Milk Poems and Blood Poems: Autobiographical Poetry and the New Nicaraguan Woman

In 1967, La Prensa Literaria, Nicaragua’s most highly regarded literary magazine, laments that Nicaragua is “overpopulated” by “poetesses” who outnumber male poets 1,000 to 700 in the capital alone. Nicaraguan women were virtually invisible in their nation’s literary history until the future of a revolutionary “new Nicaragua” was being imagined by an idealist, nationalist, socialist, but not always feminist, Sandinista movement. Through the literary magazines founded by the Sandinista National Liberation Front, these spokeswomen and activists published transformative autobiographical poetry chronicling the aesthetic, social, and political birth of the “new woman” in Nicaragua. This poetry introduced a new voice – that of a self-reflective revolutionary womanhood. The focus of this paper is the construction Sandinista womanhood through its autobiographical depiction in a full range of embodied self-expression. This paper will examine the poetry of six influential guerilla poets of the revolution – Daisy Zamora, Gioconda Belli, Yolanda Blanco, Michele Najlis, Vidaluz Meneses, and Rosario Murillo, wife of Sandinista leader and president of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega – all of whom vocalize the emergence of the “New Nicaraguan Woman” as experienced in the physical body. Unapologetically presented in cycles of menstruation, states of pregnancy, labor of childbirth, and climaxes of erotic ecstasy, these poets challenge the bourgeois chivalry of the ruling class for which graphic references to the female body are considered indecent. Depicted as well in acts of volunteerism, advocacy, and armed rebellion, these poets reveal bodies in the act of creating the New Nicaragua and defy the overshadowing masculinist content typical of testimonial poetry dedicated to the insurrection of macho rebel leaders.