Fireflies

Gioconda Belli

ESSAY- SEIX BARRAL, 2022, 304 PAGES.

"I am the thinking woman / one day my eyes will light up fireflies," writes Gioconda Belli in a poem. In these pages we follow the writer across a range of texts written at different times as she searches for the lights that interrogate and give meaning to existence. Her love for her country Nicaragua, the experience of struggling against a dynastic dictatorship in her youth, the pleasures and mistakes of a triumphant revolution and then the bitterness of a free person finding themselves caught up in another dictatorship are all examined with a personal, critical eye to provide privileged insights into the society and politics of Latin America. These texts also reveal a woman who, with the same passion as that found in her poems and novels, has sought to make visible, reinvent and celebrate the power of femininity. Here, readers will get a glimpse of a creative process that subverts our approaches to sexuality and the female body.

Volcanically non-conformist in spirit, Gioconda Belli's analysis of the collapse of the Sandinista Front following the electoral defeat of 1990 and her long interview with Zoilamérica Narváez, the stepdaughter who accused Daniel Ortega of sexual abuse, offer us essential lights to help us understand the authoritarian, tyrannical turn seen in Nicaragua in recent times.

 

PUBLISHED BY: Spanish in Spanish-speaking Latin America and Puerto Rico SEIX BARRAL

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