Writer Gioconda Belli said Tuesday morning that she almost did not make it to Mexico to receive the Carlos Fuentes Award. A technical malfunction caused the plane she was carrying to land from Madrid to New York, where it faced the chaos of the government closure that affected American air terminals. In addition, the cold has not left her these days. “It’s all very poetic, because getting to Mexico is another battle,” he said. “The first time I arrived was on December 20, when I left my home for exile,” the writer recalls her first departure from Nicaragua to participate in the guerrilla war against the Somoza dictatorship, at the end of the 1970s. Billie returns to Mexico from another exile, that of Spain imposed by Daniel Ortega’s regime, but she does so to gain recognition for her literary work. In his moving speech upon receiving the award at the Palace of Fine Arts, he recalled Mexico’s support for the struggle against the Somocistas, and asked: “I hope that Mexico and its government will regain the memory of solidarity and understanding and realize that there is no sovereignty unless it is supported by the popular will.”
Billy noted the support that Mexican intellectuals, led by Carlos Fuentes, gave to the Sandinista revolution after its victory in 1979. “I lived for several months in Mexico, which was my first safe haven, the cradle of the wonderful Solidarity movement that had the support of great Mexicans like Carlos Pellicer, Carlos Fuentes, Carlos Monsivais, Elena Poniatowska and many others. Even the government of José López Portillo led a regional offensive to suppress the revolution.” Sandinistas deposed Somoza and severed diplomatic relations with his government on May 20, 1979. “The legacy and symbolic dimension of the Sandinista Revolution are today the curtain behind which Nicaragua’s current rulers hide. There are still those who support them, despite the widely documented crimes and human rights violations that prove that my country has once again become a dictatorship equal to or worse than the Somoza dictatorship,” he warned.
She recalled the dictatorship that sent her back into exile, after she was stripped of her Nicaraguan citizenship and her home in Managua was confiscated. “I can imagine that Carlos Fuentes’ aggression and his words would have frightened the authoritarian drift of Nicaragua under the government of Ortega and (his wife) Rosario Murillo. I think that even imagination would not have allowed him to hide that I would be here, that I would come to Mexico to receive this award after I had been deported, confiscated and declared a traitor to my country. And that his friend Sergio Ramírez would accompany me in exile. “It was me and Sergio, without any Other wrong than using our words, victims of the abuse of power and manipulation of justice in our country. We had to see how the memory of that revolution to which we surrendered and which had rightly unleashed so much enthusiasm in the world was appropriated.”
That is why the writer appealed for Mexico’s solidarity, when the silence of the executive power led by Claudia Sheinbaum was the hallmark of the position of the Latin American power against the Ortega regime. He added: “It is clear that times have changed, as the world increasingly moves toward authoritarianism, racial discrimination, and the primacy of the interests of corporations and millions. Great technology has been put at the service of consumption, and paradoxically it brings us closer and benefits us, but it also distracts us and distances us from a sense of community. However, all these realities require us to protect hope and faith in humanity.”
Bailey gave Fuentes’ political commitment as an example. He said: “One of the qualities that I most admired in this cultured, passionate man committed to his time was precisely his responsibility as an intellectual.” He recalls: “I had the honor of meeting him in the midst of the euphoria of the first days of the Sandinista revolution. I remember that his presence to us, other young people, writers, dreamers, fighters, was an incentive, because we admire in his works the constant reminder that imagination has an umbilical cord with reality and political conditions over time.”
Her homage to The Mexican was not only political but also literary, for she said that although she had been a voracious reader when she was young, the literature of Fuentes, the first prosperity author she read, set her apart. He said: “Carlos was also a provocateur of the imagination to find in the depths of history the answers that would allow us, as Latin Americans, to personalize our common identity. His integrative vision aspired to be able to integrate the inevitable past, that network of holes, as poetry says, into a solid and rich structure to inhabit what he called the Territory of La Mancha. I have a lot of debt to Carlos Fuentes and his humanistic and mobilizing concept of literature…”.
Death of Artemio CruzShe said it was one of Fuentes’ books that influenced her the most. “Dissatisfied with the role of a young lady married to a good, but boring and indifferent husband, of a country choked by the grindstone of dynastic dictatorship, Carlos’s book shocked me not only politically, but also aesthetically. I understood how through words one can give life to the characters they depict and allow us to understand history and the human being within it. I also understood the mystery of evil. I found in it my own desire for identity and also for identity,” he explained. “The confidence to take risks, take the reins of the imagination, and give me permission to believe in that famous debate between committed literature or not; “He showed that: how to be committed and great at the same time.”
Gioconda Belli received the award from Leonardo Lomeli Vanegas, Dean of the Autonomous University of Mexico, and the Mexican Minister of Culture, Claudia Curiel. The $150,000 honor was given to him “for his ability to renew Latin American poetry and the strength of its dialogue between society, history, and literature.” Bailey specifically ended his speech with an appeal in favor of literary creativity. “Literature can be a form of memory and also a means of mending people’s souls. Thanks to literature and words that have bequeathed to us humans, a language to express beauty and appeal to emotions that reveal the abysses and heights of the human condition, a language that is intimate, yet makes us know ourselves and immerse ourselves in the flow of stories and experiences that have built us as a human race. I give thanks for the life that has provided me with a feast of intense experiences, both bitter and sweet.”
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