Daisy Zamora Quotes (1950-)

“In Nicaragua, everybody talks poetry...We have two sports, two national sports. One is baseball, the other one is poetry.”

“There were many women who fought to make a revolution within the Revolution, since power is held by men and they won’t give it away by themselves.”

“women were “sold out” by the men that they fought alongside, because those men were uncapable of understanding — much less articulating — a different concept of power.”

“I don’t believe in heroes and heroines of one day. I believe in heroes and heroines of everyday life, that it is hard enough, you know, to wake every morning and to do what you have to do, no matter what happens in your life.”

“Many of the truths that poetry reveals are not accepted in this era of so much banality. In this sense, a poet is per se a social activist who, through poetry, shows something that should be acknowledged, but it’s usually overlooked.”

“I traveled a lot around the country in those first years working as Vice Minister of Culture and I witnessed that the cultural and artistic explosion that took place in Nicaragua right after the Revolution had no precedent: it was like a renaissance and rebirth of all of the cultural richness which had once been oppressed and buried under the weight of the Somocista dictatorship.”

“I feel that we are the lost generation. We didn’t want to be as our mothers were. We dreamed to be different, we are trying to be different, but we will never be the women we dreamed we were going to be, because we – we have all this burden of the past, calling us every day, we are in no-woman’s land, you know. With cross fire, but we are staying there, to – to be able to – to cross the fire. (BM: And poetry is a record of that journey?) DZ: Yes.”

“I believe that all of us are political, in a very broad sense, and – and if I write about a – a housewife that is battered or that is disdained, that’s politics, it’s my understanding of politics, you see. And if I write about women’s issues in general or about a – a waitress that – that has been mistreated by life, that’s politics. So I have been writing these poems through which I – I want to speak for women, you know, to ad, I pretend to – to interpret the feelings of my fellow women and translate them to poetry”

“almost all women participated in Nicaraguan revolution. But after the revolution, there is a tendency to go back to old patterns, cultural patterns, especially in our countries. So, it was hard for us, women that have gained our space in the revolutionary process, to maintain that space. That’s why my poetry has to do also with the difficulties of everyday life being a woman, because to have a revolution doesn’t mean that – that, you know, it’s a miracle, then everything will change. It’s just the – the starting, it’s the beginning of the change.”

“Poetry makes us be in touch with ourselves, with our communities and with the world at large. It’s like a door we open to our inner self and to the outside and different realities; a bridge that connects us as species in a divided and constantly changing world. I try to express all that through my poetry and I am constantly looking to do it in a way I have not done it before. It is a permanent search for a better way of saying whatever I want and need to say. My poetry also evolves through reading the works of other poets, and through many other readings. It is like an endless personal revolution, an underground river, a relentless inner sea that must keep moving to avoid stagnation and repetition.”