The parallels between the varieties of testimonio and traditional utopian thinking are readily apparent when we recall that a utopia is “incongruent with reality” (Mannheim, 192), “a critique of dominant ideology” (Marin, Utopics, 197), that it “transcend[s] the real” (Maffesoli, Logic, 50), that it induces cultural and political change (Aínsa, Espacios, 25), that it highlights the crisis of contemporary liberal democracies (Aínsa, Espacios, 69) and that, like testimonio as literary genre, it is an “ambiguous representation” that “points to a possible future reconciliation and a present acting contradiction of the concept of history” (Marin, Utopics, 8–9). While testimonio cannot amputate the past nor reshape the present, it can be an emancipatory filter that narrates and denounces oppression, inequality, and injustices both past and present from a representative perspective that is implicitly tied to the struggle against and eradication of human suffering. Although its discursive movement from the periphery toward a social, political, or cultural center is both paradoxical and somewhat incongruous, the idealism inherent to many testimonios centers it within a survival hermeneutics. 14 In its utopian ethic and in its potential to transform the narrator, the interlocutor, and the reading public, the testimonio is both liberating and liberational in that it participates in a catharsis that may very well free the narrator from the weight of history as well as engage and motivate its readers to take part in the multifaceted process of self-determining liberation. As Omar Cabezas once declared,

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“Testimonio has to serve to level the road, to make the road easier, to help others to walk. [ . . . ] I think that testimonio, as a genre, should serve to construct men, who with their experience help others” (Anonymous, “Con Omar Cabezas,” 125). As Cabezas alludes, the strength of testimonio is that it transforms an individual life experience into a collective event that serves as a paradigm for others. Ultimately, the context that grounds the roots of any individual testimonio utilizes the narrative to project itself across and into future historical spaces in order to serve as example and remedy for potential abuses of power. As a number of critics such as Beverley have observed, it is more appropriate to speak of testimonios in the plural given the fragmenting and heterogeneous nature of the works in the genre. For that reason, Beverley noted that works as diverse as El diario de campaña de Che Guevara en Bolivia (1966–1967), Miguel Mármol (1972) by Roque Dalton, Aquí no ha pasado nada (1972) by Ángela Zago, Soy un delincuente (1974) by Ramón Antonio Brizuela, and a section of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth may all be considered testimonial works (“Anatomía,” 7–8). In Latin American testimonial narrative, a growing list of more canonical works 15 bespeaks the inherent diversity of a genre that projects itself into the future vis-à-vis the denunciation of oppression and the expressed hope for living circumstances to change. The first sections of I, Rigoberta Menchú, for example, reflect the belief that the suffering of the Quiché people would never change. In describing the destiny of a newborn child, she declares that “To us, suffering is our fate, and the child must be introduced to the sorrows and hardship” (12). One evening when she was eight years old, she wakes up and sees the sleeping faces of her brothers and sisters covered in mosquitoes. “That was our world,” she states. “I felt that it would always be the same. It hadn’t ever changed” (22). Her perspective begins to change, however, when she appreciates that their community is not alone in its suffering: “I was also very happy when I realized that it wasn’t just my problem; that I wasn’t the only little girl to have worried about not wanting to grow up” (118). Witnessing the suffering of her people and connecting it to other populations gradually awakens her consciousness and inspires her to instill in others the hope of a better future: “I remember that it was my job to explain to the children of the community that our situation had nothing to do with fate but was something which had been imposed on us” (119). As she considers the possibilities, Menchú confesses that “I didn’t sleep much during this period, thinking about the future” (120), and proceeds to detail the process by which her community began to organize itself by petitioning for a school. In another chapter that describes the horrific torture and death of her brother, Menchú admits to the confusion felt by the members of her family as they attempt to understand the meaning of her brother’s death. “We concluded that the most important thing was to organise the people so that they wouldn’t have to suffer the way we had, see

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that horror film that was my brother’s death” (181). The connection that Menchú establishes between torment and social mobilization is significant, as she implicitly declares that the first may be eradicated by the introduction of the second. The unmistakable transformation of Menchú from an unassuming young campesina to a militant Quiché reveals not only the inspiration of family members such as her brother and father, but also the fact that, through communal mobilization, she began to discern the possibility of a future that found a way to fight against “the struggles and hardship” imposed on her people. As Barbara Harlow has noted with respect to Menchú’s work, “The nature and conditions of the struggle itself are thus shown to play a critical role in determining future forms of organization” (191). In I, Rigoberta Menchú, the work and the idealistic nature of her ultimate objectives gradually come to represent that “inverted reflection” noted by Aínsa (“El destino,” 37) that, in the case of Menchú, mirrors the difficulties endured by the Quiché population of Guatemala and amplifies the utopian dimension of her work. By the end of the testimonial, therefore, her vision has become clearer. In describing the role that Christianity plays in her life, she emphasizes that the defense of her cause represents a struggle in the face of “our enemy” and “our faith within [a] revolutionary process” (246) that is agnostic in origin. “At the same time,” she continues, “we have to think about the important work we have to do, after our victory, in the new society” (246). The reference in this statement is not only a better future framed rather optimistically and, therefore, idealistically, but the enunciation of a “new society” that will occur as a consequence of their “important work.” Besides the apparent references in her language to the “new man and woman” articulated by Che Guevara, the phrase implies that this “new society” will be a direct result of “our victory” against structural violence, injustice, oppression, and marginalization. In its utopian perspective, Menchú’s message is both liberating and liberational: her work helps to release her from the downward spiral of continuous violence, and the imagining of the tangible “new society” produced by her work motivates others to participate in the process and dovetails with the concept of a better society for all as envisioned and conceived by liberation philosophy and interculturalism. Nicaraguan testimonio has been equally effective in articulating a commitment to the marginalized through the enunciation of suffering and inequity and the construction of a very public connection between the individual and society. Works such as Las sandinistas (1980) by Elizabeth Maier, Cristianos en la revolución (1983) by Margaret Randall, and La paciente impaciencia (1989) by Tomás Borge, among many others, 16 have centered on the efforts against the Somoza government and on the origins, actions, and consequences of the Sandinista Revolution. As minister of culture, Ernesto Cardenal advocated the testimonio as a unique avenue of self-expression and

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supported distinct testimonial practices in painting, film, popular music, and literature (Rueda Estrada, 151). In the national imaginary, Fire from the Mountain by Cabezas offers one of the more prominent examples of Nicaraguan testimonio and describes the transformation of the narrator from a rather egotistic university student to a selfless member of the Frente who decides to leave his life behind and participate in the rebellion against the Somoza regime. His descriptions of the countryside, of his fellow revolutionaries, of the Frente, and of the subversive actions they undertake border on being mystical experiences that transcend the physical reality of the moment to create a more profound level of significance that border on the retroactive construction of a national utopia. The marches through the dense forest become unambiguous walks toward a better future; the difficulties of sleeping or eating are endured as a necessary part of the revolutionary effort; even the flora and fauna are perceived as participating in the struggle, as they contribute to hiding or camouflaging his movements and those of his compañeros. Even the title of the work in Spanish, La montaña es más que una inmensa estepa verde—The Mountain Is More Than an Immense Green Steppe— evokes an otherworldly aura that surpasses the mere physicality of the mountain and connects the geography to the movement to depose Somoza. The mountain is “immense,” Cabezas admits, but its physical dimensions cannot compare with the symbiotic role that it plays in the uprising as it shelters the Sandinistas and punishes Somoza’s troops. The presence of the mountain in both the title and the narrative of Cabezas’s work functions as a decolonizing trope that draws attention to the role of geography and context in the construction of his personal utopia. His frequent personification of the mountain represents an explicit effort to include the topography in the struggle and make it a willing participant in the Sandinista efforts to create a better country, one free of Somoza. When he went underground to northern Nicaragua after six years of working with the FSLN in his hometown of León, he acknowledges the “sort of mythical force” of mountain: “It was where our power was, and our arms, and our best men; it was our indestructability, our guarantee of a future, the ballast that would keep us from going under in the dictatorship; it was our determination to fight to the end, the certainty that life must change, that Somoza must not go on polluting every aspect of existence” (17). The objective truth of his statement—that the “power” and “best men” of the FSLN were ultimately always recruited for insurgency work in the mountains—is gradually usurped by a subjective and rather spiritual vision of their mission, using terms such as “ballast” and “determination” to describe the relationship between the geography of the nation and the craving of the people for change. This mountain was “our guarantee of a future,” uncertain yet conceivable in light of growing popular support and expanded efforts against the Somoza regime. The transformation of Nicaragua during the second half of the 1970s reflects

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effectively Louis Marin’s characterization of utopia as existing in the “gap” or “interval” between rulers and their subjects (“The Frontiers,” 404), those who long for a better life: Although still using the National Guard to impose order and authority by force, by that time the Somoza was both nationally and internationally discredited. The FSLN, growing in popularity and strength, had been in existence since 1961 and was finding its footing, as it were, during the 1970s, a time when the two iterations of Nicaragua coexisted and crossed paths: One, Somoza’s Nicaragua, waning; the other, a Sandinista nation, on the rise. In this particular moment, in this “gap” and intersection, the designs for the overthrow of the dictator and the enunciation of a better Nicaragua found fertile ground and growing popular support. Writing on the relationship between the rural population and the FSLN, Cabezas writes, “We were trying to awaken the campesino to his own dream. We wanted to make him see that though that dream was dangerous—since it implied struggle—the land was their right. And we began to cultivate that dream” (210). In this passage, the “dream” is invoked through the relationship to the land and the work of the FSLN. What is implicit is the utopian goal of such a “dream”: that the land they worked would one day belong exclusively to them. While such an ideal is intimately linked to the efforts of the FSLN, it is evident that, though well intended, these efforts as expressed by Cabezas were frequently somewhat paternalistic. Phrases such as “trying to awaken,” “to make him see,” and “to cultivate that dream” are reminiscent of the language used by Freire in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, first published in 1968, only a few years before the action of the book takes place. Notwithstanding this likely liberational element, however, the phrases also speak to the possible implicit bias that members of the FSLN had toward rural populations in the expression and ultimate fulfillment of their utopia and “dream.” The utopian symbolism of land and of the mountain and the optimism these inspired, however, were not without reservations. When his friend and comandante Rene Tejada, alias Tello, was killed near Waslala in a skirmish with the National Guard, Cabezas begins to doubt that the mountain is on their side or, for that matter, that it can remain objective. In processing the death of his friend and the role of the mountain in the struggle, he wants to believe that the mountain must ultimately be on their side, that it must be aware of their virtue when “she” realizes that, upset as the mountain may be at his death, Tello was only part of the overall effort: “[S]he had to realize that Tello was not the end of the world. She had to realize that Tello was the beginning of the world, because after him came all of us with our teeth clenched and our feet bound up with mountain leprosy, with our wet fingers on the trigger, with our heavy packs—we had the power to light a fire in her heart” (127). In this passage, the description of a coming better life transmits a number of the Sandinista values: an appreciation of an individual’s work,

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an understanding that the mission of the FSLN transcends any individual, and a personal relationship with the community that surrounds you. The community and its utopian construction, in Fire from the Mountain, consistently includes the mountain itself as accomplice and co-conspirator against the Somozas. The “beginning of the world” included Tello, Cabezas, the compañeros, and, naturally, Cabezas himself. If the mountain was momentarily upset at the death of Tello, it had to at the very least allow them to inspire her, “to light a fire in her heart.” This “fire,” symbol of both creation and destruction, dovetails gracefully with the concept of utopia and the ideals embodied by the Sandinistas. The optimism Cabezas expresses when referencing his struggle and his relationship with the mountain is also evident throughout the text when he recalls his youth and relates moments of particular confidence. As a young college student, for example, Cabezas initiated his activism on the campus as a member of the Frente Estudiantil Revolucionario (FER) and contacts with other organizations at the Universidad de León, noting that “I think, as they say, we radiated youth in those days” (28). When the FSLN contacts him and recruits him for the mountains, he also expresses an idealism embodied by a firm belief in the importance of their mission and their ultimate victory: “So I left for the mountains with boundless faith. And it wasn’t just the romantic glow of that march I was telling you about, but this: behind that march was a whole political experience, an organizational experience, an experience of struggle, in this case in the streets” (47). The “youth” and “faith” expressed in these phrases clearly relate to the fact that Cabezas was convinced his work was gradually leading to a better Nicaragua. As a young university student, the “radiated youth” was the equivalent of a hope as yet unlimited by the responsibilities of adult life; as a fledgling member of the FSLN who had been called up to fight in the mountains, Cabezas was conscious of the motivating force behind his actions and the actions of the Frente, of how this force represented the bedrock of a future Nicaragua. Although this “boundless faith” was grounded in reality, it was a faith projected toward the future, toward a time that was palpable and possible and, for the moment, nonexistent. Reading Fire from the Mountain, it is apparent that the construction of a better world informed his decision to join the FSLN and allowed him to connect with a continental identity and with the struggle against colonial thinking and Eurocentrism. Witnessing the demonstrations in Subtiava against the Somoza regime, Cabezas reflects on the significance of leaving for the mountains and on the relationship between the bravery of his fellow Nicaraguans and his departure: “So when I left for the mountains I knew they could kill me. But I also knew that this march of Indians [in Subtiava] was a march of Latin American Indians, a march of Indians against colonialism, a march of Indians against Imperialism, a march of Indians that could mark the

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end, or the beginning of the end, of the exploitation of our peoples” (41–42). Later in the book, Cabezas again remembers the implication of going to the mountains to fight: “When you left for the mountains, you began the process of the forced shedding of your present. Against your will you were hurling that present back into the past, as if bits of your flesh were being left behind” (201). This process, he describes, is essential in the creation of the New Man as formulated by Che Guevara. Evoking an especially difficult moment in the mountains, when they were marching with seventy-five-pound packs and could go no further, Cabezas recalls the tension with Tello, their commander, his anger, and, subsequently, his words of inspiration for the group: “‘You know where to find the new man? The new man is in the future, the man we want to create with the new society, when the revolution triumphs.’ We just stared. ‘No brothers,’ he said, ‘do you know where he is? He’s there on the ridge at the top of the hill we’re climbing. He’s right there; go get him, grab him, look for him, take hold of him” (93). These examples illustrate the accessibility of the utopian project for Cabezas and, by extension, the FSLN: their struggle was the struggle—and ultimate victory—of all peoples of Latin America who continued to suffer under colonial power structures; who, in the process, looked toward the future and not the past; and for whom abstract goals such as “the new society” were incompatible with the truth of the arduous climb that awaited them. Utopia, as expressed in Fire from the Mountain, was a reference to a specific future time, one which would efficiently codify their suffering into an organic whole concomitant within the possibilities of the revolution. As the locus where memory functions to recall the past, refashion it, and project it toward a possible future, the imaginary embodies the potential of utopian projects, a place “that would allow the criticism and the realization of the possible at the same time” (Maffesoli, 81). This is, in essence, one of the purposes of Fire from the Mountain: to bringing the utopia down to earth, so to speak, and fill the gap between a facile condemnation/romanticization of the past and a blind confidence in the future. The numerous definitions of testimonio offered the previous four decades have not effectively reconsidered the utopian dimension of the genre, particularly the role of the interlocutor within the structure of the narrative’s chronotope and the subtle yet potential objectification. Margaret Randall’s socially committed works of oral history, marginalization, and testimonio give witness to the plight of the oppressed, yet in Testimonios she recommends that the interlocutor or literal writer of testimony “be conscious of his/her role as the transmitter of a voice capable of representing the masses” (8) and explicitly manipulate the text in order to achieve the greatest emotional effect (33). While we may give her the benefit of the doubt and recognize that the awareness that she is asking from the interlocutor may simply underscore both the secondary importance of the scribe and the primary priority of

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signifying the testimonial subject, there is an ethical vacuum here that has not been addressed adequately. The utopian dimension of a testimonio projects the narrator as subject through the emancipatory message that denunciation of and liberation from oppression and marginalization for one represents a future liberation for all. The intervention of memory and historical remembrance in Fire from the Mountain is crucial, particularly in the enunciation of the ou-topos that Cabezas is implicitly exploring. This utopia, however, must be considered as both a no-place and a no-time in order to effectively consider its implications as a potentially transformative location and event. NOTES 1. According to Leiva, Latin American neostructuralism is “simultaneously an alternative vision to neoliberal dogmatism, a comprehensive development strategy, an integrated policy framework, and a grand narrative about the path toward modernity that the twenty-first century allegedly offers to Latin American and Caribbean societies” (3). 2. In her work Foundational Fictions, Doris Sommer declares that her “first concern” is “To show the inextricability of politics from fiction in the history of nation-building” (5–6) in Latin America. 3. According to Sommer, the idealism expressed in many nineteenth-century romance fictions such as Cumandá and María was strictly conditioned by their adherence to traditional roles: “It will be evident that many romances strive toward socially convenient marriages and that, despite their variety, the ideal stages they project are rather hierarchical” (6). 4. As indicated by a recent report by the World Food Programme, “42 percent of households live in poverty and 15 percent in extreme poverty on less than US$1.25 per day. Poverty levels are highest in rural areas, where 63 percent of the population are poor and 27 percent live in extreme poverty. In the North Atlantic Autonomous Region (RAAN, Región Autónoma del Atlántico Norte), where most indigenous communities live, 37 percent of rural people live in extreme poverty” (5). 5. One example is the relationship that Nicaragua enjoys with Venezuela. As indicated in a 2012 Department of State Climate Investment Statement, Nicaragua depends heavily on a limited number of industries and has willingly entered into trade agreements that are beneficial for both parties. The government, for example, owns a 45 percent share of Petronic, the Nicaraguan state-owned petroleum company, with the other 55 percent owned by the Venezuelan Oil Company (PDVSA). Between 2007 and 2011, “oil monetization” earned approximately $1.8 billion in funds for Nicaragua (Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs). This relationship, however, is skewed in favor of Venezuela and almost assures that very little profit actually reaches the Nicaraguan people. 6. Beverley writes that “[T]here began to emerge throughout the Third World [ . . . ] a literature of personal witness and involvement designed to make the cause of these [liberation] movements known to the outside world, to attract recruits, to reflect on successes or failures of the struggle, and so on” (“The Margin,” 26). According to Gugelberger, there are “five topics of interest which ‘Third World literature’ has in common: 1) The political and economic present; 2) The colonial past; 3) Response to European or Western civilization: this is generally a rejection of the West including its canonized literary models [. . .]; 4) Language issues: for example, orature vs. literature [. . .]; and 5) Formation of the canon: subversion of the present canon and emphasis on canonical revision” (“Decolonizing,” 517–18). 7. In “La literariedad, la problemática étnica y la articulación de discursos nacionales en Centroamérica,” Arias writes that, after the publication of the testimonio by Menchú, critics in the United States “attempted to elaborate complex theories that encompassed the entire continent, and de facto skipped over the particular characteristics of power that could be found in its origins” (199). In Taking Their Word. Literature and the Signs of Central America, for exam-

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ple, Arias writes that “testimonios were never considered an undisputed genre or embodiments of juridical ‘truth’ south of the border” (134). 8. The bibliography on testimonio is abundant and often contradictory and includes opposite ideological positions (Marc Zimmerman and John Beverly, for example, and David Stoll) as well as different geographic contextualizations that take into account the distinct sociopolitical circumstances of each work (Leonel Delgado Aburto). One of the first edited works dedicated to the study of the genre in Latin American literature was the volume edited in 1986 by René Jara and Hernán Vidal, Testimonio: On the Politics of Truth. Elzbieta Sklodowska explores the work of writers such as Elena Poniatowska and Miguel Barnet and summarizes the principle theoretical debates surrounding the literary possibilities of testimonio in her work Testimonio hispanoamericano (1992), and María Virginia González offers a useful review of the current debate on testimonio between “the Anglo-American academy” and Latin American scholars and writers in her study “Tensiones en la crítica: el testimonio.” A skillful summary of “the critical reception of the testimonio” (161) is offered by Santiago Colás in his article “What’s Wrong with Representation? Testimonio and Democratic Culture.” 9. A selection of Randall’s titles on oral history and revolution include Cuban Women Now (1974), Inside the Nicaraguan Revolution: The Story of Doris Tijerino (1978), Sandino’s Daughters (1981), Christians in the Nicaraguan Revolution (1984), Our Voice/Our Lives: Stories of Women from Central America and the Caribbean (1995), and When I Look Into the Mirror and See You: Women, Terror and Resistance (2002). 10. With respect to the relationship between the narrator and the interlocutor, Beverley writes, “The inequalities and contradictions of gender, class, race, ethnicity, nationality, and cultural authority that determine the ‘urgent’ situation of the testimonial narrator may also reproduce themselves in the narrations of the narrator and the interlocutor” (“Testimonio, Subalternity,” 260). 11. These include memoirs, autobiographies, and the “as told to” variety of textual selfrepresentation. 12. It is no coincidence that Fanon’s work and the essays included in what is considered the first revolutionary testimonial, Pasajes de la guerra revolucionaria by Che Guevara (Duchesne, “Las narraciones,” 122), were written approximately the same years, between 1958 and 1961. 13. In her work Resistance Literature (1987), Barbara Harlow dedicates a chapter to the possible parallels between resistance literature and utopia, focusing principally on a series of African novels. A number of critics allude to the potential of testimonio to subvert dominant representations of the present and offer implicit or explicit alternatives for the future. Juan Duchesne writes that testimonio “Narrates the development of a plan of action directed at transforming a social reality” (85); Jorge Narváez indicates that “[T]estimonial es a genre in itself transformative of reality” (240); Alberto Moreiras states that “Testimonio provides its reader with the possibility of entering what we might call a subdued sublime: the twilight region where the literary breaks off into something else, which is not so much the real as its unguarded possibility” (“The Aura of Testimonio,” 195); and George Yúdice emphasizes the inherent capacity of testimonio to act as witness and guide for the improvement of a society when he asserts that “[T]estimonial writing is first and foremost an act, a tactic by means of which people engage in the process of self-constitution and survival” (“Testimonio and Postmodernism,” 19). 14. A variation of this concept was introduced by George Yúdice in his influential essay “Marginality and the Ethics of Survival,” in which he studies Rigoberta Menchú’s work Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia and declares “The very nature of the struggle for survival among the oppressed creates a situation of unifixity and open-endedness that makes possible new unfoldings” (229). 15. These include “Si me permiten hablar . . .”: Testimonio de Domitila, una mujer de las minas de Bolivia (1976) by Domitila Barrios de Chungara, El evangelio en Solentiname (1978) by Ernesto Cardenal, La montaña es algo más que una inmensa estepa verde (1982) by Omar Cabezas, and Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (1983), among others, as well as the novelas-testimonio of Miguel Barnet.

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16. Verónica Rueda Estrada offers an effective history and summary of the Nicaraguan testimonio in her study “Testimonios, confesiones y memorias del sandinismo.”

Chapter Three

Post-Revolutionary Autobiography in Nicaragua

NICARAGUAN IDENTITY AND THE POST-REVOLUTION: OMAR CABEZAS In a 1992 interview, the comandante Omar Cabezas reflected on the political consequences of the Sandinista Revolution and on the process that led to the writing and subsequent publication of his first work: “After Fire from the Mountain won the Casa de las Américas prize [in 1982], everyone began seeking me out to ask my opinions about Nicaraguan culture. I knew nothing about Nicaraguan culture because I was not involved in cultural issues. In fact, I had a rather low opinion of cultural issues; I did not consider them very important” (“Testimonio About,” 81). By applying some variation of the term “culture” four times in one sentence and connecting it to national identity, Cabezas narrows the possibilities of “culture” to the more orthodox expressions such as written literature and redefines the term through the implicit inclusion of his own work and of other decolonial works in the cultural canon. While the self-deprecating honesty that Cabezas uses to express his thoughts on “Nicaraguan culture” represents the narrator’s transformation during and after the revolutionary process, it also reveals the impact of popular success on his own self-representation and the unique nature of the testimonio as a univocal product whose author signifies a variety of life experiences. This signification, however, represents only a fragment of the complete picture and reminds us that “a testimonio is not a life history” (Arias, Taking Their Word, 124). The works by Cabezas epitomize the birth and raison d’être of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) in the 1960s and 1970s and, through their devotion to popular language (and, 71

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hence, the people), announce the coming transformation in the 1980s and 1990s of a party that was gradually losing contact with its principal base of support, the general population. The election loss in 1990 to Violeta Chamorro and the UNO coalition would provoke substantive changes in political behavior and philosophy that would ultimately be disavowed by Sergio Ramírez, Gioconda Belli, and Ernesto Cardenal, among many others, as they resigned from the party and publicly voiced their anger and discontent. In 2000, the electoral reforms agreed upon by the FSLN and the Partido Liberal Constitucional (PLC) reduced the required percentage to win a presidential election from 45 percent to 40 percent, adding that a candiate may win with 35 percent of the vote if they have at least a 5 percent margin of victory over the second-place candidate. It is no coincidence that Daniel Ortega, liberated from internal dissent, captured the party nomination in 2006 and, subsequently that same year, recaptured the presidency. The Nicaragua of the 1970s and 1980s that inspired the testimonios of Cabezas as well as work by Carlos J. Guadamuz (Y . . . “las casas quedaron llenas de humo,” 1971), Sergio Ramírez (Hombre del Caribe, 1977), Margaret Randall (Somos millones, 1977), José Antonio Siles (Yo deserté de la Guardia Nacional de Nicaragua, 1979), and Germán Pomares (El Danto, 1988), among many others, had transformed itself by 2006 into a nation parceled out by two political parties, the FSLN and the PLC. Works of testimonio by Cabezas and others represent a condemnation of Eurocentric thinking and the colonial legacy and, in the process, offer a series of warnings for those wishing to return to a less democratic form of government and popular representation. In an article published in 2016 in The Guardian and titled “Nicaragua Is Drifting Towards Dictatorship Once Again,” Belli described the coming instability and offered a scathing criticism of Ortega and his wife, vice president Rosario Murillo, concluding optimistically that “Somoza had two sons to continue his dynasty, Ortega and Murillo have five sons and two daughters. Though they might feel very strong, we have seen this before. Nothing is forever.” Given current unrest in Nicaragua, 1 it is no coincidence that there is again talk of another Sandinista Revolution, one that will re-recover the values of Augusto Sandino and the original founders of the FSLN. The years of the Somoza family dictatorship in Nicaragua (1937–1979) witnessed the application of cultural standards and practices throughout the country that took as their principal reference points the United States and Europe. Newspapers and journals such as Vanidades published stories about the activities of the wealthy elite and ran advertising for products that were, for the most part, produced by the United States and inaccessible to the vast majority of Nicaraguans. With the birth of the FSLN in 1961, a literature of resistance 2 became more evident through poems, short stories, and novels that articulated the systematic control and repression wrought during the Somoza regime and drew attention to topics such as economic underdevelop-

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ment, social disorientation, and obsolete cultural models. Works such as Mi rebelión (My Rebellion) (1961) by Luis Cardenal and Diario de un preso (Diary of a Prisoner) (1963) by Pedro Joaquín Chamorro may have been, according to Leonel Delgado Aburto, “bourgeois” and “oligarchical” in their focus and their provenance (5), but they represented a destabilizing force in Nicaragua and articulated what would ultimately be the principal themes of the nascent resistance movement against the administration of the country by the Somoza family. 3 In her volume of poems El viento armado (The Armed Wind) (1969), Michèle Najlis makes use of empowering metaphors and a series of forceful images that dovetail effectively with the struggle for national liberation. Lines such as “Do not despair / the water will break the stones” (19), “They made us spit blood, / they whipped us” (31), “The innocent ones raised their rifles and fallen bodies” (39), and “We will arrive with bloody hands” (43), for example, exude a ferocity that expresses an increasing anger at the Somoza administration and its hegemony over all matters social, political, and economic. The victory of the Sandinista Revolution in 1979 transcended strictly political categories and represented a concerted effort to recover the historical record from the hands of those leaders like Somoza who had eviscerated any expression of popular cultures from the national consciousness. Although the struggle against Somoza ended in 1979, the effort to apply the ideals of the Sandinista Revolution continued during the 1980s. Initially, a post-revolutionary euphoria allowed the twelve members of the governing directorate to set aside their differences and work toward rebuilding the nation. Contradictions began to emerge, however, and “One could say that the sandinistas came to power in Nicaragua with a common ‘pure’ ideology, but with a fragmented ‘practical’ ideology” (Pérez, 119). It soon became evident that a number of individuals in the directorate aspired to equate national politics and identity with the complete promulgation of a sandinismo that would reflect the continued revolutionary struggle for liberation and subsume all domestic policies. 4 “Sandinismo,” however, “never consisted of a coherent set of values and ideas capable of providing FSLN members with the guidelines needed for purposeful action. It was—and still is—a vague, contradictory and confusing set of nationalistic slogans and proverbs” (Pérez, 119). In light of the dearth of “a coherent set of values and ideas,” a number of issues soon emerged on the heels of revolutionary victory that would prove problematic for the FSLN: rampant inflation, endemic poverty, and the continued conscription of young men to fight the contra war. As Bishop Pedro Casaldáliga reflected in his journal during a trip to Nicaragua in 1985, “It is difficult to believe in reconstruction” (67). The disparities and visible contradictions that occurred within the FSLN as a consequence of the “fragmented ‘practical’ ideology” and the momentous 1990 election loss to Violeta Chamorro and the Unión Nacional de Oposición (UNO) ultimately re-

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sulted in the foundation of the Movimiento de Renovación Sandinista (MRS) in 1994 and the resignations in January 1995 of individuals such as Sergio Ramírez, Gioconda Belli, and Ernesto Cardenal, among many others, from the rank and file of the FSLN party. As Steven Kent Smith wrote, “The FSLN is the only party in Latin America, and perhaps the world, to have gone through a three-stage transformation from a guerrilla movement to a vanguard party in power to an opposition party searching for political meaning in a post-cold-war environment” (103). Given recent events, we would add a fourth stage in this transformation: the change from “an opposition party searching for political meaning” to an autocratic party that looks to cement its hold on national affairs by enunciating danielismo, its own particular form of sandinismo characterized by more “realistic” goals, the prohibition of abortion, the prevention of public gatherings and demonstrations, the embrace of neoliberal economic policies as manifested by government policies that support near-shoring business practices, and by the stated desire to construct the interoceanic canal (Renk). In 2006, the FSLN was back in power after Daniel Ortega won national elections with approximately 38 percent of the vote, in 2011 he was re-elected to another five-year term with 62 percent of the vote, and November of 2016 he was, again, re-elected with 72 percent of the vote over Maximinio Rodríguez and the Partido Liberal Constitucionalista (PLC). For many, the mystical revolutionary program of sandinismo has been replaced by a danielismo that combines a nod to free market reforms and dynastic intentions with the evangelical Christian values expressed by Ortega. Barbara Harlow’s affirmation that “Resistance literature calls attention to itself, to literature in general, as a political and politicized activity” (28) is particularly relevant to a nation whose political leaders applied Marxist methodologies in the eighties to evaluate the effectiveness and impact of policy decisions. Many of the works written during this period looked to demythify the notion of a literature that was inaccessible to the recently literate majority of the population and reflected the renewed interest in a social realism that promoted the ideals and ideology of the Sandinista Revolution. 5 The narrative and poetic discourses that emerged during this time left little room for an excessively abstract or metaphorical literature that was not in the service of the revolution or life stories that were not representative of the national transformation undergone since 1979. They also received little support if they were not success stories inspired by the rise from economic poverty or that did not emerge from the revolutionary experience. As T. M. Scruggs has written, “Many statements made by the political leadership, cultural activists, and sympathetic artists articulated the view that Nicaragua’s cultura popular comprised authentic forms of expression that had been repressed and neglected under the weight of imported cultural models, much as its constituency, the popular classes, had been economically and political-

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ly marginalized” (58). There would be little room for the publication of autobiographies and memoirs that would depart from or discredit the revolutionary ideology, but plenty of opportunities to disseminate testimonial writing or confessional, socially engaged poetry that followed the style of Ernesto Cardenal. Due in part to the heterogeneous nature of testimonial prose in Central America, John Beverley and Marc Zimmerman have acknowledged their inherent diversity and classified these works as proto-testimonials, Sandinista testimonio, and neotestimonio (Literature and Politics, 181ff.). Among the most important Sandinista testimonials, for example, Beverley and Zimmerman include Y . . . “las casas quedaron llenas de humo” (And . . . “The Houses Were Full of Smoke”) (1970) by Carlos José Guadamuz, Carlos, el amanecer ya no es una tentación (Carlos, the Dawn Is No Longer a Temptation) (1982) and La paciente impaciencia (The Impatient Patience) (1989) by Tomás Borge, and La montaña es algo más que una inmensa estepa verde (1982) by Cabezas. The testimonial works that emerged during the 1980s in Nicaragua reflected the important overlap between the Sandinista Revolution of 1977 and the programs and policies implemented after the war as a consequence of the 1979 victory. 6 Although much effort was made to emphasize their allegedly spontaneous popular origins, these texts, however, did not emerge from a subaltern imaginary as they did in other nations such as Guatemala and El Salvador. As Leonel Delgado Aburto confirms, in Nicaragua it is problematic to speak of a subaltern testimonio subject due to the fact that many of the authors of testimonial works are college graduates who became the paradigm for men of action and knowledge (6). With the exception of Delgado Aburto and Laura BarbasRhoden (“El papel del testimonio”), however, scholars have rarely questioned the work by Cabezas as a legitimate example of testimonio literature and more frequently than not consecrate it within the categories of subaltern studies by confirming its preeminent epistemic role in the genre. Less successful than Fire from the Mountain, Cabezas’s volume Canción de amor para los hombres (Love song for mankind) (1988) numbers over five hundred pages long and recounts the events between 1975 and 1978 when Cabezas was active in the northern mountains of Nicaragua. While there are a nominal number of studies devoted to the work, the volume was not as popular with readers and has been for the most part ignored by the same critics who explored Fire from the Mountain. Autobiographical or self-referential narrative works that touched on themes of national self-defense, national liberation, future transformations, and cultural and political reconciliation were widely published in Nicaragua throughout the eighties and into the nineties. In subsequent years, however, a number of autobiographical non-testimonial or neotestimonial works were written on the heels of a widespread discontent with the FSLN directorate and the 1990 election loss to Violeta Chamorro and the UNO. Works such as

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Ráfaga. The Life Story of a Nicaraguan Miskito Comandante (1992) by Reynaldo Reyes and J. K. Wilson, Debió llamarse libertad (It Should Have Been Called Freedom) (1996) by Georgina Lupiac, Adiós muchachos (1999) by Sergio Ramírez, El país bajo mi piel (The Country Under My Skin) (2001) by Gioconda Belli, Desnuda ante mi sombra (Naked Before My Shadow) (2002) by Suad Marcos, Nosotros no le decíamos presidente (We Did Not Call Him President) (2005) by Carlos Arturo Jiménez, El abrigadisto (The Brigadista) (2005) by José Daniel Centeno, Sueños del corazón (2007, originally published in English as Dreams of the Heart in 1997) by Violeta Chamorro, Junto a mi pueblo, con su revolución (With My People, With Their Revolution) (2009) by Fernando Cardenal, and the three-volume memoirs of Ernesto Cardenal, Vida perdida (Lost Life) (1998), Las ínsulas extrañas (The Strange Islands) (2002), and La revolución perdida (The Lost Revolution) (2004), among others, express a common sense of frustration with the contra war and a disillusionment with an FSLN party that, headed by Daniel Ortega, allowed the vision of Augusto César Sandino to become sullied by internal political machinations, suspicious alliances, and corruption. Many of these writers, however, manage to convey an optimistic spirit within a framework of criticism that, while not always in full cultural, social, or political agreement with the revolutionary vanguard of the FSLN, instills a sense of liberation and hope for the future of Nicaragua. The four-volume set of memoirs entitled Memorias de la lucha sandinista (Memoirs of the Sandinista Struggle) (2010) by Mónica Baltodano uses the interviews she conducted on her radio program to trace the development of the Sandinista ideology and the FSLN and to implicitly question the role of officially constructed written narratives. In Fire from the Mountain, Cabezas frequently takes advantage of a reconfiguration of Sandino by Fonseca and the early FSLN and fashions a work that mythifies a number of elements significant to the struggle against the Somoza government in order to reconstruct the discursive space and offer Nicaraguans an alternative metalanguage grounded in national liberation. Recent research on Cabezas’s work has drawn attention to the fact that this text constructs myth, as, for example, “the ideology does not square with the historical record” (Ross, 107). In the process of recreating “the historical record,” the text contributes to the formation of a new Nicaragua and “to the development of a new hegemony” (Barbas-Rhoden, “El papel del testimonio,” 63), ultimately mythifying history in order to create a nation whose people are distinctly aware of the birth of a new Nicaragua. 7 Unfortunately, the new Nicaragua of the FSLN was not so new, as it relied on the territorialization of the Sandino legacy and tamed his life, work, and writings according to political needs. Even the mythic representation of Cabezas himself in his work serves the ends of the Sandinista party, as, in the process, an Everyman such as Cabezas is directly tied to the work and historical legacy of

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Augusto Sandino and ultimately to the national imaginary as a whole. 8 As Thomas Ward has written, Fire From the Mountain “Is a discovery of Nicaragua through the formation of Cabezas” (308). As befits a testimonio, the examples and descriptions offered by Cabezas are ultimately representative of a larger and more general battle. In this respect, the mythification of the FSLN serves to deify the revolutionary organization that is leading the charge against Somoza and his forces. Writing of Julio Buitrago, the FSLN commander who died after fighting Somoza’s National Guard, for example, Cabezas notes that he was “one of those who forged the great legend of invincibility of the Frente Sandinista among the Nicaraguan people. Or I should say the people themselves forged that legend around the Frente” (21). These remarks underline the sought-after connection between the FSLN and the Nicaraguan people and ably endow the citizens with the consciousness of being the subjects of their own history, in the process placing the FSLN high on the national pedestal and creating new connotative possibilities for terms such as and “invincibility” and “legend.” Liberation, in these terms, comes as a consequence of inherent behaviors and patterns that form part of the national consciousness. Such language of (self-)representation embodies a liberation aesthetic shaped by a paradoxical yet effective revolutionary self-centeredness grounded in the struggle against oppression and committed to the unconcealed dissemination of the revolutionary ethos. Elsewhere in the text, Cabezas also describes the FSLN as being a secret organization that was diligently fighting for national liberation. When he recalls the moment that he was called to leave the city and become a guerrilla militant of the FSLN in the mountains, his language evokes images of a purity inherent to the organization: “I was going to be in the heart of the Frente Sandinista, in the most hidden, the most virgin part of the Frente, the most secret, the most delicate, the Frente of Carlos Fonseca and all of that” (63–64). His chosen terminology—“hidden,” “virgin,” “secret,” “delicate”— portrays the FSLN as a natural yet somewhat fragile albeit organic part of the Nicaraguan political landscape, implicitly likening it to the mountains, to the jungle that he was entering, to the wholesomeness represented by this geographical and ideological locus amoenus, and calls attention to the rediscovered—and reconstructed—innocence of the Nicaragua-to-come. These same tropes also describe the FSLN in terms typically applied by the masculine voice to the feminine or female archetype, framing the decision of Cabezas to join the FSLN as the union of man (Cabezas) and woman (the FSLN). In consequence, the national imaginary is populated with descriptions of sites and individuals that, together, rescue from memory the essence of emancipation and come to offer an alternative, more genuine nation to the Nicaraguan population.

