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Claribel Alegría Vides, Salvadoran Nicaraguan poet, essayist and journalist was an important voice in contemporary Central American Literature. Notable for her testament to the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, she was best known in the United States for the bilingual edition of her volume of poetry, Flores del volcán (Volcano flowers - 1982), translated by the poet Carolyn Forché.
Claribel Alegría was born in Estelí, Nicaragua. She was the daughter of a Nicaraguan rebel, an arsonist doctor who was nearly killed by US Marines for his opposition to his country's puppet government. She inherited a legacy of defiance, becoming a leading poet of suffering and anguish - a walking graveyard, as it was sometimes described, for the voices of people killed by Salvadoran death squads in the 1980s and the long-running crossfire of the civil war in Nicaragua.
She began composing poetry at the age of six and dictating it to her mother, who later recorded it. Alegría cited Rainer Maria Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet" as an impetus for her poetic skill. At seventeen, she published her first poems in Repertorio Americano (American repertoire), a cultural division of Central America.
Exile in El Salvador
At Claribel's nine months old, United States Marines were stationed in Nicaragua in support of the local government. Due to her father's criticism of the US presence and the violation of human rights protests during the US occupation of Nicaragua, the family was exiled to El Salvador. Claribel grew up in Santa Ana, a municipality in El Salvador. Hence, she considered herself Nicaraguan and Salvadoran.
Claribel received initial support from José Vasconcelos, a prominent Mexican educator who helped her emigrate to the United States, and Juan Ramón Jiménez, a Nobel Prize-winning Spanish poet who became her teacher and mentor.
Many critics have labeled her part of Latin America's left-wing "committed generation" of reformist poets and novelists. When her elderly mother died in El Salvador several years later, her siblings called to tell her to stay away. Do not come, because there will be two funerals instead of one. Claribel avoided the country until 1992, when the civil war ended.
In 1943, after graduating from high school, Claribel moved to the United States and, in 1948, received a BA in Philosophy and Letters from George Washington University, a center to which she moved after initially studying at Loyola University in New Orleans. Throughout her life, she emphasized her commitment to nonviolent resistance, even during her close association with the FSLN - Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (Sandinista National Liberation Front), the popular movement that took control of the Nicaraguan government in 1979 and toppled Dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle. In 1985, she returned to Nicaragua to help rebuild the country.
In 1947, she married Darwin Flakoll, with whom she co-wrote the novel Cenizas de Izalco (Ashes of Izalco - 1966). The couple lived in the United States, Mexico, Chile, and Uruguay and on the island of Mallorca, Spain, before returning to Nicaragua in the 1980s after the left wing Sandinistas toppled President Anastasio Somoza.
Dictatorship, Murders and Civil War in El Salvador
Claribel had witnessed a massacre at age 7, when hundreds of peasants were executed by the military in western El Salvador after a failed uprising. In 1980, she went into exile on her own, after doing a book reading at the Sorbonne in Paris, in which she condemned the murder of Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Romero by an unknown gunman.
Romero was a generous and active priest: he visited the sick, taught religion in schools, and was a prison chaplain. The needy poor lined up at the door of his rectory, asking and receiving help. During 26 years, in the role of vicar, Father Oscar Romero knew the deep misery that plagued his small country.
In 1977, Oscar Romero was appointed Archbishop of El Salvador, arriving in the capital with a reputation as a conservative. Deep down he was a man of the people, simple, profoundly sensitive to the sufferings of the majority, of firm perspicacity combined with the courage of decision.
In 1979, President Carlos Humberto Romero was deposed by the military coup. The dictatorship was installed in the country and, little by little, the violence intensified. Political, economic and institutional chaos reigned in the country. From January to March 1980, 1015 Salvadorans were murdered. Those responsible belonged to the security forces and conservative organizations of the military regime installed in the country.
Two priests were violently murdered for defending peasants, who went to seek shelter in their parishes. Dom Romero had to take a stand and, right away, he placed himself in the middle of the conflict. Not to increase it, but to help solve it. This attitude revealed how realistic his spirituality was and how serene and obedient his heart was to the Gospel. On March 24, 1980, Archbishop Romero was shot and died, among cancer patients and nurses, while celebrating mass in the chapel of the Hospital de la Divina Providencia, in the capital of El Salvador.
