Nicaraguan Diary

Carlos is my nom-de-guerre here, a name that sounds much more exotic and raffish than I feel this morning.

“Carlos! Como esta?” Jazmine asks me.

“Carlos es…ah…muy tranquillo,” I say in my Tarzan Spanish.

“Si…Si.”

And then everyone bursts out laughing because, despite my claim to the contrary, I am obviously not in such great shape. I’ve developed a wracking cough, which I picked up during the nineteen hours—in four planes and four different airports—it took me to get here.

I’m also dizzy with exhaustion after spectacularly overestimating my physical stamina the day following my arrival. Sandy Canales,
a tough former FSLN soldier during the 1979 revolution, and his wife Jazmine invited me to take a two hour walk around Catarina. Near the end of our hike up and down steep inclines in this mountainous area I began crying out, half in jest, “Taxi! Taxi!” This outburst caused my friends to erupt in gales of laughter.

Catarina is a beautiful little town perched on the edge of a crater, an extinct volcano, now filled with a deep lake. People still ride horses through steep narrow streets here, negotiating their way around bikes, bullock carts, dogs, three wheeled moto-taxis with customized names (JesuChristo, Fast and Furious) a few automobiles and people. Everyone has cell phones now, and life in this large windy village feels somewhat more prosperous since I was last here two years ago. But the pace of things still feels languorous and civilized. Small birds, little flicks of bright color, dash around through the trees.

For the past few weeks my wife Dianne has been a volunteer teacher under the auspices of the Iglesia Bautista El Remanente, the sister church of the Episcopal Church of the Incarnation which we attend in Ann Arbor. Dianne has been warmly welcomed into this community, and I’m here coasting on the shirttails of her good reputation. I’m thankful for the opportunity to reconnect with these gracious and generous people.

El Remanente’s minister, Bayardo Lopez, is a dignified and open man with a fine sense of humor.
Religious services at El Remanente, which begin at 6 pm Sunday evenings, are celebrations. The church building revebrates with music, led by a lead singer on the dais, four backup singers and two of Bayardo’s sons—Joel on electric piano and Joshua or Derrick on drums. Everyone in the congregation seems to have already memorized the hymns. I never saw a hymnbook during the services we attended. Then Bayardo passionately delivers his sermon. This evening he preached on La pueblo de Dios and the coming reign of love. He has great oratorical powers in the pulpit. The service ends with more songs of praise.

* * *

And then I’m quite sick, down flat for a few days, coughing like some consumptive and drifting off into a number of lurid, feverish dreams whose plots I can’t remember. I wake during the night and for a few long moments I have no idea where I am. It is not an unpleasant feeling.

In the late morning Sandy stops by my room with a bottle containing a viscous yellow liquid that appears to glow slightly. He urges me to drink two tablespoons every three hours. After reading the label, Dianne informs me that it is cod liver oil cut with orange sugary syrup.

Sometime later Jazmine, who is a wonderfully sweet person,
sprinkles me with lineament and attempts to vigorously massage and pound the sickness from my chest.

Sometime in the evening the doctor pays a house call. She takes my vital signs, prescribes five medications and says my blood pressure is so high she won’t even tell me what it is. She will not accept payment for the visit.

Miraculously, the next day I begin to feel better. I’m sure that Sandy and Jazmine’s treatments greatly helped, but I think the doctor is mainly responsible for my recovery. She has scared me healthy.

* * *

Around 25 people gather this evening for a dance recital at Sandy and Jazmine’s home. Their daughter Gaby and her friends, who have been studying traditional Nicaraguan folk dances, perform for around twenty-five people. Dianne and I sit with Bayardo, his wife Francie, and Maria Nela, a teaching colleague of Dianne’s.

At the beginning of the recital the power is out in the compound, and Jazmine has lit the large open room with candles, a nice touch that makes the space feel more intimate than it does under the ubiquitous florescent lighting.


