Gioconda Belli transported me, yet again

Not a curious and careless seductress, as Gioconda Belli puts it, Eve was not as guilty as it may appear from the Genesis story.

After all, she was human as we all are and experiencing life was for her the beginning of history.

In Gioconda Belli’s latest book, “The Infinity in the Palm of her Hand,” the story of Adam and Eve as a couple is further explained. The journey of these two characters takes the reader from the time when they were in paradise, to when Eve bit the fig, as Belli explains, to when the first murder takes place.

Yet what I really love about this book is the sexual attraction between Adam and Eve.

Not only were they the fist couple to ever have sex, but they also had no notion of how this would happen at all. Belli makes an excellent job describing this first encounter and how their love was he beginning of history. In the book, their love takes a primal aspect because they are seeking survival, and they are both very much in touch with their sexuality almost at the same level with hunger.

Adam and Eve, as Belli portrayed them, remind me of how simple love, and sex, really are.

Women’s guilt trip

Eve was blamed for making Adam bite the apple — or fig, as Gioconda Belli argues– and of being expelled from paradise.

But was Eve given the chance to explain her actions?

Last saturday, I went to Nova Southeastern University for the literary fair. There, I got to ask Gioconda Belli herself how is it that she picks out her female characters.

In the past, I’ve felt that she picked those very special women in history who were somehow misunderstood, judging by her argument defending Juana de Castilla in her book “The Scroll of Seduction.” Now I know, thanks to her answer, that the characters pick her and that in the case of Eve, the character has been a life-long obsession of Belli.

When she was discussing her latest novel, “Infinity in the Palm of her Hand,” Belli discussed guilt as the main theme in a women’s life, relating this theme to her personal life and the choices she made while raising her children. Belli described herself as a “guerrilla with a stroller,”  making me think about my own life as a writer. 

Also, Belli read a passage from her book, describing the first time Adam and Eve made love. This passage really makes me think about the wise choice Belli took, as a writer, of choosing these characters because of the unexplored territory she uncovered. Not only was this act the first ever sexual act, according to the Bible, but these characters discovered their own bodies as a result of their own awareness toward mortality. After all, there was no need to reproduce when they were going to be eternal; and when they were expelled from paradise, they discovered guilt and sex simultaneously.  

Lastly, Belli mad me think about something entirely new. Adam and Eve are such virgin characters, that they don’t even have a childhood because they were created adults and not babies. Then again, I have to give it up to Belli and her wit to make me aware of such a fact.

Globalization has its costs

As technology advances and the future seems likely to be heading towards the globalized society in Gioconda Belli’s  of “Waslala,” I really wonder if this future is closer than what it seems.

I remember a month ago when many Colombians considered it their duty to vote, if they could, for John McCain because they thought he would support the free trade agreement with Colombia. I still think that this is deranged for my fellow Colombians to actually think that McCain really cared about Colombia, but lately I’ve been thinking if the free trade agreement will actually be a good thing for Colombia.

In the past, trade between Colombia and the United States helped the Colombian economy, but as with everything else where the United States gets involved it involves a cost. What really comes to my mind is the hinting of the massacre of the United Fruit Company in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”

In the long run, I don’t think it is in the best interest of Colombia to be part of the free trade agreement because of the bad record of American companies in Latin America– and the rest of the world. Moreover, this agreement will really further the presence of the United States in Colombia, making it more Americanized and closer to Faguas as it is described in “Waslala.”

Angry Sandinistas still ruling Nicaragua

Reading about the bitter protests in Nicaragua, I am starting to wonder if Faguas, the fictitious country in Gioconda Belli’s “Waslala,” is somehow a prediction of what Nicaragua is turning into.

Belli’s futuristic novel makes a case for how the world is going to become more globalized while, at the same time, the gap between the developed and undeveloped countries will widen. In Faguas, the Espadas seem to be controlling every aspect of life in Faguas, and the people seem contempt with the situation.  Everybody is too afraid to say anything because they don’t want to be silenced– or killed.

In the book, Belli paints a very possible scenario of what life may turn into if those in power fail to manage resources well, turning undeveloped countries into dumps where other powerful countries can exploit those resources and leave the people starving. One of the main characters of the book, Raphael, is a journalist in what I assume the United States. He was sent to Faguas to find fields of “filina”, which is a combination of marihuana and cocaine. On the way there, he hears about Waslala, an Utopic land in Faguas, and finds Melisandra, a local, who will take him there. Raphael knows that the filina fields will sell more newspaper copies, but he is in love with Melisandra and wants to find Waslala with her.

On the way there, the scenes that Belli describes are much like the ones in a newspaper article about Nicaragua today. The New York Times said:

“The streets are ours,” said José Bonilla, a Sandinista supporter holding a homemade plywood shield, during the tumult in Managua on Tuesday afternoon. Fellow demonstrators, waving red-and-black Sandinista flags, shot explosives over the heads of riot police officers who were blocking them from Mr. Montealegre’s rally a block away.

What really sounds outrageous to me is that the Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega limited the access of outside observers to the elections and arranged the ballots so that candidates loyal to him came out on top. If there is nothing to hide, what’s all the mystery?

Far from Utopia

Finding a great, new book I can curdle in bed with is really exciting. Even more when the book seemed to be destined for me, and for some reason I haven’t been able to read it until now.

“Waslala” by Gioconda Belli is the story of the search for utopia. So far I am loving it. Belli’s revolutionary self seems to make way into her writing, making me longing for more.