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In mythifying the FSLN, Cabezas constructs an alternative ethos and relates the history of the organization to the history of the Nicaraguan people, writing that the paths of the two are inseparable. Nicaraguans, according to the narrator, “had a Sandinista history, a history of rebellion against exploitation, against North American domination” (220). In writing of the ahistorical connection between the party’s struggle against Somoza and Sandino’s fight against US occupation, Cabezas utilizes concepts that may be better understood in light of the growing popularity of the FSLN at the time among a majority of Nicaraguans and of the reverence that Nicaraguans expressed of national notions of honor and self-respect: “What the contemporary FSLN was doing with us [experienced recruits] and what we were doing with the newer people was nothing more than giving a new context to that historical tradition, that determination, that sense of dignity” (220). The FSLN was growing, changing, and receiving new recruits from a Nicaraguan polis that was willing to sacrifice its own in order to bring about an end to the Somoza tyranny. As he describes the struggle, Cabezas aptly mythifies the FSLN throughout the text in order to better connect the party to the sacrifices of fellow Nicaraguans and ultimately restructure the national discursive space. In the end, liberation is represented as a natural consequence of historical processes that had been set in motion long before individuals such as Tomás Borge and Carlos Fonseca had reconnected with the ideals of Augusto Sandino. Throughout the work, Cabezas fittingly includes descriptions and details of the efforts of the individual soldiers themselves and, in the process, mythifies their work in the mountains as they toil to bring about Somoza’s downfall. Significant in his descriptions of these guerrilleros is their characterization as exceptionally kind individuals, a rhetorical device that ultimately produces “A clear tendency to humanize the Sandinista guerrilleros” (Barbas-Rhoden, “El papel del testimonio,” 64). These men are keenly aware of their environment, receptive and responsive to the most minute changes in their surroundings. In general, writes Cabezas, “we were hard inside and out, but we were also very tender, very gentle; we were very loving, too” (85). Describing Rene Tejada—alias Tello—for example, Cabezas notes that “he was capable of crying; you would see how sensitive he really was, inside, how tender and human” (77). Commander Henry Ruiz—alias Modesto— “was capable of giving up his blanket when he came across a shack where he saw a little boy sleeping without covers” (85–86). He recalls an anonymous guerrillero who “came across a baby bird in its nest and carried [it] with him for six days” (86). These representations throughout the book do not ignore nor wipe away the difficulties and suffering that the Sandinistas endured in the mountains; rather, they add another dimension, one that speaks to the ability of these men and women to both reconquer the countrywide physical territory and take control of the national ideological terrain. Being “gentle”

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and “loving,” “capable of crying” and “tender” were fundamental characteristics that shaped them, in fact, into better revolutionaries that empathized and formed affective bonds between them and with the general population. The Sandinistas fighting in the mountains became, above all, individuals who humanized the military struggles and gradually institutionalized the revolution throughout the country. Subsequent memoirs and autobiographies would step away from such mythification and take the FSLN and Daniel Ortega to task for betraying the original philosophy of Sandino and the party itself. For our purposes, we will examine the autobiographies and memoirs of Sergio Ramírez, Gioconda Belli, Fernando Cardenal, and his brother Ernesto Cardenal in order to better gauge the discursive presence of the term “liberation” and survey its epistemic consequences within the framework of a post-revolutionary Nicaragua. SERGIO RAMÍREZ AND ADIÓS MUCHACHOS: A SANDINISTA LIBERATION Throughout his sweeping career as a writer, Sergio Ramírez has used both fiction and non-fiction to explore the promise and limitations of authority. Speaking at length on the relevance of Marxism, Hugo Chávez, Daniel Ortega, the state of affairs in Nicaragua, and the Sandinista Revolution, Ramírez declared in a 2008 interview that “It has to be taken into account that the revolution was a social, political phenomenon, but also an emotional one, that it was based on those ethical values and ideals. It could not be conceived that a Sandinista activist would have material riches, but, as I say, all of that was completely lost in the FSLN” (“Entrevista”). His statement reflects an idealism grounded in those “ethical values and ideals” and also expresses an implicit condemnation of those who, in his opinion, lose sight of those ideals and perpetuate their stay in office solely for financial or political gain. As the author of over thirty-five works that include novels (Margarita, está linda la mar, Mil y una muertes), short story collections (El reino animal, Catalina y Catalina), essays (Oficios compartidos, Balcanes y volcanes), and memoirs (Confesión de amor), Ramírez has consistently produced a literature that dissects and scrutinizes the discourses of power and those who wield it. As vice president of Nicaragua from 1984 to 1990, Ramírez witnessed the transformation of the Sandinista Revolution from an organic, rather fragmented movement to an institutional force allegedly represented by a national directorate that looked principally to consolidate its power throughout the country. While the loss to Violeta Chamorro in the general election of 1990 was greatly influenced by the contra war, internal corruption, and the ensuing economic setbacks, the political landscape mapped out by the FSLN had changed dramatically since the end of the

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revolution in 1979. By 1990, the consolidation of political power within the FSLN and on the national stage had blinded a number of leaders to the tenets of sandinismo and irrevocably begun to alter the direction of the revolutionary program. Since leaving the FSLN in 1995, Ramírez has been a vocal critic of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, declaring in an interview on June 3, 2018, that “Ortega’s time is up” (“El tiempo”). Changes in revolutionary morale and experience in Nicaragua and throughout Latin America at this time manifested themselves through the articulation of a coherent liberation philosophy that found itself forced to acknowledge the need to revisit categories of Marxist thought. These subsequent re-examinations, however, would frequently return to the fact that a Marxist criticism of political abuses of power would need to center on the identification and successive denunciation of that abuse as much as on the bourgeois or post-bourgeois classification of the power within a capitalist/ neoliberal framework. Today’s Nicaragua, for example, prides itself on being part of a political alliance that was initiated by Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, and Fidel Castro and criticizes the practices of “imperialist” North American and European nations. The practices of these ALBA nations, 9 however, frequently engage the global marketplace from a position that rides the wave of economic globalization and monetizes commodities such as oil and natural gas to partake in the process and benefits of a neoliberal ideology. What Leonardo Boff asked in 1995 is especially relevant in light of recent public policies that promote free enterprise and and reduce public spending on education and medical care: “What quality of life does capitalism actually produce? What type of democracy is it planning? One cut off from the people by political institutions, by the vote, and by bills of rights that do not extend into the economic sphere, protected from free choice and market forces?” (Ecology, 106). The argument that Boff makes is applicable to any national government that will continue to cut spending on public infrastructure and stimulate private initiatives. Writing about the role of the intellectual in the revolutionary process, Ramírez indicated that “Amongst us [Latin Americans], political action, especially that which proposes a transformational will, has committed the intellectuals since the time of the fight for independence, and that role has never stopped being relevant” (“Testimonio,” 69). The issue at hand, however, is that public intellectuals should balance the denunciation of dishonesty with a corresponding counter-action that brings to light the corruption of political power and, more importantly, of the political ideals that contributed to its establishment. The decision in 2015 to strip Julio César Osuna, a Magistrate on the Supreme Electoral Council of Nicaragua, of his immunity and investigate him for his connections to organized crime, drug trafficking, money laundering, and falsification of state documents (Rogers), for example, represents a positive step toward a more transparent Nicaraguan society. These improvements, howev-

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er, also coexist alongside widespread reports of corruption that threaten to undermine any advances made by the government. 10 After 1990, the FSLN was habitually accused of confiscating homes, works of art, jobs, and national resources, redistributing them among a select group of Sandinistas and, in the process, making a number of revolutionaries such as Daniel Ortega and Tomás Borge very wealthy. In his work Adiós muchachos, Ramírez takes into account his own role within the FSLN and defends the distance he subsequently took from the party and its national directorate. In this respect, his memoirs read as a sort of personal liberation primer that seeks to leave behind the systemic corruption of the late eighties and the more recent iterations of the FSLN and to search for the roots of a purer sandinismo that was somehow lost along the way. As Enrique Dussel wrote in 1988, “In the times in which we live, the prophets, the martyrs, and the heroes must be able to recognize the difference between the prevailing moral legality of the dominator, and communal ethical legality or the legality of liberation” (Ethics and Community, 75). While the FSLN may have enjoyed a “moral legality” that was subsequently betrayed by the actions of the national directorate, the “communal ethical legality” and the commitment of the party and its leaders to a “legality of liberation” has long been questioned by figures such as Ramírez. For our purposes, in Adiós muchachos we will examine the manifestation of a liberational spirit that explicitly advocates a “liberation from”—denounces unjust practices and rhetoric in the social, political, or cultural arenas—and implicitly promotes a “liberation toward” embodied by a search for the authentic roots of an all but forgotten sandinismo. Adiós muchachos by Ramírez is an even-handed attempt to settle accounts with an FSLN party that, in his opinion, had deftly manipulated Sandino’s ideals and had sacrificed its original revolutionary vision for Nicaraguan society. Initially, the Sandinista Revolution was, as Ramírez puts it, a “collective utopia” (2), a communal process through which the good of the many would outweigh the benefits for the few. If you owned large amounts of land or property, for example, your obligation was to hand it over to the government: “Many who had inherited something or who were owners of something had to surrender it to the state, just as in religious orders” (30). Under the FSLN, individual wealth would ideally translate into a collective prosperity that would reflect an ethical concern for every Nicaraguan and would pave the way for national policies and legislation inclusive of all. This liberation, however, would soon meet with a number of obstacles such as the anti-Communist hemispherical designs of the Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations in the United States and the orthodox hierarchy of the Catholic Church in Rome. Their actions would obligate the Nicaraguan state to clarify its own implicit contextual limitations in order to focus the efforts of the struggle for the implementation of an ideological program

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made synonymous with national self-determination. In speaking to the intervention of the Reagan administration in Nicaraguan affairs and the onset of the contra war, for example, Ramírez writes that “The nation had been held hostage and, for Nicaragua, such a small country, its very reason for being was linked to its true independence. This was the real meaning of national liberation” (94). With respect to the incessant conflict that emerged between the Sandinista state and the Catholic Church due to the participation of the clergy in national affairs, Ramírez indicates that “The division between political and religious influence worked both ways. The church began to zealously defend its sphere of spiritual influence, which was essentially political, and the revolution started to challenge it” (131). The implementation of a Socialist-inspired program of action for Nicaragua after the success of the Sandinista Revolution faced the opposition of a Reagan administration fanatical in its desire to eradicate any vestiges of Socialism and Communism from the Western hemisphere and a Catholic Church hierarchy adamant in its yearning to maintain its traditional sphere of influence. The fact that Ramírez uses terms such as “hostage,” “border,” and “defend” in connection with liberation represents the transcendence of the struggle for national self-determination and the complex dynamics of a state of affairs that offered no uncomplicated resolutions. As would be evident throughout the 1980s, the praxis of national liberation would gradually disintegrate and divide both the leaders of the FSLN as well as the Nicaraguans themselves, tiring of having to face an apparently unending series of relentless challenges to their sovereignty and economic health. In light of the circumstances, the divisions that had marked the FSLN since the beginning of the struggle against Somoza would soon dominate national discourse and, ultimately, contribute to the corruption of Sandinista ethics and dismember any policies that the government was attempting to implement. While the ideals promoted by the Sandinista Revolution were in accord with the “communal ethical legality” mentioned by Dussel, they were only nominally approaching a “legality of liberation” necessary for a profound transformation of the national imaginary. The movement toward national unity as evidenced by the unified struggle against Somoza was witnessed at the beginning of the revolution by the integration of the three different Sandinista tendencies within the FSLN party, 11 disseminating among the people the idealism of its leaders and combatants. “No matter what the ideological loyalites,” writes Ramírez, “the project for a Socialist society was fighting a losing battle against reality from the very beginning” (76). “Reality” became the judge, jury, and executioner of a political program intended to improve the lives of the many; yet the multiple denotative possibilities of “la realidad” shade his message ambiguously in order to allow the reader to freely associate the origins of this “reality” to myriad root causes that include dissent within the FSLN, the continued intervention of

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the United States in domestic affairs, the contra war, and economic instability, among others. “Reality,” that inspirational reference point that served as the only true touchstone for the transformation of the individual, ironically became a contentious space of conflict imbued with instability and hegemony. For Ramírez, however, “reality” represented one of the principal causes of the breakdown of the revolutionary agenda and, ultimately, of the breakdown of the authentic FSLN: the antagonistic fragmentation of the party itself: “When I joined the FSLN in 1975, a tangled web of internal conflicts was already being spun, the product of ideological tension” (56). National liberation and the rather utopian expression and implementation of a Sandinista ethic would continuously find obstacles in its path due principally to the disjointed contemporary origins of an FSLN distanced from the original ideals of Sandino. The implicit liberation from a counterfeit equality denounced by Ramírez in the pages of Adiós muchachos maintains as its inspiration the dubious actions and attitudes of party leaders that began to stray from Sandino’s principled model. Such behavior ultimately led to a return to the ideological divisions that had once haunted the country during the 1980s and brought to mind the challenges faced by Nicaraguans. In some cases—such as the indigenous and rural communities—the difficulties faced by the FSLN were never truly overcome and resulted in the creation of policies that, in point of fact, forced many of these individuals to commit to organizations such as the contra that actively fought against the FSLN. Of the campesinos in the countryside, Ramírez writes that “The revolutionary message, when it was transmitted with insufficient persuasion, through threats, or with too much rhetoric, imposed promises, parameters for political behavior, and ways of organizing that were very disconnected from the peasants’ day-to-day reality. They wanted a change for the better in their lives, land, schools, clinics, good prices for their crops, but they did not accept the attack on their traditions, their way of life, and their beliefs” (162). In referencing, for example, the expulsion in 1982 by the FSLN of thousands of Miskitos, Sumos, and Ramas from their homes along the Atlantic coast region and razing their villages so that these would not fall into the hands of the contra, Ramírez recognizes the mistakes made by an immature and self-centered revolution that “exercised an ideological paternalism” that ignored “their culture and their languages” (163), confiscating their homes and possessions in a manner that was, in the end, “unjust” (233). 12 The difficulties faced by the FSLN in these contexts were due largely to the shift in revolutionary vision within the party. As members of the National Directorate such as Bayardo Arce, Tomás Borge, Luis Carrión, and Daniel and Humberto Ortega lost sight of the ethical roots of sandinismo, the party became more self-absorbed and insensitive to those whose concerns fell outside the purview of the revolution. This lack of forethought was both caused by and gave rise to the ignorance, ideological sight-

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lessness, and unfairness that Ramírez describes in the previous examples and that, ultimately, led to his departure from the FSLN. After the defeat of the FSLN in the 1990 national elections, the party refused to change its ways and reclaim the ideological high ground. Writing about his own candidacy for president as a member of the newly formed Movimiento de Renovación Sandinista (MRS) in 1995, Ramírez expresses his frustration over the destructive political polarization that he experienced: “After all, it was a losing battle, fighting on the margin of the ferocious polarization that again devoured the country, and where there would be no votes in favor, only against: votes against Daniel Ortega so that the Sandinistas would not return, and votes against Arnoldo Alemán so that the Somocistas would not return” (15). By 1995, the consequences of the Sandinistas’ erratic behavior during their tenure in office the previous decade and of the abrupt economic changes implemented by the Violeta Chamorro administration (1990–1996) were readily apparent and proceeded to erode what progress had been made in the almost twenty years since the end of the Sandinista Revolution. In describing his run for president with an alternative party, Ramírez expresses his frustration with a political process that, embodied by Ortega and Alemán, returned the nation to a pre-revolutionary psychological state that marginalized those who worked toward any type of dialogue or consensus and pursued the well-being of the national population over their own interests. Throughout the pages of his memoirs, Ramírez implicitly denounces the actions of Ortega and the selfishness of the National Directorate by reminding the reader of the hope latent in the original sandinismo. Ultimately, it is this vision that, in his work, becomes a focal point in his return toward a more genuine sandinismo that steps outside itself and, once again, looks to construct a national infrastructure that places the concerns and well-being of the people over those of the individual. In illustrating the inherently selfless outlook of the authentic FSLN, Ramírez offers the example of Leonel Rugama, who died in 1970 and was one of the founders of the FSLN. For him, recalls Ramírez, the first Christians living in the catacombs represented “a permanent exercise in purification” (22), and for those like the original Sandinistas, “surviving until the end of the struggle was an undeserved reward” (22). Recalling his entrance into the FSLN in 1975, Ramírez describes the personal sacrifice that was expected of him and uses a language that combines political fervor with a mystical enthusiasm for revolutionary integrity: “Sacrifice made it possible to open the doors to paradise, but a paradise for others, on Earth. The Promised Land could not be see, not even in the distance. Yet one had to live a saintly life” (22). This unadulterated sandinismo was not grounded in armed violence but in a spiritual fierceness that surpassed physical limitations. “Before learning how to shoot a weapon,” writes Ramírez, “you learned an ethical behavior that emerged out of love for

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those who had nothing, in Christian terms, and you accepted the commitment to forsake everything to dedicate yourself to a fight to the death destined to substitute the power of those from above with the power of those from below, in Marxist terms” (27). The subsequent administrations of Daniel Ortega have been repeatedly denounced for betraying the ideals of sandinismo and participating in a political process that marginalizes “those from below.” 13 For Ramírez, the ethics of the revolutionary struggle were the foundation of the attempt to transform Nicaraguan reality from the bottom up by first improving the lives of the poorest in society. These values became the touchstone and inspiration for his work as an active member of the FSLN for over twenty years. It is no coincidence that Adiós muchachos criticizes Sandinista policies of the 1980s and searches for those roots of the original FLSN that had been inspired by humanitarian ideals lost along the way. These ideals, however, remained constant for Ramírez: the fundamental inspiration behind the struggle against Somoza and authoritarianism represented a ritual of purification and survival that relentlessly required the revolutionaries to step outside themselves and live and fight for others in search of a “promised land” free of the oppression and marginalization suffered by the most disenfranchised. The confluence evidenced here of revolutionary praxis and Christian rhetoric would reach its zenith during the Sandinista Revolution, at a time when the Catholic Church itself was undergoing a profound crisis that would force the Church hierarchy to reevaluate its relationship with the faithful. For any member of the FSLN committed to the original intentions of Sandino, death would be a welcome, natural, and foregone conclusion to a revolutionary process that, in its mission to eradicate inequality, anticipated and required an active commitment from every member of the party. As Ramírez writes, however, “With the revolution’s triumph, being a good militant meant being willing to respect the code of conduct established by the dead. However, that code was then interpreted by the living under the party’s authority. That was when holiness was turned into a bureaucracy” (29). To be prepared to die in the fight against tyranny was emblematic of the ethical commitment to the revolution and to the relationship between those who had fallen in combat and those who continued the struggle. The revolutionary imaginary, however, would be adulterated from the onset by Ortega and other members of a National Directorate that would place their own narrow goals ahead of the interests of the Nicaraguan people and, in the process, dishonor the memory of those who had died fighting. For Jeff Browitt, “Ramírez not only criticizes the leftist caudillismo and the political and economic mistakes of the Sandinistas, but he also repudiates their cultural initiatives: the rushed, clumsy, and insensitive imposition of revolutionary ideals in traditional communities” (16–17). Revolutionary “sainthood,” as Ramírez puts it, became a routine procedure, lacking any real significance and unable to establish a tangible

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connection to daily life. It is no surprise then that, for him, the revolutionary struggle would forever be represented by a looping back to the past—a liberation toward the origins of the FSLN—and a search for an ethical conduct originating in something more profound than monetary political motivations. THE COUNTRY UNDER MY SKIN BY GIOCONDA BELLI AND WOMEN’S LIBERATION As one of the best-known contemporary Nicaraguan authors, Gioconda Belli has been actively writing since she was in her early twenties. Her first collections of poetry, Sobre la grama (1972) and Línea de fuego (1978), attracted a considerable amount of critical and popular attention due to the candid manner in which she presented and connected themes of erotic self-realization and political struggle. Since then she has continued to publish collections of poetry (Apogeo [1997], Mi íntima multitud [2003], Fuego soy apartado y espada puesta lejos [2007], and En la avanzada de la juventud [2013]), fictional narrative (La mujer habitada [1988], Sofía de los presagios [1990], Waslala [1996], El pergamino de la seducción [2005], El infinito en la palma de la mano [2008], El país de las mujeres [2010], and El intenso calor de la luna [2014]), and the occasional children’s book (El taller de las mariposas [1994] and El apretado abrazo de la enredadera [2006]), among others, that have managed to blend literary categories and participate in the conversations regarding a woman’s right to self-determination. 14 Published in 2001, her autobiography El país bajo mi piel (The Country Under My Skin) presents a sweeping view of key moments in her life such as her entry into the FSLN ranks in 1970 and the 1972 earthquake in Managua and connects them to the larger themes of a personal and collective search for meaning and emancipation. In describing her experiences as a woman attracted to and frustrated by men as friends, coworkers, partners, lovers, and husbands, however, the liberation of the female voice comes across as a contradictory process of emotional hopscotch that is frequently informed by both traditional and non-traditional gender roles and attitudes. The liberation of the female voice and the search for equality has been a focal point of a number of the distinct currents within liberation philosophy and theology since the 1960s, when the examination of patriarchal power structures dovetailed with other themes central to identity politics. Writers such as Ana María Isasi Díaz, Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Ivone Gebara, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Dorothy Sölle, and Ana María Tepedino, among others, questioned the marginalization that women have habitually been subject to within a male-centered Christian tradition. In the process, they have paved the way for the contemporary emancipation of women from restrictive

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and rather simplistic categories of coexistence. Writing on the principal imperative motivating the construction of a woman-centered liberation, Fiorenza affirms that “A feminist critical hermeneutics of liberation shares the ‘advocacy stance’ of liberation theologies but, at the same time, it elaborates not only women’s oppression but also women’s power as the locus of revelation” (34–35). Her touchstone is not only the elaboration of a philosophical perspective that actively considers the multiple varieties of woman’s experience, but also the fact that the multi-voiced expressions of women must serve as center and fulcrum for the transcendence of patriarchal power structures that all too often have served to constrict and marginalize the other. “Revelation,” in this sense, is synonymous with “liberation” and connotes multiple possibilities that include, but are not limited to, the religious, social, political, economic, and cultural categories of dissonance, conflict, and difference. Absolutizing categories of the “feminine” and “masculine” that traditionally frame our considerations, however, are never truly equal partners in the discussion. As Sally Robinson has written, “The two terms are not parallel or complementary, although the history of Western thought might lead us to believe this. Rather, there exists an asymmetry between the two concepts— and their representations—in that the masculine has always had the power to construct both itself and the feminine” (206). Her discussion surrounding “the contradiction between Woman and women” (226) informs our analysis of the discursive territory that Belli inhabits throughout her work by bringing to the forefront apparently opposing notions of feminism that locate the narrator “simultaneously inside and outside the ideology of gender” (226). The personal experiences that Belli relates in The Country Under My Skin frequently serve as an opportunity to transcend traditional gender roles and, in the process, construct an alternative space for the emancipation and liberation of women. When she declares in the first pages of her work that “Without renouncing my femininity, I think I have also managed to live like a man” (x), the writer is blurring the conventional boundaries between men and women and is challenging us to rethink our categories of masculinity and femininity by recasting herself as both. While physiology may be an active marker of biological identity, in her autobiography it also becomes a dynamic facilitator of otherness and emphasizes the possibility of sharing in the experiences of both genders. In a collaborative sense, she is in fact more by surpassing the limits of masculinity and femininity and entering into dialogue and ultimate awareness with the gender that inhabits the other shore. Traditional attitudes and behaviors constructed by men and women and accepted by patriarchal cultures present Belli with the opportunity to denounce the inequalities of social standards. Recalling her own upbringing, for example, she recalls that “From the time we are little girls, women are taught to please. We are trained to be chameleons for our men, adapting to them” (341). Women, according to Belli, are trained to disregard their own iden-

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tities in order to mold themselves to the wishes of their fathers, brothers, friends, lovers, and husbands. The institution of marriage, in particular, serves to highlight the objectification of women. In writing of her first wedding, the author declares that “There was something humiliating about the entire ceremony—my parents symbolically handing me over to a man” (16). Later, reflecting on this troubled first marriage and on her own innocence regarding the frustrating reality of gender relations, she states: “It had never crossed my mind that a man could think he had the right to stop me from being who I was. There was no way I would accept the kind of marriage or motherhood that would require me to relinquish the infinite possibilities that life had in store for me” (20). Both statements reflect the dissatisfaction that Belli felt upon participating in a traditional ritual that ironically makes the woman the protagonist yet rarely allows her to transcend objectification. One must wonder, however, whether this dissatisfaction was sensed and expressed by her at that explicit moment in time—in the early seventies, in her early twenties, the product of a privileged social upbringing that took her to the United States and Spain for her early education—or if it is the reflection of an adult, more experienced Belli who has been through a number of relationships with men and whose consciousness over the years has undergone an unwavering process of awakening. In her memoirs, Belli constructs the semblance of an emancipated female consciousness by referring to experiences shared with other men in order to criticize the patronizing and often paternalistic attitudes and conduct endured by women. With respect to marriage, for example, Belli maintains that “I have never been able to tolerate the macho tendency of ‘adopting’ women, as if by marriage the man acquires a child or some helpless creature in need of guidance” (174). When she was hospitalized in San José, Costa Rica, due to problems with her first pregnancy, the narrator describes her stay there and writes that “I was appalled at the way the doctors treated us, as if we were whiny, spoiled brats, scarcely giving us information, and simply failing to provide appropriate care” (188). Within the contexts of marriage and pregnancy, Belli criticizes that man epitomizes traditional standards of masculinity and woman is allegedly incapable of managing her marriage and health. The suppression of female identity is integrated into patriarchal processes that, since they are informed by and since childhood, are frequently tacitly accepted throughout one’s life and by the next generations. By “adopting” a full-grown woman within the context of a consensual relationship, Belli denounces that man situates woman within dualist categories of belonging that leave little room for dialogue and growth. The solution that Belli proposes is that women unite in order to promote their own liberation: “I love women, I thought. We had to stick together so that men’s ideas about our ‘duties,’ what we could or couldn’t do, wouldn’t cloud our thinking” (326). In Spanish, the original quote is as follows: “¡Vivan las mujeres!, pensé. Sólo juntas

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podíamos evitar que las nociones masculinas del deber, de lo que era correcto o incorrecto, nos nublaran el entendimiento” (139). This is one representative example of the important differences between the original Spanish and the English translation of her work. While in English “I love women” is a statement that expresses a straightforward preference, “¡Vivan las mujeres!”— “Long live women!”—is an exclamation that serves as a cry for unity and action. This call to arms, however, is tempered by a rather polarized understanding of gender roles: “duties” and socially acceptable actions (translated as “what we could or couldn’t do”) are determined by the fact that men may “cloud our thinking.” Women, for Belli, appear to be rather easily influenced by masculine attempts to circumvent individual identity. Throughout her work, the liberation of the female voice is often compromised by the continuous presence of conflicting and often contradictory messages regarding the emancipation of women. Describing her own penchant for erotic poetry, for example, she states that her writing style and the subversion of the masculine canon “was not done. Women were objects, not subjects of their own sex drive. I wrote joyfully about my body, my passion, my pleasure. The poems were not explicit—they weren’t even remotely pornographic. They were simply a female celebration of her senses, the wonder of her body” (38). 15 Although she acknowledges the power of verse to “celebrate” the subjectivity of her perceptions and liberate the female psyche, Belli also limits the capabilities of her “power” to a traditional understanding of the erotic within a conventional heterosexuality that runs the danger of further objectifying women. As a number of critics over the years have noted, 16 her language is frankly direct in its subversion of male-centered standards—yet it is limited to erotic structures of power. In the same manner, Belli presents her relationships with men in dualist terms that limit emancipation and frequently hinge on a physical attraction or description that determines pre-established limits for the transcendence of ethics, attempting to situate herself within a progressive position while, at the same time, mirroring traditional notions of gender relations and representation. Her autobiography also offers a number of examples that present the narrator’s own place within the world and she compares herself to a variety of creatures in the animal kingdom. In romantic situations, she is a turtle, the prey (“At some point, unexpectedly, Modesto got up and came toward me moving swiftly, like a feline, to prey on my lips and plant a kiss on my mouth” [200]), a mare (“a mare set loose from the corral” [76]), and a deer (“‘No thank you,’ I said, completely disoriented, looking on with horror like a deer suddenly in view by the lights of the hunters” 17). Upon her return to Nicaragua as a known Sandinista under the Somoza regime, she confesses that she “felt like a hunted animal” (117). 18 The variety of images that she offers have as their reference point a male-centered representation of women that imbues her with an inferiority and helplessness assigned by patriarchal

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society to traditional gender roles. Her lovers may stalk her, startle her, and protect her, and her subversive political activities instill in her the instinct of self-preservation, but rarely does she use an animal metaphor to represent her own empowerment. The creatures she utilizes to describe herself frequently allude to a self-inscribed innocence and security offered by male-centered renditions of female weakness and are not represented in an assertive nor authoritative manner in their own right. While the mare, snail, turtle, and deer are autonomous projections of her inner self, these creatures as referenced by Belli simply serve to perpetuate the inequalities and stereotypes relevant to gender relations. Throughout her autobiography, Belli also offers multifaceted representations of maternity and motherhood that frequently cloud the waters of her own liberation and prevent her from being, in Fiorenza’s words, a “locus of revelation.” Her mother is represented as a paradigm of traditional motherhood that, paradoxically, both repulses and attracts Belli in its enunciation of established gender roles. On her wedding night, for example, her mother advises her that “In her home, a woman should always behave like a lady, but not in bed. When you’re in bed with your husband, you can do whatever you want. Nothing is forbidden. Nothing” (17). When she was fourteen years old, Belli took a trip to Paris with her mother and, while there, accompanied her one evening to the Folies Bergère. As they left the show and reflected on the performance, which included an erotic dance between a semi-nude man and woman, she relates that her mother exclaimed: “What perfection! That’s exactly how beautiful and perfect Adam and Eve must have been in the Garden of Eden” (18). The predictable admiration of her mother is palpably evident throughout the work, as Belli portrays her as a strong-willed woman who constructed for herself an existence with an unambiguous set of moral and ethical coordinates. From a liberational perspective, however, this veneration is muted by Belli’s implicit characterization of her mother as someone whose material wealth allowed her the luxury of picking and choosing the degree to which her own autonomy as a self-empowered woman was convenient to her. After the earthquake that devastated Managua in 1972, for example, she recalls “my mother sitting in an aluminum beach chair in the vacant lot next to her house while the uniformed maid brought her breakfast on a silver tray complete with a white lace, impeccable cloth” (49). The tragedy and the devastation that killed thousands and left more 250,000 homeless exist alongside her mother, seemingly unperturbed by events and taking her breakfast in a makeshift chaise longue. The “uniformed maid,” “silver tray,” and “impeccable cloth” may represent the penchant for manners and formality that her mother possessed, but they also reveal narrative choices made by Belli and portray her mother as a superficial individual whose concerns immediately following a national disaster appear to center around maintaining appearances and enjoying breakfast. While disconcerting, this representation

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speaks to multiple underlying motives that influence the writing process and reveal much more about the narrator than about her mother’s inappropriate and rather skewed sense of priorities. In describing these moments, Belli may allude to their potential to transcend traditional categories of motherhood. It is, after all, her mother who is speaking to her about sexual relations with her husband, who took her, as a fourteen year old, to a suggestive cabaret in Paris, and who, after a traumatic event, behaves unperturbed and continues to have her breakfast served to her while seated on a lawn chair. The soundly dichotomized relationship between man and woman presented within a framework of affluence, Christian orthodoxy, heterosexism, and domesticity, however, restrict the liberational field of vision and ultimately subordinate woman to being a male-centered enunciation. “Perfection,” as expressed by her mother, is engaged from what, in Christianity, is the productive and procreative origins of humankind. 19 By offering the image of her mother as a seemingly independent individual shaped by existing social norms, Belli perpetuates existing traditional gender roles and does little to offer an alternative to these restrictions. Belli’s own conflicted emotions surrounding motherhood continue to reveal themselves when she describes her own experiences and concerns during pregnancy. Upon recounting the moments leading up to the birth of her daughter, she testifies that “The doctors and nurses who checked in on me from time to time kept commenting on how young I was. But I felt ancient, part of the female multitude that shared, in this rite of passage, the power from which the sea, the continents, and Life itself had come into existence” (21). Belli describes sharing in motherhood, an experience that allows her to engage with other women throughout history and with the creation of life. The vision she renders, however, does little to transcend gender roles, producing instead a self-centered discourse entrenched in typical representations that only replicate traditional notions of motherhood. Upon the birth of her daughter, for example, Belli recalls that “I gave thanks for being a woman, who could experience—just like a mare, or a lioness, or any other female— that fierce primitive instinct to protect and nurture another living creature” (23). Using animal imagery once again to convey what may be considered conventional images of woman, Belli draws on typical references to “primitive instincts” and “protection” to describe her own sense of a motherhood restricted to predictable gender roles. Throughout her idealization of motherhood, rarely does she refer to potential or very real difficulties she may have faced as a subversive revolutionary actively participating in the overthrow of an authoritarian government, except to acknowledge the numerous times that these activities took her away from her children. She does not address what countless women may face in the struggle to breastfeed their children, to provide a proper home, and to care for them possibly without a supportive

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community and without the material means necessary to ensure their wellbeing. The ensuing portrayal of her experience bespeaks a stable family infrastructure and an economic fortitude that allow Belli the luxury of mythifying motherhood at the expense of transcending gender roles. Even the timely description of a lover’s goodbye falls into the recalcitrant yet anticipated role of woman as mother figure, declaring that “When I said goodbye to Marcos at the door, I felt like a mother leaving her son in a dank, grim boarding school” (91). “Life,” as depicted by the author within the context of motherhood, defies insurrection and becomes a series of all-too-solid touchstones that confirm our place as dictated by gender and circumstances. In her autobiography, domesticity is frequently represented within a rather contradictory set of values that both admire its narrow epistemic solidity and censure the subordination of women. Writing in 1975, Rosemary Radford Ruether realized the importance of altering the dynamics of power in the home environment: “Mass liberation of women depends on the fundamental restructuring of the socioeconomic relation between work and the domestic support structure” (2). Unfortunately, this “fundamental restructuring” is not to be found in The Country Under My Skin, where Belli’s ambiguous approach to gender roles in the home and family frequently derive from her own upbringing in a privileged economic patriarchal setting. She recalls, for example, a dance she attended when she was seventeen years old: “The ball was in my honor, because that year I had been designated the belle of the Nejapa Country Club—kind of a homecoming queen—and it was my duty to open the event by dancing a waltz with the president of the club” (16). Although the event occurs away from the home environment, the scene exemplifies the manner in which women were raised to be subservient to men within a social framework. The dance may have been offered in her honor, but she did not actively select or construct this event: she passively accepted this “honor” after being named consort of the Nejaba Country Club, not of one individual. She is a partner, in effect, of the entire locality. Even the term “homecoming queen,” which she uses in its original English and exists as “homecoming king” for men as well, is redolent with heterocentric connotations of an idyllic and partnered return to the home of both man and woman. The symbolic dance with the president of the country club also embodies a type of female surrender and male possession within a conventional frame of reference that manages to conceal the unseemly difference in ages behind a veneer of social acceptance and obscures the extent to which, in this context, women may be compliant with conventions established by and within malecentered institutions. The numerous relationships with men that Belli describes throughout her autobiography frequently correspond to an environment that, while not necessarily traditionally domestic, does in fact accentuate the conventional role of women both in and outside the home. Her general comments about men

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include various confessions that offer her view of an ideal relationship when she was an adolescent: “In my fantasy, I visualized myself as the spoiled wife of an interesting, beautiful man, an artist, heir to an old and welcoming cabin in the English countryside.” 20 She also imagines what life would be like with el Poeta, a lover with whom she maintained an extramarital affair and who remains anonymous throughout her narrative: “The Poet would have been a nightmare as a husband. I could never imagine him sharing responsibilities” (38). And upon relaunching a relationship in Costa Rica with Jimmy, a past boyfriend from Nicaragua, Belli writes: “Nothing like having a man to banish the musty, moldy smell of an uninhabited home” (142). The domestic scenes Belli describes dictate a space shared by a man and woman, yet it is woman who is placed in an inferior position that objectifies her and postpones, in the words of Ruether, any “fundamental restructuring” of the traditional gender roles and responsibilities. The male, as described in the passages, is the initiator and architect of a home life that positions the female as a passive recipient of conventional masculinity. Her descriptions present her as the “spoiled wife,” and the domestic connotations of the reality shared with Jimmy in San José, for example, articulate little more than the symbolic and material presence of a woman devoid of substance: she exists as an object whose presence is not enough to “inhabit” a home. Even the implicit acknowledgment of possible dialogue and communication present in her description of el Poeta emphasizes the fact that this is the projection of a daydream and, as such, is a construction of her imaginary that does little to subvert the traditional dynamics of gender politics. For Belli, the contradictions between a woman’s liberation and her own emotional dependence on men for her self-image are often highlighted by the details she offers of specific lovers and relationships. About her first husband, Carlos, for example, she writes that he was “a welcome respite from the macho men who were constantly hovering around me, attracted by the scent of my solitude” (316). Regarding the beginnings of her relationship with el Poeta, Belli indicates that “As time went on I got used to the Poet’s advances but they still bothered me mainly because, despite my objections, I didn’t want him to stop. They made me feel desirable, irresistible” (28). And Sergio, another lover she met in San José, provokes questions in her: “Why was I going to refuse his love, the nourishment he gave me while I purred, slept, and licked my wounds, the little saucer with milk and water he set for me at the foot of the bed?” (162). The machos that desired her and the interest expressed by Carlos, el Poeta, and Sergio place her squarely in the center of the narrative. Her descriptions of these individuals, however, and the relationships she embarked upon, by extension, offer an ambiguous message: On one hand, she revels in her own ability to take on and unreservedly decide between any number of lovers; on the other, any authentic personal liberation is constantly undermined by the fact that her self-worth is repeat-

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edly grounded in their perception of her. The center of the rapport is not the relationship itself of the fluid interpersonal dynamics, but rather her infantile and rather self-centered interests, designs, and observations. She presents herself in inconsistent terms, desiring a more profound connection with other men yet presenting herself as a woman to be admired, conquered, and loved, little more than a tin trophy to be placed upon the moment’s shelf. The space that she dedicates to the search for understanding and dialogue pales in comparison with the descriptions of her partners as virile and assertive individuals whose sole purpose was to win her over and to lavish her with the attention she so richly deserved. These reminiscences may certainly be selfsatisfying, to say the least, but they are not necessarily conducive to the disruption of traditional gender roles. Gioconda Belli began her career by writing poems that employed a direct, explicit language and subverted the traditional male territorialization of the erotic imaginary by giving both voice and space to women. As Sofía Kearns has written regarding her earliest collections of poems, “There appeared in her poetry sporadic representations of a new woman who was the subject of desire.” Her poem “En la doliente soledad del domingo” (“In the painful solitude of a Sunday”) from Truenos y arco iris (1982), for example, begins by declaring, “I’m here, / naked, / on the solitary sheets / of this bed, where I desire you” (“En la doliente”) and presents her as the architect of an erotic encounter that iterates the reconstruction of woman as that “subject of desire.” In her autobiography, The Country Under My Skin, her own awareness of gender dynamics contributes to the liberation of the female voice by bringing to the forefront practices of male hegemony that fetishize and exploit women. The manner in which she represents these practices, however, frequently reflects and advances phallocentric categories of difference that serve to promote traditional gender relations. The various animals she chooses to describe herself, her conventional idealization of maternity and motherhood, the appropriation of domestic discourse, and the descriptions of her relationships with men offer a guarded liberation that participates in but does not transcend the patriarchal tension frequently latent in textual representations of gender. Not unlike Ramírez, Belli has also reacted publicly to recent events and demonstrations in Nicaragua, declaring that “It was necessary to challenge the power that Daniel Ortega was amassing because we were returning to a dictatorship” (Rodríguez, “Gioconda Belli”). In her autobiography, however, any call to political or social transformation is muted by her own self-absorption. Due to the manner in which the limits of emancipation are established, the release that she advocates ultimately shifts from being a potential “locus of revelation” to a self-centered and self-constituting enunciation that inevitably inscribes itself from and within a dualist framework. 21

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ERNESTO AND FERNANDO CARDENAL: LIBERATION FROM POVERTY AND THE WRITING OF THE SELF Throughout their personal lives and careers, the brothers Ernesto (1925) and Fernando (1934–2016) Cardenal have repeatedly demonstrated a passionate commitment to the Nicaraguan people through their own experiences of marginalization imposed upon them by any number of political and ecclesiastical authorities. As minister of culture from 1979 to 1987, Ernesto, the elder of the two, was publicly chastised by Pope John Paul II in 1983 for holding political office when the pontiff visited Nicaragua. In 1994, Ernesto, along with Sergio Ramírez, Gioconda Belli, and many others, resigned from the FSLN due to the widespread opinion that Sandino’s original philosophy of national and political liberation had been distorted by Daniel Ortega and used for personal gain. Recently, Ernesto has publicly denounced the current Ortega administration, declaring that in Nicaragua today “What there is today is only corruption and dictatorship, a fascist dictatorship, familiar, installed by Daniel Ortega, his wife and children” (Anonymous, “En Nicaragua”). Fernando, minister of education from 1984 to 1990 and architect of the National Literacy Crusade, was expelled from the Jesuit order for approximately twenty years for holding a position during the Sandinista administration and refusing to renounce his responsibilities. The three-volume autobiography of Ernesto, Vida perdida (1998), Las ínsulas extrañas (2002), and La revolución perdida (2004), traces his life and travels from his upper-class origins in Managua to his disappointment at the betrayal of the Sandinista Revolution by Daniel Ortega, the transformation of its ideals, and the impact on the Nicaraguan people. While the writing of Fernando has been limited to his memoirs, Junto a mi pueblo, con su revolución (2009), and an occasional editorial or article, Ernesto has published over thirty-five works that include poetry, essay, reflections and various volumes of his autobiography. 22 The differences between them may be appreciated by the most transparent nomenclature, the titles of their autobiographies: Fernando, allegedly more extroverted and more public in his actions, draws attention to his connection with the Nicaraguan people and proclaims that the Sandinista Revolution belongs to them, while Ernesto uses the term “lost” in two of the titles to express that which was both gained and spent on a personal and collective level. The title from the second volume, Las ínsulas extrañas, “The strange islands,” is taken from the “Cántico espiritual” (“Spiritual Canticle”) by St. John of the Cross and offers a metaphorical affirmation of individual purpose that expresses the necessity to isolate oneself in order to bring out an authentic transformation. And the third volume, La revolución perdida, “The lost revolution,” openly expresses his disappointment in the myriad opportunities lost when the ethics of the Sandinista movement were manipulated and betrayed by Daniel Orte-

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ga and Rosario Murillo. Notwithstanding the differences, both Fernando and Ernesto enunciate in their autobiographies a dedication to the Nicaraguan people that calls for a liberation from material poverty. In the denunciation of poverty that echoes throughout the pages of their memoirs, the brothers Cardenal acknowledge that their own ignorance of the reality lived by their compatriots had sheltered them from fully understanding the suffering endured by their compatriots. When in 1970 he was named vice president of the Universidad Centroamericana (UCA) in Managua and was forced to deal with a student takeover of the university, Fernando admits that “I was not familiar with the reality of the country, but in those days of the takeover I saw that the students always behaved correctly” (29). In his writings, Ernesto acknowledges that their privileged upbringing and his own interest in women was evidence of a rather self-centered life. As he recounts the social gatherings he attended as a young man in Managua, he confesses, “Of course I was weary of those elegant and insipid parties, but I was willing to go to them because of the girls” (Vol. I, 30 23). As he reflects on romantic relationships with these women and on his visits to brothels, his comments emerge from a self-conscious attentiveness to his economic origins, declaring that “an interclass marriage frightened me” (Vol. I, 45) and that the most inexpensive and, therefore, more frequented bordellos were places that were “the most miserable and disgusted us” (Vol. I, 74–75). The pleasant surprise that Fernando expresses upon witnessing campus unrest at the UCA and Ernesto’s revelations regarding his amorous relations originate in a naiveté amplified by their ensuing ethical awakenings. The “reality of the country” that Fernando references and the “elegant and insipid parties” and implicit class distinctions described by Ernesto are, to use Stephen Hunsaker’s term, “fictions of memory” (11) that construct the nation from within by intoning an unreserved mea culpa that repeatedly impels their individual circumstances with the advantage afforded by the passage of time. Their autobiographies underscore the relevance of addressing national conditions of poverty and the theme remains relatively static as an ethical point of reference; yet its epistemic promise is progressively renovated as the men’s lives move forward and the narratives advance. Through a subtle process of individuation and self-substitution, the truth of their awareness gradually distances itself from the singularity of their experiences and is inscribed within the collective consciousness of the Nicaraguan people. 24 The external transformation of the nation becomes linked to the internal renovation of their respective principles and experiences. It is in this manner that identity, according to Raúl FornetBetancourt, “is thus understood as a permanent process of liberation that requires a task of constant discernment in the interior of the cultural universe with which each person identifies” (“Philosophical,” 4). As individuation is consistently altered by the dynamic transference of multiple and varied categories of belonging, national emancipation is inti-

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mately conditioned by an awareness of the structural mechanisms that influence the self-constitution of a people. In their works, Ernesto and Fernando Cardenal each describe discrete moments when they became aware of the dehumanizing consequences of poverty. When Ernesto recalls the first time he was placed under arrest, for example, he explains that he refused to pay the guards a bribe of twelve pesos that would have released him from prison: “I was arrogant in denying 12 pesos to guards who possibly did not earn that in a day. The small immorality of giving them a bribe was nothing compared to the great immorality of my having more money than them” (Vol. I, 100). In his memoirs, Fernando describes that he first contemplated the subject of poverty when he left Nicaragua as a young man and traveled to a poor parish in Medellín, Colombia, to fulfill his first religious obligations: “Every day in the neighborhood there were incidents or conversations that made more dramatic and more difficult the coexistence with poverty” (20). The shock provoked by the reality lived by his parishioners forces him to empathize with their struggle, and he professes that “The neighborhood was a sea of pain and I felt I was drowning in those waves. They were submerged in sadness, suffering, illness without medicine, lack of hope” (21). Ernesto’s awakening arrives at the hands of his own imprisonment and, as he admits, his own arrogance. Without offering specific details regarding the wages or living conditions of the guards, the narrator introduces us to their underprivileged existence by conceding the larger “immorality” that he had more money than they did and explicitly establishing an ethical hierarchy that positions as the greater evil the structural circumstances that would produce such an imbalance. His admission emerges from an ontological position that centers on principles that transcend the particular details. The negation of the bribe was a snobbish, self-centered act that denied the men the opportunity to momentarily improve their lives and the reality of their existence. Fernando, on the other hand, offers discrete information regarding the reality of his parishioners that ultimately produces in him a visceral reaction to their destitution and brings to life the truth of poverty. The neighborhood he inhabits provides a framework in which the concepts of pain, sadness, suffering, and hopelessness acquire a physicality illustrated by the metaphor describing his own drowning in a sea of existential pain and exemplified by a lack of medicines. Ernesto and Fernando each depict acutely different moments of awareness in distinctly singular terms, yet the descriptions offered by both men represent watershed moments that highlight the awareness necessary for the concretion of individual and collective liberation. The idealism and realism of the Cardenal brothers is made evident in the descriptions of poverty evident throughout their respective works. Fernando, for example, represents the poor in a manner that calls attention to how society tends to overlook the destitute and to what he believes to be the tragically enduring condition of their situation. When he recalls the nine