The young people perform with great skill and dignity, mimicking elaborate courtship rituals. The men show off, execute fancy steps and dramatically stomp in place like flamenco dancers, while the young women, dressed in long full skirts, retreat from then advance toward their partners, using their fans to indicate approval or disapproval and then swirl open their beautiful skirts like peacocks. Gaby is especially graceful with her fan

Jazmine serves cold drinks and a delicious cake that her daughter Kenya somehow constructed from scratch.

Among those present is Cristian Lopez Mayorquin, an 11 year old boy widely admired in Catarina for his abilities as an orator.
He’s known as ‘el Poeta Nino’. After the recital Cristian, who is here with his mother and father, recites a number of poems to the delight of most everyone present. It is a stylized and dramatic performance. He lifts his arms and gazes skyward one moment and then mimics wiping away tears the next. He is preternaturally calm and somewhat robotic, like an animatron figure, but it’s late and Cristian is obviously tired. His mother, who writes his material (and prompts him from the sidelines when he falters), urges him to recite more poems. He complies without resisting.

His father proudly tells Sandy that the boy has been training to be a poet since he was four years old.

I ask Jazmine later if she felt that Cristian’s mother is overly anxious. No, I’m told. She is by nature an emotional person.

* * *

One morning we drive to La Boquita on the Pacific Coast with our Nicaraguan friends and Christine Herzog, a young German woman doing volunteer work at the church. We watch children race up and down the wide beach on horseback and then we wade in the ocean. A wave knocks me down almost immediately and I’m swept into an area with razor sharp rocks. I emerge from the water bleeding with small cuts on my hands and legs and with a renewed respect for the power of the sea.


We stayed overnight at the Biological Station near the top of the Mombacho Reserva and we walked through a dense cloud forest near the peak of the (mostly extinct) Volcano looking at salamanders and small red-eyed frogs. These creatures both prefer to perch on thick palm leaves at night. The diversity of life inside the ecosystem of this park is immense, and Mombacho is part of the Corredor biologico mesoamericano, a project which will extend from Mexico through Central America linking national parks.

At twilight we stand near the Sendero Crater. The sun is behind us and we are looking down on Lake Nicaragua from a height of around 1,000 meters. We see a rainbow in the middle of Lake Nicaragua that rises straight up like a thick pillar of light out of the water. It isn’t curved. I have no idea what meteorological conditions are necessary to create this extraordinary optical vision, but it reminds me how beautiful and strange our world is. This is a place filled with signs and wonders.


Nicaragua is a country with a surprising variety of enchanting landscapes—tropical jungle, farmland, wetlands and the sea shore.

It is also a country with many active volcanoes, a landscape of geological uncertainty that exists at the intersection of shifting tectonic plates. Maybe the instability of the earth has given the people here an awareness of impermanence that those of us living in North American spaces of privilege have lost sight of. Perhaps this awareness has crossed over into an appreciation for the slippery and changeable nature of language. Words are mutable and plastic. They can be artfully arranged into beautiful and memorable patterns.

I don’t want to make too much of this, but I wonder how else to account for the average Nicaraguan’s love of poetry, a form that usually has a small audience among the literary arts. It is said that the Nicaraguan people have a special affinity for poetry. The most famous Nicaraguan, Ruben Dario, was a poet and Rosario Murillo, President Daniel Ortega’s wife, is a poet. For some reason poetry has been embraced here. It is something essential. This is a reversal of Plato’s belief that poets should be exiled from the Republic.

* * *

For the past six years Nicaragua has celebrated this heritage with a week-long International Poetry Festival in Granada , a lovely colonial style town founded in the early 16th century. It is a 45 minute drive from Catarina. Happily, my trip to Nicaragua coincides with the Seventh International Poetry Festival.

