It is important for the writer Sergio Ramírez to set up a place to write again. With his computer, his papers, pencils and pens, his books. It’s the only way, he says, that he feels like he has a home, a grounding pole, that protective space he locks himself in to create. Because Ramírez has become an itinerant writer since he had to leave Nicaragua, his country, due to the persecution by the regime of his former partner Daniel Ortega, who became a tyrant who exiled writers, journalists, critical voices, opponents. . “A million Nicaraguans,” says Ramírez, have gone into exile in an endless drama that has taken not only his home and his life, but even his own Spanish, Nicaraguan, full of phrases, sounds and onomatopoeia. “When I first started my exile, I went from one hotel to another with my suitcase open,” says Ramírez. “I wear writing on my back.”
Against Ramírez, Cervantes Prize winner, is considering an arrest warrant that faces imprisonment. So he decided not to return to his country. He knows the regime’s threats are coming true, as evidenced by dozens of critics jailed in the dungeons of El Chipote, the Nicaraguan dictatorship’s denounced torture center. Sandinista guerrilla Dora María Téllez, heroine of the revolution that brought down more than 40 years of Somocista dictatorship in 1979, is imprisoned in this prison. Although Ramírez was released from prison, exile is a suffocating weight. The metaphor he uses is that of a locked door that he cannot voluntarily open. As if it were a recurring and horrible nightmare in which one hopes to see a light that gives hope. However, she escapes in writing, always saving. “Without writing it would be nothing. I would be a wandering soul, wandering the world,” says the author of Goodbye, Boys, his beautiful memoir about the Nicaraguan revolution.
A protest against political prisoners in Managua Cathedral, Nicaragua Jorge Torres (EFE)
Gioconda Belli had to leave her two dogs in her abandoned jungle garden house in Managua. The memory of her beloved dogs haunts her and she fears that if she ever meets them again, they will not remember her after several years. “Eventually,” a terrible and reckless phrase, with no defined time, a bottle thrown into the immensity of an ocean of hopes. Leaving home in fear caused by threats, persecution, courageous exercise of the right to disagree, to criticize, and to write. What a ridiculous idea to leave what’s yours! And yet one day you find yourself packing your bags and saying goodbye to the halls where you were happy, the books that have been written and read, the beautiful view of Lake Managua, the freshness of its breeze, that moves the palm trees, the delicious monsteras, the rooster combs where hummingbirds feasted in your garden in the morning. “It hurts a lot, it hurts more every day. Because what is happening in Nicaragua I would never have thought possible,” says Belli.
Belli and Ramírez repeat the drama of their country’s abandonment. Gioconda left Nicaragua at the age of 25 and she was a young poet full of illusions, an idealistic woman who dreamed of overthrowing the dictatorship that was crushing her country. This dictatorship forced them into exile in Mexico. He arrived in Mexico City on December 20th, which was already used to receiving refugees from half the world. In the Mexican capital she was received by the Nicaraguan painter Róger Pérez de la Rocha, who worked in a graphic workshop. A cold, strange, and inhospitable city struck them with the ax of nostalgia. Pérez de la Rocha took her to the workshop, told the workers about the misfortune of this beautiful young Central American woman, and they bought tequila and spent the night singing rancheras.
For his part, Sergio Ramírez sought refuge in Costa Rica, the country that has always opened its doors to Nicaraguans and that today tens of thousands of them return to seek refuge in their cities. In the late 1970s, San José was the capital where the ‘Nica’ diaspora had to plan their exit from the Somocista regime, which hopefully fell in 1979.
These may already be stories of the past, but they return to memory with the new exile. “The absence causes the neurons that control nostalgia to be activated,” says Ramírez. And the memories of that little tropical country left behind come back, with its towering volcanoes, scrubby jungles, green leaves that are lungs and life, and lakes as big as giant mirrors that meet on the horizon with a very blue sky that the poets of this country always composed the most precious verses for him. And there’s also the nostalgia for foods that activate the salivary glands as they remember their taste, such as stewed meat, jerky made in a banana leaf casing, cooked over the fire for hours, sandwiched between yucca and green and ripe plantains, and then served up Coleslaw, or coleslaw as the Nicaraguans call it. Or that special Nicaraguan Spanish that is so necessary for writing. “The real drama is when a writer’s tongue is cut out. The true exile is the exile of language,” says Ramírez. Belli also misses the sound of this Spanish, which is so full of special, happy expressions of the “nicas” that when they speak, they have to make or imitate a sound to be understood. Exotic words that sound like music. “Diacachimba”, say the tropics, to describe something very good. An onomatopoeic Spanish, defined by the author.
Despite the nostalgia, the pain of distance, both authors also speak of resistance. Both Belli and Ramírez attended the Guadalajara International Book Fair to present new books, her book Luciérnagas (Planeta), a collection of essays that is an X-ray of Nicaragua that she has been telling about throughout her life. Ramírez presents the collection of short stories That day fell on a Sunday (Alfaguara). It is a personal triumph, but also for the readers who faithfully follow both authors. And of course for their Nicaragua, which they love and miss. “I wouldn’t be a writer if I didn’t have Nicaraguan roots. If Nicaragua didn’t exist, I would have to invent it,” says Ramírez. “It’s such a small country,” says writer Belli, “that it’s a portable country. I’m never leaving Nicaragua.”
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