Guadalajara Jalisco.- Gioconda Belli arrived at the International Book Fair (FIL) Guadalajara 2022 and, in the poetry room, read his works and talked about love, women and his homelandNicaragua, to which cannot return since February because the Daniel Ortega regime the would imprison; the poet lives in exile.
Far from the chaos that FIL Guadalajara 2022 means as the most important Spanish-speaking literary meetingthe poetry room is a private space, with its own bar and some seats, covered by a glass door that prevents noise, there the writer arrives at the appointment.
With her tousled blonde hair, black clothes, tall, fair-skinned, and ideas about female freedom, poetry, and Nicaragua, Gioconda Belli talks about her beginnings in verses and how she considers that poems heal her while novels require discipline, effort.
“I’m filling up and suddenly I feel like I’m going to sneeze flowers and poetry comes to me, it assaults me and I write it and then I work on it. In the novel it is something else. Music needs a guitar, violin or piano, the poetry is like a small expression focused on music.
Each sentence reveals her mind as a poet and writer, in a natural way her references They talk about the lake where he grew up in Central America or the volcanoes of his homeland and relates it to his writings, to the scandal he caused when in the 20th century andHe wrote about his sex and the freedom to love each other.
“I started to think about poetry and when I started to write poetry everything seemed to me that life had meaning and, furthermore, it was a discovery that had to do with my being a woman, because my poems were like a tornado that came out in the middle of Managua (Nicaragua’s capital) and the lake rioted, the lake of social prejudices”.
“God made me a woman
Long hair, eyes, nose and mouth of a woman
With curves and folds and soft hollows…”
Gioconda began with “God made me a woman”one of her best-known poems and which served to remember how she managed to separate from her first husband because she found it very boring, how poetry came to her and how she learns to love herself and love moments of solitude.
Nevertheless, she thinks of her homeland. Before going on talking about love and reciting his poems where he says he misses someone like a sea after a night away, first he talks about his homeland and how he did not return to it leaving the hummingbirds, Caramelo, its palm trees and the volcanoes.
“Nicaragua is in a very difficult situation, so I have had, once again, at this point in my life to exile myself from my country and I had a very difficult time because I left Nicaragua believing that I was going to return. I went out and they started arresting all the people who, like me, had opinions.”
“I left with the words under my arm
They are my crime, my sin,
Not even God would make me swallow them again” – Expatriated
Gioconda gives away an unpublished poem for those who are in the capital of Jaliscolistening to her. sisyphus refers to the Greek tale about the man who climbs a rock to the top of a hill, only to see it fall and repeat his work, This is how the poet remembers how far from home she continues, living with the work of believing in what she writes.
“This nostalgic body contains what is necessary
So that nothing is lost, of what I have been,
of what I am…” – Sisyphus
Belli kept the no more than 30 people captive with your words, she did not have time to read many poems, however, in each one she showed the quality that has led her to get prizes international as the Fine Arts of France.
“Amazing to say this:
I, an independent woman,
Navigator of many solitudes
Incredible the desolation of a single absence
The weight of your body is the window of Alfonso Cortés
Your body is the intensity of the whole sky.”
Accompanied by Yolanda Ramírez Michel, who led the talk, the writer took time to please the attendees, reading favorite poems, such as “Advice for the strong woman”, with which she dismissed her participation in the Poetry Room of the FIL Guadalajara 2022.
“If you are a strong woman,
Prepare for battle
learn to be alone
To sleep in absolute darkness
Without fear of anyone throwing ropes at you
When the storm rages…
It is necessary that you cultivate enormous friendships
That those who surround you and want
Know what you are…
Protect, but protect yourself first
Keep your distance, build yourself
Take care, treasure your power
Stand up for yourself, do it for you
I ask you, on behalf of all of us”.
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