“The memory is me, my country, the struggles I madeand it is the memory that as a writer transforming into words, into literature, a great wealth that I can share with others ». So says Gioconda Belliwriter, poet, and activist Nicaraguanse (in the eighties in her country in the Sandinista front of national liberation) and engaged in the defense of women’s rights. Author, among other things, of “The inhabited woman” and “The fever of memory”, with Italian Avi (the great -grandfather started from Biella to work on the Panama channel), migrant herself (“emigration has always existed in the world but the emigrant has always been seen as a lower being and today unfortunately the conservative society that fears for her privileges has assumed a racist perspective”), believes that “art in the world is in the world in the world. More necessary than ever, because it is a world that seems to be regressed, less civil, less courteous, less solidarity ».
The female condition is central in its work, between conquests of rights and loss of battles.
«The female condition still needs to advance, because it is currently regressed in the world, also due to conservative and nationalpopulist policies. Of course, in some places the situation is worse than in others, if we think about the condition of Afghan women. But, for example, in some states of the USA abortion is prohibited or limited, and therapeutic abortion has also been prohibited in Nicaragua. So in Salvador. In the Argentina of Milei, the conquered right of women to choose to have an abortion is under attack ».
What are the boundaries for those who like you have lived so many experiences?
«I am in exile, they kicked me out of my country and deprived of nationality, and now I live in Spain. For me it is a wound that concerns physical geography and that of my feelings and I face this with pain and anger. But keeping my writing alive I can resist and triumph on the desire for those who want to annihilate myself and even overcome my own desire to break down ».
The central theme of its reflections is the relationship with the body, the first border with which to confront.
«The body is our first border and the female one is like a place of dispute. We are conditioned by our body, and we live by fighting with those who want to appropriate it. And instead the woman’s body must belong only to her. In my books I told two paradigms that show how the female body was treated: the Virgin Mary and her purity and the supposed seduction of Eva, on the one hand that remained virgin before, during and after childbirth, on the other the sensual woman who induces to sin. On the other hand, I believe that today the obsession of aesthetic treatments causes the body to obey a new “master” ».