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months that he spent in Medellín, Colombia, as a young novitiate, he reflects that “The residents of the Pablo VI neighborhood were permanent victims, as in many neighborhoods and towns of my Nicaragua” (19). These circumstances reshape the reality of their plight by suggesting that poverty possesses a messianic dimension capable of transcending material concerns. Of his time in Medellín, Fernando writes: “I understood perfectly that the same God continued to listen to the same clamour of the oppressed and that Jesus has come to reveal to us that God that is not neutral in the face of that situation of misery and that he has taken the side of the poorest, the smallest, the weakest, the most marginalized, the most excluded of society” (23). The “most marginalized” represent a profound hope that permeates the destitution and that situates the poor as organic subjects of liberation. When he visited Ernesto at Solentiname, the community that his brother had founded in lake Nicaragua, Fernando remarks on the apparently innate ability that the residents had to construct an emancipatory discourse: “And just like the Chinese make vases and they make Chinese vases, the peasants of Solentiname listened to the word of God from their reality as poor Nicaraguans, they analized it, and out came liberation theology” (87). According to Antonio Gramsci, the tension between hegemony and counterhegemony erupts as groups strive to develop their own responses to dominant discourses of power. “One of the most important characteristics of any group that is developing towards dominance,” states Gramsci, “is its struggle to assimilate and to conquer ‘ideologically’ the traditional intellectuals, but this assimilation and conquest is made quicker and more efficacious the more the group in question succeeds in simultaneously elaborating its own organic intellectuals” (304–5). The “organic intellectual” that Gramsci identified would thus be purposely constructed as a response to the dominant expressions of power and to existing asymmetries. The campesinos of Solentiname that Fernando Cardenal observes, however, demonstrate that critical manifestations of intellectual discourse originate in a lived context. Informed by their living conditions, discussions surrounding the Gospel simply brought this critical instinct to life as poverty had, in essence, already created the intellectuals necessary to enunciate an alternative discourse. “The most excluded of society” and the “permanently damned” were already embedded within society, implicitly elaborating a response to the unfair distribution of resources in Nicaragua. In this sense, the poor were the organic vanguard of a Sandinista Revolution divided by distinct emancipatory methodologies. Throughout the three volumes of his memoirs, Ernesto Cardenal approaches the issue of liberation from a position that occasionally contributes to the construction of an epistemology that draws near to an incipient intercultural perspective and frequently idealizes the marginalized other. 25 In conceptualizing the living conditions of the poor, for example, Ernesto often underscores the inherent contradictions between wealth and poverty. In his

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opinion, “The brilliance of poverty is the brilliance of naked matter, painting or the body of a naked woman” (Vol. I, 251). For him, “Poverty is the elemental and natural thing, without any artificial embellishment” (Vol. I, 251). “A poor object,” states Ernesto, “is more real than a rich one, closer to nature (earth, water, air, sun, sources of all material wealth)” (Vol. I, 251). To Ernesto, poverty allows for the manifestation of an inner splendor that those overly concerned with material wealth either do not possess or, because of an excessive attachment to worldly goods, find more difficult to reveal. As aesthetics offers the opportunity to perceive daily life in distinctly ethical terms, so too does the physicality of poverty allow us to grasp a transcendent authenticity. No synthetic elaboration or contrived manipulation of the object is necessary, since poverty in itself bestows an organic truth far greater than any possessions could convey. In poverty, “the natural” rises to the surface, artificiality is abolished, and the “real” sources of material wealth become apparent. In his depictions, however, Ernesto runs the danger of idealizing the physical manifestations of poverty and, by doing so, distracts from identifying the self-centered origins of material wealth, and contributes to palliating its dehumanizing consequences. The contradictions inherent in his approach are represented by the questions posed by the theologian Julio Lois: “If poverty is something negative to be eliminated, can it be in any way proposed as an evangelical ideal?; and if it is something positive to be strived for, can its elimination be advocated in the name of faith?” (114). According to the first liberation theologians, the circumstances of the poor allegedly allow privileged access to an existence more authentic and, hence, more fulfilling, distanced from the hollow reproductions of daily life and in closer proximity to a glow that bathes them in a realism bursting with authenticity. Yet the parallel arguments that Ernesto constructs when describing the poor implicitly mythify poverty by presenting it as the uncontaminated alternative to affluence without offering a solution. Authenticity is not a dynamic process but a static condition established by one’s fluid context and rendered by the (lack of) affective distance between the subject and the object. The idealization of the poor evident in the three volumes of his autobiography embodies the criticism of liberation theology offered by Juan Luis Segundo: “If I may be allowed a somewhat risky expression, [liberation theology] gives the impression of giving more importance to counting and singing the praises of values existing among the poor than to dealing with shaking from its shoulders the inhuman weight of poverty” (“Críticas,” 231). When he arrived in Solentiname, Ernesto recalls that “I marvelled at the purity of the peasants; I mean the lack of sins in many of them” (Vol. II, 120). In his autobiographical writings, the poor become an epistemic abstraction, far from that description offered by Gustavo Gutiérrez in which “To be poor means dying of hunger,

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being illiterate, being exploited by others, not knowing you are being exploited, not knowing you are a human being” (324). The memoirs of Ernesto Cardenal reveal a solidarity with the poor that embodies a profound commitment to those marginalized by unjust social structures. For him, priesthood represented the opportunity to come together with the most destitute of society and share in their lives. He writes of Bernardo, a young man who studied with him in his early days in the seminary and ultimately joined the Ejército de Liberación Nacional in Colombia: “He went around to the poorest neighborhoods on his bicycle, organizing. There were hunger strikes and he was at the hunger strikes” (Vol. II, 71). In another passage, Ernesto explains why he was inspired in Solentiname by the clothing worn by the campesinos: “I wanted our peasant shirt to be our habit, like the clothing of the peasants of the sixth century was the habit of the Benedictines and the clothing of the peasants in the thirteenth century was Franciscan” (Vol. II, 104). In collaborating with the Nicaraguan singer/songwriter Carlos Mejía Godoy to write the celebrated Misa campesina, a rewriting of the Catholic liturgy from a rural perspective, Ernesto declares that he retranslated the Greek phrase “kyrie eleison,” traditionally interpreted as “God have mercy,” into “God, be in solidarity with us” (“Señor, solidarízate con nosotros”) (Vol. II, 255). He also brings to mind biblical history when describing the plagues he endured at Solentiname of mice, rats, mosquitoes, parrots, deer, and other insects and animals (Vol. II, 132). His vivid accounts and profound narratives depicting life among the poor and his awareness of their situation, however, do not transcend liberation: they merely underscore its obstacles and potential consequences. The possibility of dialogue and of a mutual appreciation of contrary positions enunciated by intercultural thinkers such as Raúl Fornet-Betancourt is not explored. Instead, Ernesto Cardenal entrenches his texts in an adulation of the poor that runs the danger of inhibiting them from becoming subjects whose center of reference is not only an understanding of their circumstances but a more extensive connection with those outside their sphere of reference. The connection between religious vocation and the daily reality of the poor is abundantly established throughout his memoirs, yet it fails to surpass the same living conditions that he describes. In his memoirs, the hunger strikes, peasant clothing, and changes in ecclesiastical language ultimately serve to reinforce the space that poverty inhabits in Nicaraguan society. In their memoirs and autobiographies, Ramírez, Belli, and the brothers Ernesto and Fernando Cardenal enunciate an unconditional criticism of the colonial legacy that is best understood through a discrete understanding of the possibilities implied by liberation. In Adiós muchachos, for example, Ramírez recognizes the corruption of the FSLN in the 1980s and, in the process, searches for an uncontaminated sandinismo. His denunciation of past and present transgressions and turn toward the authentic roots of the

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FSLN represent a liberation from past actions and a liberation toward the future (by way of the past). Belli’s liberation of the female voice in The Country Under My Skin engages the reader in a political process that explores her own often contradictory identity as a sandinista guerrillera, drawing attention to the transformative power of her own voice and, at the same time, the presence in the narrative of rather traditional gender roles and attitudes. And Ernesto and Fernando Cardenal remain true to their ecumenical roots, punctuating their recollections with a consistent reminder of the role played by material poverty and by the ceaseless suffering of Nicaraguans. Liberation for the two authors is inseparable from a liberation from poverty and a commitment to the people, particularly the poor. Separately, the four writers represent individual windows into the Nicaraguan psyche and into the disappointing transformation of more contemporary Nicaraguan political actors and processes. As a whole, their autobiographies and memoirs exemplify the significance of emancipation for a country that has consistently been struggling for centuries against one form or another of political and cultural colonialism and is now threatened from within and without by the instabilities brought about by globalization. The liberation of a people, community, or nation through a re-evaluation of political ideals, the role of women in society, and the representation of the poor as evidenced, respectively, by Sergio Ramírez, Gioconda Belli, and the brothers Fernando and Ernesto Cardenal epitomize their devotion to constructing a country in which civil liberties and equitable living conditions provide a better life for all Nicaraguans. These authors, however, frequently fall short of offering a profound re-evaluation of their time in the FSLN or of the FSLN itself. Writing on the memoirs of Ramírez, Belli, and Ernesto Cardenal, Arturo Arias indicates that [W]e can easily verify that not enough thoughtful or self-reflexive criticism appears in any of their memoirs about their past militant experiences or about the need to evaluate the failure of their revolutionary movement, the only one to actually reach power in the region. Rather, the remembered histories they elaborate are more sentimental and nostalgic evocations of a lost youth and of lost power than they are historically significant reflections on the guerrilla period of 1960–90, about what went right, what went wrong, and what a renovated movement ought to do in the future. (Taking Their Word, 220–21)

In reflecting on the years leading up to the Sandinista Revolution and the time he spent as vice president, Ramírez acknowledges the mistakes made by the National Directorate of the FSLN during the 1980s and distances himself from a corrupt political process that, in his opinion, had skewed the progress of Nicaraguan society. While his assertions mirror the discontent expressed by Belli and the Cardenal brothers in their autobiographies, they rarely demonstrate their relevance beyond the national context and fail to implicitly

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engage other political or social reform movements within Latin America. As Fornet-Betancourt has written, “Cultures in themselves, I emphasize, are not the solution, since all culture is ambivalent in its historical process, and its development is permeated by contradictions and conflicts of interest—in a word, because all culture produces its own ‘Barbarism’” (“Philosophical,” 3–4). The continuous search for dialogue with the other must “be practised as a way of socially, politically and cultural committed thinking” (FornetBetancourt, “Intercultural Philosophy,” 159), beginning by relinquishing any claim to emancipatory discourses that do not originate in “the exercise of critical reflexivity” (Fornet-Betancourt, “Philosophical,” 9). The political capital gathered by testimoniantes during the 1980s and 1990s was gradually diluted over the next decade, as any attempts to transform a society vis-à-vis the application of testimonial experiences brought subsequent attention to the subjectivity of memory. As Arias indicates, “testimonios always lead to equivocal perceptions of the self, even within the same cultures, while writing within preconceived notions of cultural meaning” (Taking Their Word, 134). Recent public demonstrations in Nicaragua and declarations by Ramírez, Belli, and Ernesto Cardenal indicate the need to (again) renew the FSLN and that, in order to accomplish this goal, Ortega and Murillo should step down from power. The memoirs of Sergio Ramírez, Gioconda Belli, and Fernando and Ernesto Cardenal may not be considered testimonios, yet these works also evidence those “equivocal perceptions of the self” and a restrained “critical reflexivity” that, while immersed in the historical context of Nicaragua, is seldom projected beyond national narrative limitations. NOTES 1. Intended reforms of the pension system and social security contributions announced by the Ortega government in 2017 have provoked mass uprisings in 2018, asking for Ortega’s resignation. The deaths of hundreds of civilians—including women and children—have brought comparisons to past Somoza governments and have put the government on the defensive and sparked international condemnation of violent actions by the police and military. 2. “Resistance literature” is, according to Barbara Harlow, “a particular category of literature that emerged significantly as part of the organized liberation struggles and resistance movements in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East” (xvii). For our purposes, this term effectively defines the cultural revolutionary activity that preceded the organization of the national uprising in 1977. 3. Recall, for example, that Chamorro, editor of the newspaper La Prensa, was assassinated January of 1978 by gunmen who were reportedly in the service of Anastasio Somoza Debayle. His murder was a watershed moment in the fight against the Somoza dictatorship, as a general strike was called and thousands of people rioted in the streets of Managua, sparking the beginning of a nation-wide popular revolutionary effort. 4. Works such as Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution (1986) by David Hodges, Rascally Signs in Sacred Places (1995) by David Whisnant, and The Grimace of Macho Ratón (1999) by Les W. Field explore the debates that emerged during the years of Sandinista government in Nicaragua and the ensuing territorialization of cultural production. One example of these internal disagreements would occur within the Ministry of Culture, as the

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minister of culture, Ernesto Cardenal, fought to maintain his vision for the country. The poetry workshops he initiated with the Costa Rican Mayra Jiménez were intended to make poetry accessible to the majority of the population by offering a few simple rules for writing poetry. This project, however, and Cardenal’s cultural vision for Nicaragua were soon impeached by the tensions that would arise between him and Rosario Murillo. 5. Carlos, el amanecer ya no es una tentación (Carlos, the Sunrise Is No Longer a Temptation) (1982) by Tomás Borge, Apuntes de un brigadista (Notes From a Brigadier) (1985) by Carlos Tello Díaz, La marca del Zorro (The Sign of Zorro) (1989) by Sergio Ramírez, and Una tragedia campesina: testimonios de la resistencia (A Peasant Tragedy: Testimonies of the Resistance) (1991) by Alejandro Bendaña Rodríguez, among many others, offer examples of the new testimonial literature. 6. The bibliography on the Nicaraguan testimonial is not as abundant one would expect. Many studies center on the literary production of the eighties, its explicit connection to the Sandinista ideology, and its participation in the construction of a national identity, including “Literatura, identidad y conciencia nacional” by Alejandro Bravo and Nelly Miranda, “Nación y narrativa nicaragüense” by Lisandro Chávez Alfaro, “Guerrilla autobiographies and the Construction of Nation in Nicaragua” by Susan Hawley, and “La narrativa nicaragüense durante los años de formación del FSLN” by Ileana Rodríguez. Beverley and Zimmerman also dedicate the majority of a chapter entitled “Testimonial narrative” from Literature and Politics to the Nicaraguan testimonial. A good number of the studies focus on the critical and popular success of La montaña es más que una inmensa estepa verde by Cabezas. The bibliography compiled by Edward Walters Hood and Werner Mackenbach, “La novela y el testimonio en Nicaragua: una bibliografía tentativa, desde sus inicios hasta el año 2000,” is a valuable resource that includes novels and testimonios found by the authors in libraries and bibliographies throughout Nicaragua, North America, and Europe, as well as secondary studies on the novel and testimony in Nicaragua. The study “Emotions in Context: Revolutionary Accelerators, Hope, Moral Outrage, and Other Emotions in the Making of Nicaragua’s Revolution” by Jean-Pierre Reed analyzes the overlooked collection of testimonios ¡Y se armó la runga! Testimonios de la insurrección popular en Masaya, published in 1982 by the Instituto de Estudio del Sandinismo (IES). The Revista Istmo has also published a number of valuable studies that explore the discursive possibilities of the Nicaraguan testimonio and the testimonial genre in general (see, for example, issue number 2). 7. Authors who have studied this topic include Barbas-Rhoden (“El papel del testimonio,” 64), Duchesne (121), Mantero (“Omar Cabezas,” 236), and Ross (105), among others. 8. The mythic representation of Sandino in FSLN rhetoric has been effectively analyzed by Barbas-Rhoden (“El papel del testimonio,” 70), Mantero (“La mitificación,” 53), and Yúdice (“Testimonio,” 17). 9. Founded in 2004 by Cuba and Venezuela to promote what have been termed People’s Trade Agreements, ALBA currently numbers a total of nine member states: Cuba (2004), Venezuela (2004), Bolivia (2006), Nicaragua (2007), Dominica (2008), Antigua and Barbuda (2009), Ecuador (2009), St. Vincent and the Grenadines (2009), and St. Lucia (2103). 10. In a recent statement on the Nicaraguan electoral system, for example, the Carter Center has called attention to the lack of transparency in the national electoral process: “Under the leadership of its recently reappointed electoral authorities (except for two new members) the image and credibility of the CSE [Supreme Electoral Council], together with the standards governing democracy and elections in Nicaragua, have degenerated significantly in the wake of the confirmed fraud perpetrated in the 2008 municipal elections. The government and electoral authorities in Nicaragua were entrusted with the responsibility of safeguarding and ensuring the integrity of the 2011 national elections. On the contrary, however, terms of CSE member magistrates were extended by executive order of the president in January 2010, clearly overstepping the office’s legal powers and thereby compromising the legitimacy of presidential appointments” (Hakes). 11. The three tendencies within the FSLN were: 1) Guerra Popular Prolongada (GPP), that “proposed armed struggle in the mountains, following the principles of guerrilla warfare based on a period of accumulation of forces” (Ramírez, Adiós muchachos, 313); 2) Terceristas, “the Sandinistas that believed in the overthrow of the dictatorship through the insurrection of the

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masses in order to give way to a government of alliances” (315); and 3) Proletarios, a group that “proclaimed the need to organize the working class in order to progress toward armed struggle, counting on a solid party” (315). 12. Ramírez writes that these measures “created uncertainty, generated more conflicts, and stifled production” (165). 13. Mónica Baltodano, for example, offers a succint review of the backroom deals and secret pacts that transpired between the FSLN and the conservative Partido Liberal Constitucional (PLC) in 1997 and decries that “The most damaging FSLN-PLC pact was Ortega’s pact to demobilize social forces and to neutralize any popular struggle” (“Nicaragua: From Sandinismo to ‘Danielismo’”). 14. The vast majority of critical attention devoted to the works of Belli has centered on the portrayal of the female voice and the representation of and commitment to the Sandinista Revolution. See, for example, Laura Barbas-Rhoden (Writing Women in Central America), Louise Detwiler, Sofía Kearns, José María Mantero (“El país bajo mi piel”), Cecil Albert Janine Zinani, Maite Zubiaurre, and Mirna Yazmín Estrella Vega. For a particularly lucid review of the discursive overlap between gender and politics in the work of Belli, see Kathleen March, “The Erotic Politics of the Great Mother.” 15. The original Spanish reads as follows: “Mi lenguaje subvertía el orden de las cosas. De objeto la mujer pasaba a sujeto. Los poemas no eran explícitos, mucho menos pornográficos, pero celebraban mis plenos poderes de mujer” (68). The published English translation quoted above does not precisely express her appreciation of the destabilizing nature of her own verses. An alternative English translation of this citation would read as follows: “My [poetic] language subverted the order of things. From being an object, woman was transformed into a subject. The poems were not explicit, much less pornographic, but they celebrated my complete powers as a woman.” I am grateful to Taylor Fulkerson for drawing attention to the inconsistency between the original Spanish and the published translation. 16. Please see, for example, studies by Ana Paula Cantarelli, Sofía Kearns, and Elena GrauLleveria, among many others. 17. This is our own translation of this quote, as it is not present in the English-language edition of The Country Under My Skin. The original Spanish reads as follows: “—No, gracias, dije totalmente desconcertada mirando la escena con horror como un venado enfocado de pronto por los faros de los cazadores” (276). 18. The original Spanish indicates that she was “un venado asediado por los cazadores” (161). Once again, the English translation of The Country Under My Skin is woefully inadequate in that it only states that she “felt like a wounded animal” and disregards the more specific Spanish reference to a deer, “un venado,” and to hunters. 19. Recall that her first pseudonym as a journalist, Eva Salvatierra (113), draws unambiguous parallels between her traditional Christian upbringing and her own wish to “save the world.” 20. The original Spanish reads as follows: “En mi fantasía me visualizaba siendo la esposa mimada de un hombre bello, artista, interesante, heredero de una cabaña antigua y acogedora en la campiña inglesa” (166). The above translation is our own, as the published English translation of this fragment essentially eliminates much of the terminology from the original Spanish text. The published English translation of this passage reads as follows: “This landscape was almost exactly the same one that served as the backdrop to my fantasy of living another life somewhere in the English countryside” (331). As is evident, there are no references to the face that her adolescent fantasy involved an artist, a “beautiful” man who would one day inherit a home in the “English countryside” and provide for her. As should be evident by this point, a future analysis would involve studying the Spanish and English versions of The Country Under My Skin and comparing the two in order to examine decisions to amend or eliminate parts of the text. 21. Ultimately, in her autobiography Belli writes from a perspective that may enable further marginalization of women. As Sally Robinson has indicated, “The two terms, masculine and feminine, are not parallel or complementary, although the history of Western thought might lead us to believe this. Rather, there exists an asymmetry between the two concepts—and their representations—in that the masculine has always had the power to construct both itself and the

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feminine” (206). In much the same way, Belli is at times writing as a masculine narrator that constructs both the male and female voices. 22. The bibliography on the poetry and prose of Ernesto Cardenal is extensive. The most thorough and innovative research includes studies by Alfredo Veiravé, Ernesto Cardenal: el exteriorismo, poesía del nuevo mundo (1974), Sonia Mereles Olivera, Cumbres poéticas latinoamericanas: Nicanor Parra y Ernesto Cardenal (2003), translations and exegeses by Robert Pring-Mill, an issue of the online journal Istmo dedicated to the work of Cardenal and Roque Dalton, and a wealth of virtually hundreds of articles published throughout Latin America, Europe, and North America. Most of the studies focus on Cardenal’s poetry, on the development and enunciation of an Exteriorist poetics, and on the rules for writing poetry that he gleaned from the ideas of Ezra Pound and from the preface to the anthology Some Imagist Poets (1916), edited by Richard Aldington, H. D. (Hilda Doolitle), John Gould Fletcher, F. S. Flint, D. H. Lawrence, and Amy Lowell. The recommendations of these poets included: “To use the language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word,” “To create new rhythms,” “To allow absolute freedom in the choice of subject,” and “To produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurrer nor indefinite” (Lowell). Accordingly, Cardenal states that, in writing poetry, “The verses should not be rhymed; nor is regular rhythm good,” “You must write as you talk,” “You should prefer the concrete to the more vague,” and “One should economize words as if one were writing a telegram” (“Los versos no deben ser rimados; tampoco es bueno el ritmo regular,” “Hay que escribir como se habla,” “Hay que preferir lo más concreto a lo más vago,” and “Uno debe economizar las palabras como si estuviera escribiendo un telegrama”), among others (cited in Klaas Wellinga, Entre la poesía y la pared, 179–80). For an introduction to the foundations of exteriorista poetry, its impact on Nicaraguan poetry, and respective bibliography, please consult our critical introduction to Nuevos poetas de Nicaragua (antología). 23. The textual references to the memoirs of Ernesto Cardenal will limit themselves to indicating the volume and page number. Vol. I corresponds to Vida perdida, Vol. II to Las ínsulas extrañas, and Vol. III to La revolución perdida. 24. This nation-centered awakening on their behalf, however, has its counterpoint in an interculturality that surpasses disproportionate localizations. As Fornet-Betancourt has written, “We must renew the ideal of universality as a praxis of solidarity among cultures” (“An Alternative,” 232). Within the context of Latin American poverty, José Comblin declares that “It is not simply about the option for the poor of Latin America but about all the poor of the world. There is no longer a solution for a separated continent. There will be no liberation only for Latin America” (54). And in his work The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon anticipated more contemporary expressions of liberation discourse and intercultural philosophy when he wrote that the nation is but a fulcrum for the institutionalization of a global revolutionary ethic: “National consciousness, which is not nationalism, is alone capable of giving us an international dimension” (179). 25. In his works Homenaje a los indios americanos (1969) and Los ovnis de oro (1988), among others, Ernesto Cardenal emphasizes the importance of indigenous groups to historical processes in the Americas and advocates the establishment of a mutually enriching dialogue between the indigenous and non-indigenous. When he describes his experiences with indigenous groups, however, he romanticizes them in much the same way as the poor. In writing of the Kogui Indians of Colombia, for example, he states that “They have embraced poverty as a religious order” (Vol. II, 39). His comments regarding indigenous cultures also create a continuum of experience between the Nicaraguan revolution and the broader continental context. When he describes the uprising against Somoza in the town of Monimbó, Cardenal emphasizes the parallels between it and centuries of indigenous marginalization: “Various American Indians, the Kunas from Panama, the Chocoes from Colombia, and others, had sent messages of solidarity with the Indians of Monimbó, and I answered gratefully from Costa Rica and telling them that the rebellion had been against forty years of Somocista dictatorship and also against four hundred years of oppression” (Vol. III, 72).

Chapter Four

The Work of Omar Cabezas Orality and Liberation Discourse

ORALITY AND THE PROCESS OF LIBERATION In his seminal work Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong declares that “Ontogenetically and phylogenetically, it is the oral word that first illuminates consciousness with articulate language, that first divides subject and predicate and then relates them to one another, and that ties human beings to one another in society” (175). Human communication, according to Ong, began as a self-determining act that originated in spoken utterances that ultimately expressed an acute awareness of the human community and of the desire to improve our lives. In this way, orality is, in essence, revolutionary in spirit. It allows for and advocates the simultaneous prominence of receptor, message, and transmitter in a manner that levels the discursive playing field and, according to Terry Eagleton, accentuates the who, to whom, and why more than any inherent linguistic properties (29). The strategies utilized in speech and oral discourse serve to elaborate a counterdiscourse that liberate communication from the written word and, in the process, continuously subvert the foundations of Modernity and the colonial condition. 1 In Orality and Literacy, Ong classifies the different types of thought and expression in primary oral cultures (37–49) and underscores the role of epic poets and memory in the oral transmission of cultural values and norms (23). Set expressions, for example, allow for a greater spontaneity and a “more sophisticated orally patterned thought” (35) that reflects daily reality far more effectively than the written word: “You do not find climactic linear plots ready-formed in people’s lives, although real lives may provide material out of which such a plot may be constructed by ruthless elimination of all 107

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but a few carefully highlighted incidents” (140). Ong also distinguishes primary orality from secondary orality and affirms that, while primary orality is “the pristine orality of mankind untouched by writing or print which remains still more or less operative in areas sheltered to a greater or lesser degree from the full impact of literacy and which is vestigial to some degree in us all” (“Literacy and Orality,” 3), secondary orality “is the orality induced by radio and television, and it is by no means independent of writing and print but totally dependent on them” (“Literacy and Orality,” 3). Other scholars also recognize the importance of orality to human expression. Adolfo Colombres, for example, describes orators as “specialists of the word” who are able to unite communities through the transportable, nimble, and spontaneous representation of myths and rituals (72, 78). Eugenio Mainer declares that oral culture is unavoidably contextual and evokes “profound emotions” that, combined with “clarity,” serve to impress the message upon the receptor (113). In this context, speech act theory “provides a way of talking about utterances not only in terms of their surface grammatical properties but also in terms of the context in which they are made, the intentions, attitudes and expectations of the participants, [and] the relationships existing between participants” (Pratt, 86). While oral traditions emerge from a discrete cultural context, they also connect with other communities by virtue of the metaphorical uses of icons and legends (Irarrazaval, 195), effectively establishing “the authority of oral culture against processes of cultural modernization and transculturation that privilege literacy and written literature as norms of expression” (Beverley, Testimonio, 19). The “popular language” harnessed by both orality and the written word and expressed by subaltern populations presents itself as a possible counterdiscourse to the “public language” (Barbas-Rhoden, “El papel,” 66) emanating from the metropolis and expressed by the literate authorities of a community. The disenfranchised nature of orality allows it to employ a language that both reflects reality and alludes to an improved existence for speaker and audience. As Arturo Andrés Roig has declared, “The language of utopia is that of speech” (115), reflecting how the power of orality is again being harnessed in Nicaragua by demonstrators and public figures as they protest the actions of the Ortega government and give on-thespot interviews, shout slogans, and compose spontaneous songs or chants. Recent debates surrounding national consciousness and the identification of a (post)national imaginary frequently privilege written discourse and rely on European and North American categories of classification. For Anderson, the nation is “an imagined political community” (6); Walker Connor identifies it as “a group of people whose members believe they are ancestrally related” (48); and Anthony D. Smith describes it as “[A] named and selfdefined human community whose members cultivate shared myths, symbols, values and memories, reside in and are attached to a historic homeland,

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create and disseminate a distinctive public culture, and observe common laws and customs” (19). While useful for general purposes of identification, their respective characterizations are implicitly founded on the use and dissemination of the written word and further represent patterns of Eurocentric thinking as the global norm. The “imagined political community” referenced by Anderson, for example, has its origins in a written constitution that lays down the legal distinctiveness of the nation as shaped by the literacy of its readers and writers. And the process of “naming” identified by Smith produces as its desired outcome the written transcription and identification of a communal monolithic identity. As orality preceded and functionally determined the written word, so too does it present itself as an instrumental alternative and complement to the static representations of communal, national, or transnational identity. The illustrative qualities of oral culture serve to identify its relationship with liberation discourse in both opposition and addition to the literate and ultimately limiting characteristics of written culture and the attempt by European colonizers to appropriate the act of writing in order to present the indigenous populations as free of written documentation and, therefore, ignorant, disregarding or expunging from the record any form of written language. In a political sense, orality is delicate terrain, as it is both frequently used to simplify indigenous cultures throughout the Americas and, simultaneously, to demythify written culture by providing a fluid alternative to the static configurations offered by the printed word and by opening the possibilities of expression beyond reading and writing. Edward Kamau Brathwaite, for example, writes of a “nation language” in the Caribbean that is rooted in orality and that more accurately represents the struggle to construct a popular culture faithful to the people. Nation language, according to Brathwaite, is “riddimic,” “the kind of English spoken by the people who were brought to the Caribbean, not the official English now, but the language of slaves and labourers, the servants who were brought in by the conquistadors” (5–6). In much the same manner, the Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiong’o has linked African identity and advancement to a return to non-colonial languages: “There can be no real economic growth and development where a whole people are denied access to the latest developments in science, technology, health, medicine, business, finance and other skills of survival because all these are stored in foreign languages” (90). In this respect, it is important to recall the role of the oral intellectual in pre-colonial Africa, as his vehicle of expression was his own language and “His wisdom showed itself in how he managed words” (96). Thiong’o has also taken Pio Zirimu’s concept of orature and elaborated an ethics of oral expression based on its ability to legitimize the periphery of society and to redefine the traditional concept of literature as “a total aesthetic system, with performance and integration of art forms as two of its defining qualities” (117). 2 In the case of post-revolution-

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ary Nicaragua, Ernesto Cardenal and the Ministry of Culture attempted to construct such an “aesthetic system” through outreach projects that made the arts accessible to the most marginalized and redefined their participation in the advancement of the Sandinista ideology. The speech act is the continuous and dynamic counterpart of and complement to the written text, liberating the message from its unambiguous boundaries and opening it to the interplay of reception. In its engagement with the other and, specifically, with those marginalized from structures of power by the very nature of literate cultures, orality offers itself as the very medium of expression and solidarity. Referencing and prioritizing epistemic context over hegemonic and ultimately decentering perspectives of difference, the spoken word is most revolutionary in its dynamic denunciation of antagonistic narratives that denature social transformation and inscribe themselves within canonically static traditions. In this respect, the relationship between orality and the written word is, ultimately, one of power: to identify, to subvert, and to articulate mythologies that embrace the particular and address the intercultural universal, that are informed by a contextual past and constructed toward a future inhabited by a reconstruction of dissimilarity. 3 It is no coincidence that the testimonio in Latin America has emerged from spoken traditions throughout the continent and employed both oral and written strategies that emphasize its dynamic nature and its ability to represent subaltern populations. Before the arrival of Europeans, a vast number of indigenous cultures throughout the Americas employed oral strategies and also constructed and published epic poems in order to pay homage to specific individuals, preserving key moments in cultural history and constructing a living memory of political, social, and economic traditions. The Tenek Indians in Mexico, precursors of the Aztec culture, for example, narrated a number of creation myths through the collective retelling of stories that involved the audience and obligated the narrator to alter his tale accordingly. The Incan cultures in modern-day Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, and Peru transmitted the routines and rituals of daily life through harawis and hayllis, lyric and epic poems that were ceremonially recited by the harawec poet. The Rabinal Achí is a performed oral narrative that incorporates music, dance, and theater in order to represent the conflict between two dominant political groups, the Rabinalebs and the Quiché. And the Popol Vuh, perhaps the best-known example of the prehispanic oral tradition in the Americas, employs over 9,000 lines of poetry to relate the creation myth and depict the culture and customs of the Maya people. The use of writing instruments and a written language by the Olmecs, Zapotecs, Maya, and other Mesoamerican cultures also indicate the presence and importance of written texts throughout the Americas. The arrival of the Spanish in the Americas, however, brought with it a systemic erradication of pre-Columbian written forms of communication, and, consequently, the dis-

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placement of oral traditions by a European culture that favored written documentation—particularly “the book”—and expression over the spoken word in order to further subjugate the original inhabitants of the land. The work of the Spaniard Alejo Venegas de Busto (1497–1562), for example, in portraying the “book” as sole repository of knowledge and wisdom contributed to the displacement of Amerindian “graphic semiotic interaction” (Mignolo, “Signs,” 233) and to the ignorance of the Spanish regarding indigenous cultures and customs. As Mignolo has indicated, “The model of writing and the book imbedded in the European mind during the Renaissance, and generally defined by [Alejo] Venegas, erased many of the possibilities for missionaries and men of letters to inquire into different writing systems and sign carriers rather than simply by analogy with their own model” (“Signs,” 234). In an attempt to manage the dissemination of information throughout its empire, the Crown also exercised control over Spanish-language publications and prohibited the distribution of novels such as Don Quixote to the colonies in the hopes that indigenous—and subversive—imaginations would be better controlled if tales such as these were neither read nor retold. Oral traditions in the Americas, however, were never completely disconnected from written systems of expression, adapting to the imposition of new cultural models and the embedding and expansion of the Spanish and Portuguese languages. Alphabetic writing, however, became an instrument of colonization: “The Spanish stressed reading the word rather than reading the world, and made the letter the anchor of knowledge and understanding” (Mignolo, “Signs,” 253). Today, the traditional and rather conventional distinction in oral studies between folklore and literature has been blurred, revealing “a far more shadowy and fluid territory of the imagination” (Slater, 100) and recognizing the debt owed to written systems of language used before the arrival of Columbus. As part of the debate surrounding orality, epic poetry in the Americas became particularly subject to a variety of analyses that centered on its preEuropean foundations as well as on its post-Columbian transformations and oral origins. If the epic “celebrates in the form of a continuous narrative the achievements of one or more heroic personages of history or tradition” (Oxford English Dictionary) and is, according to the Aristotelean model, “directed to noble audiences” (Falconer), Latin American poetry and narrative that dialogue with this tradition ultimately display what may be categorized as the subversion of the privileged position adopted by the bard. In his seminal writing “Epic and Novel,” Mikhail Bakhtin compares the two genres and affirms that the uniqueness of the novel and its connection to the present places it above the epic, which relies on an “absolute past” whose historical protagonist lacks the texture and depth of contemporary man because it mythifies both its subject and the language (The Dialectic Imagination, 16–17). In the epic, memory takes precedence over knowledge due to the fact

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that the source of all value resides in a past that absorbs people and denies them a true integration with their present. Bakhtin acknowledges that the epic genre, however, is formative in its ability to draw our attention to history and to the origins of our traditions: “The world of the epic is the national heroic past: it is a world of ‘beginnings’ and ‘peak times’ in the national history, a world of fathers and founders of families, a world of ‘firsts’ and ‘bests’” (13). In its focus on historical tradition, the epic remains stagnated in a completed world whose true projection into the future is best represented by the fluidity, motion, and incompleteness of the novel as it “re-orients our gaze toward the inconclusive present” (69). Latin American epic narratives generally fit squarely within the canonical descriptions of a genre that has done more to evoke that “absolute past” described by Bakhtin than to inform and influence the present. Texts such as La Araucana (1590), Arauco domado (1596), and Argentina y conquista del Río de la Plata (1602), for example, center on the heroic deeds of both the Spanish and non-Spanish and frequently connect with their more contemporary epic counterparts through a similar treatment of forms and themes. More currently, works such as Martín Fierro (1872) by José Hernández, Canto general (1950) by Pablo Neruda, and El estrecho dudoso (1966) by Ernesto Cardenal, among others, continue the epic tradition into the present day by transcending Bakhtin’s perceived limitations of the genre. In the process, however, they construct a graceful sequence of historical continuity and connect historical events such as the Spanish conquest of Central America with more contemporary episodes such as the interference of the United States in the internal affairs of Latin American nations. In the poem “Heights of Macchu Picchu,” for example, Neruda acknowledges the inspiration he receives from Latin American history and declares that “I’ve come to speak through your dead mouths. / Throughout the earth join all / . . . / tell me everything, chain by chain, link by link, and step by step” (41). In “Melancholy near Orizaba (1942),” Neruda writes: “My people, what do you say? Sailor, / peon, mayor, nitrate miner, do you hear me? / I hear you, dead brother, living brother, I hear you” (218). In The Doubtful Strait, Cardenal manages to subvert the traditional epic focus on the protagonist’s heroic actions, as “the poem depicts a conquest riddled by corruption, barbarism and chaos and ultimately invalidates and desacralizes the traditional and epically infused canonical histories that are overwhelmingly marked by their heroization of the conqueror” (T. Williams, 640). The heroic actions are not exclusive of an individual, but rather belong to an entire people who, guided by enlightened leaders, rebel against the conquest of the Spaniards. In narrating the carnival at Acalán, where Cortés and his men meet with the emperor Cuauhtémoc, Cardenal describes the role played by the entire community and transcribes the recommendations of Cuahtémoc to the lords of Acalán: “And King Cuauhtémoc spoke to them: / ‘Make every effort you can, with God’s help. /

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Be happy. / Do not go to foreign nations. / Be happy here. / Do this to avoid causing pain to the ordinary people, / to the old, the elderly, to the children who sleep in their cradles, / to those who are scarcely beginning to walk, to those who are playing’” (45). As evidenced, the works by Neruda and Cardenal emphasize the non-traditional aspect of epic poetry by drawing attention to the contemporary relevance of historical events. In the case of Neruda, the narrator brings suffering and pain into the present by offering examples of laborers and connecting, explicitly, the “living” with the “dead.” In Cardenal’s poem, the advice offered by the emperor Cuauhtémoc comments on incursions into foreign territory and expresses a preoccupation with the more innocent of society, counseling his noble listeners to care for those in their community. The “speaking” and “lips” that Neruda invokes and the words that Cuahtémoc “spoke” to the nobles of Acalán accentuate the connection between orality and liberation, particularly the role played by language in enunciating and elaborating a historical process rooted in the lived reality of the people. More importantly, orality is present in both works as the thread that connects individuals, providing the stage for personal and collective liberation. The work of Omar Cabezas occupies a unique position in that it exhibits a number of characteristics typical of the epic genre and, at the same time, manages to modify these. 4 The events of both Fire from the Mountain and Love song for mankind occur in what Bakhtin has termed “the absolute past” (15) and were instrumental in constructing a renewed post-revolutionary national tradition in Nicaragua, yet Cabezas brings the past into the narrative present and deconstructs the reverential image of the epic hero through a confession of his foibles, fears, and mistakes, framed by his own political convictions and illustrated by moments of comic relief or tragic incidents. If orality represents the “home of the sacred” (Colombres, 73), Cabezas manages to humanize such sacrosanct topics as individual sacrifice and noble cause by offering the reader a demythified rendering of individual and collective liberation. FIRE FROM THE MOUNTAIN AND INITIAL ORALITY The events described by Cabezas in Fire from the Mountain detail his own political coming-of-age and the difficulties he encountered in the mountains: How their clothes began to wear out, the effects of hunger, the weeks of isolation. While his circumstances may have been rather distinctive, the case of Omar Cabezas is not drastically different from other Nicaraguan writers who experienced an ideological awakening in the 1960s. During this period, his studies and contacts at the Universidad Nacional de León sparked his activism in the fight against the Somoza dictatorship and drove him to pursue

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a relationship with the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) through the Federación Estudiantil Revolucionaria (FER). After participating in the armed struggle throughout the second half of the 1970s in the northern part of the country, Cabezas was awarded the title of “Comandante Guerrillero” and named director of the Dirección Política of the Ministry of the Interior. His contributions to the revolution led to interviews by a number of journalists that recorded his experiences on cassette tapes that were ultimately edited and published as La montaña es más que una inmensa estepa verde, winning the Casa de las Américas prize in testimonial literature in 1982. As David Bray summarizes, “What he told the tape recorder emerges between book covers as an engaging, sensitive, and romantic memoir, complete with the sound effects of spoken language” (48). It is the role of the tape recorder as an instrument of expression and transmission, however, that dovetails with our discussion on orality and written language, filtering the memories and the process of (re)collecting evidence and acting, in essence, as the narrative bridge between the two. In recalling the writing process itself, Cabezas remembers that he had to request permission from his superior, Tomás Borge, who granted him eight days to write the book: “Then my first task was to find all my women friends and have them return the cassettes. And then I went away for eight days to Apoya Laguna, that area, and began to tackle all the recordings, arranging them chronologically; and where there were gaps I bridged them; and that’s how I finished the book, and I added an ending. I finished it before the eight days were up” (“Testimonio about My Testimonios,” 86). The process he describes here rather cleanly articulates the personality of Cabezas and the apparently effortless progression that culminated in the work itself. A number of themes that critics and reviewers of La montaña have been quick to explore in the work include the promotion of a revolutionary discourse (Barbas Rhoden, Hernández Novas, Jones, Mantero, Ross, Tirado), the boundaries of testimonio (Hood, McCallister, Ward) and the latent or changing machismo in the text (Orr). Critics have also centered on the language employed by Cabezas, particularly the discursive role of the oral aspects of the work. Claire Pailler, for example, writes that the orality so evident in the work “also allowed flexibility in writing” (210); Raúl Hernández Novas affirms that “The narration quickly wins us over because of its rigor, freshness, and sponteneity, due precisely to its conversational character and to Cabezas being an extraordinary storyteller” (131); Seymour Menton indicates that “The colloquial conversational style, sprinkled with an occasional poetic image, is most effective in providing the reader with an overall view of the revolutionary movement within” (437); and Stephen Legeay insists that it employs “a ‘language of liberation’” that transcends the writer’s individual circumstances (353).