I tried ordering the book through Amazon.com some time ago, but I ended up ordering the German translation. I finally found the book at the University of Florida’s Latin American Collection.

As I finished the first chapter, I fell in love with Belli’s writing, yet again, because she mentioned how the regions of African and Latin America were sometimes viewed as land, nothing more.

“reduced to jungles, natural reserves, to work as the lung and the dumping ground of the developed world”

These type of ideas about Latin America are the ones that make me love Belli for her honesty. Also, I love how she mentions that the developed world uses Latin America to their own advantage, especially because there is always a different Latin American country dividing opinions in Washington. The Washington Post made an excellent point of this situation and how Nicaragua has been scarcely mentioned in Washington lately.

In the article, Jackson Diehl explains how two decades ago Nicaragua and its president, Daniel Ortega, were inspiring divided attention among Washington politicians. At the time, they were arguing whether the United States should fund an armed opposition.

Nicaragua is Belli’s native country, and she was involved with the Sandinista Revolution in the 1980′s. However, she switched loyalties with Ortega after no longer agreeing with his policies.

Time certainly showed that things haven’t changed much in Nicaragua, and that the country is still far from an Utopian society.

However, Utopia is be definition “the place that isn’t” and comes from the Greek ou, meaning no, and topos, meaning place. Belli points out this definition in the beginning of the book. But the book is about the search of Waslala, the Utopian paradise of her ancestors.

The left is leaving Nicaragua

Much to the dismay of expatriates in South Florida, Daniel Ortega made a political comeback and was re-elected as Nicaragua’s president in 2006. One of my best friends was especially affected by the new term of Ortega in his native Nicaragua. He knew that this will be a life-changing presidency for him the same way it was for his parents in the 1980′s when they had to leave the country to come to the United States.

My friend introduced me to the intricate story of Nicaragua’s Sandinista Revolution and its effects on his life. Moreover, he introduced me to one of my favorite Latin American writers, Gioconda Belli.

“The Country Under my Skin” is Belli’s own account of the Sandinista Revolution. What really makes me wonder about this book is how much things have changed in Latin American politics over the past 20 years. The left, which at the time was somehow glorified, is now deemed in a different light with unpopular rulers like Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales claiming it. At the time, the left was less stigmatized with the presence of military regimes oppressing people and creating a tight elite, like the one of Anastasio Somoza before the Sandinistas took over power in the 1980′s.

Earlier this month, the Los Angeles Times published an opinion piece on Ortega’s involved in a great scandal over the prosecution of the 83-year-old poet Ernesto Cardenal, who was once his minister of culture and is now being judged by a Sandinista judge.

The sin for which he is now being punished is that during a visit to Paraguay last month, he had the temerity to call Ortega a “thief” who runs “a monarchy made up of a few families in alliance with the old Somoza interests.”

The author of the opinion piece, Stephen Kinzer, draws a parallel between Cardenal’s case and that of Heberto Padilla, who was under house arrest in Cuba after Fidel Castro punished him for his writings. At the time, figures like Jean-Paul Sartre, who had previously expressed admiration for Castro, signed a protest petition against Castro and his derailment from the true leftist thinking.

Similarly, other thinkers are drawing a clear distinction between them and Ortega. Among them is Belli, who cut off her links to the unpopular president after having helped his revolution 20 years ago.

Jose Saramago, the Portuguese Nobel Prize Winner, is now among the more than 60 Latin American writers and figures protesting against the judge’s move against Cardenal. He said:

if Ortega does not reverse last week’s court ruling, “we will know that his human and political merits have fallen to zero,” and added: “Once more a revolution has been betrayed from within.”

I agree with Saramago and Belli. People can’t be silenced for what they think. If Cardenal wanted to give such a controversial statement, he is free to do so. Maybe, when the Sandinista Revolution had plans for greater good, its leaders were not as corrupted as they may be now. But that is a whole other story. I think that somehow that leftist regimes have proved to be ineffective in Latin America.

Lost in translation

Recently, I went to Borders with my neighbor– whose first language is Mandarin– and we had a discussion about what is lost in translation in books. She found a book by Gabriel García Márquez translated into English and told me I should buy it, but I told her that there was no point for me to read a translation if I could read it how it was originally intended. My neighbor is not a big reader and couldn’t really grasp the power of language and how it is hard to translate literature.

I’m not trying to say that it is impossible to translate a work from Spanish to English because I think it can be done. However, it would be very silly of me to skip on the opportunity to read in my native language.

To me, reading in Spanish is a sensory experience . I usually think and dream in Spanish, and reading in my language is more attractive because it appeals better to my subconscious mind.

In addition, I think that Romantic languages, in general, have better cadence.

For this reason, I find it especially difficult to translate poetry.

I found one of my favorite poems by Gioconda Belli translated to English and was disappointed. “Y Dios me Hizo Mujer” , or  “And God Made me Woman” in English, which fails to capture the cadence of Spanish.  Only the title is not as powerful in English as it is in Spanish. The word “and” lacks the potential for alliteration that “y” (which is pronounced as a vowel in Spanish) has. In the second stanza, Belli uses “y” to emphasize the qualities of her gender; “y pliegues y suaves hondonadas y me cavó por dentro” does not translate properly to say “and folds and soft hollows…”

When I first read “Y Dios me Hizo Mujer,” I was hooked to Belli’s poetry. I don’t know if it is because I read the poem in Spanish first, or because of the subtle rhythm of the poem in Spanish, but the translation of the poem failed to move me the way the original poem did.