Gijón (EFE).- The writer Gioconda Belli (Managua 1948) has valued this Tuesday the recent awarding of the XXXII Reina Sofía Prize for Ibero-American Poetry, the most important in Spanish and Portuguese, as “a very strong embrace of Spanish culture”.
Belli, who is participating in the Black Week in Gijón these days, was distinguished last May by this prestigious award granted by the National Heritage of Spain and the University of Salamanca to recognize the whole of the work of a living author who, due to his literary value, constitutes a significant contribution to the common cultural heritage of Latin America and Spain.
The jury, which unanimously awarded him the prize, recognized Belli’s creative expressiveness, freedom and poetic courage, while highlighting his significance in contemporary Nicaraguan culture, reinforcing the prestige of one of the great countries of lyric poetry. Hispanic American.
In a press conference held today during the Black Week in Gijón, the writer, who lives in Spain with Italian nationality after having been deprived of her Nicaraguan origin along with 94 opponents of the Government of Daniel Ortega, expressed her “thankfulness” for having been honored with this award, which she will receive in November.
Belli, who considers herself “essentially a poet” despite the fact that she has also developed a literary work in various genres, has said that in Nicaragua everyone calls her “the poet Belli” and has assured that she never stops writing poems even though she is preparing another type of literature
The seizure of power by women
The writer has presented at the Gijón festival the first edition in Spain of her novel “El país de las mujeres”, awarded with the novel prize “La otra orilla”, which narrates in a humorous fiction tone the seizure of power by the women.
The author has said that she wrote this fiction to answer the question of how women would act if they totally displace men in decision-making.
In this regard, she has pointed out that “power is exercised by men and when a woman comes to occupy government positions, they are expected to act with the scale of masculine values, because for that they invented patriarchy.”
Published in various countries in 2010, “El país de las mujeres” was published for the first time in Spain this year by Seix Barral, and has been presented by its author at the thirty-sixth Black Week in Gijón.
The work presents a country governed by women from the Erotic Left Party, whose ideology is “felicismo” and its policy is “cuidismo”, replacing the citizenship card with that of citizenship, and relegating men to an inferior role without any ability to decide.
“Cuidadismo” is a political doctrine that puts the exercise of care at the center, to other people, to the planet and to life, and in general to everything that deserves to be preserved, the writer explained.
In that imaginary country, qualified voting has also been established, exercised by 10 percent of the voters chosen at random, whose suffrage is worth double, which in the author’s opinion is an exercise in “true democracy.”
Penalty of shame for rapists
The women sentence the rapists to a sentence of “shame”, which consists of exhibiting them in a square locked in cages for several days for the women to insult, spit on and degrade them.
Belli has said that this condemnation to shame is based on compensating for the shame that rape victims suffered when men exercised power. EFE