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The allure of Fire from the Mountain and the semantic and epistemic energy of orality and oral narrative technique are also evident in published interviews with Cabezas. In addressing the potential of the work one can discern the emancipatory concerns that guided his revolutionary ethic: “I believe the book can help to demythify, and demythify not only my image, but those of other compatriots, or in any case, according to the mind of each one, to humanize that mythical or mystic vision of the Sandinista combatants” (Anonymous, “Con Omar Cabezas,” 123). The characters in the book are, as he recognizes, larger than life, their exploits turning into the stuff of legend and survival relevant to every man and woman. In acknowledging the mythifying tendency that can be found throughout its pages, however, Cabezas addressed the frequent custom within the FSLN to transform an implicit political iconography into a social hagiography. As he declared in 1984, “We are not working to not lose power, we are working to conserve the peace and progress of our people, that is why we do not want war” (Anonymous, “‘Nuestro pueblo,’” 58). While the terms of his statement can be taken to task for lacking a degree of specificity and praxis, the complementary relationship that he describes between “peace” and “the people” helps equate the Sandinista party to the Nicaraguan people. By the end of the phrase, the simple subject pronoun “we” has changed from implicitly specifying Sandinista party officials to explictly including himself in “the people.” His enunciation of political authority as embodied by the Sandinista program becomes inextricably tied to the will of “the people” and to ethical issues of “peace” and “progress” that, albeit somewhat tautologically, manage to construct a socially populist discourse rich with anti-imperialist rhetoric and liberational potential. Writing on the salient characteristics of the epic genre, Walter Ong declares that “What made a good epic poet was, among other things of course, tacit acceptance of the fact that episodic structure was the only way and the totally natural way of imagining and handling lengthy narrative, and, second, possession of supreme skill in managing flashbacks and other episodic techniques” (141). Although Cabezas eschewed traditional epic verse in favor of more colloquial prose, the narrative technique he employs in Fire from the Mountain favors “episodic structure” and evidences that “supreme skill in managing flashbacks” in retelling the origins of his Sandinista activism. As the product of a middle-class Nicaraguan family in the 1960s that had access to different media and that offered him studies in law and a university education, Cabezas exemplifies what Ong termed a secondary orality “induced by radio and television” (“Literacy and Orality,” 3); yet the narrative episodic techniques he employs in works such as Fire from the Mountain and the poor literacy rate of Nicaragua during this time typify Ong’s description of primary orality. Through his use of oral techniques such as recounting his exploits into a tape recorder and then transcribing them, Cabezas manipulates

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the reader by using written script to convey the emotions of oral discourse. Consequently, these sensations allow the narrator to connect with the reader and stress the importance of orality by drawing attention not only to the production of oral speech but also to its reception, to both the speaking and the listening of the message. At the beginning of the work, for example, Cabezas uses oral techniques to make clear the distinction between the rich and the poor and describes the religious celebrations during Holy Week in León and the trips taken by the wealthy at this time: “Sometimes I think the rich took off for the sea or shut up in their houses just to make sure they wouldn’t get caught up in that swarming mass of poor people in the processions” (3). Those who could not afford such trips frequently congregated in bars and pool halls such as one known simply as Lezama’s: “The roar from the other tables was nonstop, and the voices of the players rose up above the racket of dozens of colliding pool balls” (5). The explicit silence associated with the “rich” during this time contrasts unambiguously with the din of the pool hall, projecting the physical absence of the wealthy as a metaphorical space in the lives of those who, due to economic circumstances, had to remain in the city. The written description offered here by Cabezas uses techniques of non-verbal communication and orality to allude to the difference between the rich and the poor, to establish the parameters of class conflict, and to accentuate the importance of non-utterances in the process of consciousness and liberation informed by the speech act. “The roar,” “the voices,” “racket,” and “colliding balls” are images that emphasize the importance of sounds and the value of effectively describing this place, a location meaningful to Cabezas and significant to those who did not have the resources to “[take] off for the sea.” The sounds of a pool hall fly in the face of upper-class decorum and present an alternative to the social order and escapism advocated by “the rich.” Other examples throughout the work exploit oral techniques and configure the act of listening as an integral part of a polyphonic liberation. In recalling his first days at the Universidad Nacional de León, Cabezas draws attention to the transformation that he was subtly undergoing: “As a kid at the university I had already started to hear things, to listen” (8). His use of the word “kid” implies a recognized innocence on his part, an admission that his ideological awakening had been preceded by personal experiences that paved the way for more informed deliberation. He begins “to hear things” that, implicitly, complement and inform what he had witnessed as a young man on the streets of León. Upon his arrival at the university, “I was very conscious of being from a working-class family, so when they talked at the university about injustice, about poverty, I thought of my own barrio, which was a poor barrio” (8). His origins are only too familiar to Cabezas, yet these are perceived in a different light when he describes the circumstances in Nicaragua under Somoza. While terms such as “injustice” and “poverty” often run the

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danger of becoming depersonalized clichés, his contact with these realities on a personal level brings the theory alive. Cabezas also notes that his first interventions in these debates was not as a speaker but as a listener: liberation begins by actively becoming aware of the “utterances” present at the periphery and understanding that these were displaced to the margins by an active and deliberate program of action designed to privilege a minority of the population that belonged to the dictator’s inner circle. The natural narrative that Cabezas begins to construct and the evident oral footprint that it leaves is, as Labov describes, an example of the counter-discourse that began to emerge from marginalized communities. Such counter-discourse would contribute to the liberation of marginalized populations through a subversion of the written word vis-à-vis a renewed emphasis on the emancipatory potential of orality, particularly of the role played by speaking and listening in transforming society. Before heading up to the mountains to participate actively in the resistance against the Somoza government, Cabezas states that he wanted to gauge the impact of student demonstrations and uprisings. One Sunday, he decides to attend church in order to hear what others were saying about the student uprisings: “I went to Mass in the cathedral of León just to hear what people would be saying in the church lobby after the service—the same sort of thing you’d hear in the stadium before a game” (14). Comparing the mass to a sports event contributes to the evident deconstruction of traditional Catholicism and enters into dialogue with liberation philosophy by favoring popular culture over the symbolism of a sacrosanct Christian ritual, his stated intention of listening to the speech of others also manages to present orality as a subversive alternative to both the characteristic methodology of the Catholic Church and the institutional channels of political participation. Action is therefore represented as a previous moment of discernment, and proof of action and subsequent liberation arrive with listening: an undertaking that leaves no tangible physical evidence, that validates silence, and that resonates long after the speaker has concluded. As Cabezas wrote, listening on the radio to the music of Carlos Mejía Godoy while living in the mountains “helped us endure that existence” (105) and constructed a palpable link between resistance and reflection. If a “nation language” is, according to Brathwaite, the “unofficial” language spoken by the most marginalized, then oral techniques and structures in Fire from the Mountain exemplify a “nation language” that serves to unify the population and the diverse approaches in the struggle against injustice. Describing the growth of the FER at the Universidad Nacional de León in the sixties, for example, Cabezas draws attention to the ability of those students, “a sum total of four or five compañeros,” who “had speaking ability and could address assemblies” (20). Edgard Munguía, a future alternate member of the FSLN National Directorate who died in battle in 1977, “was the first

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CUUN president to be elected by going from class to class repeating over and over that he was a communist, a Sandinista, and a member of FER” (25). His efforts represent not only a subversive sincerity that ignores the peril of acknowledging his membership in a clandestine political organization, but also the role of speech in openly recruiting members, bringing these members together and furthering the Sandinista cause on campus. Communication and unity were best achieved through physical contact and spoken words that, through simple repetition and insistence, invoked the integrity of the speaker. As an integral component of pre-Columbian cultures, the written language collaborated with oral practices to sustain customs and enact laws. It should then be no surprise that the Spanish would look to eliminate works written in the Americas before their arrival in order to establish their discursive authority and represent indigenous cultures as ignorant, simple, and naïve. In describing those years of tensions and student mobilizations at the Universidad de León, Cabezas consistently connects his own ideological coming of age with the potential of the spoken word to unite students in the fight against the Somoza regime. His description of a demonstration at the dean of the law school’s home, for example, faithfully depicts the exasperation of his fellow students: “I remembered the mottos SIC ITUR AD ASTRA and FREEDOM FOR THE UNIVERSITY. I thought, what garbage!, and grabbed a can of spray paint from a compañero and stopping in front of the sidewalk of the house, I yelled out to the students, ‘Do you think that with the teaching they do in Law School we’re going to get to the stars or to the light?,’ and they all roared back, ‘Noooo!’” (31). The insipid institutional motto and his own frustration with this rhetoric inspire Cabezas to address his classmates directly and pose questions that, while being blatantly transparent, use a shared disappointment to bring the group together. He does not simply speak: he shouts out in a show of discursive force that stresses both the importance of the subject at hand and the potential size of the audience. In this moment, the entire purpose of studies in law is aggressively deconstructed, as Cabezas implicitly questions the validity of the information that they are learning and the methodology used to impart such material. This awareness of purpose also undermines the written word, as the narrator, in an act of defiance, “grabbed a can of spray paint from a compañero” who was writing revolutionary slogans on the walls of the house in order to privilege the spoken word and speaks in order to more effectively include his audience in the insurgent actions. Through the intervention of Cabezas, the students have gone from being mere spectators of a graffiti performance to participants in a subversive political event. In this context, the spoken word proves to be a catalyst and a call to action for those students who are on the edges of participation and have considered becoming more active in calls for reform.

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After his decision to become a member of the FSLN and participate actively in the movement against the Somoza government, Cabezas leaves the university and begins to establish relationships with other non-student populations who were also openly dissatisfied with the poverty and the endless restrictions on civil liberties. In Subtiava, an indigenous community on the outskirts of León, Cabezas describes how the growing discontent led the Sandinistas to organize noisy demonstrations: “So the local committees went all through the barrios beating their drums: barangan-bangarán . . . barangan-bangarán. It’s a muted, serious sound; it’s not cheerful, but it’s not sad either; it’s a tense sound” (40). The sounds of the indigenous drums represent the beginnings of liberation, a public manifestation of the dissatisfaction experienced by the vast majority of Nicaraguans. “And you felt a unity in the beat of the drums,” Cabezas continues, “a unity of rhythm and face, or of rhythm and step, or of step, rhythm, and face” (41). The auditory explosion described by the narrator transcends the limits of a typical political protest in a cathartic show of frustration and cohesion on the part of the Subtiavans. The repeated demonstrations against Somoza displace the written document—the alleged “rule of law”—and restore orality as both site and instrument of social dispute. The barangan-bangarán transcribed here becomes the single, collective heartbeat of the group, emulating the strength of the marchers and their convictions. Throughout Fire from the Mountain oral techniques are also employed to express humor, more frequently than not to relieve the tension sensed by the participants in a particularly dangerous military mission or to alleviate the boredom of living in the mountains for days on end. His self-awareness regarding the potential of humor in situations of exertion or hostility proves insightful, as he recognizes the transformative power of laughter and the spoken word. In one case, Cabezas descends from the mountains and recounts his frustration at not being able to communicate with local peasants, laughing at how this impasse was resolved: I remember once when I was talking, a couple of swearwords slipped out; then ha, ha, ha! people smiled when I swore, and looked at each other. No doubt about it, they were communicating with each other; they were chuckling, but chuckling about something I’d said. I realized I was getting through to them. This is important, because it dawned on me that a swear word or a crude word used in the right way can be explosive, very sharp politically. (46)

Inappropriate or unbecoming as they may be, the swear words that “slip out” allow the interlocutor to take the discourse to a colloquial level that manages to include his audience in a way that non-vulgar language cannot. The initial laughter paves the way for a greater understanding of his message, and Cabezas acknowledges that “a crude word” interjected at just the right moment can construct a more efficient message that connects with the public and

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offers an alternative rhetorical path without altering the substance of the message at hand. The “chuckling,” as the narrator observes, represents the first signs of understanding: “I was getting through to them.” After that moment, he describes that he returned to the mountains triumphantly: “I went with millions of swearwords that represented the hatred and aspirations of the masses” (47). In the published text, Cabezas uses script to express, paradoxically, how the written language has been dislodged by oral speech that has facilitated revolutionary action and transfer. Under the circumstances, he both reacts and responds to the situation, unintentionally using “a couple of swearwords” and, subsequently, understanding the transformative potential of the spoken word when “I realized I was getting through to them.” His own self-awareness of purpose and intention has matured thanks, in part, to the realization that orality is a vehicle for liberation. The traditionally harsh language of swearwords is a visceral response to the poverty suffered by the Nicaraguan people, and the recognition of these terms implies a displaced sense of loathing intended for Somoza and the vanished dreams of a better life. In this sense, the presence and the therapeutic consequences of humor in Cabezas’s work undermine its classification as an epic or of the narrator as an epic hero. As Bakhtin indicated, “It is precisely laughter that destroys epic, and in general destroys any hierarchical (distancing and valorized) distance” (23). As will be evident in the next chapter, the humor and comic relief evident in Fire from the Mountain dovetail with the implicit goal of using oral strategies to bring about change at the national level. “Laughter,” writes Bakhtin, “demolishes fear and piety before an object” (23). While the gradual attrition suffered by the Somoza administration reflected in part the effectiveness of Sandinista guerrilla warfare in both the cities and countryside, the rhetorical construction, recollection, and transmittal of events would also further their cause. Throughout Fire from the Mountain, speech and the spoken word are referenced and inscribed into the narrative structures of the text as retrospective yet unmistakable proof of national transformation and conversion. Speaking to an intimate group of “Indians” in Subtiava, a small town near Estelí, Cabezas perceives that “You could see when I talked that they were taking it all in with their eyes; it was as if their eyes were refracting my words to their brains; who can say what the process was, but the thing is they were listening, listening, listening” (37). The implicit strength of the spoken word is surpassed only by its apposite antithesis, by the “listening,” by the expectation of a gradual change evident in the eyes of his audience. This is the moment of “the transmission of cultural values and norms” (Ong, 139): Cabezas is conveying to his audience the importance of resisting efforts by the authorities to deny them freedom of movement and speech, emphasizing the need to study ideologies that had practically banned during the dictatorship. This “consciousness raising” (36), as he terms it, connects

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with his own efforts on behalf of the growing movements against Somoza, with the theoretical base of the FSLN, and, on a larger scale, with a Nicaraguan identity distinct from the one endorsed by the regime: An inclusive Nicaragua that would care for all, not just the wealthy or those oligarchs connected to the United States. Throughout the work, the written transcription of verbal and non-verbal speech serves to emphasize the transformative power of both written and spoken language, particularly in Somoza’s Nicaragua, where the absence of a representative democracy and civil liberties left a discursive void that was ultimately occupied by organizations such as the FSLN that worked toward an alternative discourse. The “natural narrative” that emanates from the margins is a testament to the force of popular discourse, expressed through poetry, song, guerrilla warfare, or militant essays. In recalling possible parallels between Fire from the Mountain and the epic genre, what stands out is the narrative structure of the text and the role played by memory and mnemonic devices in the representation of a consistent set of themes that center around personal and collective emancipation. Throughout the work, the spoken word is presented as evidence of liberation, a harbinger of things to come. More often than not, it was employed to more effectively flesh out moments when the written word was simply inadequate or superfluous. The “noise” of the poor in the pool halls of León, the reflection provoked by listening to someone, and the tacit realization that speaking ability may be a useful instrument in bringing about change stress the epistemic relevance of orality to the text. Transcribed from scattered recordings and, according to Cabezas, organized in eight days, Fire from the Mountain serves as narrative evidence that the reaction of a people to oppression and the need to unite in the face of shared injustices may be effectively channeled and informed by oral strategies of expression. LOVE SONG FOR MANKIND, ORALITY, AND LIBERATION The privileged position occupied by Fire from the Mountain within contemporary Latin American narrative owes much to the critical and popular attention it has received since its publication in 1982. Its successor, Canción de amor para los hombres (Love song for mankind) (1988), has not been translated to English, and is neither as read nor as studied as its predecessor. While Fire from the Mountain documents the circumstances that led to Cabezas’s participation in the armed struggle and portrays the narrator’s experience in the first years of active and organized action against the Somoza government, the events in Love song for mankind center on the conflict as witnessed by the narrator in the northern part of Nicaragua between 1977 and 1979, the peak of the Sandinista Revolution. The use of recordings to “write”

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Fire from the Mountain was repeated in 1988, when Cabezas, after five years of pressure from the reading public to write the second part of his testimonio, sequestered himself for eight days in a small house at the edge of the lake found in the Xiloá crater, some twenty miles outside Managua. If, as Hernández Novas indicates, Fire from the Mountain evidences “the victory of revolutionary morale” (135) and emphasizes “a new communal sense of giving to others” (136), Love song for mankind frequently lapses into lengthy and solipsist descriptions that highlight the role of the individual revolutionary—in this case Cabezas—and that evidence the disagreements within the FSLN regarding practical strategies and ideological lines of attack. By the time the text was published in 1988, Cabezas had become part of the Sandinista political machine, witnessing the transformation of Nicaraguan society, participating in the mythification of FSLN actions and intentions, and, ultimately, seeing first-hand the corruption of the revolutionary mission. The descriptions and dialogues offered throughout the 560 pages of Love song for mankind have lost—or rather indifferently reproduced—a good deal of the expressive freshness evident in Fire from the Mountain and run the risk of burdening the reader with repetitive sequences of action, inaction, and contemplation. As is the case with Fire from the Mountain, however, the presence and transcription throughout Love song for mankind of spoken speech and both verbal and non-verbal cues and utterances draw attention to the discursive strength of oral techniques and practices. Much of the attention devoted to orality underscores the potential correlation between (oral) communication and authority, particularly the capacity of transcribed speech to engage in participatory politics and construct its own narrative space. Regarding the subversive capacity of nation languages, for example, Thiong’o writes that “Their very creations were acts of resistance; and these became sites of further resistance” (83). From the perspective of intercultural philosophy, orality also contributes to dismantling any hierarchy of cultural expression that favors the written word and strives for a decentering of culture: “The task toward deculturization of our image of culture can help us break the power of the administrators of culture and, above all, to overcome the tendency where certain traditions are worshipped, and, in turn, consider it a complex social process” (Fornet-Betancourt, “Interaction and Asymmetry,” 36). In Love song for mankind, Cabezas utilizes techniques associated with the transcription of speech and oral performance to repeatedly deconstruct the implicit hegemony of the written word and to subtly disassemble a broader “asymmetry of power” (Fornet-Betancourt, “Interaction and Asymmetry,” 38) present in the cultural production of postcolonial societies. Cabezas illustrates the progressive advance of the revolution by summarizing a number of communiqués that he wrote to Bayardo Arce, his immediate superior in the northern mountains. These notes and letters more fre-

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quently than not express his frustration at the lack of resources and repeatedly ask for more men and weapons. Arce, however, asks him to be patient, to be careful, “that he be confident, that that day would arrive” (45). Another letter from Arce informs him of the schism within the FSLN and of the “separation” from the organization of Victor Tirado López and of the brothers Daniel and Humberto Ortega, all members of the National Directorate. These decisions, however, infuriate Cabezas and give rise to feelings of frustration and despair (355). When he manages to arrange a meeting with Arce to clear the air, Cabezas acknowledges the benefits of face-to-face communication and calls attention to the shortcomings of the written word: “Before, he had told me some things through correspondence, but well, that is very short and you can’t ask letters and letters can’t respond” (146). The limits of the written expressions exchanged between Cabezas and Arce are evident, as they are often excessively brief, cannot emulate the interactive and interpersonal dialogue of the spoken word, and often lead to misunderstandings. While he manages to recognize the practical nature of the letters, the narrator references the necessity of oral exchanges and, in the process, reculturizes national discourse by giving priority to the spoken word. In a context that has recaptured the transformative potential of speech and strives to disassemble the current “asymmetry of power” informed by colonial history, written language is represented as denatured, disconnected from human interaction by the physical distance and participatory expanse that separate the producer of the word from the receptor of the word. Throughout the work, Cabezas repeatedly transcribes sounds and nonverbal cues that further illustrate the collective social promise of non-written discourse. He describes, for example, how acutely sensitive he was to any potential threat: “I am always expecting that any moment he will whistle the classic sign of imminent danger, a sign that we have long established that is the imitation of a bird in the mountain” (381). Recalling armed battle, Cabezas describes his relief upon hearing explosives detonate at a safe distance: “How delightful the sound of mortars, especially if they do not hit their targets, especially if they only fall on the banks and the ground shakes and no one is killed” (498). During breaks in the fighting, he and his men would go to clinics and field hospitals to offer assistance: “The dead and wounded by the hundreds on every side, in beds, cots, mattresses, cardboards, on the ground, on the sidewalk, on the street. A horrible chorus of cries, complaints, shouts” (505). The distinct combat and non-combat situations described reveal a level of physical and emotional violence shared by the insurgents and alleviated only by the camaraderie of the revolutionary troops. The sound of a bird, the explosion of a distant mortar shell, and the “cries, complaints, shouts” of those wounded in battle underscore not only the explicit violence of the revolution but also the implicit unity of those fighting to overthrow the Somoza regime. While practically every moment in the text is initially de-

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scribed in the first person singular, Cabezas rarely loses sight of the larger social and political objective that transcends the voice of the individual and manages to fuse it to a broader national context. A bird’s song, for example, is emulated not to save oneself but to warn others of possible danger. The blast of a mortar shell is cause for celebration when it is heard exploding in the distance, far from its intended target of friends and fellow combatants. And the sounds of suffering that he and his men would witness at the clinics reproduce the damage inflicted upon a population that continued to be united, in chorus, in spite of the efforts by Somoza’s troops to dismember and annihilate any resistance. Non-verbal noises, whistles, thuds, crashes, and cries in the text serve to remind the reader that sounds echoed the liberation of a people and that these sounds frequently reproduced the authentic voice of struggle much more efficiently than any spoken or written discourse. In this respect, Cabezas utilizes, reproduces, and documents the nation language of a Nicaraguan people actively rebelling against injustice. There are also abundant references to the liberating potential of orality and to how the spoken word participates in “rejecting the formal boundaries between the written and the oral, between the sign and the icon, between voices and silences” (Thiong’o, 115). The transcription of speech and oral strategies in Love song for mankind functions not only to deconstruct the authority of the written text but to liberate historical voices from the void of institutionalized silence. The figure of Augusto Sandino, for example, is present throughout the work as an ideological touchstone that inspires the struggle of the FSLN revolutionaries. His importance to the Sandinista cause is further emphasized by the fact that simply enunciating the name of Sandino and remembering his legacy is, in itself, a subversive action worthy of respect and repetition. Cabezas recalls a day when, at the age of fifteen, he saw the words “¡Viva Sandino!” painted on a wall across from his home: “It was like a shiver through my entire body, a strange and frozen wind in my face [. . .] because in Nicaragua, at the beginning, no one spoke of Sandino out loud, everything was silent. Suddenly, Sandino there, in the middle of the street, and in the plain light of day” (16). Although the young Cabezas is struck by potential of the written word to evoke the legend of Sandino, it is through the countercultural medium of graffiti that the historical presence is expressed. The story of Sandino had been marginalized for many years in Nicaragua due to the efforts of subsequent Somoza administrations that looked to silence his life story, a fact that ultimately contributed to his mythification. In recalling the graffiti, Cabezas equates writing the name of Sandino in that subversive manner with speaking of him and naming him in a voice that gradually grows in both tone and volume. Sandino is there because someone has summoned him. “It was like revealing something hidden,” writes Cabezas, “like challenging the bad gods, the yankees, the rich and the [National] guard” (17). The presence of Sandino and the importance of his

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struggle grows as his name is juxtaposed with the forces of the other side: the “bad gods,” the United States, the wealthy and Somoza’s own police, the National Guard, these are the adversaries of the struggle, brought to memory and to life by the simple subversive act of painting his name on a street and by speaking of him. Upon entering the University of León, Cabezas meets Leonel Rugama, one of the founders of the FSLN, who explains the importance of Sandino to the organization and to the resistance against the Somoza government. Rugama “talked seriously to me about the General, like something that existed and exists. He talked to me about Sandino’s coronels and generals as if they were flesh and bone” (17). Up until that moment, Sandino had been, for Cabezas, an absent historical figure denied physicality by the manipulations of Somoza. The silence surrounding his person begins to shrink, however, as the FSLN begins to recover the historical record and to construct a revolutionary movement based on his ideology. For Cabezas, an important part of the resurgence of his ideals is rooted in simply speaking of Sandino and his epoch. Through spoken exchanges not to be found in written texts, historical figures acquire a tangible presence of “flesh and bone” whose origins are found in spoken exchanges. “Then, I slowly begin to assimilate that, in fact, my grandmother’s Sandino, the Sandino on the wall covered by the sun, were not lies nor fairy tales” (17). The very act of hearing the stories about Sandino and sensing the subversive possibilities of political graffiti brings to life an alternate version of history that liberates the memory of Sandino and offers hope for the future of the country. The intended image of Sandino manufactured by Somoza as an insurgent and anti-patriotic element is a representation that, through conversation and dialogue, is gradually deconstructed and reconstructed to reveal that the organized struggle against repression in Nicaragua had begun decades earlier. In Love song for mankind, the transformative power of speech is further emphasized as Cabezas uses oral strategies to denounce inequality and to draw attention to the latent potential of Nicaraguan society. In one episode, Cabezas and two of his soldiers impersonate members of the feared National Guard in order to detain Sergo Olivas, a collaborator of the Somoza regime: “Yelling at this Sergio, accusing him of being a liar, accusing him of collaborating with the guerrilla, and that coward, swearing by his mommy that brought him into this world that he did not collaborate with delinquents, and the discussion continues and the three of us laughing our heads off” (254). By playing the role of National Guardsman, the narrator turns the tables on the traitor and uses oral violence to denounce the explicit betrayal of Sergio and the implicit conduct of the police. Cabezas describes the fear felt by their “prisoner” and the force of their argument through transcriptions of the spoken word and terms such as “yelling.” As the role-playing continues, Cabezas and his men attempt to contain their delight upon witnessing the fear and

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cowardice of a man who, as he himself asserts, had actually never collaborated with the Sandinistas. Both sides of the discussion are fleshed out through the use of orality and descriptions that emphasize the power of speech to transform the situation. In the narrative, the gradual liberation of the Nicaraguan people takes place at precisely such moments, when traditional approaches to battle fall victim to more creative solutions that integrate popular customs and conventions. Shouts, accusations, oaths, and laughter coexist in a moment shaped by the pointed utterances of the actors. In the episode, the concern expressed by their “prisoner” Sergio undergoes a radical transformation as Cabezas and his men hold him accountable and reveal themselves to be Sandinistas, not members of the National Guard. As Sergio tries to explain himself, Cabezas exclaims, “Hey! Sonofabitch! Shut up! Faggot! You talk when I order it!” (255). While “faggot” is inevitably related to the homophobic nature of the term, the use in Latin America of maricón or marica between males is frequently used to draw attention to effeminate, silly, or cowardly behavior. The insults directed at their prisoner exist within the liberating potential of a discourse empowered by the simple act of speech. The military authority of Cabezas under these circumstances is represented by his ability to not only allow but to order Sergio to speak. Power over the prisoner is represented as power over the spoken word, and utterances become one more weapon to be wielded in a battle that, for the moment, had been won by he who manipulated the rhetoric better than his opponent. By that point, their prisoner had lost everything, including the ability to articulate his thoughts: “The toothless and clawless lion, hairless, worn-out, and not even able to speak” (256). The image of Sergio as a nonthreatening, toothless, hairless lion is an effective one, as it takes the representation of a powerful animal and eliminates any danger it may represent simply by taking its voice. Cabezas also insults him by using the traditionally masculine image of the lion to draw attention to how Sergio has failed by betraying the symbols of his manhood. And a hairless lion missing its teeth, claws, and roar is not a lion but a sad shadow of his former self. By the end, the traitor has been transformed into a docile collaborator of the FSLN who bends to the will of Cabezas and his men and agrees not to denounce the work of the guerrillas: “Yes sir, don’t worry, sir, I’m not going to squeal! What happens is that they don’t tell me how things really are. But now that I hear you talk I know how it is” (259). According to Sergio, then, the problem was due to his inability to accurately understand the situation because others had not spoken to him and informed him. Now, however, he has heard the truth, uttered by Cabezas, and knows “how it is.” His disposition has changed simply because he has come into direct contact with a language of authority that, as Thiong’o writes regarding orature, legitimizes the periphery of society and rejects “the formal boundaries between the written and the oral” (115). Through the use of oral descriptions and techniques, Cabezas has

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managed to locate Sergio, to denounce him, to draw him out to the social margins of subversion, and to call attention to the liberating potential of orality. As Ong has noted, the potential of orality in the “transmission of cultural values and norms” (139) is limited only by the circumstances of the moment. In the case of Love song for mankind, Cabezas is describing his experience in the northern mountains during the uprising, between 1977 and 1979. The factors that led to a lukewarm popular reception of this work—the length of the work, its solipsism, the excessive detail and minutiae, the frequent repetition of events—offer an ideological continuation of Fire from the Mountain and provide us with a window into the narrator’s priorities. If his first volume, Fire from the Mountain, chronicles his ideological coming-of-age in the late sixties and early seventies, the detailed descriptions of battles and movements during the Sandinista Revolution cast Cabezas as an astute military strategist in the northern theater and further instill in the reader the relationship between thought and action. Moreover, the repeated use of oral techniques in relating moments and conversations make Love song for mankind an invaluable primer of revolutionary thinking and popular mobilization. In both Fire from the Mountain and Love song for mankind, Cabezas exercises his rhetorical authority and employs a series of narrative strategies that accentuate the denunciatory capacity of speech. The arrival of the Spanish did not represent the appearance of the printed word in the Americas: It was a harbinger of what was to come, as any trace of written documents in pre-Columbian civilizations was actively eradicated and supplanted in order to paint the Spaniards as superior and the indigenous cultures as inferior. As in many cultures throughout the Americas, in Nicaragua the written word as imposed by European colonization has traditionally formed part of an infrastructure of domination that overpowered the poorest of society and imposed the will of an oligarchy indebted to political machinations. Writing, as Ong noted, is an “imperialist activity” (Orality, 12) that emerged from the urban centers of economic power and shifted the center of authority from the spoken word to the physical document. While his considerations emanate from a rather Eurocentric perspective that disregards the presence of written language before Europeans arrived in the Americas, his comments should be taken within the context of (post)colonial systems of thought. Contemporary examinations of orality consider its potential to complement written language, to displace authority and replace it with a framework that locates the speech act within contemporary cultures. While Pratt approaches speech act theory as a site that privileges the context from which utterances emerge, Brathwaite delves deeper and declares that nation languages, those languages that are born from orality and the lower classes, are connected inextricably to experiences of subjugation and marginalization. Orality, in this sense, allows

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Cabezas to express the margins and, paradoxically, to both use and demythify print culture through the affirmation of a political project. The work of Cabezas locates the Sandinista Revolution and its ideological origins within a revolutionary organization that looked to redefine itself in its post-Somoza years and remake the country through a process of historical recollection and reconstruction. In this respect, both of his works utilize memory and an epic voice in order to establish a link between that prehistoric past and a narrative present that is firmly rooted in indigenous cultures and in figures such as Augusto Sandino. In the case of Fire from the Mountain, Cabezas relates his initiation into the FSLN and utilizes oral strategies to build a sense of unity that transcends individual differences within the revolutionary struggle. Over time, those differences would come to divide the party and compel many members to leave it and seek other avenues of political participation. Love song for mankind continues and amplifies the thematic line established by Fire from the Mountain, highlighting the capacity of the written word to reach a larger audience and the capacity of the spoken word to liberate and empower those fighting against the Somoza government and the symbiotic relationship between the two. Both works are dissimilar and inconsistent, rooted in distinct moments that represent the transformation of Nicaraguan society and of the narrator himself. And both utilize orality effectively and contribute to refashioning the cultural topography of a nation victimized by political power surges and scarred by the struggles that took place within the FSLN. NOTES 1. According to Walter Mignolo, the origins of Modernity may be traced “to either the European Renaissance and ‘discovery’ of America (Italian, Spanish and Portuguese scholars) or to the European Enlightenment (England, Germany, Holland, France)” (6). Our use of the term Modernity reflects the symbiotic relationship between the Modern and coloniality, “two sides of the same coin” (Mignolo, 6). 2. With respect to its destabilizing capacity, Thiong’o writes that orature “assumes a dynamic interplay of margins and centres so that any could come to wonder about which was the margin and which the centre. Orature in this sense could be seen as rejecting the formal boundaries between the written and the oral, between the sign and the icon, or between voices and silences” (115). 3. Ong has explored the authoritative voice of oral cultures, declaring that “Oral peoples commonly think of names (one kind of words) as conveying power over things” (33). 4. Merriam-Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature states: “The main aspects of epic convention are the centrality of a hero—sometimes semidivine—of military, national, or religious importance; an extensive, perhaps even comic, geographical setting; heroic battle; extended and often exotic journeying; and the involvement of supernatural beings, such as gods, angels, or demons, in the action” (“Epic,” 381).

Chapter Five

Comedy as Subversion and Resistance in the Work of Omar Cabezas

COMIC THEORY, RESISTANCE, AND REVOLUTION Born in 1960, the Nicaraguan artist Róger Sánchez Flores, “Róger,” began to publish his editorial cartoons in 1979 in the Sandinista newspaper Barricada, using satire to criticize US involvement in national affairs and injecting a much-needed dose of humor into the national political scene. Muñequitos del pueblo (Dolls of the People) (1981), his first collection of editorial cartoons, contains drawings that cover the first twenty months of the Sandinista administration. Topics such as the search for political and economic stability, food rationing, the literacy campaign, and the unending poverty caused by the armed intervention of the United States, among many others, proved to be fertile inspiration for not-so-subtle appraisals of both national and international figures and events. One of his editorial cartoons, for example, is a series of panels that depict soldiers wearing helmets labeled “USMC” attacking a house with automatic weapons and bazookas. The US Marines are growling, shell casings are flying, and a window is broken and hanging by its hinges. The home is, in effect, decimated and riddled with bullet holes. In the final panel we see that, inside the home, standing on a box amid the destruction, there is a dove, holding an olive branch. The words of the Marines enter the home through a window and declare “Give up! You’re surrounded” (Sánchez Flores, 6). The message is clear: the Marines have little idea who their foe truly is, and the violence perpetrated by them is ultimately no match for the peaceful intentions of the Nicaraguan people. In the cartoon, the subversion of the physical and military strength of the United States—as represented by the Marines—is accomplished not only by the presence of the dove, but by the implicit ignorance of the US forces: they 129

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are not aware who is inside that building nor what they are indeed up against. Their representation as large, flat-nosed soldiers whose helmets cover their eyes conveys the image of an unthinking US government that attempts to solve any and all disputes with military force instead of dialogue or reconciliation. The work of Róger is not simply a critique of past policies, as represented by US forces and Somoza. It is, as Guillermo Rothschuh Villanueva has written, an argument for the construction and implementation of structural changes that would favorably impact the immense majority of the Nicaraguan people: “For the new initiate, it was not enough to leave Somoza behind. The country requires a more profound change that would favor the immense majority of the people.” As will be evident, Fire from the Mountain and Love song for mankind often employ humor to subvert political and cultural hegemony and to promote structural changes in Nicaragua. Although humor and the comic as catalysts of social criticism have not been sufficiently studied in Latin American literature, their potential as agents of change has not gone unnoticed. The writings of Simón Bolívar, José Martí, and Fidel Castro, among others, indicate that revolutions are serious work. Humor, however, has the capacity to be revolutionary and to play an active part in the overthrow of asymmetrical structures of power. For some theorists, the transformative potential of play is at the heart of these structural changes. 1 In studying the interstices of comedy and literature, for example, Brian Boyd reviews the three main traditional theories of humor (3–4) and draws attention to the universal nature of facial expressions (6). Boyd also effectively highlights the capacity of play to serve as a tool for social transformations, declaring that “Play prepares us for competition in a way that heightens cooperation” (14) and that “Playing socially with our expectations reinforces a sense of solidarity” (16). Play and humor and the latent pleasure inherent in these, in essence, coalesce to bring together disparate social elements, particularly when authoritarian regimes threaten to shut down any avenues of collective release. As Ileana Rodríguez has contended, “[P]leasure is one of the fundamental tools that subalterns use to contest hegemony” (“Acknowledgments,” ix). Wit—one of the many facets of humor—has the potential “to unearth identities that have not been perceived before, to yoke together things that resist juxtaposition” (Glasgno, 84). In social struggles, humor and amusement may be the most critical to the continuation of the movement and, at the same time, one of the most unrecognized instruments of social transformation. Recent events in Nicaragua have inspired a series of satirical songs, caricatures, editorial cartoons, and political memes that question and subvert the actions of the police, the army, paramilitary groups, and the Ortega administration against protestors and the Catholic Church.

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HUMOR AND LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE In his influential study Aspects of Spanish-American Literature (1963), the Chilean writer Arturo Torres-Rioseco offers what may be considered the first contemporary analysis of humor in Spanish-American literature. Examining the literature of Miguel de Cervantes, Juan del Valle y Caviedes, and Ricardo Palma among others, Torres-Rioseco considers the use of humor, comedy, and satire in canonical works of literature from Spain and Latin America and proposes biographical observations that connect the work to the individual psychology of the writer. His definition of humor, however, rather narrowly limits the narrative possibilities and sidesteps the social framework of both author and work: Within the context of Spanish-American literature, TorresRioseco declares that “Humor, usually allied with the comic, is a negative act that deprives a person of his aspirations to be worthy, intelligent, courageous, or rich” (4). Although it is difficult to deny the influence on the Americas of Spanish literary humor during the colonial period, Torres-Rioseco traces an unwavering line to Spanish-American literature from Spanish works written in the sixteenth and seventeenth century—particularly the picaresque genre, as exemplified by the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) and La vida del Buscón (1626) by Francisco de Quevedo—and acknowledges, toward the end of his essay, that “A complete study of humor in Latin America would presuppose a careful review of all our literary values, a re-evaluation of the whole field of belles-lettres” (30). The limitations of his perspective are rather evident, as he fails to recognize the heterogeneity of humor throughout Spanish America and to fully consider the subversive possibilities of the comic as expressed by traditionally marginalized populations such as women and those of African or indigenous descent. When he declares that humor “is a negative act” and directly relates it to individual self-esteem or material aspirations, Torres-Rioseco defangs comedy by failing to reflect on the destabilizing potential of humor in works by writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Vicente Huidobro, Elena Poniatowska, or Alejo Carpentier, among others. Comedy and the comic element in literature are, in themselves, subversive acts, capable of destabilizing colonializing discourses and of dismantling Eurocentric visions of power and authority. More recently, Paul Seaver has examined the comic in Hispanic literature and emphasizes the need to consider humor within its own set of cultural circumstances (xiv). Humor, according to Seaver, “appears throughout Hispanic literature from the earliest times and its importance cannot be discounted nor can the merits of the numerous humor writers of both first and second quality” (x). In a volume of essays edited by Seaver, the contributors study the work of Juan Luis Vives, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Isabel Allende, Oscar Hijuelos, and Luisa Valenzuela, among others. Humor in Spanish America is, in his opinion, distinct, as “Hispanics make fun of everything,

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even things that would be considered taboo or hurtful by Anglos, including deformities, ethnicity, religion and death” (xiv). While this rather general observation may also be applied to non-Hispanic cultures, it does strengthen the argument that the comic and its companion, laughter, frequently originate in a recognition of customs and attitudes that deviate from established conventions and that ultimately manage to deconstruct imposed systems of social norms and values that distinguish acceptable from unacceptable practices. To this end, humor “often encompasses social issues and attempts to promote social change through criticism reflecting social problems” (xv). Further, “Humor is a weapon against injustice, fear and marginalization and, in that regard, threatens entrenched power structures” (xvi). By accentuating the indispensable public dimension of comedy, Seaver manages to acknowledge the role of humor in social activism and, in the process, undermines the opinion expressed by Torres-Rioseco that humor “is a negative act.” If anything, humor is an affirmative act that offers the individual the opportunity to connect with others vis-à-vis the many varieties of comedy and the potential criticism of accepted customs. In their appreciation of the unifying potential of humor, both Bergson and Feibleman challenge the accepted view that comedy is an isolated event that occurs first and foremost within the recesses of individual consciousness. In her analysis of humor in the fiction of contemporary Latin American women writers, for example, Dianna C. Niebylski takes the individual as her starting point and declares that the comic is used “to refer to a range of discursive strategies meant to produce an active response from readers who apprehend the incongruity, double-voicedness, absurdity, or hyperbolic nature of the articulation, utterance, or situation” (4). Even this characterization, however, employs a language that establishes the importance of communal boundaries for comedy, as “discursive strategies,” “incongruity,” and “double-voicedness,” for example, necessitate a mutual agreement on the interplay between participatory language and collaborative action: a discourse implies a counter-discourse, “incongruity” originates from uniformity, and a monolithic single voice ultimately gives way to “double-voicedness.” According to Niebylski, “traditional” humor in Latin American literature supports accepted values in society (Catholicism, “family values”) while transgressive humor breaks with conventional views and “[derails] cultural mechanisms” (6). In studying the presence and role of humor in Latin American literature, we must ask if the work supports the established structures of social, political, or economic control or if it does, in fact, exemplify what Niebylski has termed “humor’s creatively destructive impulses” (5) and advocates a destabilization of hegemonic discourses. Throughout history, the multiple pathways of Latin American literature are evident in works that use humor to question authority and, in the process, advocate alternative hierarchies. In colonial times, Juan del Valle y Caviedes, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, Alonso Carrió de

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la Vandera/Concolocorvo, and José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi, among many others, used parody and satire to criticize corruption, complacency, and inefficiency. Caviedes, for example, lived almost his entire life in presentday Peru and penned a number of satirical works that sought to probe contemporary society and cast doubts upon the alleged professional capability of academics, doctors, and the clergy. 2 Although his poems criticized lawyers, poets, painters, drunks, priests, and the indigenous (Reedy, xxi), among many others, his strongest admonitions are reserved for physicians, particularly those who assert that their primary intention is to heal the sick. While it is true that “doctors ultimately had more mixed success with their treatments that Caviedes described” (Warren, 16), the poet manages to weaken the authority of physicians in colonial Lima by questioning their careless practices and associating these to actions and instruments of violence. During the second half of the seventeenth century, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz also received a great deal of both positive and negative criticism due to the fact that she wrote secular and non-secular plays, poems, and essays that frequently questioned male authority. Her well-known essays “Carta atenagórica” (frequently translated as “Letter Worthy of Athena”) and “Respuesta a Sor Filotea” (“Response to Sister Filotea”) as well as her poem “Hombres necios que acusáis” (“You foolish men that accuse”), for example, address the marginalization of women and the double standards to which they are subject. Although humor in her works is frequently the vehicle of this criticism, the subversive component of the comic has not been sufficiently studied. 3 In a well-known passage in the “Respuesta,” Sor Juana writes on the many marvels—“natural secrets”—that she has uncovered while cooking, observing, for example, what occurs when an egg is fried in oil and subsequently declaring that “If Aristotle had cooked, he would have written much more” (“Respuesta a Sor Filotea”). Her best known play, Los empeños de una casa (The House of Trials, 1683), tells the story of Doña Ana de Arella and Don Pedro, who must move from Madrid to Toledo for business. The misunderstandings that ensue involve their respective amorous interests and those of their servants inform the confusion brought on by unnecessary manipulations of the heart. In the play, there are attempts to subvert male hegemony through cross-dressing and criticism of the employers by the servants, but little is substantively achieved by the women as physical beauty wins the day and order is regained and maintained by the nobles. In the end, the comic element in the work exemplifies a typical comedy of errors and ultimately does little to derail class constructions, male authority, or traditional gender roles. During the later colonial period, other writers in Latin America often employed humor to different ends. Sigüenza, Carrió de la Vandera/Concolocorvo, and Lizardi, for example, used humor in their works to weaken the authority of the Crown and draw attention to flaws in the Spanish character.

