Adrienne Rich on Nicaragua

“The Miami airport, summer 1983: a North American woman says to me, "You'll love Nicaragua: everyone there is a poet."”

“in Nicaragua, this tiny, impoverished, economically besieged country, trying through its own fragile means to feed itself, it is easy to see that women's ability to liberate themselves from social roles and domestic bondage cannot precede their ability to feed themselves and their children, and their access to basic resources. Meeting daily with the women and men who are responsible for day-to-day policy decisions in that revolution the United States is so determined to overturn, I found myself constantly having to remind myself that these were members of the government. We are not used to seeing and hearing people at the highest levels of government who sound as if they believe what they are saying, who speak with love and commitment to the needs of the poorest people, who speak of their country in a language of concrete, unaggrandized simplicity-of its sufferings, its hopes, its beauty, its poverty, its smallness, its need to work out its own way in the world. The acknowledgment that in the process of revolution, so newly begun, mistakes have been made, injuries inflicted, that the defeat of dictatorship does not give instant birth to new human beings, that people trying to reconstruct a battered society are not free of old chauvinisms-and that there must be continuing openness to criticism. But what most entered my heart and soul, in that brief time of being in the physical presence of a revolutionary process, was the quality I think we are all here tonight trying to affirm-hope. The sense that it can change. We ourselves can change it.”