Poetry & Politics In Nicaragua: The Uprising of 1978

Zimmerman & banberger 63 Marc Zimmerman and Ellen Banberger (editors and translators) Poetry & Politics In Nicaragua: The Uprising of 1978 Introduction: The Revolutionary Bloc and Political Poetry In spite of all the good justifications that existed for a revolution in Nicaragua, Central American specialists will generally agree that the Revolution itself still awaits adequate theorization. What seems perfectly dear, and is inscribed in all post-Gramscian Marxist thought, is that the supposedly "objective pre-conditions" for revolution (overall crisis, the progressive immiseration of the people, etc.) are not adequate to the generation of a successful revolutionary struggle. If only such objective pre-conditions mattered, revolution would be a common experience across the globe. And in the Nicaraguaof 1976-77, the very nature of Nicaragua's labor structure, the force of Nicaragua's repressive apparatuses, and, it must be added, the relative failure ofthe FSLN to organize peasants, workers and other immiserated sectors, seemed to preclude the possibility of a successful revolutionary movement in the near future. Events in 1977 and 1978 were to change all that very rapidly. But they were not to occur simply as a function of the "objective pre-conditions." The emerging insurrectional bloc shared as a feature of minimally necessary and provisional unity an ideological and more generally cultural "macrovision" or "world view": Sandinismo. Rooted in the structural development of the nation over the decades, Sandinismo was sufficiently promoted by the FSLN and sufficiently accepted by large enough numbers to serve the given historical moment, in spite ofall the specific differences among classes, sectors and groups. And an important material contributant in the constitution of Sandinismo as the multi-valenced revolutionary force adequate to the historical moment was the exteriorist poetic system, whose impact in the formation of the revolutionary counter-culture, especially among the young, distinctly contributed to the overthrow of the Somoza regime. To be sure, the regime's ever-greater dependence on its repressive apparatuses signalled the crisis of its "ideological" ones. Never having had a sufficient consensus to institutionalize its power at any great depth, and never having fostered a significant national ideology and culture of its own (beyond paternalistic misappropriations of Dario, folk culture and the like), yet attempting to block or restrict ideological and cultural manifestations which might prove threatening, the regime in fact forced people toward producing a culture which opposed it and gave these producers no other choice but to "sell out" or join an increasingly radicalized opposition. When the regime no longer had the flexibility to tolerate the space of Ernesto Cardenal's Solentiname community, when it cracked down on dissident priests and no longer respected church sanctuaries, when it was forced to kill off the figurehead of semi-legal and respectable opposition (Pedro Joaquin Chamorro), when it had to close schools and universities and send its death squads after the students, it completed the process of displacing all oppositional intellectual and cultural work towards the overall production of a revolutionary rupture. Poetry was a space in which anti-capitalist and ultimately pro-revolutionary ideology could develop, thus contributing to the politicization of a whole generation of urban young, literate and not. It was the particular contribution of Carlos Fonseca Amador to realize that a standard Socialist Party could not forge a revolution in Nicaragua, and to tie his socialist aspirations to the specifically national anti-imperialist campaigns of Sandino. 64 the minnesota review Carlos Fonseca invented modern Sandinismo as a political and ideological force. But that leftist valence given to Sandinismo has a prehistory tied not only to the Salvadoran revolutionary Farabundo Marti and the poet-soldier Manolo Cuadra (who fought against Sandino in the mountains, then became one of his staunches! Socialist idolizers), but also the Cuadra's overtly reactionary fellow vanguard poets (Coronel Urtecho, Pablo Antonio Cuadra, etc.), and ultimately in their most famous disciple, Ernesto Cardenal. Cardenal's work, given new direction by the FSLN opposition to Somoza, came to serve as an ideological weapon of inestimable value for Sandinismo. Indeed, since Rubén Darío gave his native nation and area an international standing in literature seemingly out of proportion to its economic and political development, poetry has served as the inscribed mode...