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Author of El Periquillo Sarniento (1816) and considered the founder of the modern Spanish American novel, Lizardi, for example, frequently used humor and comedy to underscore the social hypocrisy of the period. Published in 1815, the article “La gran barata de frioleras” reflects on the variety of goods sold throughout the Mexican capital and offers a list of what Lizardi is selling from his cupboard: “eye covers for rich and jealous husbands, 6 or 7 pesos,” “Fine eyeglasses to see at any distance the defects of your fellow man, ten reales,” and “Flexible consciences so that life is not too burdensome, two for half a real” (El laberinto de la utopía, 76). Published in 1832 and directly inspired by the picaresque literary tradition in Spain, his Don Catrín de la Fachenda also uses humor to comment on the absence of a work ethic (136) and to challenge the accepted notions of military “dignity” (82–83) and social decorum (96). These observations, however, belie the fact that the vast majority of writers during colonial times in New Spain belonged to the noble or affluent classes and could allow themselves the luxury of criticizing a political or social system that was, in the end, maintaining their privileges. As the nineteenth century began and a new historical period dawned on the recently independent nations of Spanish America, a generation of writers emerged who found inspiration in European Romanticism and molded it to their own needs. Directly influenced by the work of Johann Goethe, François-René de Chateaubriand, Walter Scott, Victor Hugo, and Alexandre Dumas (both père and fils), among many others, Latin American Romanticism was serious stuff and generally lacked a significant or subversive comic element. The works—as their objectives—may be divided into two historical periods in Latin America: the literary extroversion that lasted from approximately 1800 to 1830 and included authors that focused on the construction of a national or continental identity (works by José María Heredia, Andrés Bello, Esteban Echevarría, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, or José Joaquín Olmedo, for example); and the period from 1830 to 1860, marked by a manifest looking inward, into the individual psyche of society and the writer (Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Jorge Isaacs, José Mármol, and Juan León Mera, among others, come to mind). This literary Romanticism dovetailed neatly with what has come to be known as Modernismo, exemplified by the writings of José Martí, Rubén Darío, and Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera. While these are the first gleanings of a contemporary and autonomous Latin American literature, humor and the comic as instruments of social criticism are as generally absent in these works as they are in the poetry and prose of the previous Romantic periods. It was not that humor was necessarily missing from the poetry of Darío or Martí, for example, but rather that its purpose as a social or political corrective was deficient. Subversion of existing codes and behaviors was achieved principally by a reconfiguration of the Spanish language, by an implicit criticism of the poor quality of Spanish—read “Pe-

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ninsular”—literary works of the time, and by the considerable influence they had on the next generation of Spaniards that included Juan Ramón Jiménez and Antonio Machado. The works and travels of writers such as César Vallejo and Vicente Huidobro reflected the continued influence of Modernismo and, at the same time, the voiced desire to move away from its shadow. Initiated toward the end of the 1910s and beginning of the 1920s, vanguard literature in Spanish America was directly influenced by movements such as Dadaism, cubism, futurism, and surrealism and the growth of urban centers of population in the Americas. At this time, humor returned to the literary vernacular as an instrument of social criticism and change and a number of writers immediately began to work to eliminate the perceived gap between the literary and nonliterary experience. Published in its entirety in Madrid in 1931, the epic poem Altazor by Huidobro presents the forces of creation and destruction through the exclusive lens of the written language and habitually uses humor to convey its principal themes. The metaphors and neologisms present throughout the work perform a double duty, as they ridicule the subjective nature of language and, at the same time, depend on its rational irrationalism to express this. Canto III, for example, declares that we know how to “Charm tourists like snakes” (71), “Light cypresses like lanterns” (73), and “Bottle smiles like wine” (73). The imagery is decidedly surrealist, yet it is their very surrealism that inserts a comic element into the poem and deconstructs the practical applications of logical thinking. If the scientific method and rigorous logic had unwittingly contributed to bringing about the horrors of World War I, society could do no worse than look for inspiration to the illogical and absurd. Neologisms, inconsistent metaphors, nonsensical illustrations and actions: humor, in this respect, represented an unconcealed critique of reason and of institutional violence and social oppression. The anguished verses of the Poemas humanos by Vallejo and the solitary poems in Residencia en la tierra by Pablo Neruda, for example, serve to illustrate the humorous imagery that presents the reader with alternative possibilities of thinking and considering human existence. Vallejo’s poem “Height and Hair” from Poemas humanos, for example, asks, “Who doesn’t write a letter?” and “Who isn’t called Carlos or some other thing? / Who to the kitty doesn’t say kitty, kitty?” (361). His rhetorical questions use humor to draw attention to the conventional in our lives: Many of us write letters, many are named Carlos and all are called “something else,” and all of us call a cat a cat in our own respective tongue. We all possess given names and use accepted terminology such as “cat” to identify the objects at hand and enable communication. His subsequent reply that he also engages in these activities, however, is a commentary on his isolation and on his mission in life: he is frustrated in his quest for the unique and the distinct in human experience. The questions may seem amusing, as they refer to actions or events that are commonplace and, for that

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reason, unimportant; yet it is their very unexceptionalness that causes Vallejo to yearn for and, at the same time, lament his individuality. Writers such as Miguel Ángel Asturias, Juan Rulfo, Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Rosario Castellanos, Gabriel García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa, among others, have influenced the works of authors such as Isabel Allende, Elena Poniatowska, Jorge Volpi, Alberto Fuguet, Roberto Bolaño, and others in myriad ways and styles that reflect the ultimate and continuing fragmentation of the literary voice. The uncontrolled growth of urban areas, economic displacement, crime fiction, post-nationalist discussions, countercultural aesthetics, hybrid identities, popular culture, autobiography, decolonialization, postcolonialism, and ethnic politics, for example, are themes that reflect the continued hybridity of literature written in the Americas today. The common thread, however, is frequently found in irony and the comic and in their capacity to subvert social and political hegemony. Humor is often evoked for its own solipsistic sake—to alter the tone of the narrative, for example—yet its very presence draws attention to the need for social, political, and economic reforms. In Central American literature humor and satire have been used with varying success to criticize topics ranging from corruption and cronyism to the excessive influence of the United States in national affairs. La oficina de paz de Orolandia. Novela del imperialismo yanqui (1925) by the Guatemalan Rafael Arévalo Martínez (1884–1975) takes place in the fictional country of Orolandia and tells the story of Félix Buendía, a humble man who wants to work at the Office of Peace, created in 1900 by the United States to protect its interests in Orolandia (loosely translated as “Gold Land” or “Land of Gold,” a transparent commentary on the exploitation of Central American resources by the United States for its own profit). From the outset, the use of humor and irony in criticizing the machinations of the United States and the behavior of its lackeys at the Office of Peace brings to the forefront issues of economic exploitation, dishonesty, and national security. In order to gain employment at the Office, for example, Félix must first curry favor with one of the five delegates (members of the board, as it were), Don Luis Rojo. Don Luis tells Félix he will vote to give him a job, provoking the editorial intervention of the narrative voice: “‘I offer you my vote in your favor’ . . . He always offered it, even when he was prepared to deny it in the next meeting” (19). The subservient behavior on the part of Félix to secure a position at the Office is complemented by the hypocrisy of the board itself, personified by Don Luis: He may tell Félix what he wants to hear, but circumstances may later require a swift correction, one that will implicitly benefit Don Luis, not Félix. The intervention of the narrator both informs us of the true nature of Don Luis and elicits a knowing smile from the reader that prepares us for the more important themes of the work. Once gainfully employed by the Office of Peace, Félix gradually works his way up the ranks and encounters increasing examples of incompetent and

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contradictory behavior that cast growing doubts on the seriousness of the office. His first tasks involve writing articles on a number of topics ranging from paper factories to syphilis and are so successful that Don Luis and the rest of the delegates promote him to head of accounting. His ambition, however, is countered by the ineptitude and laziness of his assistants: “It appeared that the only responsibilities of his subordinate employees were to read the extensive Orolandian and global press and smoke, because until then Félix had found them every morning with newspapers in their hands and cigarettes in their mouths: In the morning they read and smoked; in the afternoon they smoked and read. They chatted at all hours” (47). While there may be no self-evident relationship between accountancy and smoking or reading the newspaper, Arévalo Martínez uses humor and the juxtaposition of language—“read and smoked,” “smoked and read”—to emphasize the essence of the Office of Peace, an organization managed by five men and maintained by indolent workers who prefer to smoke, read the paper, and gossip. This scene begins to set the stage for the novel, denouncing the lack of ambition of these mid-level bureaucrats and placing part of the blame on the impassivity of individuals such as these for the excessive influence of the United States in Orolandia. As he is hardworking, Félix continues to rise in the ranks and becomes secretary for the Office of Peace, a position which obligates him to work directly with the Five Delegates. This promotion, however, is not without its own rude awakening to the true nature of his co-workers and his countrymen, and he comes to understand the essence of a nation built by the excessive influence of foreign intervention: “Nothing now surprised our hero in that tropical country of mismanagement and impudence” (53). When his aid, José García Aguirre, summarizes the resposibilities of his new appointment and what the previous secretary did, particular attention is paid to the work—or lack thereof—entailed: “His charge as Secretary obligated him to open the envelopes of copious correspondence that concern you so much, and of every one hundred letters he tore up at least ninety-five, especially those that he foresaw would give him much work, such as those that touched on annoying issues and that required serious study in order to be replied” (65). Félix clearly had good intentions when he went to work at the Office of Peace, yet any desire to transform the office—and, by extension, the country—is stymied by the self-interest of predecessors and current co-workers. The sarcastic characterization of his duties—those letters that “concern [Félix] so much”—and frank description of any responsibility that would involve time and effort speak to the laziness of an individual and the system that allows that individual to remain and even flourish at his position. Humor in the novel is a double-edged sword that both provides comic relief and touches on the tragic circumstances that have welcomed the presence of US businessmen and politicians, the true concern of Orolandian oligarchs. As their secre-

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tary, Félix is able to better discern the priorites of the Five Delegates and of the Office of Peace, which exists solely to stabilize the country so that US investment will continue. By the end of the novel, the country is in chaos as the typical political factions once again devolve into armed conflict. The Five Delegates and the Office of Peace are practically disbanded and Félix is left once again unemployed, musing on his future. The satire present in the novel denounces the apathy and laziness of those who, in the fictional nation of Orolandia, have turned their country over to foreign interests. If we place the work within a Guatemalan context and consider there the influence of the United Fruit Company, we may better recall the significance of this work and the prescient warning that it would offer for future generations in Guatemala and Central America. More contemporary examples in Central America also use humor and satire to criticize social conventions and bring our attention to salient social issues. Published in 1969, the collection of micro-fiction La oveja negra (The Black Sheep) by the Honduran writer Augusto Monterroso (1921–2003) is a series of allegories and fables that personify different animals and subtly employ irony and parody in an attempt to dismantle and reveal the absurdity of human behavior. As Francisca Noguerol Jiménez has written, humor “works as a defense mechanism in the texts of Monterroso in order to not succumb to an irrational and dehumanized world, one in which the notion of truth has lost its absolute value.” A number of short stories in The Black Sheep such as “The Lightning Bolt Which Struck Twice in the Same Place” and “The Repentent Apostate,” for example, exemplify the dry wit that characterized much of the work of Monterroso. “The Repentent Apostate” criticizes the Catholic Church and its narrow social conventions: “It is said that once upon a time, a long time ago, there was a Catholic (according to some, though others said a Protestant) who, assailed by doubts, began to think seriously of becoming a Christian. However, fear that his neighbors would imagine that he had done it just for a joke, or to attract attention, made him give up such a foolish and extravagant plan” (47). This short story is masterfully divided into two sections: The first phrase offers context, as “a long time ago” a man who was either Catholic or Protestant (the difference is unimportant) was “assailed by doubts” began to consider “becoming a Christian”; the second phrase projects the individual’s questioning to the social sphere, underscoring the concern for el qué dirán—“what will others say”— and indicating that this concern “made him give up such a foolish and extravagant plan.” The irony that this occurred in some remote, unspecific time does more to contribute to its current relevance than any chronological specificity might have, particularly if we consider that The Black Sheep appeared at the same time the Catholic Church and society in Latin America were undergoing an important reorientation, as manifested by the Second Episcopal Conference in Medellín, Colombia and the publication of Pedagogy of

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the Oppressed, both in 1968, as well the publication in 1971 of A Theology of Liberation by Gustavo Gutiérrez. In the short story, the paradox between rhetoric and behavior is evident in that Protestants and Catholics alike are part of the Christian tradition, yet Monterroso draws attention to the fact that these individuals may not be acting in a Christian manner and that to act this way may paradoxically infringe on socially accepted conventions that privilege the individual over society. The commentary implicit in the text uses humor to accentuate the hypocrisy of Catholics and Protestants alike, as, in the short story, they are practically interchangeable in their rather rote obedience of Christian rituals and distaste for applying those rituals to daily life and behaving in a Christian manner. The concept of humor is even embedded in the work itself, as the protagonist is afraid that “becoming a Christian” would be perceived by others as “a joke.” The fear of the humorous in what is already an implicitly humorous narrative brings together the seriousness of Monterroso’s criticism and the inseparable personal and social elements of the story. Additional texts by Central American authors that use humor, irony, and/ or parody to draw attention to the contradictions of human behavior and society include the work of Sergio Ramírez, particularly De Tropeles y Tropelías (1971); the short stories of Horacio Castellanos Moya (Honduras, 1957); and the novels Los compañeros (1976) by Marco Antonio Flores (Guatemala, 1937–2013); Pobrecito poeta que era yo (1976) by Roque Dalton (El Salvador, 1935–1975); El detén (1977) by Claribel Alegría (Nicaragua, 1924–2018); Una función con móbiles y tentetiesos (1980) by Marcos Carías (Honduras, 1938); Única mirando al mar by Fernando Contreras (Costa Rica, 1963); and Managua, Salsa City (¡Devórame otra vez!) (2000) and En este mundo matraca (2004) by Franz Galich (Guatemala, 1951–2007). The allegorical short story “On the Stench of Corpses” by Ramírez, for example, offers a clear criticism of those who blindly support political power, narrating the death of the dictator’s mother and describing his wish that she remain at his side, even as her remains decomposed and his acolytes behaved as if she were still alive, dressing her every morning, kissing her hand, and giving “the old woman the best bites from their plates” (140). In Pobrecito poeta que era yo, Dalton offers an imperfect look into Salvadoran society in the 1970s, observing that “The only thing this country wants (urgently needs, accepts in chronological order) is a very humble collective suicide, an auto-kick in the ass” (23). On Una función con móbiles y tentetiesos by Carías, Arturo Arias has written that “It is the most amusing and the best novel that has been written in Honduras” (Gestos, 185), seconded by Héctor Leyva’s opinion that it is “a master work that is also a humorous work” (109). And En este mundo matraca uses humor and fictional characters from three generations in Galich’s native town of Amatitlán, Guatemala, to explore the of language and social commentary. In one exam-

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ple, Galich takes the name “Guatemala” and conjugates it into a series of verbs that varies according to the acting subject: “Yo guatemato” (“I guatekill”), “Yo guateamo” (“I guatelove”), “Yo guatemamo” (“I guatebetray”) (78–79). In sum, the comic tradition in Central American literature reflects not only the presence of the humorous in Central American society but also its use as an effective instrument of satire and criticism, especially relevant when examining the corrupt and cruel practices of authoritarian governments and the current inequalities imposed by neoliberal economic policies. HUMOR, NICARAGUA, AND NICARAGUAN LITERATURE Before his untimely death in 1990, the Nicaraguan cartoonist Róger had portrayed the Sandinista Revolution and US intervention in Nicaragua in a light that managed to draw attention to the paradoxes of military action and to the challenges faced by the newly installed Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) national government. While his humor in the Barricada newspaper touched on the politics and policies of national reconstruction, it was the “Humor Erótico” section in the weekly La Semana Cómica that provoked the most vehement reactions both critical and supportive of his illustrations. As David Kunzle has written, La Semana Cómica “was profoundly subversive of hallowed Christian attitudes” as Róger “repeatedly attacked the hypocrisies of individual reactionary clerics” (91). 4 In many ways, the drawings of Róger exemplify the enigmatic attitudes toward subversive humor in Nicaragua. During the decade of the 1980s, for example, the Sandinista leadership proclaimed itself a champion of freedom of expression. When a particular publication or editorial cut too close and used humor and satire to criticize government policies, however, the FSLN usually took prompt action and disciplined those responsible. Nicaraguan writers such as Sergio Ramírez, Claribel Alegría, Jesús Miguel Blandón, Julio Valle Castillo, and Fernando Silva have used humor and comedy in their novels, short stories, and essays in an attempt to either reflect traditional values and beliefs or transcend these. Juan Sobalvarro, for example, blends irony with humor in order to demythify the glory of any military struggle (see his short story “El cuchillo”). In Nicaragua, poetry—the literary genre par excellence—has generally not been known for its humorous or farcical intentions. The verses of Rubén Darío offer insight into the human condition and his own life circumstances, yet rarely do they venture into comical territory. 5 The same is true for the poetry of Ernesto Cardenal, another of Nicaragua’s consecrated writers, and for poets such as Gioconda Belli, Yolanda Blanco, Conny Palacios, and Daisy Zamora who came of age after the victory of the Sandinista Revolution. The writings of more recent generations of Nicaraguan poets center on the difficulties endured across the

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country and employ vivid and at times violent or surreal images to depict the bleakness of their own personal landscape. The poem “Terra incógnita” by Danilo López begins by affirming: “I was born in a city that is not Miami / It was a barrio with dirt streets and wandering dog packs / There were grey gracing cows and wooden carts pushed by dingy kids / There were blind limping beggars and creepy peeping toms in the back yards / There was a canal full of filthy water and garbage / and small plank houses about to fall apart.” In her poem “Parte de hueso en decadencia” (“Part of a Bone in Decay”), Tania Montenegro writes “Anonymous woman wavers and bites her toenails to pieces, / splinters that know how to fall into the pulverizing hole / that infect the emotions in the face of the food digested in the past moment” (Montenegro). When humor or laughter are present, they are used to illuminate the primary themes of despair and solitude. In her poem “Invierno no” (“Not Winter”), for example, Marta Leonor González declares that “Jesus laughed dryly / showed the world his decomposed ulcer, / pus and blood” (17). The laughter of described in the poem is a dry, uninspired reaction that allows all creation to view the decaying ulcer of Jesus Christ and the accompanying pus and blood. Any possible humor or comical relief is mitigated by the explicit subordination of Jesus to his physiological condition and to the absence of any joy or amusement that is generally associated with the act of laughing. Ultimately, this laughter connotes a forced, antagonistic reaction, unwittingly exposing himself and his very human infection to the world. In a number of his poems, Ernesto Cardenal uses laughter to highlight injustices, but the comic or risible element in his poems is not employed to transgress social or political boundaries. His renowned Salmos (Psalms) habitually alude to laughter, yet it is a laughter that originates in compassion, ridicule, or retribution. In Psalm 34, “You Are Our Ally,” for example, Cardenal describes those who manipulate the people and instigate their repression: “Their propaganda makes fun of us / and holds us up to scorn” (The Psalms 43). In Psalm 36, “Their Stocks Are like Straw from the Fields,” Cardenal writes: “They are sleepless scheming / to crush us more / to exploit us further / but the Lord will make fools of them / because he sees they will soon fall from power” (46). In this poem, the desire of God to “make fools of them”—the “laughter of God” in the original Spanish—may represent the approaching liberation for Nicaraguans marginalized and oppressed by the actions of the US government, but it is an aspiration and a laughter that emerge from exploitation and devastation. God laughs at those who make plans to crush us, Cardenal declares, because they will soon find themselves without authority, lost without this sense of power. The laugh of God in this poem, it appears, may be as mischievous as it is righteous, as it revels in an approaching justice that is visible just above the horizon. Humor in this text is absent, and the narrative voice brings to light the continuous efforts during

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the 1960s and 1970s to denounce the unmitigated influence of the United States in Nicaraguan affairs. Born in 1946, Michèle Najlis has published poems and essays that reflect on the circumstances of the Sandinista Revolution and on the existential categories of human existence. Her first book of poems, El viento armado (1969), centered on the struggle against Anastasio Somoza Debayle and utilized an unambiguous language to denounce the suffering of fellow Nicaraguans—particularly the poorest among them—and predict the inevitable overthrow of the dictator. Described by Amy Kaminsky as “A heretical book that is forgiven due to its jocular tone” (213), Ars combinatoria (1988), her third book, unremittingly employs an irreverent wit to transgress social, political, and religious boundaries and to question the validity of secular and eccleasiastical authorities. The short, epigrammatic poems that fill the volume employ humor to criticize discrete aspects of Nicaraguan society and to disempower repressive discourses, particularly as expressed by those in positions of political and religious power. From the outset, her verses and prose poems utilize humor to effectively criticize social convention and those who equate solemnity with ethical and aesthetic excellence. The “Imprimatur” offered by Giulio Girardi at the beginning of the volume sets the tone by declaring that “Her work deserves to be included in the index of forbidden works for all those who have no sense of humor (and it so happens that there are many)” (13). While the recommendation suggested by Girardi subverts ecclesiastical authority by deconstructing the apparent logic of a list of forbidden books, it also declares that “there are many” who do not have a sense of humor and subtly connects the elaboration of such a list to the futility of seriousness. Her work flies in the face of convention and, contrary to popular logic, “deserves to be included” on the list. Excluding Ars combinatoria would be counterproductive to its objectives and would not recognize the humor explicit in its verses. If we recall that the Imprimatur was a license to print or publish granted by the Roman Catholic episcopal authority, the declaration by Girardi titled in the official Latin language of the Church irreverently initiates the conversation between Najlis and her readers. The statement is also transgressive if we recall that secular Sandinista culture required no official Imprimatur and that Girardi, a Catholic priest, was a member of the movement “Christians for Socialism” and was active in the systematic application of liberation theology to Nicaraguan culture and society. 6 Throughout Ars combinatoria there are numerous examples of how humor may be used to deconstruct the political or intellectual established order in an attempt to criticize “current customs and institutions” in post-revolutionary Nicaragua and implicitly invoke the “inherently revolutionary nature” of comedy (Feibleman, 200). Her one-line poem “Lapsus linguae” is dedicated to “S. Freud” and once again uses Latin, the official language of the Catholic Church, to question authority on a number of different levels:

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“Lapses are the hernias of the unconscious” (53). Translated as “slip of the tongue,” the title of the poem references Sigmund Freud directly and alludes to the fact that unconscious utterings that may reveal more about our inner motives or desires than conscious ones. This fact and the historical significance of Freud in Western culture are cleverly subverted, however, when Najlis describes these inadvertent misspeakings as mere “hernias of the subconscious”: moments when the unconscious protrudes through the walls of our consciousness. By reducing the unconscious to a distended physiological phenomenon, Najlis demythifies the work of Freud and the importance that we have come to place upon his research into human behavior. At times, the writer intimates, a “slip of the tongue” may expose only an insignificant and untimely bump, the revelation of nothing except a biological reality. Spoken language—deliberate or unintended—is reduced to being a rupture in the physical fabric of the body politic. Both the epigraph to Freud and the oneline poem dovetail effectively, as one illustrates the other, illuminates the paradoxical nature of the subconscious, and draws attention to the ambiguous nature of language. Are we to believe that this poem is an example of such “lapsus linguae” and, therefore, to be taken lightly? Humor and impertinence permeate the few words of this poem and construct a monument to ruin: only by taking on such sacred figures as Freud and questioning the accepted truth of their observations may Nicaraguan society advance beyond rhetoric. The Catholic Church is also taken to task for what it has historically done to undermine what Najlis perceives to be the authentic teachings of Jesus Christ. Her prose poem “On the Importance of the Sacraments” utilizes the Catholic sacraments to draw attention to the manner in which the Church has deviated from a human-centered praxis: “The most important sacrament for Jesus was communication. Over the course of centuries, the Church made many efforts to hide this” (68). By implicitly referencing the sacraments of Baptism, Eucharist, Reconciliation, Confirmation, Marriage, Holy Orders, and the Anointing of the Sick and then ignoring them by declaring that there is one more, “the most important,” Najlis takes the Catholic hierarchy to task and reminds it of the original intentions of Jesus Christ: interpersonal, faithbased communication. The irony she employs in the second sentence of the poem adds a humorous element by dryly declaring that this Church has, historically, been doing everything in its power to hide these original intentions and to promote an ideology which would further reinforce the hegemony of the Church leaders. Furthermore, she references that the Church has been blind to the true necessities of its members, as other sacraments have been prioritized and the most basic one, communication, has been relegated to a position that reflects its importance within a Church whose members— particularly those in developing nations—were growing more and more disaffected and distanced from its ecumenical leaders. The “large efforts” made by the Church to “hide” this also exemplifies the potentially revolutionary

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nature of this “most important” forgotten sacrament, as communication may lead to a destabilization of the Church and a possible reinsertion of its members into conversations on its present and future. Much as it began, the volume ends with a humorous tone that uses an accepted formal expression to subvert the perceived gravity of the work. The last text, “Fe de erratas,” invokes an author’s acceptance of possible mistakes that occurred after producing the book. Instead of offering a list of errors, however, the author inverts the accepted dichotomy between errors and achievements and declares that she is unsure of the difference between the two: “Given that this book contains more errors than accomplishments, it would be easier to attest to the accomplishments. I just happen to ignore what they are” (201). Her apparent humility in accepting that her work contains more errors than successes is further strengthened by her admission that she is unsure which successes these are. If this is the case, then she has negated the dichotomous “good/bad” significance of her work: If she cannot identify the mistakes because they are too numerous and she ignores where the true accomplishments of this work lie, then it is simply up to the reader to identify these and to dispense with the authority of the author. She has distanced herself from determining the importance of the text, driving this message home by paradoxically subverting her own objectivity and implicitly invoking the subjectivity of the reader: “You know what I think,” she appears to declare, “now it is up to you.” This last text of Ars combinatoria humorously accepts her mistakes and displays her own ignorance of the value of her work, daring the reader to find it for him- or herself and, in the process, stimulating that connection between laughter and “the people’s unofficial truth” that Bakhtin had articulated (90). As a member of the vanguardia generation of Nicaraguan writers that included Pablo Antonio Cuadra, José Coronel Urtecho, Manolo Cuadra, and Luis Alberto Cabrales, Joaquín Pasos (1914–1947) was strongly influenced by European movements such as futurism, Dadaism, and surrealism. Although his work has been studied by Giuseppe Bellini, George Yúdice, and Steven White, among others, it has not received the critical attention that it deserves. 7 Like many of his Nicaraguan contemporaries, the political opinions of Pasos frequently reflected conservative perspectives that, frankly, contradicted many of his attitudes on writers and on literature in general. As Melvin Campos Ocampo notes, “Perhaps the strangest thing about the case at hand is that Joaquín Pasos attacked the avant-gardes, being himself avantgarde.” His distaste for the aesthetic models of the European vanguardists would come to reflect the dislike of other members of his generation and attempt to cleave a distinction between an authentic Hispanic poetry that combines modernity with tradition (as exemplified by the poems of Federico García Lorca) and a vanguardismo that rejects the Hispanic literary tradition (as demonstrated by the poems of Pablo Neruda) (Campos Ocampo).

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The presence of comical elements in his poems and essays comes as no surprise, as both European and Latin American artists at the time frequently used humor in their criticism of established cultural values and the bourgeoisie. For satirical purposes, Pasos often gave his essays humorous titles that addressed public figures directly and criticized them for inefficiency and corruption. “The Zoological Miracles of Murillo the Magician,” for example, directly references General Andrés Murillo, mayor of Managua, and mocks his grandiose electoral platform as candidate for president of Nicaragua. In searching for a renewed Nicaragua, Pasos was often criticized by contemporaries for ignoring the political realities of the day and framing Nicaragua’s colonial history in a rather utopian light. While Pasos may have yearned for an ideal past that could only be found in a colonial identity grounded in a tradition forgotten and erased by the bourgeoisie (Campos Ocampo), his political tastes represented a profound critique of the authoritarianism displayed by the Somoza government of the time. In his essay “The Horse,” for example, Pasos explores the semantic possibilities of the term “horse” to criticize the political state of the nation. The ironic use of the phrase “Gentlemen Presidents” (Tomo II, 140) 8 leads him to coin the term “caballocracia”—“equinocracy”—and to assert that these political figures commit “caballadas”: a linguistic amalgam of “caballo” (“horse”) and “canalla” (“scoundrel”) used to describe the destructive actions born from a blind disregard for the public interest: “It is always very tricky to deal with president horses, because they are very tricky and are easily accustomed to the stable, which they don’t want to leave for anything” (Tomo II, 140). In comparing a president to a horse, Pasos subtly criticizes the Somoza regime by stating that these presidents are effortlessly led and become too comfortable in the “caballeriza,” their stable. If we recall that in 1946 democracy in Nicaragua was virtually nonexistent and that, notwithstanding the existence of national elections, presidents were chosen with the express consent of Anastasio Somoza García, his criticism of presidential politics is rather daring. 9 Humor, in this respect, serves to palliate any potential adverse consequences by using metaphors and illogical language to camouflage his message. His essay concludes with a reflection on the subject of public opinion and declares it to be simply unreal: “Amongst the political horses that have appeared more recently the famous white horse of public opinion occupies a prominent place, and the same thing happened to him that happened to Napoleon’s horse: That is was a mare!” (Tomo II, 140–41). Pasos subverts the political state of affairs by criticizing the expression of public opinion and declaring, rather misogynistically, that it is not what it appears to be: the “horse” is a mare. The fact that he also defines public opinion as a type of “political horse” is also telling, as it forces us to rethink its construction in a nation dominated exclusively by the family of a political figure, Somoza, and by the collusion between this individual and the oligarchy. The continuous application of the term “horse”

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and its multiple variations cannot but introduce a humorous element that thinly veils a strong reproach and makes the criticism the more palatable. A number of essays written by Pasos in 1946 directly criticize the politics of Anastasio Somoza García (Tacho) and address the exploitation of the country and its residents. In “The Napoleonic Attitude and the Anastasic Pose,” Pasos offers the features of a “Napoleonic attitude” characterized principally by arrogance and suspicion: “Every lunatic that uses the Napoleonic attitude does not greet anyone nor does he shake his hand; he rather waits for the visitors to bow respectfully. He is a mistrustful lunatic who fears that if he gives his hand someone will grab his elbow” (Tomo II, 168). The “lunatic” that projects a “Napoleonic attitude” trusts only himself and places his intentions at the self-determined pinnacle of reverence and admiration. When he compares Tacho to Napoleon in no uncertain terms, Pasos declares that these airs of superiority belie an insecure personality: “Regardless, Napoleons and Anastasios only represent one same insanity, the same ancient insanity of dominating other lunatics through fear, the same desire to submit a sane people through fraud and the tyranny of their own lunacy” (Tomo II, 169). His disapproval of Tacho’s actions is classified within the categories of insanity, as it is the absence of reason that produces this behavior. The plural use of the nouns “Napoleones” and “Anastasios” allow Pasos to distance himself slightly from offering a direct condemnation of Tacho, however, as he suggests a disapproval of all those who are similar in style and policy. Similarly, he juxtaposes the insanity of leaders such as Napoleon and Somoza with the understanding and reason of a people (“a sane people”) who have historically been the objects of “fraud” and “despotism.” Absurdity and folly are as much to blame as the figure of the dictator, and the possibility of humor associated with these does little to temper his attack. 10 The humor evident in the essays of Pasos also challenges a number of accepted cultural norms and values that include the designation of “good” poetry and deconstructs the notion that the present is a continuous improvement on the historical past. In writing on the poetry of Adriana Calderón, for example, Pasos uses irony to criticize the fact that Calderón believes she influenced all the poetry of Rubén Darío when he met her when she was sixteen years old, and turns her poetry against her: Taking a verse of hers that describes the poetry of Darío—“What true poetry!”—Pasos plays with the denotations of the term “neta”—translated as “true”—and writes: “Note: The author labels the poetry of Darío as truthful so as not to confuse it with gross weight” (Tomo II, 95). 11 Written in 1936, the essay “The Crisis of ‘Homo Sapiens’” subverts the image of the constant forward evolution of human society by emphasizing the preposterous condition of the present times: “The conscious homo sapiens are gradually disappearing, and man once again becomes monkey, and the only remaining consolation is, when he is a monkey, to once again begin to become a man” (Tomo I, 160). The economic

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terminology of “net” and “gross” used to reference the poetry of Adriana Calderón and the scientific language of human existence offers a gravitas to his comments that is deceptive, as Pasos employs them to deconstruct ostensibly serious topics: the historical place of Calderón’s poetry alongside Rubén Darío, and the progressive evolution of humankind. Humor, however, is used to indicate the opposite: the poetry of Calderón is undeserving of such a place and, if we are to judge by the actions of the day, humankind is reverting to a simian state of ignorance whose only hope is that it will one day learn from its mistakes and return to its human condition. As models of social critique, the essays of Joaquín Pasos are both corrective and utopian in that they use humor to draw attention to the problems of the day in the Nicaragua of the 1930s and 1940s and, hopefully, transcend them; as examples of social consciousness, his works use humor to enter into dialogue with political authorities and provoke them and the people to action with wit and irony. Authored jointly by Joaquín Pasos and José Coronel Urtecho, the play Chinfonía burguesa (written originally as a poem in 1932 and first performed in 1939) took as its point of departure the rhyme and rhythms of traditional popular poetry (“Breve nota,” 220). While the influence of vanguardist themes and language on this work cannot be denied, 12 its authors stress that the primary inspiration came from the desire to create a theater rooted in historical and national circumstances (“Breve nota,” 220). According to Pasos, Chinfonía burguesa is a play that uses the absurd to enter into dialogue with contemporary themes: “Its plot is completely silly and it all comes down to demonstrating the common adventures and misadventures of common life and the common life of a common bourgeoisie. Domestic life in our small merchant cities happens in the circumstances of a fantasy that, in spite of its tremendous nature, does not stop being logical” (“Breve nota,” 221–22). To review it is, therefore, to reflect on the redundancy of domestic life. The cast of characters includes Doña Chomba, Don Chombón Fifí, and “el pueta”— the bard—and involves a series of incongruous dialogues and exchanges that center on interpersonal relationships and the business owned by Don Bombín. Individual pieces of furniture such as the chair, sofa, and player piano also participate in the dialogue and continuously employ rhyme patterns that draw our attention to the euphonious features of the exchanges: The chair, for example, declares that “I am Paquilla the chair”; the sofa: “I am Chon the sofa to help with digestion”; and the player piano: “I am Manola the player piano and when I am not played I play myself” (9–10). Throughout the play, the furniture will reappear periodically and offer a running, absurdist commentary on the action and dialogue between the other characters. Illogical language and situations are employed consistently in an attempt to reflect those rhythms of national popular poetry and, at the same time, to offer an implicit criticism of the bourgeoisie and other discrete elements of

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Nicaraguan society. When the pieces of furniture speak at the beginning of the play, their nonsensical and humorous remarks and the fact that they are made to speak at all overturn the logical order: objects are humanized and, as will be seen, the actions and concerns of those in the play only serve to objectify the human characters. At the beginning of the play, for example, the sofa describes the owners: “We have small owners / owners who tell us their dreams, / their businesses without partners, / their direct projects, / their mischievous enterprises, / their forbidden adventures” (11). The description of the owners as open and talkative does little to hide the loneliness of these individuals who, in their isolation, resort to thinking out loud and revealing—perhaps inadvertently—their deepest concerns. In the metaphorical eyes of the furniture, their owners are small and divulge their dreams, their businesses without partners, their projects, their mischievous schemes, and their forbidden adventures. Their lives are but a sequential series of frustrations and disappointments that may only be revealed sotto voce, to the physical elements of their home. This confession is tamed, however, by the fact that the speaker is a sofa and that contemplative consciousness has typically eluded it. Expressed in this manner, what may have been perceived as biting social commentary is instead expressed as an observation whose function is principally rhythmic as reflected in internal assonant and consonant rhyme schemes that draw us to the musicality of the language: dueños, pequeños, and sueños; negocios and socios; proyectos and directos; empresas and traviesas; and corridas and prohibidas. In the play, the musical quality of the spoken language is intertwined with the progressive and humorous deconstruction of allegedly bourgeois values. These dynamics are explored through family relationships, notions of love and affection, and value judgments that look to define the boundaries of economic success and “good” literature. When Doña Chomba asks her daughter Fifí whom she would like to marry, her answer is nonsensical: “Fifí (half singing): Dad, mom, / I would like to marry / a bird that knows how to dance” (13). As the conversation progresses, however, we realize that this is not so ridiculous a statement, as from offstage we hear the voice of the bard that responds: “(Inside and humming) Marry me and I will give you / coffeecolored shoes and stockings” (14). Her parents, Doña Chomba and Don Chombón, voice their objections, offering to pay to send her abroad (14) and threatening to throw her out the window (15) if she goes through with it. To the proposition and threats Fifí simply answers that “Tomorrow I will marry / whom I know” (15). By the end of the scene, her father is on his knees, “begging,” pleading, “Curtain, curtain, curtain, / look on me with compassion. / Come down to cover my disgrace, / my disgrace Engracia!” (16). Although we must again consider the musicality of the rhyme schemes and their role as both vehicles of the message and the message itself, the unmistakable humor dovetails nicely with the eradication of parental authority and

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the gradual development of Fifí’s individual sense of worth and identity. The metaphorical “bird that knows how to dance” is a clear allusion to the bard, who symbolizes both music and individual freedom. His promise to give her shoes and brown stockings may seem superficial, but their monetary worth attracts Fifí and begins to lure her away from her parents. In an evident criticism of middle-class values, Fifí’s emotional desires are explicitly connected to meeting her material needs. When the dialogue concludes, the scene has turned comical as Don Chombón, her father, pleads with the curtain to look down on him with compassion and fall to cover his shame, which he names Engracia. Any direct social criticism is made more palatable by the rhyme and meter of the language and by the comical and incongruous elements of the story. As the relationship between Fifí and the bard progresses and they confess their growing affection to one another, the superficial characteristics of bourgeois love are soundly criticized. One moment the bard tells Fifí: “And I feel in your tender legs / and in your backward legs / the laziness of table legs / and the tickles of the chair haunches” (21). Later he praises her and declares “You are simple like a chamber pot” (22). The physical descriptions of her “tender” legs and inverted feet are complemented by the fact that he senses in her body the laziness of the table and the tickle of the chair legs. Her beauty may not meet a set of aesthetic standards, yet the bard is clearly taken by the association between the lines of the furniture and those of the legs and feet of his beloved. While this represents an objectification of the female figure, the humor evident in the personification of the furniture and of equating this personification with romantic love contributes to mask the misogyny and emphasizes, instead, the rather shallow nature of their relationship. The declaration that Fifí is as simple as a bedpan functions in much the same manner, as the rather sexist comparison uses humor to speak to both the objectification of women and the subversion of bourgeois love. The character of the bard and his subsequent behavior also serve to question the role of poetry in society and to examine the relationship between poetry and the middle class. When Fifí and the bard marry, for example, they have a baby which they name Jacobo that turns out to be, in fact, an iguana. 13 Don Chombón, the grandfather of the child, protests: “Take Jacobo, / the product of a theft, / an impure mixture / of poetry and the bourgeoisie” (33–34). When Death arrives toward the end of the play, the bard proclaims: “Death I don’t want to see you! Give me enough time / to write my work. / Give me a second for the second / volume. I will show you a sample of my / master work / that although it may go wrong / will make me immortal” (41). Literature and literary figures—as exemplified by the bard—are paradoxically characterized as both superficial and incompatible with middle-class values. As Vicky Unruh has indicated, “the longer he resides in this environment, the less poetry he produces and the more contented with his presence

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others become” (39). The literal result of the union between poetry—the bard—and the bourgeoisie—Fifí—is “impure”: a cold-blooded animal that symbolizes the impossible relationship between these. When Don Chombón refers to the fact that the infant is the product of a theft, it appears that the character is alluding to the mutual pilfering of values that poets and the middle class have endured: on one hand, poets have taken inspiration from the middle class and, in the opinion of Nicaraguan vanguardists such as Pasos and Cuadra, have also lost their thematic way; on the other hand, members of the middle class have at times looked to poetry to elevate them and help them transcend their routine and conventions. In the end, however, they have both lost out, as the product of their union is an “impure” concoction of their search and ambitions. That this product is an iguana evokes any number of humorous associations and tempers the critical blow to bourgeoisie customs and practices. Conventional life and middle-class values are further taken to task in the play through descriptions of daily life and the aspirations of the characters. Don Trombón, the manager of Don Bombín’s business, proudly states that “I have / a white spirochete as my lineage, / a mosquito on my shield, / a fig in my navel” (27). The social aspirations of Don Trombón are represented in language that directly alludes to nobility and the aristocracy such as his lineage and his coat of arms. These declarations are moderated, however, by the nonsensical references to bacterial spirochetes, mosquitoes on his coat of arms, and the fig in his navel. However honorable his ambitions may be, Don Trombón is forced to resort to un-noble language to express his dreams of social and economic advancement. At the time—nor any point hereafter— the middle class in Nicaragua typically possessed neither noble lineage nor coat of arms and individuals were forced to pursue social advancement through economic means that may have allowed them access to the nouveau riche. The humor does not lie in dreams of material or spiritual wealth, but rather in the language that juxtaposes patrician symbols with the reality of a bourgeoisie life that obligates Don Trombón to work and manage a business enterprise belonging to someone else. Spirochetes, mosquitoes, and figs settled into navels are generally not related to the landed gentry, yet it is this comical association that undermines both middle-class values and the aristocracy and, ultimately, affords them equal standing by elevating the mindnumbing routine endured by Don Trombón and reducing the symbols of the nobility. The cartoons of the artist Róger regularly satirized life in Nicaragua during the 1980s, routinely used humor to dialogue directly with middle-class values, and explored the consequences and contradictions of the Sandinista Revolution. In the process, Róger used his cartoons to champion a more progressive Nicaragua that would be open to social and political changes. 14 If, as Bakhtin wrote, there is a direct correlation between laughter and “the

