YOLANDA BLANCO

Penqueo en Nicaragua

Managua, Nicaragua: Editorial Unión, 1981

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Penqueo en Nicaragua was written during the revolutionary fight of the Nicaraguan people that put an end to the regime of Anastasio Somoza. It constitutes the testimony of a call for action against injustice and a chant for the hope of liberation. With an enormous emotive force, the poet depicts the heroism and courage of the indigenous neighborhood of Monimbó that led the vanguard in the war against the Sower of the Flowers of Evil. The transformation of peace, work, music, and dance into shrapnel, bombs, destruction, and death originated the uprising against the Somocista army. Blanco remembers the dead Sandinista guerrilla fighters and the faith in the cause for Nicaragua. Pain, hope, guns, and guitars alternate in the poet's affirmation of having been "impregnated" by the love for the Revolution. The colors of Sandinismo, black and red, appear in most of the poems to verbalize the conflict generated by oppression and liberty. The denouncement of atrocities, the imprisonments for insurgency, the voices of witnesses, the poverty, orphanhood, mutilation, hunger, and affliction create a multiple cry for solidarity in the fight guided by the motto "Free Country or Death."