The Nefelibatas
By: Cristiana
Guevara-Mena
Up and up, but be
careful, Nefelibata,
that among the clouds
you can also mess up.
-Antonio Machado
Nefelibata. What a strange word,
right? It’s a Spanish word that refers to people living in dreamy clouds. It
was formed from the Greek words Nephèle (cloud) and bates (he who
walks). Rubén Darío, who was the first to use it, used it in his poem Epistle,
which was written in honor of the wife of Leopoldo Lugones, a poet, essayist,
journalist, and an Argentinean politician. This curious word is widely used
among highly educated people to refer to poets, who are always living in the
clouds and do not like living their own reality.
Having understood the meaning of
this strange word, let's talk a little about the poets in general. For as long
as mankind has existed, man has interpreted his reality through figures and
songs, the drama of his own reality. In the Greek world, there were authors
like Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, who were the three great tragic poets
of ancient Greece, who by their stories of love and fights told stories of the
conflicts in Greek society. The troubadours of the Middle Ages brought the
truth to life for people through songs, dances, and epic romantic poems. Let us
move now to America. In Cuba, the famous Cuban poet José Martí, was consistent
with what he wrote. He was a fighter for the freedom of his country and gave
his life on the battlefield. In Nicaragua, Ruben Dario in Ode to Roosevelt
described the international relations between the U.S. and Nicaragua, a
relationship that is still a dramatic situation. Also, authors and political
actors, such as Ernesto "Che" Guevara and Carlos Fonseca Amador, used
their writings to reflect their ideological thinking and the vision of reality
that surrounded them.
We cannot deny that our country is
going through a dark, sad, and dramatic moment. Here, the truth is forged, and
the values are suffocated by a totalitarian and mediocre propaganda spread
throughout the country. This is intended to hijack the imagination of all
Nicaraguans, intimidating outstanding personalities by forcing them to commit
intellectual suicide through voluntary self-censorship. Let us know that this
behavior is promoted by the person responsible for the diffusion of culture and
government.
The generation to which I belong,
who were born in the eighties, note and criticize our parents’ generation for
being incompetent, corrupt, ignorant, and arrogant, which has led us to the sad
situation we are in today. My generation wants to find in local poets and
writers the expression of what we live, and the protest and resistance to the
intellectual kidnapping. We do not accept or allow the current poets to live a
Nefelibata, to write only about their confessions or their toxic world of
depressions that they carry as a banner, because it would be a dishonest
betrayal of the need for freedom of our people. We want to find in the poets
and writers of our generation who publish in the XXI century, new ideas that
fit the current situation. We want them to manifest, without fear and with much
patriotism, their action in solidarity with the rest of the population, under
the various artistic and cultural expressions. It would not be the first time
that it is done in our poetic history of Nicaragua.
It is through these words, not as an
author, but as a citizen born in the years of the "dark night", that
I ask the poets of my generation to turn their eyes towards our reality full of
anguish, fear, outrage, etc. that all Nicaraguans share (with the exception of
those who are loyal and obedient to the current government). I demand them, as
one more of this generation, to express courageously and with beautiful poetry
the reality that our people live in, to assume their role and their
responsibility. Because if they don‘t, the absence of this expression should be
understood as a cowardly complicity by their voluntary self-censorship, and they
will go down in history as the Nefelibata poets living in silence. As Octavio
Paz says in the preface to his work Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz or the traps
of faith: "Ignoring the relationship between society and poetry would
be a mistake as serious as ignoring the relationship between the writer's life
and work".