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people’s unofficial truth” (90), then the drawings of Róger document the antagonistic relationship between political authority and popular constructions of the post-revolutionary discourse and subvert any hegemonical attempt by either the FSLN government or the United States to manipulate the national narrative. The political and military presence of the United States, for example, are frequently criticized in his comic strips, as the Army or Marines bear the brunt of his denigration for being ignorant of Nicaraguan reality, for committing armed acts of violence against the people, and for being in collusion with Somoza’s National Guard. The individual US soldiers portrayed in the drawings are further represented as physically large specimens (Sánchez Flores, 6) who allegedly abide by the letter of the law (7), 15 whose military advantages are overshadowed by the spirit of the Nicaraguan people (9), and whose application of overwhelming military force reflects a growing insecurity in their methods (8). A number of drawings also take a broader regional perspective, drawing attention to the actions of the United States in Central America and beyond. One drawing (40) depicts a small man wearing an overcoat and a dark hat labeled “Comisión Kissinger” (“Kissinger Commission”) about to light the cigar of another man who is dressed in striped pants and a hat decorated with stars and stripes. The cigar, however, resembles a stick of dynamite that will predictably detonate moments after being lit, making reference to the politically explosive recommendations of the report. 16 Another drawing shows an Uncle Sam–type figure in the cockpit of a heavily armed fighter jet, looking down on the airport of the small Caribbean island of Grenada and declaring “But it’s that they won’t stop threatening me!!” (41). And yet another drawing projects US influence beyond the realm of earth: a rocket labeled “USA” shoots through space and, upon landing on the surface of another planet, discharges a number of uniformed soldiers. In the last panel, their commander states: “ . . . and remember: we’re here to defend the national security of the United States” (43). The salient point is not only that these drawings represent a criticism of the United States, but that they use rather straight-forward humor to subvert the actions of the most powerful nation on earth. In the first example, the smoker looks exceptionally self-assured and does not know that he is smoking dynamite. In the second, the size of the plane and the armaments that it carries are excessive when compared to the size of the island, its three palm trees and its miniscule airport. And in the final example, backpack-wearing soldiers whose military helmets cover their eyes project a rather paranoid and aggressive US government that feels the need to conquer even the smallest of planets. Much of what is parodied in these drawings is the excessive confidence of the United States: the serenity of the smoker in the face of an impending explosion, the size of the fighter jet attacking Grenada, the apparent clarity of a military mission to another planet to protect US interests there. Yet this confidence is undermined by the comic element present in

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each, as the potential laughter provoked by these cartoons invokes the struggle for a Nicaraguan post-revolutionary identity. Throughout the 1980s Róger also parodied Nicaraguan politics and domestic policies, enduring, for example, the suspension in 1988 of La Semana Cómica for five issues by the Sandinista authorities for publishing a photograph that many deemed offensive to women. 17 While a number of his drawings criticized the oligarchy in Nicaragua (18) and the absence of an impartial national press (20), many of his cartoons also censured political hypocrisy and the destructive consequences it brought on the Nicaraguan people. In one series of vignettes, two men are walking side by side. One is wearing a suit and hat, while the other is dressed more informally, in pants and a shortsleeved shirt. In the first panel, the formal one says to the other, “Now that elections are coming, we have to figure out how to improve the party’s image.” The other man responds in the next panel, saying, “How about a document condemning imperialist aggression?” to which the first man replies, “I said to improve the party’s image, not the party itself” (23). The doublespeak of political language is highlighted, as the intentions to improve the image of the party do not necessarily mean a fundamental improvement of the party. What counts, then, is simply an enhancement of the appearance of the party, not of its essence. Its essence may remain unchanged as long as the façade of the party garners it more votes and an eventual victory at the polls. While the center of our attention is the exchange between the two men, the visual difference between them is significant as well: Both appear to have honorable intentions as they speak about the upcoming elections, yet it is the rather more humbly dressed individual who makes the substantive proposal. The other gentleman, dressed more formally and who resembles the traditional image of an oligarch or businessman, is concerned merely with appearances. Possible ideological disparities, in this case, are mirrored by differences in attire and demeanor: we rarely see the well-dressed man speak, while the other individual appears to have a constant smile on his face. To recall Bergson, the suppressed laughter underscores possible defects and juxtaposes “the rigid, the ready-made, the mechanical” with “the supple, the ever-changing and the living” (119). The man in shorts expresses a willingness to adjust to the present circumstances, while the oligarch manifests a rigidity typical of what would become the economic policies of Daniel Ortega. In another series of panels, a woman is selling eggs from a basket and lamenting her situation, declaring: “We’re worse off than before. The Sandinistas don’t care if the people starve . . .” In the next section, a man approaches her and asks her the price of the eggs: “How much are eggs?” “50 pesos a dozen,” she replies. The man begins to object: “But the official price . . .” “I don’t care!” says the seller, “If you don’t like it keep on walking.” And the series ends with a final panel that recalls the first one: the

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woman is sitting by her eggs, lamenting her situation: “We’re worse off than before. The Sandinistas don’t care if the people starve” (24). The first panel establishes a political opinion popular at that time: that the Sandinista government was to blame for the growing poverty. The second panel, however, shows that, given the opportunity to sell her product, the woman prefers to ignore the “official” lower price for eggs established by the government and instead price them higher, hoping to obtain greater profit. By the final panel, her repetitive complaint is clearly self-interested: when she had the opportunity to sell her eggs at the more modest official price and earn a modest return, she chose instead to price the eggs higher and hope for greater proceeds. By ignoring the contradiction between her grumblings and her own actions, the woman comes to represent those in Nicaraguan society who expect maximum returns from the national government for minimum investment or sacrifice on the part of the individual. This criticism, however, is accomplished through humor, as the woman that we see in the first panel— sitting on a low stool, head cradled in one hand—is transformed in the second panel when she sits upright and responds rather cuttingly to the man who is interested in buying her eggs. By the final panel, she has regained a relaxed physical posture that recalls the first panel and reminds us, humorously, that she only stirs when her own self-interest is as stake. Any effective cartography of Nicaraguan literature should consider the subversive capacity of humor and its ability to draw our attention to hegemonical strategies of marginalization. If, as Werner Mackenbach writes, “It is obvious that literature as an institution has lost its centrality, as writers have lost their traditional prominent function in the formulation of the grand projects of national and Latin American identity” (Mackenbach), then the presence of humor and comic language or situations should contribute significantly to recentering the ongoing dialogue between popular culture and strategies of liberation. Although we would agree in principle with Brian Boyd’s assertion that “humor begins with the pleasure of play de-fanging aggression into non-aggression” (15), we would suggest that humor, in effect, has the capacity to re-fang any type of hostility or anger by calling our attention to the tension produced by social, political, and economic inequalities. Nicaraguan writers such as Rosario Aguilar, Erick Aguirre, Gioconda Belli, Erick Blandón, and Sergio Ramírez, among many others, have successfully integrated humorous language, episodes, and characters into their works; yet few have utilized humor systematically to subvert contemporary notions of power and authority. Upon closer examination, the drawings of Roger Sánchez Flores and the writings of Michèle Najlis, Joaquín Pasos, and Pablo Antonio Cuadra attest to the critical potential of humor and to the fact that, as Feibleman has written, “It is in the very act of laughing that we become reconciled to the unimportance of limitations and realize that we can surmount them” (191).

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HUMOR AND THE WORK OF OMAR CABEZAS If, as Feibleman declares, comedy subverts hegemony by confusing and directly ridiculing categories of actuality, underrating “that which it intends to raise” and overrating “that which it tends to lower in estimation” (179–80), then humor contributes directly to establishing a hierarchy of intended ethical behavior. Comedy, in effect, consistently projects a better world and “is never felt when the psychological subject accepts things as they are” (Feibleman, 192), proposing instead an alternative reality in which strategies such as foul language represent “a breach of the established norms of verbal address [and] refuse to conform to conventions, to etiquette, civility or respectability” (Bakhtin, 187). As is evident throughout both Fire from the Mountain and Love song for mankind, Cabezas offers numerous examples of comic situations and anecdotes that skillfully blend a deep-rooted affection for his fellow Sandinista guerrillas and rural campesinos with a sensitivity to the desired outcomes of the Sandinista Revolution. Humor in the two volumes of memoirs by Cabezas serves principally to promote the values of the Sandinista Revolution and confuse the categories of social norms and practices through the use of foul language, recollections of carnivals, scatological references, the presence of laughter at difficult predicaments, and numerous jokes. Writing in 1885 on “senseless oaths and imprecations” (536) and their relationship to the evolution of humankind, Edwin P. Whipple decried the spread of profanity in contemporary society and denounced the impact that this language would have on his fellow human beings: “There is, unhappily, a class of men who, in different degrees of depravity, seem possessed by the devil. These creatures find a strange pleasure in showing their superiority to common folk, by disgusting all decent people whose ears unfortunately come within reach of their tongues, by their ribaldry, and shocking by their blasphemy all devout people that are placed in the same predicament” (544). It is no surprise that his implicit distinction between “depravity” and virtue reflects the pre-eminent position of class-consciousness in nineteenth-century society in the United States and is solidly grounded in a theology that rewards social decorum over recklessness or intemperance. Using terminology such as “devil,” “blasphemy,” and “devout,” Whipple invokes religious themes to extoll the virtues of the individual who avoids obscenities and, in the process, to censure the morality of those who pepper their speech with such terms. Although his statement is grounded in the puritanical religious beliefs dominant in New England at the time, his declaration actually reflects the capacity of foul language to level the rhetorical playing field. His characterization of those who use profanity as being “possessed by the devil” and his subsequent remarks reveal an implicit fear of social contamination: that all “decent” and “devout people” will be affected by their “ribaldry” and

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“blasphemy.” Since these adults are, for the most part, incorrigible (he classifies individuals as “reclaimable” and “irreclaimable” [546–47]), the duty of every respectable person is “to protect the neglected children of improvidence, carelessness, and vice from what seems to be their inevitable doom” (539). Far from distancing individuals from one another, it appears evident from his comments that obscenities serve to connect individuals through a common language that values spontaneous verbal expression. The apparent “shock” and “disgust” at inappropriate language may only be a superficial reaction that conceals a more profound connection to the speaker and the situation. At times, the potential humor evident in these expressions and in the precise situations that motivated their use may serve to reduce barriers between individuals. In Fire from the Mountain, examples abound of profanity and foul language—“Son of a bitch” (33), “To the shit pile, to the shit pile!” (49), “Son of a bitch” (56), and “I still hadn’t figured out how in hell I was supposed to march” (60), among many others—are frequently used to embellish an unexpectedly dreadful situation. As unpleasant as these moments may have been for the narrator, however, the use of foul language frequently adds a humorous dimension that takes the sting out of the moment (at least retrospectively) and introduces an element of solidarity that helps him to connect with others who are suffering under the same circumstances. When speaking to a group of students at the Universidad de León, for example, he becomes agitated and “a couple of swearwords slipped out” (46). At first his audience was speechless and simply “looked at each other” (46). This reaction quickly changed and became one of pleasant surprise: “No doubt about it. They were chuckling, but chuckling about something I’d said. I realized I was getting through to them. This is important because it dawned on me then that a swearword or a crude word used in the right way can be explosive, very sharp politically” (46). Instead of alienating his audience, his unintended and impulsive use of profanity transformed the energy in the room, paved the way to improved communication, and, given the context, offered a more effective vehicle for the revolutionary message of the incipient Frente Sandinista. After that episode, Cabezas comes to understand the effectiveness of humor and obscenities in the revolutionary struggle: “I went [to the mountains] with millions of swearwords that represented all the hatred and aspirations of the masses” (47). If “swearwords” offer another weapon in the fight against the Somoza regime, then it is the awkward humor—that “ribaldry” identified by Whipple—born from an expletive and shared with a group of students that first underscores the potential of this language to subvert authority. His journey to the mountains required both an ideological and a semantic preparation, as the “millions of swearwords” represented a deeper connection to the people. Although these “swearwords” implied a contamination of the natural environment and of the political innocence of the mountains, they also purified

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them, as the use of those same expressions among the flora and fauna brought “the masses” into the daily struggle for change and survival. His preparation for the journey to the mountains therefore required a commitment to both the ideology of the revolution and the language of the people that he had left behind. In his analysis of the work of Rabelais, Bakhtin divides “folk humor” into three categories: “ritual spectacles,” “comic verbal compositions,” and “various genres of billingsgate.” In writing on these last “genres,” Bakhtin explains that “Profanities and oaths were not initially related to laughter, but they were excluded from the official sphere of official speech because they broke its norms” (17). This capacity of “swearwords” to “break norms” and, in time, to incite laughter is misleading, as humor may transcend the anecdotal and lead to a sincerity that grounds a renewed society. The work of Rabelais, according to Bakhtin, performed this specific function: “While breaking up false seriousness, false historic pathos, he prepared the soil for a new seriousness and a new historic pathos” (439). According to Bakhtin, festivals, carnivals, and the carnivalesque serve as a counterbalance to the authority exercised by the state: “In its historical manifestation as a Medieval and Renaissance institution, carnival is offered as an example of a revolutionary dispersal of a hegemonic feudal order, its uncontrollable laughter performing a directly political and anti-ideological function” (Young, 76). In both Fire from the Mountain and Love song for mankind, carnivals and the humor and laughter associated with them frequently appear as components of an unstoppable revolutionary process that utilizes comic elements to fight oppression. This juxtaposition of the comic and political oppression serves as an effective catalyst of social awareness and highlights the role of laughter in deconstructing a solemn occasion, making it more palatable, as it were, for “the masses” and, in the process, more accessible. In one section of Fire from the Mountain, for example, Cabezas mentions the carnivals that students presented at the Universidad de León: “Sometimes there was even obscene stuff in the carnivals—and León is very moralistic and conservative, but the vulgar jokes of the students delighted the people anyway” (30). At these student carnivals “we also staged comic carnivals, with lots of clowning around. And people were delighted because we made fun of Tacho (our nickname for Somoza) and the government” (30). In the first quote, Cabezas presents the “obscene stuff” and “vulgar jokes” of the carnivals as successful counterpoints to the conservative values of the people of León, obliging the residents to lift the veneer of social decorum and allow themselves to be entertained by the students. The second example reinforces the humor of these performances, connects it to a criticism of the regime, and represents the population of León—the “people”—as willing participants in the growing struggle against Somoza. In turn, “obscenity” becomes a vehicle for

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criticism of the Somoza regime and facilitates social interaction, revealing a set of common values between students and non-students in León. In Love song for mankind, Cabezas describes the festival that the Centro Universitario de la Universidad Nacional (CUUN) customarily organized to welcome new students to the university, drawing attention to the parade floats: “The floats satirized the dictatorship, ridiculing political and religious characters, popular characters or bourgeoisie directors, oligarchs or aristocrats from the city of León” (194). The subject of students’ satire is clearly identified: it is principally the dictatorship and those associated with the regime. This right to amuse themselves, however, was not the sole property of the university population, as the people of León shared in the entertainment and welcomed the humorous denunciation of Somoza and his cronies: “The entire town of León was at the doors of its homes, on the sidewalks or behind us, dying laughing, because the town loves the student revelry and it waited for those days as if they were a type of religious holiday” (195). By declaring that “[t]he entire town of León” attended the parade and that “the people” enjoyed student celebrations and awaited them as if they were religious celebrations, Cabezas conveys the significant popular support enjoyed by the students at their performances. This public sharing of the comic in communities reinforces the underlying solidarity of the historical moment, as the residents of León leave the privacy of their homes and commune with the students in “a type of religious holiday” that, through the use of laughter and public denunciation, brings people together. These “ritual spectacles,” as Bakhtin termed them (5–6), are used to plumb popular discontent with the government and employ humor that explores the potential of religious celebrations to awaken expectations. “Carnival,” Bakhtin continues, “is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people” (7). The satire and criticisms expressed in the festivals prepared by the CUUN were not an abstract set of academic celebrations separated from the lives of the residents of León by intellectual and economic elitism: the criticism expressed in the festivals, in fact, used the university setting as context for a life lived under the shadow of the Somoza government and, in the process, employed humor to gauge resistance and to legitimize ideas that would “[embrace] all the people.” In both volumes of his memoirs, it is clear that the memory of those carnivals during his student years and the unmistakable humor of those celebrations lay the foundation for the popular support of the Sandinista Revolution in León. Their recollection, however, reflects the subjective tendency in Cabezas and in subsequent sandinismo to overestimate this popular support of (pre-)revolutionary ideals and to ignore the growing appeal of what would become during the 1980s a counterrevolutionary discourse. In much the same way that memory and our own personal history condition our response to events, humor adapts itself to specific circumstances and functions as a corrective to

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outdated beliefs or principles. The ability of Cabezas to laugh at his own ignorance, missteps, and political innocence is implicitly connected to his own maturity and growing commitment to the revolution and to the Nicaraguan people. In this respect, the self-deprecating humor evident in both Fire from the Mountain and Love song for mankind conditions his recollection of events and allows him to present himself as an incipient and awkward guerrilla instead of the legendary comandante that he would become. The possibilities inherent in both texts speak to the potential of humor to reveal or inhibit our memories and, conversely, of memory to shape what comical or humorous mean. This complementary relationship between humor and memory has been recognized to be both productive and symbiotic in advertising (Cline and Kellaris), performance studies (Mintz), therapy (Dziegielewski et al.), pedagogy (Vance), and political science (Purcell et al.), for example. As humor conditions memory and allows us to reprocess past challenges and solemnities, so too does memory influence our understanding of what is comical and enables us to adapt to alternative characterizations of humor. Both works by Cabezas offer examples of incidents that were, in the moment, clearly humorous; yet there are also examples when the passage of time and the process of recording and inscribing his memories has allowed Cabezas to recall more sober events with some critical distance and, hence, appreciate their possible comical characteristics. Moments that provoked the use of curse words, socially awkward situations, or fear, for example, retrospectively become amusing and aid the reader in navegating the narrator’s ideological transformation. Throughout Fire from the Mountain and Love song for mankind, Cabezas employs scatological language and anecdotes to illustrate the inherent difficulty and humor of a situation. Scatology, “that branch of science which deals with diagnosis by means of the feces” (Oxford English Dictionary), has been recognized as a vehicle for satire, pathos, tragedy, and comedy in the work of Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Sergio Ramírez, Isabel Allende, and Gioconda Belli, among many others. The humor apparent in a scatological description or reference frequently serves to unite us by calling our attention to human existence as a series of physiological functions punctuated by spells of intellectual or emotional lucidity and to subvert class distinctions or underscore potential social transformations. As Gabriel P. Weisberg has written, “[T]he development of scatological discourse and its increasingly public nature can be seen to represent and reveal metaphorically deeper ills afflicting society” (18). In the discourse of Latin American thinkers such as Leopoldo Zea, the physical body has conventionally been separated from and juxtaposed to the life of the mind and, hence, antithetical to the “higher” functions of the intellect. In Christian discourse “it predictably signified the opposite of the sacred” (Klein, 20). Early cultures of the Americas, however, did not excise the body from the mind and

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recognized an essential connection between the two. In ancient Mexico, “excrement played an important role in certain visual and verbal discourses that helped the Mexicans to structure their relations to each other and to the simultaneously physical and spiritual world in which they lived” (Klein, 20). It should then be no surprise that scatological characterizations in literature serve to undermine the customary separation between body and mind and subvert accepted notions of decorum. In the writing of Omar Cabezas, for example, the humor evident in descriptions of excrement and bodily functions advocates an alternative conduct and injects a humorous tone that manages to fuse the revolution with concerns for individual identity and privacy. The private and the public are subtly brought together through an examination of human physicality and the implicit recognition that the revolution is, in essence, a body, composed of multiple features yet united behind the common goal of bringing down the Somoza dictatorship. Fire from the Mountain offers a number of scatological references and descriptions that call our attention to the potential humor of a non-humorous situation. When Cabezas describes the first time he uses the bathroom in the woods, the emphasis is on his physiological discomfort and his own ignorance of the necessary procedure: “Off I went with all my sores and blisters— pretty pathetic. I dug a hole, took my shit, then grabbed a couple of leaves. Well, what happened was, I drenched my hand with shit trying to wipe myself; it was impossible. I figured out later that you had to take a huge handful of leaves” (74). His individual behavior reminds us that he is far from his community, unprotected, and, as a result, practically incapacitated. His emerging organic relationship with nature represents him as both partner and victim and, as a result, is comical. His own inexperience—“I figured out later”—adds to the humor of the moment and effectively reveals the relationship between ignorance and comedy. As a result of the marches through the jungle and the subsequent physical hardships, he is, as he indicates, “pretty pathetic.” And what is from the beginning a humiliating process that involves distancing himself from his fellow soldiers and relieving himself becomes even more so when his inexperience leads to soiling himself with his own feces. In this episode, pathos and comedy intertwine to bring together the innocence of the young revolutionary and the self-ridiculing description of his filth: his intention was simply to relieve himself, yet his own innocence under the circumstances teaches him a difficult lesson. Although one cannot help but wince at the discomfort of the moment, there is a humor that emerges at the end of the statement, when he acknowledges one of the most valuable lessons he was to learn in the mountains: you must clean yourself “with a huge handful of leaves.” If we broaden our focus, we recall his motivation for being in this challenging environment: to overthrow the regime of Anastasio Somoza. His “sores,” “blisters,” and “shit” are all part of a larger project that incorporates the problems of the individual to the grander

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fight for liberation. By using humor to describe the difficulties involved in relieving himself, Cabezas also humanizes the image of the typical revolutionary by de-romanticizing him and demonstrates that he, stained with feces and theoretically unaware of the struggles that lie ahead, is capable of toppling a repressive government. Any smile or laughter evoked by the reader becomes an implicit expression of solidarity with his plight and, ultimately, with his struggle. In another episode from Fire from the Mountain, Cabezas narrates that he and a fellow revolutionary, Manuel Mairena, had gone to a collaborator to ask for help and, upon arrival, found that there was a party in progress and proceeded to hide in a ditch behind his home: “Can you imagine my horror when I saw some son of a bitch at the top of the ditch with his cock out all ready to pee on my head? Manuel and I didn’t make a sound, and we were pelted with at least four arcs of piss—I’m not exaggerating. Plus two blasts of vomit. After the first spray of piss we took the burlap bag we had and put it on over our heads and managed to survive the remaining blasts” (178). Once again, Cabezas uses scatological references to describe his own individual and rather humorous predicament and to give the reader a vivid idea of the various difficulties endured by the revolutionaries. His rhetorical question “Can you imagine my horror . . . ?” at the beginning of the passage indicates a willingness to include us in the moment, asking us to reflect on his “horror”—which will soon become our “horror”—as we realize what is about to transpire. This “horror” becomes associated with the masculinizing shock of seeing another “cock” and being urinated on. These demeaning circumstances, however, further emphasize that his masculinity is never called into question, as they suffer “like men” for the sake of their mission and the revolution. Throughout the works, humor, especially in these situations, is continuously related to his own gender identity and his own ability to endure practically any difficulty. The thought of a “son of a bitch” looming over them, ready to urinate, allows us to visualize their predicament as heteronormative males: Cabezas and Manuel are crouched down, in the ditch, waiting to request weapons, nourishment, and some type of logistical support, when they find themselves in one of the possible latrines. The humor evident in this example and the underlying concepts of masculinity and virility allowed him to shut out the visual imagery of other men’s penises and urination and center on the ultimate sacrifice and success of their mission. The fact that they were hit “with at least four arcs of piss” and “two blasts of vomit” illustrates their own passive participation in the festivities and that their greatest fears were realized. The “horror” of this moment, however, is retrospectively mitigated by the comic hyperbole of the situation, as the urine and vomit are equated to weapon “blasts” and the burlap bag becomes their only armor against these attacks. Even Cabezas welcomes the humorous nuance of overstatement when he defensively declares that he is “not exag-

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gerating.” Upon reflection, we recall that the narrator has been in military combats and witnessed explosions from shells, grenades, bullets, and other ordnance, and that the discharges suffered by Cabezas at the party are trifles when compared to the violence of armed battle. We know that he will “survive” this unpleasantness, yet the humor inherent in this rather humiliating experience at the party is implicitly part of the larger battle against tyranny in Nicaragua and does much to broaden the categories of the struggle: patience is a virtue, and no task is insignificant in the effort to depose Somoza. Sharing these foul moments may make them more bearable and serve to unite the revolutionaries, as when Cabezas is describing their visit to a rural family and recalls how the tension disappeared in the face of jokes and flatulence, “telling vulgar jokes and eating and all of us farting openly and openly smelling our stinking farts” (Love song for mankind, 32). While the various graphic descriptions of bodily functions and fluids described may be quite comical, their political context and the overall mission entrusted to Cabezas and Manuel and their visit to a rural family ground the moment in survival and subterfuge. The humor evident in the vulgarity, dirty jokes, and the passing and sharing of gas, however, is represented as a communal act, not an individual performance. Comedy and any comedic elements ultimately acquire value within a communal space, serving to unite the individual to the larger group and its goals. The comic in any community is a bard, willing to use humor in order to tell truths in a manner that, in the long term, neither inflicts lasting pain on a companion nor betrays the greater cause. In Love song for mankind, Cabezas describes various activities in training camp that involved working with live armament. Training with a grenade, the commander one day decides to remove the firing pin and ask his guerrilleros to pass it around without removing their hand from the lever in order to lose their fear and familiarize themselves with the weapon. In the process, one of the men drops it and they all take off running for their lives. When it does not explode, they gradually return and have a good laugh at their own expense. One of them, Rufino, does not come back, and they all decide to search for him, finding him in a most repulsive hiding place: “Poor Rufino, the closest hole he found to protect himself was the latrine, where, terrified, he threw himself headfirst. He was completely covered in shit” (236). As the terror provoked by the dropped grenade gradually disappears, the situation passes from relief to comedy as they discover him sunk in the latrine of the camp. In his desperation, Rufino had looked to protect himself from the imminent explosion and impulsively sought refuge in the filthiest place around, immersing himself in the urine and feces of his compañeros. The description of a “terrified” “Poor Rufino” deftly connects this comic moment to the sympathy/empathy that the reader may have for him. His act of selfpreservation is ultimately not very masculine, however, but it is better: It’s funny. In the situation, the humor is unavoidable: “When we saw the similar

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and undescribable spectacle, we could not avoid laughing until our stomachs ached, including me who, theoretically, was the most serious” (236). In a matter of minutes, the situation has passed from extreme danger to absolute humor, as their worst fears present themselves simply as a soldier looking up at them from the latrine pit and all of them have a good laugh. The laughter that Cabezas evokes, however, dovetails with the overarching revolutionary mission and reminds the reader that the fight is all-inclusive: everything is possible and acceptable, even diving into a hole filled with excrement. The humor evident in this situation is reminiscent of the ritual spectacles described by Bakhtin (7), as the struggle comes to resemble a type of carnival and the battlefield simulates a marketplace where distinct ideologies vie for preferential treatment and space. The insurgency is, by nature, “unofficial” and finds itself fighting for an alternative and improved version of society. The profanities and scatological anecdotes described by Cabezas use comedy to transcend the “official speech” of what had been the Somoza administration and offer us a window into discrete and popular elements of the Sandinista Revolution. The humorous scatological incidents and language present in both Fire from the Mountain and Love song for mankind are also examples of laughter provoked by difficult predicaments and serve to displace notions of authority and control. These episodes generally occur during moments of anxiety, fear, or suffering, and serve to relieve the accompanying tension and to unleash a collective sigh of relief. One of the men, Tito Córdoba, for example, had decided to participate in the revolution and had gone up into the mountains wearing his best pair of pants. In the process of hiking through the dense foliage and participating in the military training, the pants were ruined: “He tore his pants to shit, really shit, ever since I began to direct the physical warm-up exercises, and on one of the squats his pants split up the middle from behind, and he spent the rest of the training in his bare ass, and the laughs and jokes begin. For him, his Managua pants were the best thing he had” (Love song for mankind, 86). The act of splitting his pants and offering a view of his backside adds a bit of levity to a situation in which all the participants are on edge, either waiting for the next attack by the National Guard or preparing to react to such an attack. Since they were his only pair of pants, Tito spent the entire training period with his pants split. His pants, torn “to shit,” serve as comic relief for a tense situation and as metaphor for the struggle of the revolutionary: he will be symbolically—and quite possibly literally—torn asunder by his experience. The laughter and jokes that Cabezas describes—“risas” and “chiles”—at the expense of Tito were most certainly welcome relief from the hardships of the camp and serve to undermine the power of the army and National Guard. As history would prove, Somoza could not dominate a ragtag bunch of revolutionaries who possessed only

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limited resources yet were prepared to sacrifice all for the revolution, even their only pair of pants. In another example from Love song for mankind, a small group of Sandinistas visit the home of Sergio Oliva, a collaborator of the regime, and pass themselves off as being, in effect, members of the National Guard. As Cabezas and two other men remain outside the house, a few of the revolutionaries enter and accuse him of being a clandestine associate of the Sandinistas. Cabezas, listening from outside, explains that the three of them were “laughing like shit” (254). After additional interrogation, the men in the home finally call Cabezas in and ask him—still under the guise of being members of the National Guard—if they should go ahead and execute Oliva. “I’m trying my best to calm down,” Cabezas writes, “so that the laughter of the three men can’t be heard” (255). They know that they themselves are not in danger and that the man will not be put to death, provoking a certain amount of humor and almost joy at the predicament of this individual who has collaborated with the National Guard. Their threats are empty, yet their ultimate intention is to demonstrate that the hearsay that Sergio Oliva has frequently used to denounce revolutionary activity may also become a weapon employed against him. While Cabezas makes an attempt to be serious so that Oliva does not hear their snickering, the humor is one-sided as Oliva knows how random the cruelty of the National Guard can be and is, quite certainly, afraid for his life. The subterfuge is therefore evident on two levels, as one is the secretive behavior of Sergio Oliva as informant to the National Guard, while the other is the effort made by Cabezas and his companions to pass themselves off as members of the National Guard. Both, however, speak to the underlying insecurity of the Somoza regime: Cabezas, his motley crew, and all Sandinistas are perceived as a threat by the government and are dealt with accordingly; and Oliva has quite possibly been recruited by the Guard under promises of material gain or threats of physical injury to him or his family. The laughter described by the narrator is utilized to underscore the unmistakable kindness of the revolution, as the reader may by now perceive that Cabezas will not execute this man and is simply teaching him a valuable lesson and recruiting him for the Sandinista cause. In the process, the revelation and subsequent eradication of the secretive practices utilized by Oliva are, in fact, subverted by the humor and humanitarian actions of the Sandinistas and exemplify the elimination of that “false seriousness” and the construction of a “new historic pathos” described by Bakhtin (439). Another example of the liberating potential of laughter occurs when he and his men are recalling the rural legend of Sisímica de Cantagallo, a female ghost who supposedly inhabits the mountain of Cantagallo near Estelí and appears to travelers, frightening them into leaving the area. In transcribing the story, Cabezas recalls the words of Concho, a peasant who is constantly complaining about the cold weather and reminding the Sandinistas about la

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Sisímica: “‘Hopefully she is really a woman and appears in my hammock, because, as cold as it gets there, I’m going to wrap her up in the sheet and I’m going to screw her and you’re going to see how she stops wanting to appear and scare people,’ and he laughs and gets serious and since then he realized that neither his story nor his impression intimidate me” (Love song for mankind, 42). In the passage, Concho declares that he wishes the apparition would appear in his hammock so that he may “screw her” and teach her not to scare people. This attempt to frighten the Sandinistas to underscore his own courage through a combination of humor and sexual prowess backfires on him when Cabezas declares that neither his story nor her image would scare him. The anecdote turns into a masculine posing contest: after Concho describes his willingness to have intercourse with her, Cabezas proclaims that he is not afraid of her. While it is important to recall that Cabezas is the narrator and hence the manipulator of the experience, the humor of this episode is in actuality a veiled skirmish for authority: In describing his willingness to sleep with a ghost, Concho displays a fearlessness that will potentially place him at the front of the pack; Cabezas, however, chooses to write that “He laughs” and to draw attention to the solitary and self-conscious nature of Concho’s laughter. If there existed, in effect, a struggle for authority between the rural seasoned peasant and the newly arrived urban revolutionary, Cabezas makes clear that he himself is the victor when Concho “realized” that Cabezas was not going to be affected by a fairytale. Humor— or the lack thereof, in this case—liberates the group from the power struggle between participants in the revolution. While comedy serves to proclaim a new framework for emancipatory concerns, it also draws attention to the contradictory nature of the present. Jokes—“Something said or done to incite laughter of amusement” (Oxford English Dictionary)—have long been recognized as barometers of social issues as comedians through the years have worked to provoke audience reactions and shine a spotlight on the paradoxes and irrationality of human existence. In this context, Freud writes of the “short-circuit” that occurs when “two circles of ideas are brought together by the same word” (147) and predates the penchant for illogical humor, ambiguity, and surprise espoused by Dadaists and surrealists. Throughout both Fire from the Mountain and Love song for mankind there are numerous examples of jokes and pranks that alleviate the tension of a situation and shrewdly “confuse the categories of actuality” (Feibleman, 179–80). In Fire from the Mountain, for example, Cabezas describes his clandestine trip to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy, accompanied by his compañero Toño Jarquín. As the nurse is shaving his groin in preparation for surgery, Cabezas begins to get aroused and experiences an erection: “But how humiliating: there was nowhere to turn there on that cot, naked and totally erect, nervous and embarrassed” (156). A moment later, Toño enters the room, “laughing like a hyena” (156):

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“‘That’s right. I bet with the nurse that you wouldn’t get a hard-on, and she said she was sure she could make you have one.’ Can you believe it?” (156). The urgency of his medical condition exists alongside his embarrassment and subsequent amusement in light of the prank and reconfigures the epistemic terrain by offering complementary alternative visions of a revolutionary: these men may gradually be growing into seasoned combat veterans, but their jokes in moments of self-conscious discomfort also reveal their innocence. For the narrative moment, the revolutionary struggle appears to take an epistemic back seat to the joke; yet it is precisely the confluence of the revolution and the joke that redefines the revolutionary struggle and displays both vulnerability and humor without sacrificing Sandinista ideals. In the process, Toño’s laughter becomes the soundtrack for the moment and enunciates a solidarity shared by Cabezas, his companions, and the attending nurse. After the operation, Cabezas realizes that he cannot stay and convalesce because he is an outlaw, a revolutionary wanted and hunted by the National Guard. In order to exit the hospital without causing suspicion, he and Toño decide to employ the help of a companion and pretend he is drunk: “They swung me to the side of the bed; I sat on the edge, then took hold of them, hanging around the neck of one guy with another arm around the guy’s waist. And we started walking. They half-dragged, half-carried me, and that was how we got out of the hospital” (158). The situation the narrator describes is serious: Cabezas has just undergone an emergency appendectomy and needs to leave urgently in order to not arouse suspicions. This urgency, however, is complemented by the dark humor of the moment as we visualize Cabezas unable to walk properly and acting as if he had consumed an excessive amount of alcohol. He is struggling to overcome a physical discomfort he is certain to feel, yet he cannot appear to be overly affected by the operation and must simulate a drunken stupor in order to leave the hospital safely. The humor evident in the actions of the nurse in preparing him for surgery and in his pretend state of intoxication reflects a negotiation for power: in his physically vulnerable state, he is embarrassed at the potential of appearing as anything less than the Sandinista commander he is and, in the process, losing face in front of his men; yet his scheme to exit the hospital successfully allows him to recover that authority. Humor, in effect, palliates the potential humiliation by ridiculing the safety measures of the hospital and, by association, the authorities that are searching for him. Other examples of jokes and comic relief from Fire from the Mountain also underscore the collaborative nature of humor and its role in the creation of a renewed revolutionary aesthetic. While he was recovering from the operation, sequestered in the home of three elderly women who lived on the outskirts of Ocotal, he recalls how “we kidded them and played practical jokes, silly things. They adored us” (161). In another moment, he mentions in

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passing how a few of the compañeros were preparing for combat and had given their weapons names such as “The Stud” (148) (“El Garañón,” 174) and “Black Lady” (148) (“La Negra,” 174), so he decided to call his M-1 carbine rifle “Teddy Bear”: “I had an M-1 carbine, and since I always slept with it beside me, sometimes right in the hammock with me, I called it my ‘Teddy Bear.’ In Malpaisillo I felt unprotected without my Teddy Bear, because it guaranteed me the opportunity to die fighting, a chance to defend myself” (148). Another moment, he recalls one Christmas: “We were in our hammocks listening to music, to a song that went ‘If you’re far from friends, come to my home for Christmas.’ So we started singing, ‘Come to my rain cover for Christmas’” (110). The humorous wordplay involved in the jokes, the name of his firearm, and the modification of the lyrics to a Christmas song reveal a more profound commonality that reshapes the image of the typical revolutionary: comedy is part and parcel of the search for collective self-determination. The “practical jokes” they played on the three elderly women who assisted him connect him to the immediate community; his M-1 named “Teddy Bear” reveals much about the search for innocence in the struggle against the Somoza regime; and the collective reworking of a Christmas song occurs in the company of his men, when they are all remembering past holidays with friends and families. In these examples, humor occurs simultaneously with an unspoken respect for camaraderie and for the liberation of his own memories and of those that aid and support him. The comical juxtaposition of images and words serves to relieve the tension of the moment and undermine the monolithic and homogeneous image of the revolution. Humor is also used effectively in Love song for mankind and functions gradually and retrospectively to reimagine the Sandinista cause. In writing of a collaborator in Ocotal named Fredy Lobo who sold eggs from his home, Cabezas recalls that they called him “the laziest of all the collaborators” (201) and makes a pun on the word güevon (a term that may be used supportively for a friend and that is directly related to “huevo,” egg). Remembering a pesky neighbor who lived next door to his family, Cabezas calls to mind the practical jokes he and his friends played on her such as kidnapping her dog (402) and buying a padlock in order to lock her into her own home (402). Afterward, Cabezas describes that they became friends—“She needed children and we needed a grandmother” (403)—and that he proceeded to recruit her for the Frente Sandinista. While humor in these examples emerges from uncomfortable situations and individual ridicule through wordplay or tomfoolery, the comic element is unremittingly considered under the aegis of the revolution, as both the egg seller and his elderly neighbor eventually join the Sandinistas in the fight against Somoza and his regime. Comedy and the use of humor in literature have frequently served to undermine social standards of conduct and reconstruct structures of author-

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ity. The research of Bergson, Freud, Bakhtin, and Feibleman has served as a lens through which we may comprehend the subversive potential of humor in literary works. In the Latin American tradition, writers such as Caviedes, Sor Juana, Lizardi, and Huidobro often used humor in their works to draw attention to the injustices of daily life and to propose other implicit alternatives to the social, political, or economic authorities of the time. In the case of Nicaragua, the cartoons of Róger and the writings of Michèle Najlis and Joaquín Pasos serve to contextualize any analysis of the comic and offer a window into a cultural landscape torn apart by the government of Somoza and the Sandinista Revolution. Throughout the two volumes of his memoirs, Cabezas habitually invokes comic situations and language and, in the process, offers a liberational message that proposes an alternative to the epistemic aggression often found in solemnity. NOTES 1. The nine types of play identified by Brian Sutton-Smith are particularly useful when attempting any analysis of the relationship between play and social dynamics: “mind or subjective play,” “solitary play,” “playful behaviors,” “informal social play,” “vicarious audience play,” “performance play,” “celebrations and festivals,” “contests,” and “risky or deep play” (4–5). These distinctions, however, arise from contexts in developing nations in which consumer culture allows for the possibility of a more distinct integration of the private and public life. In developing economies such as Nicaragua, the struggle for subsistence endured by much of the population makes academic the differences between, for example, “mind or subjective play” and “informal social play.” In this respect, the forces of globalization and President Daniel Ortega’s past and present economic policies have done little to close the affective gap between reality lived beyond one’s front door—hawking food or goods for fourteen hours a day or working for a subsistence wage in order to increase profit margins for companies such as H& M and Sanyo—and life within the confines of home, where adequate shelter, food, and clothing may be all but absent. 2. The bibliography on the satyrical and socially critical aspects of Caviedes’s poetry is extensive, yet few studies center on the subversive nature of his poems and the capacity of his verse to challenge the influence of individuals such as physicians who enjoyed a close relationship to both the clergy and political authorities. Perhaps, as Ruth Hill notes, this dearth is due to the fact that his “caste poetry forms part of the cultural system of Lima (a society of castes), and it is therefore inseparable from hegemony” (271). As Hill indicates, a number of researchers have also remarked that his poetry may be considered “reactionary” as he “was writing against middle-income residents or the working poor in Lima” (271). While Caviedes certainly formed part of the upper classes, his criticism of medical professionals and of their ignorance in determining treatments for their patients speaks to a desire to empower the patient with the tools necessary to discriminate between a knowledgeable doctor and one who is inexperienced or uninformed. According to Daniel R. Reedy, his work may be divided into four categories that include satirical poems, religious or moral-philosophical poems, amorous poems, and those poems that narrate or describe events of the day (xx). 3. Notable exceptions include “De los recursos cómicos en el teatro de Sor Juana” by Frank Dauster, “Lo(s) gracioso(s) de Sor Juana. El género no religioso en el teatro colonial: de la comedia de santos a la de enredo” by Antonio Cortijo Ocaña, and the work of Julie Greer Johnson, Satire in Colonial Spanish America. 4. Kunzle’s study on the erotic humor of Róger offers an excellent introduction to the history of La Semana Cómica and of the circumstances behind its success. Kunzle notes, for example, that the weekly publication hosted a series of international artists that included Quino,

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Roberto Fontanarrosa, José Palomo, Ríus, and Rogelio Naranjo (92–93). Gradually, attacks on the weekly journal and on the drawings by Róger came from all sides of the politial spectrum and included the conservative La Prensa, the Sandinista El Nuevo Diario, and the officially sanctioned AMNLAE (Asociación de Mujeres Nicaragüenses Luisa Amanda Espinoza) (94–100). 5. Federico Mitchell Zavala notes three poems written by a seventeen-year-old Darío that deal with apparently light-hearted themes and may be considered “humorous” and “mischievous:” “Un pleito” (“A Lawsuit”), “Los zopilotes” (“The Buzzards”) and “La profecía de Horacio” (“Horatio´s Prophecy”). 6. The statement by Girardi takes on an added dimension if we consider the Imprimatur within the context of officially sanctioned Sandinista publications and literary culture in Nicaragua during the 1980s. At this time, the politicization of culture contributed to the conflict between the Ministry of Culture—led by Ernesto Cardenal—and the Asociación Sandinista de Trabajadores de Cultura (ASTC). Cardenal, for example, was hesitant to draw qualitative distinctions between individual artists and writers and defended the participation of all sectors of the population in the construction of a new national literature, theater, music, etc., while the ASTC looked to establish clear qualitative differences between those who were professional artists and those who were not. As David Whisnant has observed, this distinction within the ASTC would jeopardize the elaboration of a new political paradigm by reiterating cultural hierarchies: “Designating about half of its members as destacados, for example, preserved the cleavage between elite, ‘good,’ serious art on the one hand, and everything else on the other, and hence between trained professional artists and both general artists and the general public” (238). Girardi himself would subsequently enter the conversation directly with his works Fe en la revolución: revolución en la cultura (1983) and Sandinismo, marxismo, cristianismo en la nueva Nicaragua (1986). 7. The essays by Bellini, White, and Yúdice (“Poemas de un joven que quiso ser otro”) are worthwhile documents, yet their respective analyses only superficially touch on the work of Pasos and generally sidestep any considerations within a national political context. 8. The bibliographical citations directly reference the two volumes of the collected essays of Pasos, Prosas de un joven. 9. The frustration that Pasos expresses with political figures in his country is especially understandable if we recall that within a year’s time, Nicaragua would “elect” three presidents between May and August 1947: Leonardo Argüello Barreto (May 1, 1947–May 27, 1947), Benjamín Lacayo Sacasa (May 27, 1947–August 15, 1947), and Víctor Manuel Román y Reyes (August 15, 1947–May 6, 1950). The annoyance that Pasos expressed with presidential process in April of 1946 certainly foreshadows the contrivances and manipulations that would come to pass only a year later. 10. A number of essays by Pasos also use humor to confront the authority of Tacho Somoza. “El maestro Guerrero Parajón o el loco que se cree locomotora,” for example, alludes directly to the fact that Guerrero Parajón, one of Somoza’s most trusted aids, is sole owner of Nicaraguan railways and declares that he has lost his reason, criticizing him for believing that the president was always in the right (181). 11. Pasos also toys with the terms “bruto”: within an economic context it may be understood as “gross,” as in “gross weight” or “gross national product”; in a cultural context, however, “bruto” may also signify “brute” or “ignorant.” 12. Vicky Unruh has noted that “the parody of bourgeois art and aesthetic attitudes” in the play “combines vanguardist strategies with colloquial forms and in its exaltation of vernacular expression constitutes a manifesto of linguistic nationalism” (38). We would argue, however, that such “a manifesto of linguistic nationalism” is tempered by the fact that Pasos, Cuadra, and many members of the vanguardist generation in Nicaragua also took their linguistic inspiration from Spanish writers of the misnamed Siglo de Oro such as Francisco de Quevedo or Luis de Góngora. Although the “Breve nota sobre el teatro nicaragüense” begins by declaring that “El teatro popular es la veta más rica y más sugerente del folklore nicaragüense” (217), the absurdist language also masks a subtle homage to playwrights such as Lope de Vega as evidenced in metric constructions and rhyme patterns. It should also be noted that the theater opened by

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Pablo Antonio Cuadra in Granada, Nicaragua, during the 1930s was named “Lope” (“Breve nota,” 219). 13. Addressing the inspiration for this work, Pasos references the paso, a brief play popular during colonial times, and states that “En el argumento hemos utilizado la leyenda del parto del garrobo, tomándolo de un antiguo y misterioso paso colonial” (“Breve nota,” 222). 14. As Kunzle has noted, Róger has “contributed [. . .] to female and well as male social and moral emancipation” (90). 15. These correspond to the page numbers on which the cited/described drawing may be found in the work Cartoons from Nicaragua: The Revolutionary Humor of Róger. 16. The Kissinger Commission was a twelve-member National Bipartisan Commission appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1983 that examined issues of Central American security and proposed political and economic strategies for economic development and social reform in the region. The broad-minded intention of the commission, however, belied the Reagan administration’s intentions to frame the activity of the commission in Cold War terms. As William LeoGrande has written regarding the Commission’s concluding statement, “It read, in fact, as if it were two documents interwoven: a liberal one calling for social reform, and a conservative one calling for private-sector development and military aid to fight communism. But on closer examination, it becomes clear that the liberal agenda stands at odds with the underlying logic of the Report—mere gloss on a vintage Cold War brief for intervention” (252). 17. Kunzle offers an effective summary of this controversy (104–6).