This year the Festival is dedicated to Claribel Alegria, a Nicaraguan poet of the ‘Committed Generation’ from the 1950s and 1960s. She is known as a writer concerned with bearing witness to the social and political issues of the day. In her poem Ars Poetica she writes

I,
poet by trade,
condemned so many times
to be a crow, would never change places
with the Venus de Milo:
while she reigns in the Louvre
and dies of boredom
and collects dust
I discover the sun
Each morning
And amid valleys
Volcanoes
And debris of war
I catch sight of the promised land.

* * *

In order to attend a poetry reading in Granada this evening, seven of us pile into Sandy’s old van, which has no backlights, weak headlights and leaks brake fluid. He wraps two wires together under the steering wheel, releases the brake and as the car moves down the hill he jumps the clutch and guns the engine. He always parks on an incline, with the van facing downward so we don’t have to push it much to start it.

When we arrive in front of La Merced Church I’m astonished to see hundreds of people from a variety of social classes sitting on folding chairs in the plaza, listening attentively to the speakers. Poetry is news, as Ezra Pound said, and everyone here appears anxious to hear what the poets have to say.

I’m standing fairly far back at the edge of the crowd. The acoustics (and my pathetic grasp of the various languages) make it difficult to understand much, but I hear Spanish, French, German and English.

Brian Johnstone, a Scottish poet, reads from his recent collection The Book of Belongings (Arc Publications, 2009).

The book of belongings of those found dead
lies open across my lap. I cradle it and look and look,
not knowing what I must find, half hoping to recognize nothing.

Photograph after photograph, page after page
of someone's jacket, trousers, shirt: I'm searching the fabric
for stitches my hand has known, for threads my thumb has pulled.

This book is heavy with more than belongings:
with gestures an arm has left in a sleeve,
with breath filling the breast of a shirt.

I place a plate on a table surrounded by empty chairs.
Each speaks to me in the voice of a husband, a son.
Those found dead are a handful. I sweep away the crumbs.

I am reminded that there is a deep pleasure in something as simple as gathering together with strangers to listen to a variety of voices artfully expressing joy, pain, anger, anguish and desire, each of these reports embodied by an actual person. We are hungry for the singular human voice. This experience has been devalued in my own community, where just about everything is so easily accessible. Our reality—or the future we are living into at close to the speed of light—is based on the values of convenience and effortlessness. This Festival is an example of an alternative global culture. It is about something altogether different—the primacy of direct experience:

…what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life.

When the poets finish, the folksinger Norma Elena Gadea, who is described as a national treasure beloved by the Nicaraguan people, steps up to the microphone and her extraordinary voice fills the plaza with beautiful music. Sandy and Jazmine know most of Gadea’s songs by heart.

* * *

On Friday the Festival organizers have scheduled poetry readings in the municipalities. Groups of poets fan out into the towns surrounding Granada. Late that morning Jazmine and I walk to the Casa de Cultura Municipal in Catarina, a cavernous hall with a high ceiling and a huge sound system that blasts out ear peppy Latin music at an ear shattering level.

The program was scheduled for 10 am, but the audience—a hundred or so polite school children in white and blue school uniforms—start to drift in around 10:45. At 11:15 the entourage of seven poets and their handlers pull up in black vans, like some oddball rock band. The lineup includes Anthony Phelps, a well dressed older man from Haiti; Maria de los Angeles Camacho, a beautiful tall woman from Puerto Rica; Rozalie Hirs, a Dutch woman in blue jeans who reads her poems in Dutch and then reads them again in perfect Spanish; Luis Chacon from Costa Rica, Guatemalan poet Enrique Godoy Duran, Antoni Perez from Puerto Rica and Nicaraguan poet Jose Adrian Montoya.

Everyone stands for the pledge of allegiance and the national anthem, which thunders out from the sound system. No one sings along, but the children looked properly respectful and attentive. A couple of young people perform folk dances to warm up the crowd and Cristian Lopez Mayorquin, el poeta nino of Catarina, recites a poem welcoming our guests.

As the poets read, municipal employees quietly move through the hall with trays, distributing orange pop and small vanilla wafers. It is welcome in the midday heat, another example of the thoughtful kindness of these people.