Somoza dictatorship (1934-1979)
Anastasio Somoza García was an employee of US companies or companies controlled by the US government during the military occupation of Nicaragua in the first decade of the 20th century. Later, he became a loyal soldier in the service of Washington, during the period when the US government, pressured by the patriotism of the president, General Augusto César Sandino, decided to discard the Nicaraguan army and establish a National Guard in its place, whose command was entrusted to Somoza. The success of the Somoza family was born out of control of the national army and loyalty to the interests of the US government.
Somoza's first task was to assassinate Sandino and create conditions to stabilize the country, marked by traditional conflicts between conservatives and liberals. With that, he paved the way to become president of Nicaragua. During World War II, Somoza's government, allied with the United States, declared war on Hitler's Germany. With this, he managed not only to secure the generosity of the Americans, but also to confiscate the properties of the Germans in Nicaragua and easily start his fortune. Such an attitude was considered progressive compared to the position of the conservative oligarchy, which preferred to align itself with the Axis Franco, Hitler and Mussolini.
Supported by the misleading credibility of electoral democracy, Somoza and his family managed to remain in power for 45 years (1934 to 1979). With the Somoza dynasty, US imperialism strengthened its hegemony in the Caribbean region. Later, Nicaragua served as a base for the invasion of Guatemala by Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán (1954) and the Baía dos Porcos (Bay of Pigs), in Cuba by Fulgencio Batista (1961).
Sandinista Revolution of 1979
In the 1970s, in Nicaragua, the nascent bourgeoisie (away from liberalism and economically resentful) and the traditional oligarchy (politically opposed) began to organize themselves in corporate and political terms. Popular forces developed a similar organizational impulse, spearheaded by the FSLN, which since 1960, excited by the Cuban Revolution, and had declared war on the Somoza dictatorship.
The blackmail and repression by somozism did not take long. The FSLN and the oligarchy had to join forces to lead a project of national unity to defeat the dictator. Many prominent members of the oligarchy became involved with the revolution and participated in all fields, military, political, diplomatic, cultural, etc., even becoming leaders of the triumphant revolution.
Fearing a revolution that would transform Nicaragua into a second Cuba, the government of the United States, which raised the banner of human rights, participated in the defeat of the Somoza dictatorship.
President Jimmy Carter and some nearby governments (Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama and Venezuela) have cut off all military, economic and diplomatic aid to the Somoza government. Cornered, he agreed to relinquish power. The defection of the Somoza family demoralized the National Guard. The indecision of the bourgeois-democratic opposition and the delay of the US government itself to force the departure of Somoza, allowed the guerrilla forces of the FSLN and the insurgent population to disrupt the entire military scheme of the Somoza dictatorship.
The assassination, in 1978, of conservative Pedro Chamorro, opposition leader and director of the newspaper El Diario La Prensa, whose surname symbolized the entire leading and governing trajectory of the conservative oligarchy, was one of the episodes that most influenced the ordering of forces opposed to the dictatorship of Somoza. This assassination and its national and international condemnation expanded the range of political possibilities within the reach of the population as a whole, which the FSLN took advantage of to increase revolutionary audacity in the final insurrection.
The discontent of the big bourgeoisie and the conservative oligarchy, the awareness and mobilization of the Grassroots Christian Communities and the guerrilla atmosphere that manifested itself in the Latin American continent contributed to the triggering of revolutionary events against the Somoza dictatorship.
The Sandinistas, however, had to fight internal and external opponents. The period 1979-1990 was characterized by the reaction of the “Contras”, a right-wing military group that had many former members of the National Guard and that received funding from US President Ronald Reagan.
Throughout the 1980s, the relationship between the Sandinistas and the Nicaraguan bourgeoisie began to fray and, little by little, the latter's adherence to counterrevolutionary groups weakened the Sandinistas in power. Furthermore, it should be noted that the action of the Contras in their struggle with the Sandinistas was responsible for undermining social peace in the country. As a result, the Sandinistas were defeated in the 1990 presidential election. In that election, Violeta Barrios de Chamorro won 55% of the votes and defeated Daniel Ortega, putting an end to the Sandinistas' power in Nicaragua.