Chapter Six

The Liberation of Fire from the Mountain Testimonial Text, Documentary Film, and the New Nicaragua

DOCUMENTARY FILM, LATIN AMERICA, AND NICARAGUA “Documentaries,” according to Paula Rabinowitz, “construct not only a vision of truth and identity but an appropriate way of seeing that vision” (12). Released in 1987, the documentary film Fire from the Mountain, directed by Deborah Shaffer, exemplifies that “the camera does not simply give us the vision of the character and his world; it imposes another vision in which the first is transformed and reflected” (Deleuze, 74). In the process of recreating Cabezas’s text, the documentary film echoes the book and presents an image of the Sandinistas and their evocative struggles that mythifies the process of the testimonio and subtly sidesteps the discursive consequences generally associated with the act of gazing upon its subjects. Through an evaluation of how the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN), the Sandinista guerrilleros, and Cabezas himself are represented in both the testimonio and the documentary film, we may better understand the fragmentation and subsequent reconstruction of Nicaragua’s post-revolutionary national identity and the role that liberation discourse plays in this process. Not unlike the testimonial genre itself, documentary films have frequently sought to challenge Eurocentric thinking and the colonial legacy and dissect more profound social and political transformations. In Nicaragua, the expression of Sandinista ideals and revolutionary goals during the period from 1979 to 1990 would ultimately become synonymous and virtually inseparable 171

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from the representation of national objectives, a “confusion between country and party [that] was a constant source of tension in the ensuing years” (Buchsbaum, xv). As the Nicaraguan filmmaker Frank Pineda declared in a 1987 interview, “Nicaraguan cinema was born out of the necessity to document the war of liberation” (Fusco, 207), a statement echoed by the fact that “The Sandinista documentary stands in dialectical relationship to the national need for renovations on all social fronts” (Ramírez, “Introduction,” 209). The task of revolutionary filmmaking became married to the project of constructing a national identity that would reflect the objectives of the Sandinista Revolution and its political arm, the FSLN. As Pineda asserted, “In film, we have to use our limited resources rationally and think about appropriate themes. We have to think about what kind of films will create the image of Nicaragua that we want to create” (Fusco, 210). Acknowledged by Pineda, this manipulation of the national image offered as a counterdiscourse to the Nicaragua that had been fashioned between 1936 and 1977 by the Somoza dictatorship frequently served to further deify the figure of Sandino and offer a counter-memory contrary to the “official” memory promulgated by the regime between those years (Lacaze, 60). Created in 1979, the history of the Instituto Nicaragüense de Cine (INCINE) reflects “the chaotic, contradictory situation in which these filmmakers worked, including their many unrealistic fantasies about what could be done and their terrible isolation from both the rest of Sandinista culture and from the heart of the Sandinista revolution” (Hess, “Cinema,” 51). The internal conflicts that arose at INCINE would be a reflection of the tensions that erupted in other government organisms such as the Ministerio de Cultura over how to balance artistic freedom and remain loyal to the revolution. Since its inception in 1979, “INCINE faced a difficult, perhaps insuperable, challenge: how to develop a Nicaraguan cinematic idiom while honoring its self-imposed commitment to the FSLN” (Buchsbaum, 10). Individual efforts that went beyond the FSLN party line were frequently checked by the censorship of the Commission of Classification in order “to weed out the most damaging films” (Buchsbaum, 100). The documentaries produced in Nicaragua by INCINE during the 1980s then became a discursive instrument of the state as it attempted to engineer a national mythology and renegotiate the spaces of national memory under the guise of elaborating a narrative grounded in themes of national liberation. The difficulty was how to navigate competing versions at a time when ideological clarity was perhaps the central priority of the revolution. The elaboration of a counter-discourse and the recovery of memories marginalized by authoritarian regimes speak to the intentions of documentary films and testimonial texts. In this sense, there are a number of parallels that speak to the negotiation—and transcendence—of a pre-existing national identity. As with the written testimonio, “The memory of cinema has a presence and strength exceptionally superior to the history edited or compiled in

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academic circles” (Paranaguá, 15). Like the testimonio, documentary films “dramatically demonstrate that no documentary is a transparent window onto reality, and that all meaning-making is motivated” (Aufderheide, 77), deliberately constructing a counternarrative that frequently seeks to repudiate existing cultural standards through works that participate “in the politicization and mobilization of cadres and even work with the masses, where this is possible” (Solana and Getino, 44). Both the testimonio and the documentary film are invested in a larger liberational project that gradually inverts the relationship between the Self and the Other and manifests a sweeping aesthetic identity that, as Rabinowitz has written, “is about the politics of representation, as objects of inspection become subjects of action” (219). In the same vein, Eliana Rivero has written of how testimonialistas “Are compilers / interviewers / assemblers, and their work . . . resembles that of a film director that produced a montage of perspectives to achieve the totalizing image of the protagonist or event” (51). And Víctor Casaus has similarly described the potential commonalities between documentary film and testimonio, highlighting that both “Utilize similar media and methods in the capture of the elements of reality” (329) and that testimonio is considered a “subliterature” in the same manner in which the documentary film is frequently deemed a “subcinema” perceived to be a “Complement or ‘filling’ of the principle work, the work of fiction” (329). What these perspectives often fail to consider is the manner in which both testimonio and documentary films absorb myths and reinsert them into the collective consciousness in an attempt to privilege the memory of the marginalized and destabilize any hegemonical incursions into the periphery. FIRE FROM THE MOUNTAIN: SANDINISMO, TESTIMONIO, AND THE DOCUMENTARY Fire from the Mountain, the film version of Cabezas’s testimonial work, is among a vast number of documentaries on Nicaragua that were completed by non-Nicaraguan directors and producers over the course of the 1980s that looked to celebrate the victory of the Sandinista Revolution. In these films, themes such as the increasing political polarization of the country or the intervention of the United States and other nations in what became a growing political and economic instability were frequently explored through vivid imagery and interviews. Documentaries such as Patria libre o morir (Costa Rica, 1978), Nicaragua: September 1978 (Chile, 1978), and Nicaragua: Los que harán la libertad (Mexico, 1978) were completed before the victory of the revolution in July of 1979. During the 1980s, other documentary films on Nicaragua produced by filmmakers of other nationalities offered multiple perspectives along the political spectrum, from anti-Sandinista propaganda

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such as Nicaragua Was Our Home (United States, 1983) and Ballad of Little Soldier (Germany, 1984) to films supportive of the Nicaraguan struggle against the contras and/or critical of the role that the United States had in the nation’s affairs: Target Nicaragua: Inside a Civil War (United States, 1982), Nicaragua: Report from the Front (United States, 1983), Faces of War (United States, 1985), and Living at Risk (United States, 1985), among many others. Released in 1987, the documentary film version of Fire from the Mountain was viewed in theaters approximately eight years after the victory of the FSLN and, therefore, enjoys the benefits of hindsight in incorporating any assessment of the revolution. Besides the evident textual distinctions between Cabezas’s written work and Shaffer’s film, the documentary version of Fire from the Mountain offers images and interviews that reflect upon eight years of Sandinista governance in Nicaragua, subtly mapping the limits of liberation discourse and, in the process, mythifying the process of testimonio. The film also includes reflections on Omar Cabezas by other individuals, Cabezas speaking to groups of campesinos, the admission and reevaluation of Sandinista difficulties and mistakes after the revolutionary victory in 1979, and visual documentation rendering post-revolutionary events such as the contra war of the 1980s and the signing of the new Nicaraguan Constitution in 1987. Through the implementation of distinct strategies that underscore the manipulative gaze of the narrative eye, the imagery of the film complements Cabezas’s text, constructs its own discursive and often liberational space, and gives visual form to the mythification in his work of the FSLN, the guerrilleros, and Cabezas himself. Not unlike the documentary film, Fire from the Mountain by Cabezas describes the personal circumstances that led to his decision to participate in the uprising against the Somoza government and join the FSLN in the late 1960s. Although the work centers on the life and decisions of one individual, the themes and personal experiences resonated with a large segment of population and with the larger objectives of the FSLN, including the mythification of Augusto Sandino and the construction of an explicit historical connection between the FSLN and Sandino. Such a mythification is nothing new to revolutionary strategy, as individuals and events are frequently reformulated in light of current conditions in order to reconstruct the embattled discursive space and make it (un)palatable to a general public. During Sandino’s lifetime, for example, there was a concerted effort to revere his image and to fashion for himself an aura suffused with mysticism and symbolic importance. According to Whisnant, Sandino “understood that the success of his crusade depended substantially on his own self-presentation” (350). Donald C. Hodges offers a particularly relevant example and writes of how “In a letter written to Abraham Rivera (February 1931), [Sandino] likened his wife, Blanca Arau, to Mary, that is to say, Eve, who came with Adam and

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other missionary spirits to redeem humanity” (45). In a revealing description, Whisnant documents that reportedly “There were accounts of double rainbows appearing around his head after a rainfall, and on the day when he began to disarm his troops he took them (Christ-like) to a nearby hill to tell them—because, he said, ‘the spirit of God comes more readily on the heights and in solitude’” (350). These representations, reproductions, and “mythic constructions are as thoroughly embedded in the culture of Nicaragua as constructions of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, or John F. Kennedy are in the culture of the United States” (Whisnant, 347), and their subsequent introduction into the fabric of a Sandinista Nicaragua would configure a national identity that associated the Somoza years with countrywide injustice, suffering, and trauma. As the FSLN erected a national project of liberation around the historical figure of Sandino and his fight against the United States, Nicaraguans began to associate him with national salvation from tyranny and with larger themes of Christianity and the struggles of indigenous communities. This venture, however, was undertaken by members of an FSLN that was exploring the boundaries of liberation discourse at a time when the rhetoric of identity in Nicaragua found itself in a precarious vacuum: the future was unprojected, the present referenced extra-national models, and the official past had been built mainly through the gaze of Somoza. The ideological terrain became a site rife with the subsequent rendering of figures such as Sandino and Fonseca, recovering them from popular memory and emancipating them from the subordinate role to which they had been relegated for over four decades. In the process, founding members of the FSLN elaborated a hagiology that, at least initially, served as moral compass for the party hierarchy. Founded in 1961 by Tomás Borge, Carlos Fonseca, and Silvio Mayorga, the FSLN initially based a large part of its popular appeal on the historical figure of Sandino, shaping and fetishizing him and his fight against US intervention until the finished product fashioned by the new “Sandinistas” took on the patina of a more contemporary Sandinista political agenda. As Donald C. Hodges has noted, “In Nicaragua the FSLN made concessions to the people’s prejudices and nonrational convictions from the beginning. The cult of Sandino performed an indispensable role in mobilizing the masses for a general insurrection” (193). One of the founders of the FSLN, Carlos Fonseca, “interpreted Sandino according to [his] needs” (Nolan, 17–18) and represented one of the principal forces behind the creation of “the cult of Sandino” and its bond with the Nicaraguan people, particularly the poor and rural populations. As Fonseca once wrote, “The Sandinista resistance (1927–1934) that turned into the heroic vanguard of the people was almost exclusively composed of peasants and the glory and tragedy of that revolutionary movement is found precisely in this detail” (cited in Instituto de Estudio del Sandinismo, El sandinismo, 261). Aside from the use of patriotic

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rhetoric such as “heroic,” “glory,” and “tragedy” that hinges on the messianic, the presence of the adjective “Sandinista” is in itself problematic: while it is certainly true that Sandino’s struggle against imperialism was “Sandinista” since he gave rise to the movement that bears his name, took military command of his troops, and informed their ideological development, the term “Sandinista” was co-opted by another subsequent historical context, that of the FSLN and its sociopolitical agenda. According to Whisnant, “The Sandino that issued from Fonseca’s effort was in many respects the familiar (if not completely historical) Sandino of the popular songs and stories, but he was also a Sandino shaped to both the ideological requirements of the FSLN’s particular historic moment as well as to more general and longstanding ones within the culture” (361). In his statement regarding Sandinista resistance, Fonseca elegantly connects Sandino’s fight in the 1920s and late 1930s against the US military presence and occupation to the more contemporary FSLN, founded almost thirty years after the death of Sandino. Ultimately, Fonseca and the FSLN edited the life and persona of Sandino, “[recovering] only those aspects of Sandino’s thought that they considered useful in activating ideologically the movement of national liberation bearing Sandino’s name” (Hodges, 167). The film version by Deborah Shaffer utilizes a variety of visual techniques that mirror the mythification found in Cabezas’s testimonio, emphasizing the simplicity and apparent transparency of the Sandinista mission and represent the natural connection that the people forged with Sandino forged with the FSLN in their struggle for liberation. Addressing the initial appeal of Fire from the Mountain, Shaffer notes that “I thought it was a rare intimate, personal account of the hardships, disappointments, screw-ups, deprivations and other sacrifices required of an inexperienced, poorly prepared guerrilla army” (Shaffer). At the beginning of the film, the director offers images of camouflage-clad Sandinistas entering a town, followed by a smiling, laughing group of young men running up a hill. In the town square, a group of Sandinista soldiers proceeds to hold a ceremony in which a young Cabezas speaks to the townspeople about their commitment to the struggle—given the chronological context, against the contras—and leads them in singing a revolutionary song. At the end of the ceremony—and in front of the townspeople—a Sandinista commander passes the FSLN flag to another Sandinista soldier in what is an apparent show of connection and moral authority: the patriotic symbol of the town is not the national blue and white flag but the red and black flag of the Frente Sandinista. The acceptance of the FSLN flag in the film has significant symbolic importance, and serves as a self-evident microcosm of what is occurring throughout the country: under the Sandinista administration in the 1980s, party and nation become intertwined until any distinction between the two is strictly academic and the discursive transference between the two is indecipherable. While such an association has its

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roots in the exploitation of Nicaragua by the United States since the first arrival of armed troops there in 1909 and global movements of national liberation that arose in the 1950s and 1960s, it would subsequently contribute little to combating Eurocentric thinking and the colonial legacy. One of the individuals who holds an important position in Cabezas’s book is the elderly don Leandro Córdoba, the campesino who offers Cabezas his sons to fight against Somoza and continue the struggle that Sandino began in the 1920s. Don Leandro is interviewed a number of times throughout the film, and each time the setting is the same: he is wearing a simple white shirt, surrounded by three or four children, and expanding on the ideas that Cabezas expresses in his book. He declares that “I met Sandino” and that, in justifying his own continued participation in the struggle against injustice, “no one should come steal my home.” His representation in the film is not coincidental, as his presence in Cabezas’s testimonio stresses the importance of FSLN ideals and creates a historical connection between Sandino, the FSLN, and Cabezas (a connection that is not always theoretically clear). In listening to don Leandro’s comments, the viewer must not only be aware of the manipulation of the image itself—the ubiquitous presence of the children behind him, for example—but also of the number of filters present between the originator of the message—don Leandro—and the audience: beginning with Omar Cabezas—the transcriber of don Leandro’s words—and continuing with those who transcribed Cabezas’s taped recollections into Spanish, with the translator(s), and, finally, with the director of the film, Deborah Shaffer. Each of these individuals portrays don Leandro as the mythical and historical embodiment of FSLN ideals, offering an apparently transparent representation of someone whose principles are as self-evident and necessary as the decades-long Sandinista struggle against tyranny. In this way, the visual example of don Leandro serves as an essentialist reduction and embodiment of post-revolutionary Sandinista values and emphasizes the connections between the FSLN and a national historical memory that refused to be distorted during the Somoza years. Liberation, in this context, is personified throughout the documentary in the image of don Leandro, someone who, in identifying with the Sandinista program and implicitly speaking of the contra war, renews the historical revolutionary effort. His declaration that “No one should come steal my home” addressed US intervention in Nicaragua and is, therefore, applicable to both the 1920s and 1980s. In the end, the struggle against injustice transcends historical context and the discursive possibilities blend into one another and become indistinguishable. His home is equivalent to his nation, and his concern is not his material possessions but that the location itself may be appropriated by an armed force acting on behalf of US interests. Revolution becomes a struggle best represented as a cartography of ethical boundaries that inscribes itself into the plurality of the nation.

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An individual who does not appear in Cabezas’s work but is in the film and contributes toward the mythification of the FSLN and the liberation of the nation is the farmer Pilar Monzón. As he recalls his connections to the FSLN he reminds the viewer that he “worked with Cabezas for years,” that he repeatedly stressed to the guerrilleros that, if caught and interrogated, he would not reveal any confidential or strategic information. “If they kill me, I will die,” he recalls saying to Cabezas, “but I’m not going to talk about any of you.” Once again, an individual is brought into the film in order to establish the connection between the people and the FSLN’s revolutionary project during the 1960s and 1970s and to draw attention to the profound commitment of Nicaraguans to the FSLN. As the film reveals, although Monzón was subsequently captured by the National Guard and tortured, he proclaims that he always told the Guard that he knew nothing and that, as a consequence, he was able to safeguard any information and protect the young men fighting in the mountains. The pledge made by Monzón to the guerrilleros is a direct consequence of tactics employed by the FSLN that looked to incorporate Nicaraguans directly into the struggle and, in the process, construct a seemingly organic connection between those who lived on the margins of Nicaraguan society and the revolution. The self-determining process of mythification and liberation articulated is evident in his statement “If they kill me, I will die,” a tautological declaration that establishes his moral authority and gives expression to the sacrifices made by the population in their defense and support of the FSLN. In the documentary, members of the FSLN are frequently portrayed as possessing an organic connection to the dreams, hopes, and struggles of the Nicaraguan people. The images of the street fighting that occurred during the final insurrection in July 1979 manage to portray an armed force that was formed principally by civilian street fighters who were vigorously engaged in carrying munitions to the front lines and holding a more powerful enemy at bay. In choosing to show images of these fighters stumbling over sidewalk curbs and ducking for cover, the director manages to humanize the combatants, to connect the military mission of the FSLN to the Nicaraguan population, and to reposition the historical subaltern in a position of authority and power that serves as a visual challenge to the colonial legacy. Liberation, the viewer may conclude, comes from the ethical and often unexpected necessity to reconfigure the birth narrative of a people and dismantle structures that promote structural asymmetries. Reflecting on the consequences of the Sandinista Revolution, playwright Alan Bolt affirms in the film that “A very big part of Sandinismo [is] dignity; the sense of sovereignty, freedom, the joy of creation, the possibility to do things.” Both examples—the street-fighting civilians and Bolt’s more philosophical declarations—manage to naturalize the Sandinista struggle and convey the most essential ideals of the Sandinista philosophy. Bolt’s “possibility to do things” implicitly stresses the need for

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Nicaraguan citizens to become a part of the FSLN, its “fourth column,” by exercising their newly won creative freedom. Any possible disjunction between the people and the revolution is visibly neutralized by the popular participation of the citizens in the insurrection and, not unlike the moral authority invoked by Monzón, by Bolt’s use of terms such as “dignity,” “freedom,” and “creation” in connection with a Sandinista identity. Accordingly, the interplay between myth and liberation in the film constructs an alternative, more authentic Nicaragua whose origins may be found in both past events and future projections of the revolutionary ethic. Ironically—and in a sign of the coming tide—Bolt was scorned by both the Sandinistas and the contras in the 1980s as he fell out of favor with the FSLN for “teaching the actors in his Nixtayolero theater group to continually question authority” and twice lost his job with the Ministry of Culture in the early part of the decade (Loynd). In Cabezas’s written testimonial, the guerrilleros are frequently represented as natural extensions of their surroundings, intimately connected to their mountain environment in a show of unity made palpable by the descriptions of the immediate flora and fauna. Cabezas recurrently depicts the men as progressively turning into feral creatures that corroborate an innate relationship with their surroundings. When they were training in the jungles and hills, for example, he writes that “We were like animals prowling in our natural habitat, like savages” (90); that in the mountain, “your own smell [was] one more smell of nature” (102); and that their time living the life of the mountains made them change as individuals as “you feel you are one more element, one more being in that environment which you have come to grips with and dominate” (204). Interestingly, their presence is often paradoxical, as Cabezas underscores that they quite literally became the mountains and, as he states, governed their surroundings. In marching through the jungle, he relates that “the sound of the river changed as we passed, for we possessed the river, had impressed our own sound upon it” (127). The apparent contradiction between physically connecting with their environment and unambiguously leaving their footprint on those same surroundings is easily resolved when considering what may be Cabezas’s motives. According to Thomas Ward, “Cabezas greatly resembles Martí and Hostos in his praise of nature. He shares with them a faith in her and, without clearly saying it, advocates for the natural nation, founded in nature, the people in the countryside and a new urban life, reoriented after reeducation” (308). By presenting the guerrilleros as residents and masters of their mountainous jungles, Cabezas mythifies his men and portrays their potential capacity to both acclimate themselves to any unfamiliar environment and change said environment to meet their immediate objectives. While the revolution may not necessarily be sustainable, in point of fact it is represented as a process negotiated by

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strategies of domination and repression, of a simultaneous collaboration and conquest that invokes the ideological certainty of the combatants. Throughout the documentary film, Sandinista guerrilleros are also repeatedly mythified, as, not unlike Cabezas’s book, they are portrayed as a very human part of a mountain environment that belongs within the discursive space of the nation. In choosing images of these guerrilleros gradually emerging from the jungle dressed in green fatigues and carefully crossing a shallow creek, for example, the director is offering visual evidence of the military struggle and, simultaneously, subtly associating them to their own environment: they have become the jungle and depend on it for their protection, livelihood, and the continuance of the fight against Somoza and his legacy. Footage of the Sandinistas in their camps shows these men to be coarse but also very human: some are cooking around a diminutive campfire, another is lying in a hammock reading a newspaper. The narrator’s voiceover states that arriving in the camps as a new recruit “was a complete demoralization. You find only fifteen guys divided into little groups.” José Mendieta, an FSLN government official who was once a guerrillero in the mountains, describes in an interview the difficulties and admits that, as a combatant, “Sometimes I couldn’t help have a little cry.” Like Cabezas himself, the guerrilleros in the film are frequently presented as tender individuals who fashion a logical albeit zealous connection to their surroundings. Their fight is not only the people’s fight: it is, mythically, the fight of the entire ecosystem and country against Somoza. They are vehicles and architects of a struggle that, through a reification of national history, promotes a renewed set of ethical and aesthetic standards. The “demoralization” referenced by the voiceover represents an initial purification of the military corps that contributes to weeding out those who cannot endure the grueling conditions. Upon suffering the initial shock of life in the mountains and emerging intact, the guerrillero is in a position to invoke his environment and to represent the interests of the most marginalized. The liberation process initiated by the Sandinistas and continued by the FSLN in their fight against the contras and US interference in the region, therefore, originates in a pantheistic revolutionary ethic that implicitly declares that the revolution is everything and everything is the revolution. As Rosemary Radford Ruether wrote, “Liberation must begin with ‘blowing our minds,’ with dissolving our egos in order to rescind the consciousness structure of Western objectivity and alienation from the totality of reality” (Liberation Theology, 30). This disappearance of “our egos” is evident in dissimilar ways in both the published text of Fire from the Mountain and the documentary film: in the published work, it is Cabezas himself who is transformed and “dissolved” by the process of national liberation; in the film, Cabezas is represented as a symptom of the greater national liberation that occurred between 1977 and 1979 and was, at the time of the documentary, still taking place in the struggle against the

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contras. The shock of emancipation alluded to by Ruether and the ensuing suspension of self-centered behaviors and attitudes lead to an awakening of the individual’s responsibility in the face of aggression and inequality. The historical moment in which the film was produced and released— 1987—is significant, as it is subsequent to the publication of Cabezas’s book in 1982 and is therefore better positioned to evaluate the long-term consequences of the Sandinista Revolution and to examine the material and emotional costs of the ensuing contra war. An essential component of the last third of the hour-long documentary is the war veterans themselves, a group that involves those who participated in both the Sandinista Revolution and the contra war and implicitly includes Omar Cabezas. Initially the film shows injured veterans, wheelchair-bound men and women—some with tshirts that read “Organization of Disabled Revolutionaries,” Organización de Revolucionarios Discapacitados on the back—unsurprisingly capable of leading an active life. One veteran blames the United States for the current state of Nicaraguan affairs, as Nicaragua “is a country that didn’t accept its policy of domination” and was obligated to defend itself from a foreign aggressor. His statements create an ideological context that frames both his physical appearance and the scattered images of disabled war veterans: We are both the consequences of armed conflict and the harbinger of our national future. The gaze of the camera appears to declare that the guerrilleros are also a natural part of a post-revolutionary Nicaragua forced to sacrifice its citizens in order to protect the nation and, more importantly, its revolutionary identity. The sacrifice and contribution of combatants to the reconstruction of the national imaginary is duly noted by a physical on-screen presence that subtly underscores the heterogeneous and inclusive nature of the revolutionary effort. The “policy of domination” denounced by one of the handicapped veterans is complemented by his willingness to carry on the struggle against continued US intervention in Nicaraguan affairs. In the film, the disabled veterans in wheelchairs are also shown playing full-court basketball, handling the ball skillfully, taking shots and grabbing rebounds. In another moment, the film shows another such veteran wheeling up a ramp that leads to the “Organization of Disabled Revolutionaries” and offers images of other men and women sweeping, arranging various types of materials into separate piles, and performing a number of different tasks. As the film cuts to display a group of wheelchair-bound veterans taking target practice with a variety of handguns and rifles, one veteran emphatically states that “We can also defend our revolution from this wheelchair.” Through the visual presentation of these men and women, the film subtly mythifies the guerrilleros by reminding the viewer of the role that they played in the rebellion against Somoza, of how they suffered the physical and psychological consequences, of how the struggle continues in the fight against the contras, and ultimately of how they

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are adapting to their new responsibilities in a post-revolutionary Nicaragua that is in the process of recovering its historical memory. Yet the ultimate cathartic results of their efforts on the screen are postponed, as the camera rarely profiles any individual outside the context of the group of handicapped veterans and lacks any possible individuation. Their invaluable contributions and sacrifices for the revolution and the FSLN are framed by the political agenda promoted by a Sandinista government overwhelmed by the consequences of the contra war and the ensuing economic difficulties. As depicted in the film, their actions and their language function in the service of a revolution that, in the process of liberating the population from Somoza, viewed all patriotic activity through a revolutionary lens unable to include in its gaze the plural history of the Nicaraguan people. This difficulty most certainly contributed to the disaffection of many within the FSLN and their ultimate resignation and/or expulsion from a party that never quite learned how to consider dissenting voices within it. As leader and an integral part of his guerrillero community in the mountains, Cabezas also mythifies himself throughout his own written text. According to Laura Barbas-Rhoden, “The text clearly reveals that Cabezas constructs his life in terms of the narrative of the emergence of the hero. Like the mythical heroes of Judeo-Christian tradition, this hero fearfully preferred to resist the calls of his new role; but extremely human and humble, he accepts it, passes its tests in the mountain and proceeds to share his vision” (“El papel del testimonio,” 70). Not unlike his fellow guerrilleros, Cabezas frequently represents himself as a pure and natural extension of his surroundings. In one example, he describes a particularly demanding mission that required spending a number of days alone, camped out in one place: “I never felt more like an animal than in that spot, a contemplative animal, observing nature, its full cycle” (100). This observation once again acknowledges his own transformation in service to the revolution and the sacrifices he made for short- and long-term military objectives. As challenging as the experience may have been, Cabezas manages to convey an organic connection to his surroundings that balances animal instincts with an anthropocentric awareness of the act of contemplation. As a student in his native León—before his political consciousness was jolted, before joining the FSLN and heading to the mountains—Cabezas underscores his impulses and recalls that his ambitions and political savvy were virtually nonexistent: “Remember, I didn’t have any firm political convictions. I wasn’t a theoretician, not even a theoretician! Worse, I had serious doubts about whether Marxism was a good thing or a bad thing” (10). His self-effacing depictions serve to mythify himself within the grander Sandinista ideology, as he, not unlike his fellow guerrilleros, did not come to serve the FLSN cause through a series of political indoctrinations. In fact, it was quite the opposite: he arrived there from a “pure” position, from a place where he had not “even” considered the theoretical impli-

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cations and ideological underpinnings of political action. In the words of Barthes, his admitted ignorance and bravado reflect how “Myth hides nothing” (121). As he became more involved in the Sandinista cause and decided to join the struggle in the mountains, Cabezas sensed himself becoming a part of the terrain and his surroundings that confirmed his ideological conversion. The resemblances are explicit, as the reader is left to associate the simplicity and innocence of a young pre-FSLN Cabezas with the “natural” desire to join the movement and begin his life anew. The importance of his organic role within the FSLN and his increasing responsibilities in the subsequent liberation of Nicaragua are a constant theme throughout the work. When he leaves the mountains for a mission in the city of León, for example, he declares that “I felt something beyond my control was rocketing me toward León” (147). When he first meets don Leandro, he remembers that “I understood my own past; I knew where I stood; I had a country, a historical identity, with everything that don Leandro was telling me” (221). And when this venerable and elderly Sandino-era veteran offers the FSLN his own sons so that they may continue the fight begun by Sandino, Cabezas states that, at that moment, “I was rooted in the earth, attached to the soil, to history. I felt invincible” (221). Meeting don Leandro, Cabezas the individual is portrayed as simply one more Nicaraguan, and the ensuing mythification of his own persona and the gradual reformulation of his individual identity symbolize the mythification of the Nicaraguan fight against tyranny and oppression. Unfortunately, such a representation also contributes to the depersonalization of a struggle that was marked by individual actions and a valor difficult if not impossible to generalize. If, as a number of critics have noted, Cabezas represents the Everyman, the particularized variety of human exploits and accomplishments during the uprising takes a secondary role to the popular heroism embodied by the comandante. Through Cabezas’s prose, the distinction between the individual’s environment and the larger social collective is blurred sufficiently so that one man’s struggle is held up as an example of both personal determination and, by extension, the social strength and courage of a people. The homogeneity of this courage, however, becomes problematic when examined in consideration of the individual sacrifices and circumstances. Any revolutionary process that looks to truly transform a nation, however, must find a way to mythify its heroes and offer an implicit point of reference to the individual’s efforts on behalf of the revolution. As the author of Fire from the Mountain, Cabezas is present throughout the film, playing an influential role in physically and verbally supporting the visual imagery that the documentary offers through a retelling of his experiences and anecdotes and complementing the camera’s gaze with his own. In the film he not only speaks, but is also spoken on, as others reflect on moments when they met or had contact with the FSLN commander. Alan

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Bolt, for example, recalls when he met Cabezas as a university student at León, describing him as “that very skinny, bony guy, with that smile, that special language [who acted] like he owned the world.” At the beginning of the film, as FSLN soldiers are seen entering a small town and accompanied by laughing, running teenagers, a young Omar Cabezas is speaking to the townspeople about the scarcity of everything in Nicaragua and acknowledging that there are Nicaraguans who declare that “Things were better with Somoza because at least we had toilet paper.” He tells the townspeople that “They’re trying to confuse the people and make them say the revolution is bad,” reminding them that “When you’re picking coffee, you’re helping to resist economically.” His use of humor and his acknowledgment of difficulties under the Sandinista government are supported by images of rural Nicaraguans listening attentively to him, portraying his ability to maintain a critical distance from his ideals and mythifying the process by which Cabezas the university student became Cabezas the revolutionary leader. In this fragment, the difference between Cabezas the military commander and Cabezas the understanding Everyman is blurred, as his rhetoric allows him to play two parts at once and present himself as both a leader and a follower of the revolution. The visual images of an impassioned Cabezas and his captive audience establish both an alliance and a critical distance between leaders and followers and are one more representation of a revolution made palpable by the visceral relationship between its leaders and the people. In the film, a subsequent interview with Cabezas shows him dressed in a light blue short-sleeved shirt, reflecting on his personal connections to the Sandinista struggle: how he came to know the Sandinistas through his grandmother, how his grandparents supported Sandino, and how his grandfather was tortured and killed by the National Guard. While hearing his comments, the viewer is shown a number of black-and-white stills from the 1920s that include images of Sandino, a group of apparently prosperous men scrutinizing a map of Nicaragua, and US Marines climbing hills. Through the images, the personal life and history of Omar Cabezas is formed and framed by the historical presence of the United States and serves as counterpoint to those who looked to divide Nicaragua for their own material and political gains, ultimately connecting him to the grander historical project initiated by Sandino. If these shots had appeared without any context, narrative, or subtitles, they would represent an important yet unadorned visual documentation of US greed and hubris; offered in conjunction with Cabezas’s memories and family history, however, they manage to attach the Nicaraguan historical record to a project of national liberation that denounced the explicit immoral and unethical actions and activities of the Somoza administrations and, by extension, challenged Eurocentric thinking and the colonial legacy. The accounts retold by Cabezas of the death of his grandfather at the hands of the dreaded National Guard and the stories he heard from his grandmother may

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support his own fame as a gifted storyteller, yet they also mythify the efforts of the FSLN and occupy any discursive gaps left by the official chroniclers. Historical memory, by extension, becomes that territory where a nation’s identity is recreated. As Sergio Villena Figo has written, “Revolutions promise a bright future, but they return to the past in search of symbolic harbors where the foundations may be established, something which obliges the protagonists to present themselves as the heirs to the heroes and other significant figures and as forgotten popular fighters who are usually ‘rescued’ from oblivion and turned into revolutionary martyrs, realizing in this way the passage from the abject to the sublime” (9). In the film, Cabezas declares of his childhood that he “grew up in a very poor family,” that his “father was a sort of genius,” his “mother washed and ironed,” and that he “sold things on the street to help.” At this point in the film, the process that is his life becomes visual part and parcel of his testimonio as his words become a simple voiceover to images of Nicaraguan children working, a woman washing clothes by hand, and, as counterpoint, of Somoza giving a speech and of the opulent parties that the dictator held. Once again, the visual depiction of Cabezas constructs a new national space that rides the representative fence, as he is both born a poor, typical Nicaraguan and a product of a “father [who] was a sort of genius.” Similar to the juxtaposition of Cabezas telling his family history and to the black-and-white images of US Marines, the footage of Somoza and his dinner parties establishes a conspicuous distance between Cabezas and Somoza: if Sandino and Cabezas represent the essence of Nicaragua, Somoza is the anti-Nicaragua, that part of Nicaragua that had little understanding of the lives led by the majority of people. The anti-hero has been supplanted not by an individual hero but rather by a landscape of heroes who are best represented by those such as Cabezas whose actions were extraordinarily commonplace and whose intentions set the foundations for a national identity grounded in the free exchange of ideas. The documentary film also offers information that is not included in the text written by Cabezas. In speaking of and to a post-revolutionary Nicaragua, for example, Cabezas also manages to delicately mythify himself as he admits on camera to mistakes made by the FSLN administration immediately following the 1979 victory and recognizes the problems faced by the people: “We didn’t have a clear picture that it would be like this, that it would be so difficult.” Far from diminishing his courageous actions, his admission of errors in judgment mythifies him all the more as it humanizes him and, in the process, magnifies him and paradoxically brings him closer to the Nicaraguan people. In comments made toward the end of the film, Cabezas even lends an olive branch to the United States and justifies mutually beneficial relations between Nicaragua and the United States: “They have very good tractors [. . .] and we have very good meat for making hamburgers.” The

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relationship he establishes between Nicaraguan tractors and the hamburgers consumed in the United States substantiates his fame as a talented writer and articulates an unironic weltanschauung untainted by revenge or animosity. By expressing and exploring the possibility of maintaining stable economic relations with the United States, Cabezas portrays himself as having the interests at heart of the peoples of both Nicaragua and the United States and, in doing so, elevates the struggle of the Nicaraguan people and the role that he is to play. The relationship between Fire from the Mountain and its respective documentary film version of the same title is rich with ideological parallels and inspired peculiarities. Through a contextualization of the works within the theories of Roland Barthes regarding myth and its creation, an analysis of both text and film as vehicles through which the FSLN, the Sandinista guerrilleros and Omar Cabezas are mythified enters into dialogue with the historical record. The written testimonio and the visual account submitted by the documentary film may be perceived as “natural,” historical, transformative, and manipulative, as they both offer a discursive space accessible to the plurality and open to interpretation. In their own particular ways, both the documentary film version and testimonio of Fire from the Mountain participate in the creation of a Nicaraguan identity inclusive of past national experiences and reflective of a Nicaragua that, in refashioning itself as “new,” was essentially a recovery of not-so-new national elements revived by the writing of Cabezas and restored by the gaze of the camera. NOTE I would like to thank my colleagues Natalia Jacovkis for her observations regarding the role of Latin American documentary cinema in the construction of a national ideology and Tim White for his valuable insights throughout this chapter.

