Gioconda Belli ends her “memoir of love and war” with the electoral defeat of the Sandinista revolution and her subsequent move to the USA with her American husband, a journalist whom she’d met while he was covering the Nicaraguan conflict. As she points out, this transition represents the culmination of something like a personal “revolution” in the old-fashioned (and original) sense of a return to the former state of things: “Had my life come full circle? (358). Indeed, when she arrives in Los Angeles and moves into “a house that was exactly like the homes of all [her] teenage friends in Managua: one-story, 1960s-style, with straight lines, a yard in the back,” she muses that she “felt like [she] was back in the past after such a long, circuitous trip through so many other dimensions. [. . .] Funny, I thought, that my life would take such twists and turns. But I remained the same” (362).
What, however, does it mean to “remain the same” in this context? For no sooner does she note the remarkable similarities between the US West Coast and the tranquil suburbia of her own privileged childhood than she also starts to mark the differences between North and Central American cultures. When the Santa Monica earthquake hits in 1994, for instance, she observes that her neighbours “shared a legacy of civic trust and public safety that [she] completely lacked” (364). Whereas they “were confident that their houses were well built, that the firemen would always answer their call, that the police were there to help them,” by contrast she “was frightened by the possibility of anarchy and chaos” (365). Or, rather less flatteringly to the US, she notes the “tanned, muscular men and women” around her, devoted to “healthy diets” and personal self-discipline (366), and she waxes nostalgic about the energies that, in Nicaragua, she has spent in pursuit of a collective project, “the exaltation and joy that comes from joining others in the effort to change the world” (367). Seeing her fellow citizens “with bottles of Evian water tucked under their arms” she thinks back to the days when she “transported weapons, carried a machine gun on [her] shoulder” and asks herself “if [she is] the same person.” “I can’t help but wonder,” she writes, “if a stroke of fate granted me not one but two lives” (366).
A memoir tends to assume–better yet, it actively constructs–a unitary subject, the first-person “I” that stitches together a diverse range of experiences and unites them under the sign of the same grammatical subject. But this is a memoir about a self that, more than many others, frequently flirts with dissolution and division. Or rather, perhaps, with multiplication: not one, but two; not even two, but many. Indeed, at the very outset of the book Belli notes that it was her “destiny to be drawn to the warmth of the crowds” (ix). And it is this impulse that perhaps explains both aspects of what is from the start a dual autobiography: of love and war. For her “response to the multitude” leads her to seek to break out of the stifling cocoon of bourgeois feminine comfort in which she is raised, and (as she puts it) to be “attracted to the world of men, biological functions and domestic life notwithstanding” (ix). Her twin passions, then, are political activism and, well, passion itself. For this is an account of her involvement with the revolution by way of a series of romantic relationships with the powerful men who lead it. Yet these two impulses are as likely to tear her apart as they are to reinforce or strengthen each other.
To take only the most dramatic example: the initial triumph of the Revolution in July 1979 almost passes Belli by. For she is involved in a somewhat torrid affair with a senior Sandinista comandante, “Modesto” (Henry Ruíz), who forms part of the initial National Directorate, and she finds that her “obsession” for him “possessed [her] and robbed [her] of the elation and novelty of that period.” As she puts it: “I did not breathe in the crisp, fresh air of rebirth that was pervasive in those first few weeks. [. . .] Such maddening, all-encompassing love monopolized all my senses and robbed me of energy” (259). Yet soon and unsurprisingly enough, as part of a litany of accounts of the ways in which revolutionary men take women for granted, Modesto discards her. Ultimately, she doesn’t fit his image. So just as the “real revolution” then begins with the first literacy crusade, so Belli’s own personal revolution (now in the sense of change, rather than restoration) can only truly be launched once she realizes that her “love for him was like a disease that was slowly consuming [her, that] if [she] didn’t exorcise him from [her] body, [her] identity would slowly burn away into nothing” (288).
Ultimately, what’s interesting about this book is the way in which it remains torn, incomplete or (perhaps better) excessive. Belli tells us at almost the same time both that her goal is “reconciling [her] two lives” (x) and that she has “discovered the joy that comes from surrendering the ‘I’ and embracing the ‘we'” (xi). I rather doubt both these propositions, however serene (or sometimes more banally self-justifying) the net her recollections cast over her past adventures. There is in fact as much anxiety as joy over the dissolution or multiplication of the self. And there is much here that is unresolved, even unexplored or insufficiently analyzed. We don’t, in the end, get all that far “under [Belli’s] skin,” or rather what is presented as depth is too often sentimental and glib. But she knows this. Or perhaps it is the book itself that betrays her and stands as evidence that the revolution with all its threatening disarray continues, la lucha sigue.
See also seduction; Revolution: A Practical Guide.
Posthegemony 