Relationship with the Committed Generation
Alegría's ideological and literary tendencies are a reflection of a literary current in Central America that gained momentum during the 1950s and 1960s known as La generación comprometida (The committed generation). Recognized as one of the most prominent voices in Latin American poetry, Claribel related to the Compromised Generation. She maintained a close relationship with the FSLN and returned to Nicaragua in 1985 to help rebuild the country.
It was José Vasconcelos who prefaced his first publication Anillos de silencio (Rings of silence) - her first collection of poems, in 1948, when Claribel was still a student at George Washington University. Her mentor Juan Ramón Jiménez, Nobel Prize in Literature, made the poetic selection of the work. Claribel kept alive the legacy of the Salvadoran avant-garde of the 1930s in Latin American literature: Salarrué, Alberto Guerra and Claudia Lars.
Opposed to dictatorial regimes and included in the Compromised generation, she also wrote several essays of a political nature, such as: La Encrucijada Salvadoreña (The Salvadoran crossroads - 1980), No me chaman viva: la mujer salvadoreña en lucha (They don't call me alive: Salvadoran women in struggle - 1983) and Romper el silencio: resistencia y lucha en las cárceles salvadoreñas (To break the silence: resistance and struggle in Salvadoran prisons - 1984).
Main works
Educated in the United States by Juan Ramón Jiménez, Claribel Alegría is one of the best-known and most important writers in Central America. Brief, frank, soft in a minimalist tone, her lyrical work lacks rhetorical pyrotechnics that blur feelings, and offers us balanced texts that simulate taciturn songs soaked in hope, vital joy, death, love, life or pain, treated in greater depth than that its expository simplicity appears.
Among her titles are: Suite de amor, angustia y soledad (Suite of love, anguish and loneliness - 1950), Vigilias (Vigils - 1953), Aquarius (1955), Invitado de mi tiempo (Guest of My Time - 1961), De una sola mano (One way - 1965), Aprendizaje (Learning - 1970), Suma y Sigue (1981), Flores Del Volcán (Volcano Flowers - 1982), Álbum familiar (Family Album - 1984), Mujer del río (River woman, bilingual edition -1989) - with parallel texts of poetry in Spanish and English, Fugas (Leaks - 1993), Escape de Canto Grande (Escape from Canto Grande - 1992); Variaciones en clave de mí (Variations in the key of mi - 1993), Umbrales (Thresholds - 1997), Nostalgia (Missing – 1999) - one of his best books, Tristeza (Sorrow - 1999), Liberando lazos (Releasing ties – 2002) and Desechando (Casting Off - 2003).
She also devoted herself to children's stories and novels, such as El detén (The stop - 1977), Pueblo de Dios y de mandinga (People of God and Mandinka - 1985) and Despierta, bebé, despierta (Wake up, baby, wake up -1986).
Claribel collaborated with her husband on several works, including Nuevas voces de Norteamérica (New voices from North America - 1962), Cenizas de Izalco (Ashes of Izalco - 1966), No me panhan viva (They did not let me live - 1983), Somoza: expediente cerrado (Somoza: file closed - 1993) - an account of the murder of Somoza by the Sandinistas in 1980.
Awards
Ibero-American Poetry Prize Queen Sofía. The French government granted her the Order Awards 1978, by Cuba - Casa de las Américas, sponsored for Sobrevivo. 2006 - Neustadt International Literary Prize of Arts and Letters. Claribel Alegría died in Manágua, Nicaragua, on January 25, 2018, aged 93. She was buried in the Sierritas Cemetery in Manágua. In more than 40 books of poetry, fiction, and historical "testimony," she has blended lyrical poetry with prose that chronicles her own personal tragedies, as well as the political violence that plagued her home countries, Nicaragua and El Salvador, for decades. In Latin America, a writer cannot live in an ivory tower, she told the Economist in 1991. Reality marks you. You cannot isolate yourself.
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