* * *

In the middle of the week there is a parade in Granada that is billed as a funeral procession for ‘the Burial of the Miseries and Poverty of the Soul.” We arrive early, in time to catch the end of an open mic poetry reading, and I catch sight of Ernesto Cardenal, the eminence grise of the Festival, moving slowly across the plaza greeting people.

At 2:30 the parade begins. A group of men dressed in what looked to me like ski masks with odd antenna jutting out from the tops of their heads snake forward. They remind me of Heyoka, sacred clowns, trickster figures in traditional societies Then people wearing death head masks and dressed in black cavort down the street.


They are followed by hundreds of musicians and dancers who shimmy and shake their way down the street, caught up in the trance-like rhythms of the drummers, slick with sweat. The temperature is a toasty 90 degrees plus and the afternoon sun is brutal On a float stopped at the intersection high above an enormous crowd a poet declaims his verse. People packed together around him break into applause. This is followed by a horse drawn funeral carriage bearing a coffin draped with flowers and the slogan Que Viva La Poesia!


Jazmine tapped my shoulder and when I turned she introduced us to the glamorous Gioconda Belli, poet, memoirist and one of the organizers of the Festival, who is walking through the crowd. Belli gives us a dazzling smile and welcomes us to Granada.

The parade continues for hours. It ends with two antic spectacles.

The central figure in the second to the last float is a man dressed in a white slip wearing a gaudily made-up woman’s mask up and kneading a huge paper Mache breast that juts out from his slip. He is lying on a mattress in the back of a truck and kicking his legs in the air suggestively. Men dressed as Catholic hierarchy walk next to the truck. They feign outrage, acting scandalized by the overt sexuality of the figure writhing on the mattress. They douse her with holy water and then recoil with disgust. This is all done with great energy and gusto by the actors and the crowd roars with laughter.

The last float mocks the ruling FSLN party of Daniel Ortega—the Sandinistas. Two men made up to look like President Ortega and his wife walk down the street waving to the crowd and blowing kisses. They are surrounded by men dressed as soldiers in camouflage outfits, wearing black ski masks and brandishing toy Kalashnikovs. There are actors who imitate other Sandinista leaders, including a man in an Ernesto Cardenal mask. People in the crowd surge into the street to have their pictures taken with the actors.


Both of these floats are examples of el Torovenado—traditional street performances that satirize the rich and powerful, protests against corruption and social injustice.

The extraordinary events in the street signal the survival of an anarchic, bacchanalian, sensual spirit among these people, despite the failed promises and various compromises of the political classes. This seems to me to be heroic given the difficult economic circumstances of many Nicaraguan people. I hope these qualities survive the compromises and seductions of the global consumer culture. Today’s parade reminds us that our lives, bracketed as they are by a great silence at either end, should be passionately lived and fiercely embraced. According to the Festival brochure, the official slogan for the ‘Poetic Carnival’ is POETRY IS THE REALM OF THE IMAGINATION AND THE MOST HAPPY AND PAINFUL TESTIMONY OF HUMAN BEINGS ON EARTH. LONG LIVE POETRY! LONG LIVE FREEDOM! LONG LIVE LOVE!


For Jazmine, Sandy & Bayardo

Hermanos, siempre debemos dar gracias a Dios por ustedes, como es justo, porque su fe se acrecienta cada vez más, y en cada uno de ustedes sigue abundando el amor hacia los otros. Así que nos sentimos orgullosos de ustedes ante las iglesias de Dios por la perseverancia y la fe que muestran al soportar toda clase de persecuciones y sufrimientos. (2 Tesalonicenses)

We must always give thanks to God for you, brothers and sisters, as is right, because your faith is growing abundantly, and the love of every one of you for one another is increasing. Therefore we ourselves boast of you among the churches of God for your steadfastness and faith during all your persecutions and the afflictions you are enduring. (2 Thessalonians)