Gioconda Belli

In her memoir The Defense of Happiness Belli retells these events as they occurred but also through the lens of the poet she has since become. "Disoriented and out of breath, I arrived in Mexico," Belli writes, "feeling that I had fled Nicaragua with giant steps through the clouds. Fear helped me not to look back at what I had left behind."

While working on her second poetry collection, Line of Fire (for which Belli was later awarded the prestigious Cuban Casa de las Américas Prize) her lover, Comandante Marcos, planned a coup against President Somoza Debayle's regime while in exile in Mexico. Somoza's regime fell in 1979.

But it wasn't until the 1988 publication of the novel The Inhabited Woman that Gioconda Belli started attracting the attention of a larger international audience. Abroad, where it became a bestseller, the novel was seen as an emblem of international solidarity with Nicaragua. Due to a paper shortage in Nicaragua, the novel was first published in Germany.

The Inhabited Woman is a semi-autobiographical novel about the protagonist Lavinia, the daughter of a well-to-do Nicaraguan family who grows increasingly sensitive to the social and political oppression that surrounds her cloistered world. It also deals with the universal theme of a woman trying to get by in a world dominated by men.

In other words, the novel tells the story of Belli herself and sets her up as the perfect spokeswoman for women's issues. Yet despite her outspoken stance on many issues affecting women, Belli says she doesn't want her literature to be branded with the feminist stamp.

"No one would seriously consider asking a man who writes about coal mines or hunting whether his novel is masculine or not," Belli once said in an interview with the "Rheinische Merkur" newspaper, but she went on to lament the fact that, in her view, the "male condition" was still the measure of all things.

Lavinia, like Belli herself, leaves behind the comfortable lifestyle afforded to her by her privileged upbringing in order to resist a dictatorial regime. "The world is not simply this way, or the other, " Lavinia says. "It's ourselves who make the world one way or the other."

However, by the time she wrote The Inhabited Woman, the woman once known as "Comrade Belli" had already pulled back from her life as political activist in order to devote her time to writing. But she never managed to completely withdraw from political life.

After the fall of Nicaraguan dictator Somosa in 1979, Belli returned to Nicaragua to work in the Interior Ministry under the Sandinista-led government. Later she was appointed director of the country's national broadcaster.

But instead of the massive reconstruction many had hoped for after the fall of the Somoza regime, Nicaragua soon found itself embroiled in a gnawing civil war in which Belli's war poem "No pasaran" (a reference to "they shall not pass," an anti-fascist slogan from the Spanish civil war) became a hymn of the Sandinistas in their fight against the U.S.-backed Contras.

In 1994, shortly after Liberation theologian Ernesto Cardenal withdrew from the Sandinstas, Belli too distanced herself from her former comrades at the "Frente," and joined Cardenal in accusing former comrade in arms and then-president Daniel Ortega of corruption and ruling with an iron fist.

A new passion

A new revolution is now in the making for Gioconda Belli. "I am now becoming very interested in this process of globalization and trying to understand it better."

Already, she says, she is thinking of ways to raise awareness that "there has to be a globalization of compassion and fairness, and justice," if people want to prevent a war between the first world and developing countries.

"I think we have to think globally. Not only about becoming richer, but also of becoming happier," she says.

With her life spanning more than half a century now, Belli published her first full-fledged memoir, The Country Under My Skin, in 2002. In it, she defends everything she has stood for as a political revolutionary and as a writer.

"Literature is full of very tragic stories of women who dare," says Belli, "and I wanted to say, well, this is a story of a woman who dares and has had a good life."

Kerstin Steinbrecher