Conclusion

On April 16, 2018, elected representatives in Nicaragua signed legislation that confirmed the reform of the Social Security system that would reduce benefits and raise individual contributions, from 19 percent to 21 percent, reaching a scheduled high of 22.5 percent in 2020. Two days later popular demonstrations erupted against the increases, as both students and business leaders expressed their disapproval of measures that, in their opinion, were meant to cover corruption and inept financial practices (Anonymous, “Claves”). In its zeal to control the situation, the following months the government reacted with violence and mobilized the National Police and armed forces, killing over 300 protestors across the country. Paramilitary groups and organizations sympathetic to the government have also contributed to the violence and have instigated a series of robberies, murders, kidnappings, and illegal arrests in cities such as Managua, Masaya, Jinotega, León, and Carazo. In an effort to extend an olive branch to the business community, President Daniel Ortega invited the private sector and members of the Consejo Superior de la Empresa Privada, the Superior Council of Private Enterprise (COSEP), to dialogue, but this organization insisted that the administration put an end to the repression, that detained protestors be freed from jails, and that the dialogue include other groups. Faced with growing popular opposition, on April 22, 2018, Ortega repealed the social security reforms, declaring that he is open to conversation and that he would invite the Catholic Archbishop Leopoldo Brenes and members of the business community to discuss the matter. As Kelli Bissett-Tom and Daniel Pulido-Mendez have stated, “A democratic exit to the crisis would not see early elections before 2019 . . . as there are obstacles to a credible election process. Opposition parties are weak and fragmented. President Ortega’s consolidation of influence over public institutions (including the election 187

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tribunal, national assembly and judiciary) since his return to power 11 years ago places institutional credibility and logistical challenges to any transition government” (5). Although Fitch Ratings has recognized short-term improvements to the Nicaraguan economy and the fact that “Nicaragua has a record of prudent fiscal policy” (Bissett-Tom and Pulido-Mendez, 3), it has downgraded its overall rating from a B+ in 2016 to a B in 2018. Most trends indicate that Nicaragua’s economic growth will slow considerably in the coming years, due in part to the current insecurity and destabilization. Bissett-Tom and Pulido-Mendez, for example, have forecast that unemployment and consumer prices will increase in the near future and GDP growth and private sector growth will both decline drastically (8). This crisis has proven to be the spark behind the mobilization of thousands of Nicaraguans against the excesses of the government and the gradual monopolization and manipulation of power by Ortega and Rosario Murillo, his wife and the vice president. The university students who first protested the actions of the administration in April have since been joined by other sectors who express their discontent with an administration that has done little for the general population and has, in fact, been scaling back individual freedoms since the re-election of Ortega in 2016. An editorial in La Prensa from April 23, 2018, emphatically proclaimed that “Daniel Ortega no longer has the political capability nor the moral authority to continue governing. Ortega must renounce peacefully or he will have to leave like Somoza left” (“Ortega”). Pablo Abrao, secretary for the Interamerican Commission on Human Rights, declared on July 18, 2018, that “There is an escalation of the violence and a diversification of the forms of repression. Now there are kidnappings, land seizures, home invasions in the early hours of the morning. The situation in Nicaragua is alarming and getting worse every day” (“Interview”). A particular target of recent criticism and actions by demonstrators has been 130 metal trees that Rosario Murillo had installed throughout Managua. Although intended to beautify the urban landscape, the fifty-six-foot sculptures known as árboles de la vida (“trees of life”) have come to symbolize how the Sandinista party “has lost touch with the people in whose name it once fought” (Phillips). In an interview on April 20, 2018, Ernesto Cardenal criticized the “madness and arrogance” of the government and asserted that he rejected any dialogue with the Ortega government, declaring “What we want is another government, a democratic republic. Why a dialogue?” (“Sacerdote”). The militarized response of the government has facilitated the creation of paramilitary groups and caused or contributed to the deaths of over 300 protestors in the streets and at the barricades. Four news channels were also blocked from transmission as they were televising the demonstrations live and, in the opinion of Ortega, not acting in the national interest. Ortega himself further destabilized the situation and compared the demon-

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strators to gangs in Guatemala and El Salvador such as MS-13, declaring that the situation has now turned into a fight against their threatening influences. On July 16, 2018, the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN)majority National Assembly approved Article 394, an anti-terrorism law that allows demonstrators to be classified as terrorists and specifies prison sentences of between fifteen and twenty years for those who actively participate in the demonstrations. It does not appear that these protests, however, will end anytime soon, as students, community leaders, and business owners are calling for the end to censorship of the press, for the resignation of Ortega, and for the eradication or reform of legislation that has enabled him to remain in power indefinitely. On July 9, 2018, the Nicarguan Cardinal Leopoldo Brenes led a group of Nicaraguan bishops to Diriamba to negotiate the release of a group of nurses and Franciscan missionaries that had taken refuge in the Basilica of San Sebastián and in support of the victims of attacks by soldiers and paramilitary groups there that left fourteen people dead. As they arrived at the church, a group of people began to attack them and protest their presence, calling them “liars” and “murderers” due to the growing intervention of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua in national affairs and punishing them for their alliance with organizations such as the Asociación Nicaragüense Pro Derechos Humanos (ANPDH) and the Coalición Universitaria. In an official statement, the Conferencia Episcopal de Nicaragua stated that the delegation “was carrying out the mission of Jesus Christ, accompanying those who were suffering, a pastoral visit to priests and the faithful to the region of Carazo, victims of the police, the paramilitary, and mobs producing death and pain” (Conferencia Episcopal). Injured in the encounter, Bishop Silvio José Baez posted to Twitter “What matters least is what they did to us today, the blows & the wound that I suffered. What our people suffer is much more serious; today more than ever the Church will be at the side of the people, those who have to voice, those who don’t have the strength to ask for help” (Baez). For its part, the Catholic Church in Nicaragua has continued to support the need for a dialogue and has been visible in its role as mediator of the recent conflict and criticism of the government. In a sermon on April 29, 2018, Cardinal Brenes declared: “It’s sad to see young people being attacked with tear gas bombs, it’s sad to see young people dying from bullet wounds, wounded by mortars, it’s sad to see families destroyed by the loss of their children. My call is that all the people of Nicaragua remain calm and remain united in the love of Christ” (Narváez). Toward the end of April 2018, over 2,000 people had gathered in the cathedral of Managua to protest the actions taken by the Ortega administration. On April 21, 2018, Archbishop Baez had promised them that the clergy did not intend “to leave the young people who are in the cathedral alone, we’re going to protect them against everything” (San Martín). Faced with growing unrest, instability, and violence perpetrat-

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ed by paramilitary groups and police, members of the Catholic Church clergy and hierarchy in Nicaragua are once again mobilizing themselves and emphatically declaring that they are on the side of the victims, particularly the students and young people who have been protesting against the Ortega government. Although national circumstances have most certainly changed since the 1970s and 1980s and globalization has forced nations such as Nicaragua to adapt to a changing global landscape, integrating neoliberal reforms into domestic economic policies and enjoying relative economic success and growth, the basic principles of liberation theory are, once again, tragically applicable to a country that is once more witnessing the growth of poverty and, notwithstanding the ersatz sandinismo of the recent Ortega administration, the continued marginalization of millions of Nicaraguans. Writing on the “retreat” of liberation theology, Edward A. Lynch noted that “liberation theology has been reduced to an intellectual curiosity” (12), concluding prophetically that “If capitalism comes to Latin America without these cultural elements [of fellowship, solidarity, work, austerity, and unity], it may bring greater productivity to Latin America, but it will also, at least in the short term, bring resentment, brutal competition, and other evils that could resuscitate liberation theology” (20). The principal tenets of liberation theology as expressed by Gustavo Gutiérrez, Leonardo Boff, Jon Sobrino, Ignacio Ellacuría, and Juan Luis Segundo and the subsequent adaptations enounced by James Cone, Ivone Gebara, Naim Ateek, José Ramos Regidor, and Aloysius Pieris, among others, continue to be relevant in the face of growing economic inequalities, the univocal role of global capitalism, the increasing number of poor and marginalized peoples throughout the world, and, given the circumstances, the return of a more public role for the Catholic Church after the election of Pope Francis in 2013. Published the same year, the encyclical Laudato Si by Pope Francis recognizes the growing global environmental crisis and asserts, “The urgent challenge to protect our common home includes a concern to bring the whole human family together to seek a sustainable and integral development” (Laudato). His use of the adjectives “sustainable” and “integral” in this context are not coincidental, as his papacy has, thus far, demonstrated a more inclusive approach to issues of social justice that the Church had managed to sidestep during the papacy of Benedict XVI. The Nicaragua that demonstrators and the Catholic clergy are in the process of (re)building is a unique manifestation of current historical circumstances and, at the same time, a part of the Latin American struggle to build a better society and challenge Eurocentric thinking and the colonial legacy. For this construction to be effective, however, there must be an acute awareness of both liberation from and liberation toward: What will be left behind and what will be gained in the current conflict in Nicaragua and how does this relate to broader issues of social, political, and economic stability across the

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continent? Central American nations are being encouraged to consider projects such as a united customs union, a common currency, and the creation of a single capital market (Bulmer-Thomas and Kincaid, 49–58) that relate directly to the vision of the ideological founders of latinoamericanismo. Toward the end of the nineteenth and at the cusp of the twentieth century, José Martí and José Enrique Rodó each mounted an impassioned defense of the nascent Latin American identity and provoked its corollary from Roberto Fernández Retamar some seventy years later; Pedro Henríquez Ureña observed an explicit relationship between literacy and “the new nation” in his essay “La utopía de América”; and Simón Bolívar yearned for a united Hispanic America that would offset the influence of the United States and Europe in the region. Contemporary theorists such as Michel Maffesoli and Louis Marin perceive any utopian project as a diagnostic appraisal of the times, a “critique of modern ideology” (Marin, Utopics, 194). Given the betrayal of Sandinista ideals by Daniel Ortega in the 1990s, it is no surprise that Gioconda Belli, Sergio Ramírez, Jaime Wheelock, and Ernesto Cardenal, among many others, have expressed their anger against the violent actions that police and government forces inflicted on demonstrators throughout Nicaragua. Forceful essays such as “A Senseless Repression” (April 23, 2018) by Ramírez, “A Petition to President Daniel Ortega” (April 26, 2018) by Wheelock, and “Open Letter to Rosario Murillo” (June 17, 2018) by Belli, for example, represent manifestations of utopian thinking that look, above all, to effect change and transform the current state of affairs in Nicaragua, continuing the work of Bolívar, Martí, Mariátegui, and many others. The actions of Sandino in the 1920s and 1930s against the interference of the United States in Nicaraguan affairs, for example, find their natural correspondence in The Psalms of Struggle and Liberation by Ernesto Cardenal and El viento armado by Michèle Najlis. In this respect, the birth of the modern testimonio in the 1980s represents another step in the search for and creation of a better locus, a place that will ultimately embody the dreams and aspirations of all residents. For Cabezas, the starting point for such a society was the mountain, training ground and spiritual touchstone for those organizing the overthrow of the Somoza regime. More than sanctuary or hideaway, the mountain represented the collective force of the FSLN and was, as Cabezas wrote, “where our power was” (Fire from the Mountain, 17). The mountain also exemplified camaraderie and its utopian possibilities: For the purest form of the Sandinista Revolution, power itself—military might, ideological authority, ethical aptitude, economic force—existed not for political or material advantage but to facilitate a sudden and drastic change that would generate a better life for all Nicaraguans. While much has been written on the decolonizing elements of testimonio and the role these texts have played in further dismantling the European colonial legacy, the ultimate legacy of testimonial works such as Fire from the Mountain and

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Love song for mankind by Cabezas is their use of individual experiences to denounce injustice and implicitly enunciate a particular utopia. In their autobiographies, Sergo Ramírez, Gioconda Belli, and Ernesto and Fernando Cardenal also articulate the promise of the possible and the potential of individual and collective liberation to challenge Eurocentric thinking and the colonial legacy, yet their differences are revealing. In his memoir Adiós muchachos, Ramírez concedes the achievements of the FSLN while it was in power in the 1980s—particularly the success of the literacy campaign—and acknowledges its mistakes, including the treatment of the Miskita and Sumo populations on the Atlantic coast and the 1984 legislation that facilitated the misappropriation of thousands of homes and estates and would famously be termed La Piñata. For Ramírez, liberation implied a deliverance from the corruption and excesses of the 1980s and the subsequent reformulation of a purer sandinismo that would (re)turn to the ideals of Augusto Sandino and the founders of the FSLN. In her autobiography The Country Under My Skin, Gioconda Belli reviews her life and participation in the Sandinista Revolution and rhetorically distances herself from sexist discourses and attitudes. The liberation of the female voice in her work, however, is a conflicting process of emotional and psychological hopscotch that is informed by both traditional and non-traditional gender roles, exemplifying a more autonomous and assertive female voice and, paradoxically, also reinforcing gender stereotypes through her own self-representation and the portrayal of her mother and friends. Unfortunately, the concepts elaborated during the 1980s and 1990s by such pioneering feminist thinkers as Ana María Tepedino and Ivone Gebara or her countrywoman Mónica Baltodano are markedly absent from The Country Under My Skin. In their autobiographies and memoirs, the brothers Fernando and Ernesto Cardenal take a more ecumenical path and recall their work with the poor, especially the continuous relationship between their religious vocation and the fight for the eradication of poverty. In Junto a mi pueblo, con su revolución, Fernando recalls the origins of the literacy campaign, his experience as minister of education (1984–1990), and his expulsion from the Jesuits (1984–1997) for accepting a political appointment. When he began his work as minister of education, he declared “It is possible that I may make a mistake as Minister, but allow me to err on the side of the poor, because the Church has erred on the side of the rich for many centuries” (Tamayo, “Fernando Cardenal”). This position is also evident throughout the three volumes of his brother Ernesto’s memoirs and autobiographies, Vida perdida, Las ínsulas extrañas, and La revolución perdida. Although socially more introverted than his brother Fernando, Ernesto consistently emphasizes the social framework of his religious calling and recalls his work in support of the poorest in Nicaragua and the transformation and gradual betrayal of Sandinista ideals by Daniel Ortega. For Ernesto, liberation involves an exploration

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of the contradictions between material poverty and wealth and the problematic admission that it is possible to romanticize the values allegedly incarnated by the poor and, in the process, sidestep the physical manifestations of material hardship and destitution. While distinct, the diverse representations of liberation evident in the work of Ramírez, Belli, and the Cardenal brothers participate in the act of recovering and re-articulating events from the historical record. Not unlike the 1993 painting “Adiós a Sandino” by Armando Morales, contemporary memoirs and autobiographies “create their own time” (Ugarte). The pervasive influence of the Sandinista Revolution on Nicaraguan writers and artists and on the national weltanschauung is decisive. As Ernesto Rogelio Laureano Valle Moreno has noted, “Far from being a moment of tension for memory, the [Sandinista] revolution was a cultural platform and catalyst for a countless and unprecedented number of national artistic-cultural productions in which important deeds, events, and characters of the previous insurrectional process bloomed and were remembered” (3). The capacity of the spoken word to use memory to amplify and correct the historical record is amply evident in both Fire from the Mountain and Love song for mankind by Cabezas. As Adolfo Colombres indicated, orators are “specialists of the word” (72), individuals who are able to bring a community together through the deft use of spoken language. The persistence of the oral tradition throughout the Americas, however, has served a double purpose: On the one hand, it has served as a facilitator of liberation practices and a discursive alternative to the written word as it was imposed from Europe; on the other, colonial practices used indigenous orality and the imported printed book to establish the limits of knowledge and ignorance with little to no awareness of the Other. As Walter Mignolo has written, during colonial times, Mexicans and the Spanish “were both, so to speak, on opposing sides of the letter. The Mexicans were not aware of its existence, while the Spanish were perfectly aware and convinced that the lack of letters placed human communities in the realm of the absences: the illiterates” (“Signs,” 257). In essence, the book “became a symbol of the letter, in such a way that writing was mainly conceived in terms of the sign carriers: paper and the book, and the practices associated with reading and writing more and more came to be conceived in terms of the sign carrier; reading the word became increasingly detached from ‘reading the world’” (Mignolo, “Signs,” 261). By characterizing indigenous communities as illiterate and indigenous writing practices as non-existent, the Spanish were able to manipulate the flow of information and construct a racializing narrative, using writing “as an instrument for taming (not representing) the voice and language” (Mignolo, “Afterword,” 294). The appearance of epic poetry in Spanish written and published in Spain and the Americas during the colonial period appears to both serve the inten-

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tions of Spanish authorities and to give voice to those individuals and events marginalized by history and the colonial legacy. If, as Bakhtin noted, the oral tradition and epic poetry draw our attention to the past (13), Latin American epics such as La Araucana by Alonso de Ercilla, Martín Fierro by José Hernández, Canto general by Pablo Neruda, and El estrecho dudoso by Ernesto Cardenal, among others, reach back into time and reconstruct the historical record in order to present an alternative version of events. The testimonio, however, has proven to be both partner and successor to the epic poem, recovering the experience of the subaltern and projecting it in heroic fashion. In the case of Fire from the Mountain and Love song for mankind, Cabezas humanizes allegedly noble subjects and themes such as the formation of a revolutionary identity and makes the revolution itself more accessible through the deft combination of the spoken word and print media. Throughout Fire from the Mountain, for example, the use of oral communication strategies contributes to personal and national liberation through the descriptions of sounds and noises (the uprising in Subtiava [198], for example) and the equal emphasis placed on the acts of listening and speaking. In Love song for mankind, the reader is reminded of the limits of writing and written documentation and reiterates the importance of “hearing stories” about Sandino, presenting an alternate version of the official history as previously portrayed by the Somoza government and correcting the national record. Hearing and (re)telling become acts of rebellion and resistance, enabling the experience of one man to transcend individual limitations and connect with the larger Nicaraguan community. Recent events in Nicaragua have inspired artists to tell stories and express their opinions through editorial cartoons that are typically critical of the recent actions of Daniel Ortega and the repression he has mounted against demonstrators in cities such as Managua and Masaya. Manuel Guillén, editorial cartoonist for La Prensa, has been particularly active in portraying Ortega, his wife Rosario Murillo, and other members of the FSLN government as hypocritical technocrats who have only their own selfish interests at heart. In an editorial cartoon appearing in the July 19 edition of La Prensa and titled “Drunk on Cynicism,” for example, Guillén depicts Ortega and Murillo with their right hands raised and covered in blood, declaring, “Now, ‘Lord,’ make us an instrument of my peace, my justice, and my dialogue.” Another editorial cartoon from July 4, 2018, shows Ortega dressed as a vampire, seated at a table with bottles of water and a bowl of fruit. The acronym CIDH is written on the tablecloth, representing the conversations between Ortega and the Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos (Interamerican Commission on Human Rights) to discuss events in Nicaragua. There is a pile of bones and skulls beside the president, and the Nicaraguan flag and his own person are stained with blood. A man and a woman wearing vests with the letters CIDH are approaching the table, and Ortega wryly remarks, “Make

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yourselves at home.” While both cartoons draw attention to the violence incited by the administration and the hypocrisy of Ortega, they also use humor in each drawing for satirical purposes. In the first example, the caricatures of Ortega and Murillo highlight what have become their rather typical facial expressions and physical characteristics: Daniel is paunchy, squinting, sporting a cap decorated with the national flag; Rosario is wearing a loose, draping dress, rings on every finger, a clunky bracelet on each wrist, and a visor that matches her lavender dress. One eye is larger than another, so she is looking at and away from the reader at the same time. The second cartoon shows Ortega as a blood-thirsty vampire, dressed in a high-collared cape and picking his fangs with a toothpick. Both editorial cartoons by Guillén use humor effectively to criticize the current actions and attitudes of Daniel Ortega and offer another perspective on the crisis in Nicaragua that has implicated the Organization of American States, the Interamerican Commission on Human Rights, and the Catholic Church. Artists throughout Latin America have commonly used humor to criticize and subvert the colonial legacy and exemplify Seaver’s declaration that “humor is a weapon against injustice” (iv). In the case of the published word, writers such as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Juan del Valle y Caviedes, José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi, and Vicente Huidobro characterize the multiple uses of both transgressive and traditional humor (Niebylski, 6) to parody social customs and political behavior. The work of Central American authors such as Rafael Arévalo Martínez, Augusto Monterroso, Sergio Ramírez, Horacio Castellanos Moya, Claribel Alegría, Marcos Carías, and Franz Galich, for example, effectively harnesses the liberating potential of humor, frequently drawing attention to regional and national circumstances and, in the process, using a variety of neologisms and colloquial expressions to satirize attitudes and behavior. In the case of Nicaragua, artists and writers such as Róger, Joaquín Pasos, José Coronel Urtecho, Ernesto Cardenal, and Michèle Najlis, among many others, highlight injustices, criticize public figures, censure the participation of other governments in Nicaraguan affairs, and parody communal norms and values. Unfortunately, recent actions by Ortega, the National Guard, and paramilitary forces have provided ample inspiration for artists to criticize the president, his wife, and the administration for the callous disregard for the safety and security of Nicaraguans. Throughout Fire from the Mountain and Love song for mankind, orality and oral strategies of communication are regularly linked with comedy, humanizing the Sandinista Revolution, subverting established standards of written communication, and highlighting the liberating potential of humor. The recollections in both works of profanity and foul language in a comic manner, for example, serve to “break norms” (Bakhtin, 17) and cast a rather rosy glow on the challenges of the revolutionaries as they established training camps in the mountains and fought in skirmishes against the armed

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forces and National Guard. This connection between humor and historical memory, however, is not arbitrary, as the authority of past and present events is solidified through their connection with the Nicaraguan people and their use of humor. Not unlike Cabezas’s use of humor, the Facebook page “Nica Que Se Respeta” offers a number of memes and videos that use comic relief to represent the current situation in Nicaragua. One photograph, for example, shows a woman participating in a protest march on July 2, 2018. On her shoulder sits an iguana with a minuscule Nicaraguan flag on its shoulders, and the caption reads “Rango en la marcha vandálica” (“Rango at the vandal’s march”), referencing comments made by Ortega describing the protestors as vándalos (“vandals”) and golpistas (“putschist,” or leader of a coup) and the cartoon lizard voiced by the actor Johnny Depp in the animated movie Rango (2011). Another post on the “Nica Que Se Respeta” Facebook page from June 7, 2018, shows a chihuaha riding a small homemade cannon in the shape of a tank used by protestors against the military. The caption reads “El hijo no reconocido de Firulay y ex trabajador de ‘viper’ llega con armamento pesado para el gobierno, tiembla Daniel y tiembla la Chayo” (“The bastard son of Firulay and an ex-employee of Viper arrives with heavy armaments meant for the government, Daniel trembles and Chayo trembles”). In Central America, “Firulais” is the nickname given to stray dogs, especially the mangiest and dirtiest. During the recent protests in Nicaragua, stray dogs have been adopted by the demonstrators, calling them their good luck charms and assigning them droll political roles (“smelling out enemies,” for example). The Daniel and Chayo named in the post refer directly to Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, and Christian Mendoz Fernández, alias “Viper,” is accused of being a government agent and infiltrating the popular demonstrations and of torturing and murdering Keller Steven Pérez Duarte, a protestor and student enrolled at the Universidad Nacional Agraria. The disparate elements—Ortega, the “Viper,” a chihuaha, and a homemade mortar—both criticize and satirize the actions of the Ortega government and its minions. While the “trembling” of Daniel and Rosario in the face of an armed chihuahua is intended to emphasize their cowardice during these times, the photograph and caption bring a dose of humor and disapproval to a tragic situation. Throughout Fire from the Mountain and Love song for mankind, Cabezas also uses humor to both defuse a situation and make it both more accessible and more understandable for those who were unable to witness it directly. His descriptions of the festivals organized by the students at the Centro Universitario de la Universidad Nacional (CUUN) in León and the scatological language and anecdotes, for example, underscore the liberating potential of humor and its ability to carve out a place for itself on the national topography of past and current events. Like many Sandinista comandantes, Cabezas possessed a resolute faith in the goals of the revolution and a confidence that

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the revolution would ultimately defeat Somoza. The challenges endured by the troops and the setbacks suffered due to malnourishment, difficulties in communication, and inadequate weapons or training were perceived as part of the revolutionary experience and frequently tolerated or remembered with an implicit smile. The humor present in many of the hardships became an integral part of the revolution and, ultimately, participated in the victory on July 19, 1979. Premiering in 1987 at the New York Film Festival, the documentary film version of Fire from the Mountain directed by Deborah Shaffer conveys the spirit of Cabezas’s text and makes effective use of visual images to simultaneously represent and recreate the difficulties of the struggle against Somoza and, subsequently, the contras. If the political and cultural policies of the Somoza administrations (1936–1977) created a narrow image of the national identity, the FSLN government installed in 1979 utilized institutions such as the Ministry of Culture and organizations such as INCINE to reinvent this image and attempt to present a more inclusive version of the nation. As products of the 1980s, both the printed work of Fire from the Mountain and the documentary film of the same name mythify the Sandinista struggle and challenge Eurocentric thinking and the colonial legacy. Recent documentaries on Nicaragua have explored a variety of topics that range from indigenous cultures to political history. La llegada de Karla (Karla’s Arrival, 2011) by the Dutch filmmaker Koen Suidgeest, for example, examines the marginal lives of street children in Managua. Nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Documentary (Short Subject) category in 2014, the twenty-nine-minute film La parka (The Parka) by the Nicaraguan Gabriel Serra follows the life of Efraín Jiménez, employed in a slaughterhouse in México. Pikineras (2012) by Rossana Lacayo and The Black Creoles (2011) and Lubaraun (2014) by María José Álvarez and Martha Clarissa Hernández explore Garifuna and Miskito cultures on the Atlantic Coast of Honduras and Nicaragua. And Palabras mágicas (Magic Words, 2012) by Mercedes Moncada tackles the circumstances and legacy of the Sandinista Revolution and expresses its disappointment in the hierarchy of the FSLN after the electoral defeat of 1990. These and other documentaries on Nicaragua and/or by Nicaraguan filmmakers connect with the legacy of the films produced in the 1980s through themes that utilize the historical moment to examine the impact of globalization, political transformations, and cultural upheavals. In this regard, the film Fire from the Mountain and the differences between the documentary and the print version offer a unique perspective into the efforts to detail the causes and consequences of the Sandinista Revolution. As we have seen, the testimonio by Cabezas describes his own personal background as well as the reasons that led to joining the FSLN and participating in the revolution against Somoza. In a number of sections, the text

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also mythifies the figure of Sandino and reincorporates him into the national imaginary through the experiences of individuals such as Leandro Córdoba, glossing the struggle and participating in what Donald Hodges has termed “the cult of Sandino” (193). The guerrilleros are integral to the central themes of the book and offer an explicit connection to the title and, hence, the natural surroundings: Not unlike the author, they are an organic part of the mountain and sense that even nature is on their side. In turn, Cabezas the narrator mythifies himself as a “pure” revolutionary (287), conferring rather heroic characteristics on Cabezas the protagonist—the capacity to endure physical and emotional suffering, the significance of his own ideological awakening, the motivation of romantic love—and merging the Everyman with the Superman. Through the use of images and the incorporation of additional content, the documentary film also represents the guerrilleros as an inherent representation of the liberation struggle and portrays the 1979 revolution as a work-in-progress, capable of reflecting on both its accomplishments and mistakes. The visual presentation of events such as the contra war and of individuals such as Pilar Monzón and Alan Bolt who do not appear in the book by Cabezas illustrates the timely relevance of Cabezas to subsequent events (the contra war), the rural population (Monzón), and artists (Bolt). The presence of Leandro Córdoba throughout the film also lends a vital air of authority to the filmmaker and to declarations by and about Cabezas as these link the work of the comandante to the greater historical struggle against tyranny and foreign intervention. The unblemished association between Don Leandro and more profound Sandinista values establishes Cabezas’s political caché and supports his declaration in Fire from the Mountain that, when they met, “I understood my own past” (221). In the documentary film, the subtle connection forged between Sandino, Cabezas, and the historical record is palpable through images of members of the “Organization of Disabled Revolutionaries” working and playing basketball, for example, and is proyected forward by declarations that entertain the possibility of future (post-contra) cultural and economic ties between Nicaragua and the United States. The presence of Cabezas on screen and the reflections of Monzón, Bolt, and others on their experiences with the comandante illustrate his legitimacy and further cement his reputation as an accessible leader of post-revolutionary Nicaragua. “The memory of cinema,” a phrase used by Brazilian filmmaker Paulo Antonio Paranaguá (15), dovetails nicely with the groundwork laid by the documentary version of Fire from the Mountain and draws attention to the manner in which both documentary film and testimonio participate in the construction of alternative histories. Elected by the National Assembly in 2004 to the post of Attorney for the Defense of Human Rights, Cabezas remained a prominent figure in national affairs until his resignation in 2016 due to health concerns and has been active with Los Pipitos, an organization founded by parents with children

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that suffer disabilities such as autism. Given his history with the FSLN and his lengthy relationship with Daniel Ortega, it is not surprising that he has not offered any public statements or interviews on recent events in Nicaragua. The nation that inspired him to join the FSLN, that he fought for during the 1970s, and that he led through various positions and appointments for over thirty years after the revolution is facing a series of challenges that once again place it front and center on the international stage. Published during the 1980s, Fire from the Mountain and Love song for mankind lend themselves to a deep analysis of revolutionary ideology and political incentives and require further explorations of political and personal motivations. Liberation theory and the theoretical constructions of utopian thinking allow us to delve into these texts, offering a potential better understanding of Nicaragua’s past circumstances, present challenges, and future capacity to address conditions that lead to poverty and inequality. Through his personal experience and works, Cabezas offers an imperfect road map that, to this day, manages to both shape and transcend current debates on the possibilities of testimonio and the role of texts, revolutions, and popular movements in contending with Eurocentric thinking and the colonial legacy.

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Index

A Black Theology of Liberation, 13 Boff, Leonardo, 9, 10, 16, 25, 80 Bolívar, Simón, 2, 34, 35, 43, 44, 46, 55 Bolt, Alan, 178, 184 Borge, Tomás, xx, 114 Boyd, Brian, 130, 153 Brathwaite, Edward Kamau, 109 Brenes, Leopoldo, 189 Buchsbaum, Jonathan, xxxii, xxxiii Buitrago, Julio, 77 Burton, Julianne, xxxi

Acosta, Yamandú, xxv Adios muchachos, xxxiv, 76, 79, 81, 83, 84–85, 100, 192 Aínsa, Fernando, 40–42 Altazor, 51, 135 Arce, Bayardo, 123 Arévalo Martínez, Rafael, 136 Arias, Arturo, xiv, xv, 57, 58, 101 Ariel, xxiv Ars combinatoria, 142–144 Asociación Sandinista de Trabajadores Culturales (ASTC), xviii Assmann, Hugo, 10 Attardo, Salvatore, xxx Báez, Silvio José, 189 Bakhtin, Mikhail, xxix, xxx, 111–112, 120, 150, 156, 157, 193 Baltodano, Mónica, 76, 104n13 Barnet, Miguel, xiii, xiv Barrios de Chungara, Domitila, xiv, 57–58 Barthes, Roland, xi, xii, xiii, 183 Belli, Gioconda, 86–94, 95, 101, 102, 192; and the FSLN, xxxvin1; and motherhood in The Country Under My Skin, 90–92; and Nicaragua, 72, 191 Bello, Andrés, 47, 56 Benz, Stephen, xv Bergson, Henri, xxviii, xxx, xxxvin7 Berryman, Phillip, 6 Beverley, John, x, xv

Cabezas, Omar, ix, xiv, 113–121, 198; childhood, 185; and FSLN militancy, 64–65; origins of militancy with FSLN, xxiii, 66, 113–114, 115, 116, 119, 184; and the testimonio, 62, 71, 113 Campanella, Tommaso, xxiv Canción de amor para los hombres. See Love song for mankind Cardenal, Ernesto, xxii, xxxvin1, 26, 192; and Daniel Ortega, 95, 192–193; and exteriorismo, xvii, xviii; Las ínsulas extrañas, 95; and John Paul II, 20; as minister of culture (1979–1987), x, xviii, xxiii, 64, 95, 103n5, 109, 168n6; participation in Nicaraguan politics, 20, 95; poetry of, 54–55, 105n22, 105n25, 112–113; The Psalms of Struggle and Liberation, 141–142, 191; resignation from the FSLN, 95; La revolución

221

222

Index

perdida, 95–96; and social unrest in Nicaragua 2018, 188; and Solentiname, xvii, xxiii; and testimonio, xvi; Vida perdida, 96 Cardenal, Fernando, xix, xxii, xxiii, 20, 95; Junto a mi pueblo, con su revolución, 95, 96, 98, 192 Carey-Webb, Allen, xv Casa de las Américas Award in testimonio, xiv Casaldáliga, Pedro, 11, 26, 73 Casaus, Víctor, xxxii Castro, Fidel, 51, 52, 53 Catholic Church: criticism of capitalism, 24; and intercultural philosophy, 26; and Latin America, 5–6 Chamorro, Violeta, ix, 20, 84 Chávez, Daniel, xxxiii Christian Base Communities, xxii, xxiii, 15 cine testimonio, xxxii, xxxiii Colombres, Adolfo, 108, 193 Comblin, José, 11, 16, 18 Cone, James, 13 Conference of Latin American Bishops (CELAM): Medellín, Colombia (1968), xxi, 12, 13; Puebla México (1979), xi, 13 Córdoba, Leandro, 177, 183 Coronel Urtecho, José, xvii The Country Under My Skin, 86, 87, 92, 94, 101, 192; motherhood, 90–92 Craven, Wes, xvii, xviii contra: and indigenous communities in Nicaragua, xi Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la, 45, 133 Cruzada Nacional de Alfabetización (National Literacy Crusade: Nicaragua), 20 Cuadra, Pablo Antonio, xvii Dalton, Roque, 58 Darío, Rubén, 33–34, 47, 48–49; “Canto a la Argentina,” 48; and exteriorismo, xviii Darling, Juanita, xvii D’Escoto, Miguel, xxii, xxiii, 20 documentary film: evolution of, xxxi; and the Instituto Nicaragüense de Cine (INCINE), xxxiii, 172; and Nicaragua,

172, 197; and revolutionary movements, xxxii; and sandinismo, xxxiii, 173–174; and testimonio, xxx, xxxi Dunn, Kate, xvi Dussel, Enrique, xiii, 17, 23, 81 Echeverría, Esteban, 47 Elizondo, Virgilio, 26 El Periquillo Sarniento, 46 epic literature in Latin America, 112, 193 Ercilla, Alonso de, 45 “Evangelii Gaudium,” 24 exteriorismo (Exteriorism), xvi, xviii, 105n22; description, xviii; and Ernesto Cardenal, xvii Fanon, Franz, 4, 11, 60, 69n12 Feibleman, James, xxix, xxx, 154 Fernández de Lizardi, José Joaquín, 46, 133 Festival Internacional de Cine Documental y Experimental (1954), xxxi Fire from the Mountain, 127, 191; bibliography, 114; documentary film, xxx, xxxiii, 171, 173–174, 176–179, 180–182, 185–186, 197; and historiography, ix; and mythification of the guerrillero, 182–183; and natural surroundings, 179–180; and orality, xxvi, 113–121, 193; and profanity, 155; as testimonio, 64; and utopia, 65–67 folk humor, xxxvin8 Fonseca, Carlos, xx, 175–176 Fornet-Betancourt, Raúl, 12, 27, 102 Francis I, 22, 24, 190 Freire, Paolo, 4, 65 Frente Estudiantil Revolucionario (FER), xxiii, 117 Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN), 31n5; challenges during the 1980s, 73; conflict with the Catholic Church, 82; formation and origins, xxi, xxiii, 3, 54, 72, 76, 103n11, 125, 174–175; and Omar Cabezas, 77–78; and rebranding of culture, xi, 76–77; and Talleres de alfabetización, xix; tensions within the party, 83; transformation, 71–72

Index Freud, Sigmund, xxviii, xxx, 164 FSLN. See Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional Fuentes, Carlos, xxiv Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias (Guatemala), 3 Galeano, Eduardo, xxxii García Espinosa, Julio, xxxii Garcilaso de la Vega, Inca, 45 Getino, Octavio, xxxi, xxxii Gilio, María Ester, xiv Gómez-Martínez, José Luis, 18, 26, 29 González, Marta Leonor, 141 Gramsci, Antonio, 98 Guevara, Ernesto “Che,” 51, 52–53, 67 Gugelberger, Georg, xv Gustaffson, Jan, xxiv, xxv Gutiérrez, Gustavo, xxii, 4, 8–9, 10, 18, 25, 139 “Heights of Macchu Picchu” (“Alturas de Macchu Picchu”). See Neruda, Pablo Huidobro, Vicente, 51, 135 humor: and Henri Bergson, xxviii, xxix, xxx; and Latin American literature, 131–140, 195; and Mikhail Bakhtin, xxx; and profanity, 154–155; scatological, 158–159; and Sigmund Freud, xxviii, xxx; social aspects of, 131–132; and current social unrest in Nicaragua 2018, 194–195; and society, xxix; and the work of Omar Cabezas, xxviii, 196–197 I, Rigoberta Mench ú, 62–63 indigenous cultures: and the FSLN government, xi, 83 Instituto Nicaragüense de Cine (INCINE), xxxiii intercultural philosophy, 26–27, 28–31; and utopia, 41 Isaacs, Jorge, 47 Jara, René, xiv Jiménez, Mayra, xvii, 103n5 John Paul II, xxiii, 20, 24 John XXIII, 6, 7

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Kissinger Commission, 169n16 “Laborem Execrens,” 24 Labov, William, xxxvin6 Latin American literary “boom,” 4 “Laudato Si,” 190 Leiva, Fernando Ignacio, 43 Leo XIII, 23 liberation: and documentary film, xxxii, 178; and domesticity, 92; and the female voice, 89; and material poverty, 9–10; and mythification, xi; and the New Man, 53; and the 1979 Episcopal Conference in Puebla, México, xi; and orality, 109, 110, 117, 193; and poverty, 99; and print culture, xxvi, xxvii; and social unrest 2018, 190. See also liberation philosophy liberation philosophy, 4, 8, 13; distinct manifestations, 15; future of, 26; and poverty, 8, 98; and the Sandinista revolution, 26, 80 liberation theology: and capitalism, 17, 23, 24–25; challenges to, xxii, 19; and Christian Base Communities, xxii, xxiii, 15; criticism of, 17–18, 99; current relevance, 22–23, 26; and the historical figure of Jesus Christ, 16–17; and Marxism, 19, 21; and oppression, 17; origins, 6, 10–11, 16; and poverty, 99, 105n24; principles, 14; and reaction of Church hierarchy, 13, 15–16; and the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, 13; and the Second Vatican Council, xxi “Libertatis Conscientia,” 24 “Libertatis Nuntius,” 24 Lois, Julio, 99 López, Danilo, 141 López Pérez, Rigoberto, xxiii, xxxvin5 López Velasco, Sirio, 21–22, 40 Love song for mankind, xxiii, 75, 157, 158, 161–163, 166, 194; and historiography, ix; and orality, xxvi, 113, 121–128 Mackenbach, Werner, 153 Maffesoli, Michel, 37–38, 45 Mairena, Manuel, 160 Maldonado, Eduardo, xxxii

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Index

Mannheim, Karl, xxv, xxvi, 36, 37 Marcuse, Herbert, xxv, 36 Mariátegui, José Carlos, 34, 51 Marin, Louis, xxiv, 36–37 Marteinson, Peter, xxx Martí, José, 34, 47–48 Marxism: and Latin America, 18–19 “Mater et Magistra,” 7, 10 Mejía Godoy, Carlos, 100, 117 Menchú, Rigoberta, xiv, 62; and David Stoll controversy, xv Mera, Juan León, 47 Metz, Johannes, 38 Mier, Fray Servando Teresa de, 46 Mignolo, Walter, xxvi, 2, 128n1, 193 Miranda, Francisco de, 34, 43, 55, 56 Misa campesina, 100 Mistral, Gabriela, 49–50 Molina, Uriel, xxii Moltmann, Jürgen, 38 Montenegro, Tania, 141 Monterroso, Augusto, 138–139 La montaña es más que una inmensa estepa verde. See Fire from the Mountain Monzón, Pilar, 178 More, Thomas, xxiv, 35 Movimiento de Renovación Sandinista (MRS), xxxvin1, 74, 84 Müller, Gerhard, 19 Munguía, Edgard, 117–118 Murillo, Rosario, xviii, xxxvin4, 188 myth, xi; and language, xiii; and the manipulation of speech, xii; and the reconstruction of the present, xii Najlis, Michèle, xx, 26, 73, 142, 191; and the Catholic Church in her work, 142–144 Nance, Kimberly, ix, xiv, xxxiv Neruda, Pablo, 112–113; and exteriorismo, xviii New Latin American Cinema, xxxii Nicaragua: social unrest 2018, 187–191, 194 Nicaraguan Canal, 8, 31n6 La oficina de Paz de Orolandia, 136–138

Ong, Walter, xxvii, 107–108, 115, 127, 128n3 orality: and colonialism, xxvii; and humor, 119–120, 195; and indigenous cultures in the Americas, 110–111, 118; and liberation, 109, 110, 193, 195 Ortega, Daniel, 20; 2006 elections, ix, xxxvin1, 72, 74; 2011 elections, ix, 74, 103n10; 2016 elections, ix, 74; 2018 social instability, xxiii, 102n1, 187, 188; 2018 repressive actions against protestors, ix, 194; danielismo, 74 La oveja negra, 138 Oviedo, José Miguel, xvii Panikkar, Raimon, 27 Paranaguá, Pablo Antonio, xxxii, xxxiii Pasos, Joaquín, 144–147, 168n9, 168n10, 168n11, 169n13; Chinfonía burguesa, 147–150 Paul VI, 7, 24 Petrella, Iván, 25 Pineda, Frank, 172 Pinxten, Rik, 27 Plato, xxiv poetry workshops, x, xvii; criticism of, xvii, xviii; and the Sandinista Revolution, xviii, 103n5; and testimonio, 59 political theology, 38–39 “Populorum Progressio,” 7, 10, 24 Pound, Ezra, xvi poverty: and climate change in Nicaragua, 9; and ethics, 9; and Latin America, 12–13 Pratt, Mary Louise, xxvii preferential option for the poor, 12 print culture, xxvii Ramírez, Sergio, xxxvin1, 20, 58, 79–85, 139, 192; and criticism of Sandinista policies, 85, 191. See also Adios muchachos Ramos, Samuel, 4 Randall, Margaret, 59, 67 Ratzinger, Josef, 13 “Rerum Novarum,” 23 Richard, Pablo, xxii Rodó, José Enrique, xxiv, 34, 49

Index Rodríguez, Ileana, 130 Rovira, José Carlos, xviii Ruether, Rosemary Radford, 92, 180 Rugama, Leonel, xvii, 84, 125 Ruiz, Henry (“Modesto”), 78, 89 Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, 6, 15, 19 Sánchez Flores, Róger, 129, 140, 150–153, 169n14 Sandinista government. See Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional sandinismo, 73, 178; and documentary film, xxxiii; and Sergio Ramírez, 84 Sandinista Revolution: and impact on Nicaraguan culture, x, xi, xx, 73, 193; and liberation philosophy, 26; and national film-making, xxxiii, xxxiv; and poetry, xvii; and social changes, 20; and testimonio, ix Sandino, Augusto, xxiii, 51–52, 53, 54, 72, 76, 124, 174–175 Sanjinés, Javier, 35 San Martín, José, 43 Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, 47 Seaver, Paul, 131–132 Schüssler Fiorenza, Elizabeth, 86–87 Second Vatican Council, xi, xxi, 10 Segundo, Juan Luis, 10, 18; and utopia, xxvi Shaffer, Deborah, xxx, 176 Sobalvarro, Juan, xviii, xix, 140 Sobrino, Jon, 8, 9 socialism and Latin America, 40 Solanas, Fernando, xxxi Solentiname, xvii, xxiii, 98, 99, 100 Sommer, Doris, xv, 35, 44 Somoza Debayle, Anastasio: and Catholic Church, xxii; and cultural standards in Nicaragua, 72; dictatorship, xxi, 121 Spanish colonies in the Americas, 43–44, 45 Stoll, David, xv, xvi Sutton-Smith, Brian, 167n1 Tamayo, Juan José, 19, 22–23 Tejada, Rene (“Tello”), 65–66, 67, 78 testimonial cinema, xxxii

225

testimonio: and authenticity, xv; and authority, xiv, 58, 71; characteristics, 59–60, 75; critical response to, xiv; definition, x; and documentary film, 172–173; and historical memory, xxiv; fragmentation of, xv; and mythification, xiii, 77; in Nicaragua, xvi, 63–64, 103n6; and orality, 110; post-1990 Nicaragua, 75–76; and the public sphere, xvi; as reaction against Eurocentrism, xvii; and subalternity, xiv; and truth, xv, 61; and utopia, 61, 68, 191 Thiong’o, Ngugi Wa, 109, 122, 126, 128n2 Torres-Rioseco, Arturo, 131 Trigo, Pedro, 9 Tünnerman Bernheim, Carlos, xix Ureña, Pedro Henríquez, 39 Urtecho, José Coronel, 147; Chinfonía burguesa, 147–150 utopia: and humor, xxix; and Latin America, xxvi, 39–42, 44–45; and Latin American literature, 44–51; and New Latin American Cinema, xxxii; and the political, 35–37, 42, 45; and Simón Bolívar, 44; and social justice, 40–41; and testimonio, xxiv, 57, 61 Valdés, Jorge, xvii Vallejo, César, xviii, 50–51, 135–136 Valle y Caviedes, Juan del, 132, 167n2 Veiravé, Alfredo, xviii Vidal, Hernán, xiv Ward, Thomas, 179 Wellinga, Klaas, xvii Wheelock, Jamie, 191 Whisnant, David E., xi, xviii Whipple, Edward, 154 Williams, William Carlos, xviii Wren, Brian, 19–20 written culture and literacy: and Latin America, 109; and orality, 108 Yúdice, George, xiv Zea, Leopoldo, 4–5

About the Author

José María Mantero earned his PhD from the University of Georgia and is professor of Spanish at Xavier University (Cincinnati, Ohio). He has authored a book on the Argentine writer Marta Traba (La voz política de Marta Traba, 1995) and another on the impact of Latinos on the US South (Latinos and the U.S. South, 2008). He has also published an anthology of Nicaraguan poetry (Nuevos poetas de Nicaragua, 2004) and a number of critical articles on Latin American and Spanish literature in journals such as Hispanófila, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, Letras Hispanas, Journal of Hispanic Modernism, Chasqui, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Romance Studies, Latin American Literary Review, and Revista La Torre, among others. His current research interests lie in the manifestation and construction of national and regional identities in Latin American literature across a range of genres, including poetry, memoirs, testimonios, and works of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. His most recent work on the works of Omar Cabezas, Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz, and Alberto Chimal turn on the challenges and opportunities presented by decolonizing narratives and the discursive spaces created in their wake.

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